When the Killing's Done (33 page)

“Or bear and grin it,” Freeman says. Lamely.

“At least the courts are on our side.” Alma can feel her smile bloom and then fade. She reaches for her coffee cup, then thinks better of it, pulling both hands down into her lap.

“For now,” Annabelle says. “But you can’t count on that. Every time one of these crazies sues for an injunction I tremble to think what’s going to happen if we wind up with a judge that just doesn’t get it.”

“Amen,” Alma says, “me too. I can hardly sleep nights thinking of what it would be like if they stop us now, when we’ve committed the funds, when weeks, days even, could mean the difference for the foxes. I mean”—looking round the table, caught in the grip of her emotions, so wired she can’t find the off switch—“they’ve got money behind them. Have you seen their website? The ticker there showing how much people are donating? And the local paper. The editorials? They’re just manipulating public opinion. Cynically. Stupidly. But it works. I mean, the pig in the bull’s-eye?”

There’s a silence, as if all this is too much to bear, especially at eight-thirty on a morning made in heaven with the sun riding up off the water and the brown pelicans—brought back from the very edge of extinction because people woke up to the fact that DDT wasn’t exactly a vitamin—gliding low to report on the health of the local anchovy population. This isn’t a morning for fear or doubt, this is a morning for celebration, for eggs benedict and sweet cakes, for resolve and concerted action.

“This LaJoy,” Frazier says after a moment, looking up from the nest of his folded hands, “does he ever go to work or what? The man seems to have a lot of time on his hands. Christ, it seems like every time I come down here he’s out in the parking lot marching around with his bloody sign. And I tell you these bloody chants—‘Nazi’ and ‘Animal killer’ and the like—just put my teeth on edge.” He pauses, patting his breast pocket for his cigarettes, Camels, a pack of which he actually removes before he catches himself. “Almost forgot: no smoking in a public place in this glorious state. But what I want to say is maybe Phase I should have been ‘Eliminate Dave LaJoy.’ ” He raises his left arm and squints an eye to sight down it, squeezing off an imaginary round with the trigger finger of his right hand: “Pow!”

“Can I buy the bullets for you?” Freeman says.

“Not that I’m violent or anything, just that certain species—or individuals within that species—sometimes have to be removed for the salvation of all the rest, right, Alma? Euthanized. There’s a term I like. As long as it’s got a .223-caliber slug attached to it.”

Well, of course. And there’s general laughter, fellow feeling, comradeship, and then there’s food, plates heaped high with it, and the sun picking out each individual mast in the harbor and setting fire to the rigging while the islands float somewhere out there on the horizon. All well and good. But Alma’s the one who has to bear the brunt of everything LaJoy can bring—she’s the one who has to stand up there in the public forums and explain as patiently as she can the rationale for the killing, she’s the one who has to pick up the morning paper and see her own name there like a slap to the face, and it’s wearing her down.

Restoring an ecosystem is never easy—maybe it’s not even possible. She thinks of Guam, where it’s beyond hope. Or Hawaii. Florida. Places where so many species have been introduced it’s hard to say what’s native and what’s not. She’d attempted to boil it down for her mother the night before, because her mother was trying, she really was, and Alma wanted her to appreciate what she was doing—or at least what she was going through. She’d waited for a lull in the conversation—Ed got up to refill the glasses, the ice maker clanking philosophically, the tonic hissing with a rush of released gas—and said, “Take Tim, for instance.”

“Yes,” her mother said, “take Tim. You mean to say he’s not even going to be here for your birthday? Because I don’t know about you, but I intend to bake a cake first thing in the morning—devil’s food, with mocha frosting. And what was that ice cream you like—Vanilla Swiss Almond? Ed’s going to pick up a pint. Or maybe a quart. What do you say to a quart, Ed?”

“I told you, Mom, he’s trapping the goldens. Which has to be done because we discovered that it’s the golden eagles killing the foxes. You see, what most people don’t realize—”

And she went off into her tutorial mode, unraveling a parable of cause and effect that might have seemed like a sick cosmic joke if it weren’t so catastrophic. The whole thing started with Montrose Chemical dumping DDT during the war, the DDT working its way up the food chain and preventing the eggs of the native bald eagles from forming properly. The balds—aggressive, highly territorial and primarily piscivorous—died back, and the goldens, which prey on land animals, cruised in from the coast to colonize the islands, attracted by the bountiful food resource presented by the wild hogs,
Sus scrofa
, that should never have been there in the first place. But then—and here’s where she paused to let the lesson play itself out—you can never foresee how a closed ecosystem is going to react not only to introduced elements but to their elimination as well. The sheep had overgrazed and that kept the invasive fennel down, but once the sheep were removed the fennel sprang up in all but impenetrable thickets ten feet high, which provided ideal cover for the pigs. “So,” she’d said, her mother’s gaze bright but fading, “you’ve got no balds to keep the goldens away and the goldens are nesting and hungry but with fewer and fewer pigs available. In that case, what do you think they’re going to eat?”

Ed, who by this time had shifted to the couch, where he seemed to be monitoring two baseball games simultaneously with the sound muted, looked up and said, “Foxes. Cute little dwarf foxes.”

It wasn’t till one of the biologists began to notice a falloff in the population that they began to trap and radio-collar the foxes. In the mid-eighties the island-wide population was robust, in the range of three thousand individuals. By the late nineties it was a tenth of that and no one could determine the cause of the decline.

“We were in danger of seeing the fox go extinct. On our watch,” she said. “Look”—she carried her laptop over and set it on the kitchen table, canting the screen so that Ed could see it too, and brought up the image of a single golden eagle chick perched proudly on its nest with the remains of twenty foxes scattered beneath it, some still wearing their radio collars. “That was our proof. We followed the radio signals and this is what we found.”

So the eagles had to be trapped and removed, no easy task. First they tried netting them on the wing out of the door of a helicopter, but it was like trying to catch butterflies on a roller coaster, and even if they’d been successful, there was the problem of the eagles surviving the fall. It was Tim who came up with the idea of baiting the birds to a carcass rigged with a spring trap that when activated would shoot out a net to ensnare them, and that worked, to a degree. In the interim the biologists trapped as many foxes as they could and caged them for a captive-breeding program, which to date had produced eighty-five kits to be released once the goldens were gone and balds could be brought in from Alaska to reestablish a viable breeding colony. The thinking was that the balds would keep the goldens at bay and that the goldens would have no incentive in nesting on the island once the pigs were removed.

The question everyone asked at this juncture—the question Dave LaJoy asked endlessly, vociferously, in the press and on the pavement—and the question her mother asked then, was: “Why can’t you just trap the pigs alive? And bring them back for, I don’t know, for farmers or something? Or food? Think of all the starving people in the world.”

“Believe me,” she’d said, “we would if we could. But there isn’t a federal agency that would allow it. The risk is just too great.”

The fact was that these hogs—Santa Cruz Island hogs—were a discrete population that had had no interaction with outside populations in a hundred and fifty years, and thus could carry leptospirosis, foot and mouth disease, mutations of common bacteria and viruses that could burn through the American hog industry and leave it twitching in the mud. So there was no choice but to euthanize them. With bullets, two each, the first to the heart, the second to the head, according to the American Veterinary Association guidelines. Clean kills. As swift and final as fate. And the carcasses? All that wild-bred pork? The carcasses were to be left where they lay for the entertainment of the ravens and the benefit of the soil.

“The thing is,” Frazier is saying, now dabbing at a bright smear of egg and hollandaise at the corner of his mouth, “with pigs you get ninety percent of them right off, but it’s that remaining ten percent that gives you hell. And you can’t run the risk of missing a single individual because that could be a pregnant sow for all you know and then the whole business just starts in over again.”

The oatmeal goes down like a brick, the wrong thing to order, definitely the wrong thing. Her stomach is on fire suddenly—too much coffee, too much tension, dealing with her mother, hitting the squirrel, fighting traffic to get here—and she has to square herself in the chair and sit rigid a moment till the burning passes. Is she developing an ulcer, is that it?

“Aerial starts when—next week? That’s what you’re projecting?” Freeman asks, leaning into the table, the rind of his grapefruit at one elbow, coffee cup at the other. The pen in his breast pocket has left a dark blue Rorschach blot on his pale blue shirt and the silver points of his bolo tie are tarnished—or maybe they’re smudged with ink. But his eyes are bright. He’s attached to the notion of the park superintendent as a man of action, like the legendary Bill Ehorn, who flew into San Miguel to personally pull the trigger on the last pregnant jenny, thus ending the occupation of the island by introduced mules, and Alma knows he’s angling for an invitation.

Frazier nods genially. “As best we can figure. Because we’re already having good success on the ground, but we need to get up on the ridges and work our way down. And I tell you, you only do a kill if you can get the whole group. If there’s a chance even one’ll get away, you draw back. Because, you understand, these are very clever animals—they say they’re smarter than dogs, smart as a three-year-old child for that matter, but for my money even the dopiest dog beats that . . . anyway, they’ll communicate to the others and go into hiding. And that’s a nightmare.”

Alma catches the waitress’s eye from across the room, thinking to expedite things and get the check now, but the waitress misinterprets her meaning and brings the coffeepot back round. Frazier, gesturing broadly now, holds out his cup to be refilled, giving the girl a quick wink and then going on about how while aerial is indispensable the real hunt takes place on the ground, now that the dogs—his own dogs, from New Zealand—are out of quarantine. And then, Freeman and Annabelle edging their cups forward for refills while Alma lays a palm over hers and mouths, “Check, please,” he brings up his Judas pigs, a concept so devious it gives her a thrill every time he mentions it.

Annabelle, who to this point hasn’t been as closely involved with the details of the hunt as she herself has, gives him a bemused smile and drops her voice. “Judas pigs?” she echoes. Her look says,
Amuse me
.

And Frazier stops right there to take in that look and sweep his eyes over the restaurant, the retreating waitress, the view out the window, before he comes back to her. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Very effective in an operation like this. You see”—leaning in over his plate to pin her with his gaze—“we use their own sex drive against them, and if that seems unfair, well, dearie, I guess it is. But this isn’t a game. This is war. All-out war. And wave goodbye to the little piggies.”

“Okay,” Annabelle says, flashing a smile, “we can all agree with that—but what do you mean?”

“What we do is trap as many as we can and hope to find a couple females in estrus—these things’ll breed all year round in this climate, so it’s not so hard as you might think, especially if you cage a boar with them for a day or two. Then we radio-collar the females and let them go.” He’s leaning so far over the table he’s practically in her lap at this point and Alma has to remind herself, while sitting rigid and fighting down the gas pains, that it doesn’t really matter to her one way or the other if he finds a little solace wherever he can. “And you’d be surprised,” he says, “or maybe not, maybe it’s just what you’d figure. But each of those females will wind up with a whole parade of boars around her, rooting and fighting and sniffing her up—even the wiliest old scarred-up paranoid razorback’ll come charging up out of his hole for a chance at that—and it can bring in a whole bloody contingent of sows and juveniles too, whether they’re in heat or not, just to be close to the action. Like a pig disco.”

“And then?”

“Then we track them and move in.”

He pauses to take a sip of coffee, all three of them playing that scenario over in their heads, the abrasive hides, the mobile snouts, pig sex. “And believe me,” he says, “nobody gets out alive.”

Afterward, after she’s put the bill on her card and said her goodbyes all around, she finds herself in the deserted ladies’ room, the light of ten o’clock in the morning suffusing the high glass-block windows. She should be at work. And she will be, she promises herself, in just a minute—she’ll leave the car where it is and walk so she can get a little sun on her face and steal a march on the protestors, blending with the tourists and slipping in the service entrance before they even know she’s there—but for the moment she just needs to clear her head. And breathe, breathe as deeply as she can. The pain in her abdomen hasn’t gone away—in fact, it seems worse, as if she’s swallowed some sort of corrosive, Drano, Emma Bovary’s strychnine, brodifacoum. The image of a rat flits through her head, its feet churning, eyes fixed. It’s the coffee, it has to be. And the oatmeal. Whatever possessed her to order oatmeal? She should have stuck to toast, dry toast, but then the thought of it—brittle, abrasive, crushed and wadded and stuck in her throat—sends her banging into the stall and suddenly everything’s coming up, the coffee, the oatmeal, the dregs of her mother’s pasta and the thinnest disembodied hint of Onikoroshi
sake
, too much
sake
, formerly on the rocks.