Endangered Species (2 page)

.  ."

Those selfsame cynics also intimated that the fire crew, of which Anna

was part, had been bivouacked on Cumberland to soothe the nerves of

those privileged few with the ear and purse strings of various

congressmen.

Cumberland was in the midst of a drought.  The palmetto that carpeted

much of the island would burn hot and fast if ever ignited .

It could be argued that the natural areas would benefit from such a

cleansing by fire.  But the palmetto grew up to some very influential

doorsteps.

Whatever the politics, firefighters from the National Park Service had

been housed on the island in a presuppression capacity for the past ten

weeks.  Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, over the course of their

three-week rotations, they wandered around racking up overtime in heavy

boots and two derelict pumper trucks on the off chance something would

happen.

So far the sum total of excitement had been the ongoing chemical warfare

with Cumberland's voracious tick population and the discovery in an

inland slough of fourteen baby alligators still living at home with an

impressive mom the locals called Maggie-Mary.  Maggie hadn't been seen

in so many years, apocrypha added more to her length and girth than the

mere passage of time could have managed.

And, tonight, the loggerheads.  According to Marty they nested May

through August.  Usually they came up on the beaches at night, usually

at high tide.  The eggs incubated for eight weeks; then the little

hatchlings clawed their way out of their protective graves and, with

luck and the fierce intercession of Marty Schlessinger, found their way

to the Atlantic Ocean.

Each new nest was recorded, protected, and timed.  The next hatching was

due in nine days.  In a rare unguarded moment Marty had divulged this

bit of information and Anna had pounced on it .

When the baby loggerheads made their dangerous dash for the sea she

wanted to be in the turtle vanguard.

"Eggs!" came a curt demand and Anna was snapped out of her brown study.

She dropped to one knee and presented Marty with the cap in an

unconsciously courtly gesture.

One by one the biologist lifted out the treasure of turtle eggs and

settled them into the sand.  When they had been arranged to her liking,

eggs in all, she ordered Anna to stand back.  With great care she

refilled the hole and gently tamped it down.  To Anna's amazement the

woman then collapsed, elbows and knees on the ground, and began flailing

her forearms and shins in frenzied arcs.

After half a minute of this she stood and dusted the sand from her

trousers, looking as sane as anyone ." Loggerheads aren't particular,"

she explained ." They scuff over the areas with their flippers but don't

seem to feel a need to disguise the nest carefully."

Marty handed Anna back the ball cap and she absentmindedly pulled it on

her head.  An unpleasant trickle of water and turtle slime crawled

beneath her collar.

Up and down the beach, easily visible against the pale sand, the great

shapes of the loggerheads moved with startling agility back toward the

sea.  Dark clusters of humanity, self-appointed guardian angels,

cheered.

"Quiet!" Marty growled.

"Does the noise bother the turtles?" Anna asked.

"Of course it does," the biologist snapped.

As near as Anna could tell, anything less serious than a shark with a

bullhorn went largely ignored by these phlegmatic amphibians.  She

cheered with the others, but silently lest she set Schlessinger off.

"Want to come back to the fire dorm for a beer?" Anna asked on impulse.

"Never touch the stuff," Schlessinger replied.

"Me neither," Anna said, to see if it still felt like a lie.

"Recovering alcoholic?"

Anna said nothing.

"That's BS," the biologist declared ." I don't drink because I don't

need it."

Any warm fuzzy feelings the turtles had engendered in Anna evaporated.

Marty Schlessinger turned and stalked toward the black curtain of inland

foliage.  Anna fell in step beside her, simply because they were headed

for the same place.  On their daily circuits of the island the

firefighters customarily drove the trucks down the beach in one

direction, and kept to the dirt lanes on the island's interior on the

other.  In deference to the turtles, all night travels were confined to

the inland roads.  One such track ended in a sandy spur a quartermile

north of where the egg laying was concentrated.

Volunteers, rangers, and the rest of fire crew had started back in the

direction of the parked vehicles as Anna and Marty reached their

destination.  Schlessinger began rearranging boxes, a broom, and two

new-looking shovels on the back of a battered all-terrain vehicle she

used to get around the island.

An obnoxious, if infectious, hooting laugh cut through the lesser sounds

and was answered by what Anna could only describe as a snarl, or as

close to a snarl as a beast without claws and fangs can come.

"That man's on my Better Off Dead list," Marty Schlessinger said ."

Mitch Hanson has no more business here than Hitler at a bar mitzvah."

"Maybe he likes turtles," Anna said, just to see what kind of reaction

she'd get.

Schlessinger snorted and Anna was impressed at the range and accuracy of

her animal sounds ." Hah," Marty said as if translating .

"Maybe he thought we were serving Jack Daniel's." She stabbed her shovel

into the sand.  The handle quivered like the shaft of a harpoon.

For several seconds Anna watched as the biologist slammed around pieces

of equipment.  Wet white braids smacked against her bare arms and she

made little plosive noises as if she was carrving on a heated

conversation with herself.

Anna lounged against the fender of one of the rusting green trucks

they'd inherited from the crew they had replaced.  Along with the salt

scent of the sea and the fecund perfume of the jungle, a faint

sickly-sweet odor made it to her nostrils.

Her flashlight lay on the seat of the truck.  She retrieved it and

combed the ground with its yellowing beam till she found what she was

looking for.  Pushed partially off the road several yards from the rear

wheels of Marty Schiessinger's Afy was the carcass of a young raccoon.

From the looks of it, it hadn't been dead long.  Scavengers had yet to

disembowel it.  Whether it had been struck by a vehicle or had died of

natural causes, Anna couldn't tell.  She played the light over the

little corpse invitingly but Schlessinger didn't give it so much as a

glance.

The others approached.  Schlessinger fired up her four-wheeler and

gutted the nightwith the noise of her departure.

Anna sighed and clicked off the light.  Evidently Marty wasn't going to

eat so much as a tick tonight.  She shrugged in the darkness .

It was always good to have something to look forward to.

GUY MARSHALL a man in his late forties with a chiseled face, no hair to

speak Of, and the body of a rodeo cowboy-lean and strong and stove up in

one knee-walked in from the beach.  The moon reflected off his pate,

casting a deep shadow over his eyes.

Anna and the rest of the crew had dressed for the occasion in

light-weight clothing and tennis shoes.  Marshall wore regulation

firefighting regalia: lemon-yellow shirt, olive drab pants of

fireretardant NoMex, and heavy lug-soled, lace-up, leather boots.  He'd

been wearing them for so many years he'probably thought they were

comfortable.

Marshall was crew boss in charge of the abbreviated presuppression crew:

Anna and three men, one from Gulf Islands, one from Cape Hatteras, and

one from the Natchez Trace Parkway.  Fire crews were drawn from a well

of red-carded rangers-those with the training who could also pass the

physical.  The call went out to the national parks.  District rangers

let go whoever they could best spare-or whoever had a favor coming or

whined the loudest.  Fire details, especially one as cushy as

presuppression on Cumberland Island, were much sought after.  Twenty-one

twelve-hour days with time and a half for overtime plus per them rounded

out one's paycheck nicely.

The crew boss threw one leg across the seat of the ATV he'd claimed for

his own and shot a thin stream of tobacco juice into the sand.  In the

moonlight it looked like an ink blot on white paper.

A seal balancing a ball on its nose, Anna thought, looking at the

impromptu Rorschach.  She made a mental note to ask her sister when next

she called what sort of incipient madness that might indicate.

Laughter waited up from the beach; the throaty laugh of the interpretive

ranger who lived on the island, echoed by the barklike guffaw of a

member of fire crew and the booming hoot that had so incensed Marty

Schlessinger.

"They're all crazier'n bedbugs," Guy said without rancor, and ejected

another stream of tobacco juice neatly over the handlebars .

"Watching a bunch of turtles bury eggs has got 'em all lit up like the

Fourth of July.  I'd hate to see 'em in a hen yard.  They'd think they

died and went to heaven.  Takes all kinds, I guess.  Look at museum

curators.  The Park Service's got a whole passel of 'em.  What do they

do?  Sit around and watch old shit get older."

"We could have stayed back at the dorm and watched Under Siege Two,"

Anna reminded him.  On the island there were only two available videos,

Under Siege II and Fire Weather: A Meteorologist's View.

"Like I always say, turtles is damn good entertainment," Guy drawled.

What was left of Marshall's hair was steel-gray and cropped close in a

horseshoe that extended from car to car just above his collar.  He

pulled a comb from his hip pocket and carefully ran it through the back

and sides ." Reliving my glory days," he said when he caught Anna

watching.

For a minute or two they waited without speaking as the others made

their way across the dunes.  Flashlights had been summarily banned by

Schlessinger.  Light disoriented the turtles-not only when they came

ashore to nest but when the babies hatched.  Theory had it that when

turtles as a species were young, man had not yet discovered fire, let

alone electricity.  Temperature dictated that the hatchlings emerge from

their sand incubators at night.  Instinct told them to creep toward the

lights on the horizon, the stars over the sea that would be home.

With electric lights and beach front condos, baby turtles were often

confused, crawling inland toward the false stars and dying.

At present the moon made flashlights unnecessary and Anna reveled in the

gentle southern night.  Ten p.m.  and it was still over eighty degrees.

Even with the drought, the air was humid.  Anna's hair curled and her

fingernails grew.  After so long in the high desert of southern

Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, she felt like a raisin turning back

into a grape.

Near the ocean there was always a slight breeze-enough to cool the sweat

and make the air feel alive.  Overhead it played through the tinder-dry