So there’s the wind, the dinghy jerking back on its painter, waves slapping at the pilings of the landing dock, the smell of rain on the air, the Paladin sitting right offshore and this jerk standing in their way. “The island’s closed to the public,” he says finally. “Will be closed for the next three weeks. Maybe you didn’t see the sign?”
“No,” he hears himself say, and he’s not going to get worked up here, he’s not. “No, we didn’t see any sign.”
Sickafoose measures out one of his long big-knuckled fingers and directs their attention to a white enameled sign the size of a regulation backboard, the squared-off admonitory letters stamped there in take-no-prisoners red. How had he missed it? Not that it would have mattered. This is public land, reserved for the public, owned by the public.
“So what are you,” Dave says, “some kind of cop?”
“I’m a biologist.”
“Congratulations.”
Sickafoose ignores him. He’s got something in his hand, in the palm of his hand, which opens in a kind of slow phalangeal striptease on a spatter of rust-red cat kibble and pale yellow vitamin tabs, even as Wilson tugs at the brim of his cap and says, “Well, we got to be going, see you later, man,” and starts for the ladder.
“One minute,” Sickafoose says. The hand thrusts forward. “You know what these are?”
He can feel it now, the quickening pulse of that rage the drugs can only snatch at, and it’s all he can do to stop himself from spitting at the guy’s feet. “Uh-uh,” he says, the voice threshed in his throat. “Never saw them before.”
A beat. Wilson has his hands on the ladder, ready to kick down into the boat, in retreat, and that’s what he should do too—just get out of here and forget it. “You know it’s against the law to feed the wildlife in a national park?” Sickafoose says. “If that’s what you were doing. This is food, right?”
Another beat. Longer. Much longer. He’s thinking of the rat he saw along the road one sorrowful morning, huddled there in the tight binding robe of its agony, a perfect being, perfectly made, every detail of it alive in his memory, the pale exquisitely shaped fingers and toes, whiskers brushed back as if they’d been groomed, the suppleness of the nose, the dark bloodied holes of the nostrils and the pits of the suffering eyes, all of it senseless and wrong, wrong, wrong. All he says is this: “You going to step aside or what?”
Then they’re in the dinghy. Then the boat. Then the rain comes, washing across the surface in a series of sweeps that bring the waves to a boil, and forget the champagne, forget the whole thing, because the engine selects this moment, out of all the myriad others since he’s owned, maintained and piloted the Paladin up and down the coast and out to the islands and back in every sort of weather and the most violent of seas, to fail.
Boiga Irregularis
In the mid-1950s, when the indigenous birds of Guam began to dwindle in number, and then, in the sixties and seventies, to disappear altogether, no one could trace the cause. Researchers serially suspected DDT, herbicides, habitat loss and disease, but it wasn’t until the early eighties that Julie Savidge, a graduate student doing field work for her Ph.D., focused on a hitherto little-noticed reptile that first appeared on Guam just after World War II. The brown tree snake, native to Australia, Malaysia and New Guinea, was thought to have arrived as a stowaway in a crate of munitions, the engine compartment of a military vehicle or perhaps the wheel well of a Navy transport plane. Its appearance had been duly recorded but very few people came into contact with it. Nonetheless, having eliminated the other possible causes, Savidge decided to plot the snake’s spread from the main port at Apra to the southern, eastern and northern verges of the island, and found that she was able to correlate its expansion with the progressive topographical decline of the island’s avifauna. The mystery had been solved. The problem remained.
In fact, when the brown tree snake reached the island, it found itself in an ophidian paradise. The only other species of snake on Guam, an innocuous thing the size of an earthworm, was no competition at all, and there were no predators to limit its numbers. The food supply, consisting of some eighteen species of birds found nowhere else in the world, was rich and abundant, and the birds, in common with other insular species, suffered the sort of naïveté to predation that had doomed the dodo and its ilk. Boiga irregularis lives in equilibrium with the other species in its native environment, and isn’t particularly impressive or dangerous as snakes go. For one thing, its venom, distributed through fangs located at the back of the throat, is relatively mild and only marginally a threat to humans. For another, it is nocturnal and thus rarely seen, and so reedy—no thicker around than a man’s index finger until it reaches a length of three feet or so—as to pale in comparison with some of the snakes of the continental tropics, the cobras, boomslangs, mambas and water moccasins that slither through the herpetophobe’s nightmares.
Still, it has proven to be one of the most insidious and successful invaders on record, reducing those eighteen species of unique birds to eleven, of which two—the Guam rail and the Micronesian kingfisher—exist only in captivity, while six are considered rare and three uncommon. The snake’s density—up to 13,000 per square mile—is among the highest recorded densities of any snake anywhere, and it has proven infinitely adaptable, feeding quite happily on the island’s native frogs and lizards in the absence of the birds, as well as snapping up introduced geckos, skinks, cane toads and just about anything else it can work its jaws around. It grows to some ten feet in length. It appears in toilets, showers, infants’ cradles. Since 1978, 12,000 power failures have been attributed to its climbing electrical poles and shorting out the carrying wires—unintentionally, of course, but knocking out lights, computers and refrigerators all the same. Above all things, it is a climber. A great and undaunted and increasingly voracious climber that has adapted its diet to include pet food as well as pets—in one documented case, a three-week-old golden retriever pup—and anything, alive or dead, that carries the scent of meat. Or blood.
Alma is reminded of all this by the printout—“The Use of Acetaminophen in Controlling Boiga irregularis Among Insular Populations”—spread open beside her laptop on one of the gently rocking Formica tables in the main cabin of the Islander, bound for Anacapa. Sipping coffee from a paper cup and staring into the computer screen as the neatly marshaled lines of type hypnotically rise and descend along with the tabletop and the deck and hull beneath it, she’s not yet aware she has a headache coming on, but every sixty seconds or so she looks reflexively away from the screen and out over the water so as to refocus her eyes. Then she comes back to the text, hits the backspace key and inserts a new phrase or extends a line, her lips silently forming the words. She’s frowning but unaware of it.
The boat’s carrying capacity, both in the cabin and on the upper and stern decks, is a hundred-fifty or so, and today, eighty-five of the spots have been reserved for NPS employees and assorted biologists, including Tim, who are part of the Anacapa Recovery Program, as well as a collection of journalists from the AP, the Los Angeles Times and the Santa Barbara Press Citizen, a dozen local politicians and tastemakers and a television crew from the local NBC affiliate. In the ship’s hold are three big coolers chock-full of marinated chicken, turkey sausage and tofu burgers for the barbecue grill, various salads, whole-grain breads, a pot of chili and rice, a fourth cooler of bottled water, soft drinks and dessert, and a fifth reserved exclusively for champagne. Two cases. On ice. Medium-priced California stuff, as befits the Park Service budget, but champagne—or, more properly, sparkling wine—all the same.
The sea is flat, the fog already lifting. The captain has just slowed for a pod of dolphins, and most of the passengers—NPS people, tourists, backpackers, a sugar-and-hormone-fueled group of sixth graders under the rapidly eroding control of two harried teachers—have gone out on deck to watch the glistening cetaceans slash through the water like shadows come to life. When she glances up she can see Tim out there amongst the
m, a paper cup of coffee in one hand, binoculars in the other.
It’s early June, ten in the morning, just over one and a half years since the initial drop of the control agent, and the purpose of this little jaunt is purely celebratory—while the journalists tap at their keyboards and the photographers manipulate their digital cameras and the TV crew homes in, Alma will lift a glass of champagne in faultless synchronization with Freeman Lorber, the park’s superintendent, and declare all three islets that compose Anacapa one hundred percent rat free. At the moment, she’s busy polishing her press release, while the article, by Robert Ford Smith, the herpetologist she’d worked under on Guam, awaits a free minute. It came to her via e-mail from the field station at Ritidian Point on the northernmost tip of the island, where the beaches are soap-powder white and the vegetation gnarled and snake-haunted, before she left her office at seven-fifteen this morning, and she’s as eager to get to it as a child with a new video game, but duty calls, always calls, and always takes precedence.
The press release, which she’s been tinkering with for the past two days, will inform the assembled journalists, and through them the public, that the rat-eradication project has been an unqualified success. No rat sign has been detected anywhere on Anacapa since the release of the control agent, neither nests nor scat or tracks or any evidence whatever of predation, and the dummy eggs the consulting ornithologist has slipped into the nests of various birds have not been disturbed, whereas formerly they would have been scrimshawed with tooth marks. Careful monitoring over this period has led her to be able to declare with absolute confidence that all the target animals have been eliminated. And the result has been swift and dramatic. The seabirds have rebounded, not to mention the Channel Islands salamander and side-blotched lizard—whose numbers have doubled—as well as the native deer mouse, the population of which is estimated at 8,000, the highest count on record. And more: Tim Sickafoose, consulting ornithologist, resident humorist and all-around prince of a man, has discovered the first pair of Cassin’s auklets nesting on Rat Rock in living memory, a place which, she imagines—and yes, this will be the sly and triumphal joke to insert in an otherwise by-the-numbers text—will soon have to undergo a name change. How about Auklet Rock? she’s thinking. Do I hear any takers? Or what about Sickafoose Point? Will that fly?
Jokes aside, she can’t help worrying over the small details—punctuation, paragraphing, the drum-beating phrases that seem increasingly fatuous every time her eyes fall on them. Or not just fatuous: asinine. Right here, right in the first paragraph, for one. She calls Lorber “a monument of preservation,” which conveys a modicum of truth, but doesn’t it make him sound like something static, like one of the carved heads at Mount Rushmore or a blade dulled by use? Or worse: dead. And here’s his epitaph: Loving husband, loving father, and a monument of preservation.
“Hey,” Tim breathes, sliding into the seat beside her. The boat has begun to move again and the passengers are trooping back into the cabin, all but the sixth graders, who will linger along the rail until they’re soaked through and shivering and in dire need of the hot chocolate, popcorn and microwave burritos the galley dispenses. “You done with that thing yet?” he asks, his voice oily with insinuation. She gives him a sidelong glance. He’s right there, invading her personal space—which is the prerogative of a lover, she has to remind herself—and holding his lopsided grin. “Because there’s a point you reach where you’re just going to tinker it to death, right? And isn’t this supposed to be a party, or am I wrong?”
She’s on the verge of snapping at him, but she catches herself. For a long moment she stares into his eyes, the spray flying beyond the windows, the squeals and shouts of the sixth graders rising round them like the cries of the raptured. “Yes,” she admits finally, and she can smile now too, relax, celebrate, because he’s right—the worst is behind her and this is a day for looking ahead, not back. “Yes, you’re right.”
And it works. The air’s been cleared. Her headache—the incipient headache she’s just begun to become aware of—extends its tendrils and begins to recede all in a single moment. She shifts the mouse, shuts down the laptop and dips forward to reach into her pack and dig out a bag of trail mix, just to keep her energy level up. Party or no, she’ll still have to make a speech after distributing the press release, and she’ll have to oversee her assistant, Wade, who’s in charge of the food, and shine with glowing interest as Freeman gives his own speech replete with awkward pauses, furious lip-tugging and jokes amusing by definition only. But this is a party, or the very beginning of one, and she slips her laptop into its case with a definitive shrug of her shoulders and a business-like chafing of one palm against the other, then cracks the Ziploc bag of trail mix. She sifts a handful into her mouth and works her molars over a cud of sunflower seeds, dates, raisins and M&M’s, the sugar rush almost instantaneous, before offering it to Tim, who takes it absently. He’s giving her a dubious look, as if he’s thinking about something else altogether, as if he’s anticipating her, worrying for her. “You better hope the printer out there’s going to work—”
Her smile is richer now, spreading across her lips till she can feel the tug of it in the muscles at the corners of her mouth, and what are they called? Zygomaticus major. Or minor. Or both. That sounds about right, but it’s been a long time since she took anatomy, and if she remembers correctly something like seventeen different muscles are required to achieve a full smile. But that doesn’t matter. The important thing is she’s smiling because this is Tim smiling back at her and they’re getting a rare day off together, if that’s what you can call this.
“He don’t know me very well, do he?” she says, reaching down to pat the backpack at her feet. “I brought my own along. Just in case.” Before he can respond, she’s holding up a hand to forestall him. “Yes,” she says, “yes, I know. And paper too.”
She’d gone to Guam seven years ago because the opportunity presented itself, because Julie Savidge was one of her enduring heroes and because she’d just broken up with Rayfield Armstrong, who played his guitar in the bars and coffeehouses around Berkeley when he wasn’t working on his dissertation assessing the impact of a species of introduced crab—the European green—on the local invertebrates in San Francisco Bay, and whose chest, shoulders and back were so intricately and finely muscled from all the hours he spent in the water he looked like a living mosaic. She’d moved in with him, and that was a commitment, the first real commitment of her life, but as the months wore on he depleted her patience and her hope and goodwill too. He was never home, always diving, strumming his guitar under the gaze of a spotlight in some bar or coffeehouse somewhere or riding a Greyhound bus to play in towns nobody had ever heard of, and when he was home he was so self-absorbed—crabs and guitar, crabs and guitar—he didn’t seem to have much time for her. And so she moved out. And took a job in the field. In Guam.
What she expected to find there was something like the environment she’d known in Hawaii, only less developed, more primitive, closer to the edge, and she wasn’t disappointed. The roads, hacked out of the bush, were congested and deadly, the architecture tended toward reinforced concrete block (out of necessity, as a way of surviving the typhoons in this corner of what meteorologists dubbed “Typhoon Alley”) and everything, even the inside of the plastic bleach container she kept under the sink in her bunker cum one-room apartment, smelled of the festering explosive microbial life of the tropics. The jungle was lush, but many of the native trees, destroyed during the war, had been replaced by a South American import, the tangantangan, and it was eerily silent in the absence of the birds. With the birds gone, the insects had bred out, with the attendant result that the spiders—palm-sized, with iridescent yellow stripes on a gleaming black body—had experienced a population explosion, draping understory and canopy alike with the great trembling tents of their webs so that it was impossible to move through the jungle without having the stuff cling to you like a second skin. Not to mention the spid
er itself, presumably disappointed at being displaced from its web to your sleeve, hair, face.
The local people—Chamorros and Filipinos, mainly—never gave her much more than a vaguely curious glance. They saw her as Asian, or some variant thereof, and so, despite her Big Dogs running shorts and T-shirts touting Micah Stroud and Carmela Sexton-Jones, less an anomaly than someone like Robert Ford Smith or his wife, Veronica, both from Lancashire, with great beaky English noses and skin as blanched and lusterless as potato meal. She felt at home, as she had in Hawaii and at Berkeley, and perhaps she would have felt differently if she’d gone to lily-white Wisconsin to study the effects of cat predation on woodland birds or to Salt Lake City to monitor the grebe population on the Great Salt Lake, but she hadn’t.
Robert—not Bob or Rob or Robbie, just Robert—was in his mid-fifties and had been working to undermine the brown tree snake since the time of Julie Savidge, who’d since moved on. He was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of the Brown Snake Research Program and his primary objective was to devise barriers to keep the snake away from the shipping containers at the port and the planes at the airstrip, the fear being that it would hitchhike to one of the neighboring islands—or worse, Hawaii. That was the first step—to limit its spread—but the second, and larger initiative, was to find some biological agent, a bacterium, virus or parasite, that could control its numbers so that the captive-bred native birds could be reintroduced. To that end, he trapped snakes and experimented on them. And her job, both in daylight and at night, with a headlamp and a stick to clear away the spiderwebs, was to check the traps and return to the lab with her clutch of snakes—there were always plenty—so that she could dissect them and determine what they’d been feeding on. It was solitary work—“creepy,” as Tim, no fan of snakes, would describe it—but it got her out of doors, which was the whole point of working in wildlife management to begin with.