When the Killing's Done (49 page)

“Never miss,” he shouts back. “But you lads’re getting sloppy. If he gets away, he’s going to be one tough hog to hunt down next time.”

The rebuke hangs there in the air a moment, and then one of the voices below—she recognizes it as belonging to Clive Hyndman, a blond twenty-six-year-old with a perpetually peeling nose and legs so good he could have been modeling his khaki shorts for money—comes back at them. “We got the sow and three piglets. Didn’t even know the old man was there till he started running up the hill.”

And Frazier, cupping his hands to his mouth: “No worries, mate. Just so long as he didn’t get away. Now, are you coming up here or am I going down there?”

She can hear them working their way up from below, a scratching and rustling accompanied by the clatter of shingle scattering underfoot. The dogs, slick with wet, settle on their haunches, the pig of no interest to them now—it’s the living pig that pushes their buttons, the fleeing pig, the mysterious thing that bolts at the sound of their conjoined voices and never stops till they’ve got it cornered and the man with the gun is wading in for the finale. She wants to sit down on the nearest rock—her legs are lifeless, numb, too weak to support her—but instead she finds herself standing over the carcass as if she’s willed it into existence. It’s bigger than she thought it would be, huge really, three or four hundred pounds, its fur brindled and shaggy, more like a sheepdog’s than the smooth brushed coat of the domestic hogs she’d seen rooting around the villages in Guam. Frazier’s first shot, the one from the rifle, severed the carotid artery and a loop of bright oxygen-rich blood arced away from the wound till the heart stopped pumping and the flow faltered like the choked-off stream of a garden hose. The blood shadows the carcass now, so dark it could be oil, as if the animal had stumbled and fallen in a seep.

Rain stirs the dense tangle of fur, drops silently into the fixed and unseeing eyes, the delicacy of the lashes there, the canthic folds, the deep rich chocolate brown of the irises. She bends from the waist to see more clearly, ignoring the riveting of the rain. The hooves fascinate her. She’s never seen a hoof up close before—it’s so neatly adapted to its task, a built-in shoe shining and dark with the wet, as impervious as if it were molded of plastic. And the ears, the way the ears stand straight up, like a German shepherd’s, to collect and concentrate the sounds that only come to us peripherally. The heavy shoulders, the neat arc of the haunches, the switch of the tail. This wild thing, this perfect creature. She feels the sorrow in the back of her throat, the sorrow of existence, and if she could have brought the animal back to life, restored it to some other ecosystem where it could belong and thrive and live out its time under the sun, she would have done it.

Frazier comes up behind her. “Five down,” he says, “and bloody hundreds to go.”

She just nods. “It’s kind of”—and she feels like an idiot even before the words are out of her mouth—“neat, though. Healthy, I mean. A good specimen.”

“Oh, yeah,” Frazier says, stepping forward to tap the carcass with the toe of his boot. “He’s in his prime, no doubt about it. Probably been out there making all the little piggies he can. But see this?” His boot poking at the jaws now. “These tushes? He could rip the guts out of a dog in a heartbeat with these things and no mistaking it. This is one mean animal. And you can tell by the way he was coming at us he didn’t really have any charitable notions in his head.”

He’s right. Of course he’s right. These animals have to be eliminated and if you stop to see them as individuals you’re done. How many acorns will have the chance to germinate and grow into trees to shade the terrain and capture mist in their spreading branches because this pig at their feet won’t be there to glut himself on them?
Five down. Hundreds to go.

At that moment Clive emerges from the chaparral downslope, his shorter but just as sturdy and just as sunburned companion following close behind pulled by two more dogs on leashes. The men are dressed identically: gaiters, shorts, ponchos, wide-brimmed hats. Both carry rifles of the same make and caliber as Frazier’s. “Jesus, what a day,” Clive hollers in his high husky voice that always seems to be going hoarse on him. “I say we’re lucky to get what we got because the critters aren’t stupid—they’ll all be hunkered in cover while it’s coming down like this.” And then, as if just noticing her, he touches the dripping brim of his hat and says, “Hi, Alma. Nice day, huh?”

The other hunter—he won’t look directly at her, not yet—lets go of the leashed dogs so they can rejoin their compatriots in a brief exposition of shoulder bumping and tail wagging. “That’s a trophy animal there, Fraze,” he says, nodding in the direction of the boar. “Wish you’d left him for me.”

“Maybe Alma wants the tusks for a souvenir?” Clive says, giving her a sidelong glance.

“Sure,” the second one says, and he looks up now and there’s no mistaking the intent of his gaze, a healthy young man out in the bush bereft of the company of women, and he’s dissolved her clothes, healed her abrasions and wiped her clean of mud all in an instant, “but as I’m sure she knows that’ll require hacking off the head and burying it for a couple weeks so the beetles and worms can get at it. Try to pull those things out otherwise and they’ll snap off every time.” He looks to the dead animal and then comes back to her. “I’m A.P., by the way, short for Arthur Peter—don’t think we’ve had the pleasure.”

She takes the hand he offers—as cold and wet as hers—and murmurs, “I’m Alma. Nice to meet you. But maybe, given all that effort, we ought to just leave this one for the ravens.” Turning to Frazier, not for protection, not because the moment is awkward and she can feel the lust radiating like an aura from A.P. and Clive, but because she’s feeling good again, or better, and wants desperately to keep from breaking down in front of them, keep from showing weakness in the face of the killing and dying and death they take so casually. The necessary death. The death she’s ordered. As boss and overseer. “Right, Frazier?” she says, letting her voice rise in an easy jocular way.

“Royt. But then, and this is always a worry once you start in on these things, you’re going to have an artificial blip in the raven population, you know that, don’t you?—and nobody can say what effect that’s going to have down the road on, say, the island scrub jay or the side-blotched lizard or any of the other species you’re trying to preserve.”

“Okay then,” A.P. chirps, going down on one knee before the carcass, “let me just do some mouth-to-mouth here on this one and see if we can’t revive him—”

They’re standing unprotected in the rain, deep in a wild canyon on an island off the Pacific Coast on which there can’t be more than twenty people total at the moment, discussing the cascading effects of the artificial removal of one species to favor another. In all her years in the library, the classroom, at her desk in her dorm writing papers and dreaming of the outdoors, she couldn’t have imagined this. It feels good, though. It feels right. Ignoring A.P., she says, “Of course I’m aware of that. Providing this resource for the ravens is going to increase their numbers exponentially and once the carcasses are gone they’re going to starve and die back, but not before robbing every nest they can and predating anything that moves . . . but we’ve got to take that chance. I mean, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

Frazier nods. “Just making a point,” he says. And adds, as a clarifier, “No worries.”

One of the dogs whines. The rain, which has slackened, begins to pick up again. A.P., still down on one knee, still clowning, says, “Nope, there’s no bringing this one back.” And Clive, hands hanging at his sides and a fountain spouting from the crease at the brim of his hat, says, “What I don’t understand, ecologically speaking, is why don’t we get out of this rain someplace?”

Lunch, shared round under the canopy of a bright blue plastic tarp Frazier weighted with rocks atop the ledge above them and strung across to the crown of an ironwood rising up from below, is heavy on jerky, PowerBars and dried fruit, though each of the men produces a foil-wrapped sandwich and Alma contributes half a dozen veggie cheese wraps she made up in her pre-dawn kitchen for just such an encounter as this. They’ve got a fire going and she’s grateful for that, shivering actually, the sweatshirt soaked through and propped up on a stick to dry or at least steam, and no, she’s not going to worry about the strict prohibition against open fires out here—not today, not in this mess. Frazier passes round his flask and she fits the cold metal rim to her lips and takes a burning hit like everybody else, feeling it work its way down her throat to ignite in the acid pool of her stomach, fire on fire. From there, it will be absorbed into her bloodstream where it will rise to massage the pleasure centers of her brain and plunge low to sweep through the embryo growing inside her, her daughter, and her daughter better learn to take it, to toughen up, that’s what she’s thinking. One hit. Half a shot. What harm can that do?

“What’re you thinking, Alma?” Frazier asks, leaning in to poke at the fire.

“I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.”

“Another hit?”

“No,” she says, waving away the proffered flask. Then she feels a grin coming on. “Or yes, hell yes—why not?” Another swallow, another burn. She’s feeling reckless, celebratory, proven—blooded, isn’t that what they call it? Shouldn’t Frazier be dabbing a handkerchief in boar’s blood and anointing her forehead?

“That’s the spirit, girl,” A.P. says, and she passes him the flask, conscious now not only of his eyes on her but of something else too, a deferential note to the foolery, as if he were forcing it, as if, despite her passing illusion of solidarity, he—and Clive and Frazier too—can’t forget that she’s the one paying the bills here.

The rain seems heavier now, if that’s possible. All four dogs, stinking and wet, have crowded in with them, tight quarters. The dead boar, a swollen shaggy heap sinking into its own fluids a stone’s throw away, is the only one not invited to the party, though in a way, he’s the guest of honor. It’s chilly. She edges closer to the fire.

For a long while no one says anything, each occupied with his own thoughts, listening to the rain, the fire, feeling the surge of life all around them—the life of the wild that progresses minute to minute, day to day, in this very spot, whether they’re here to record it or not. The brandy is in her brain. She shivers again and leans forward to reach for the sweatshirt.

“So what you think?” Clive asks in a kind of yodel that startles them all. “Should we call it a day? Not much sense in mucking about in this shit. You won’t see another pig today, I guarantee you that.”

A.P. looks first to her, then Frazier, to see how the proposition is going over, before rubbing his hands together, ducking his head and concurring. “No,” he says, “no way.”

Frazier, his legs tented before him, his grin in place, leaves it to her. “What do you say, Alma—seen enough?”

Before she has a chance to answer—and she can already see the fire going in the big paneled room of the field station, already feel the dry sustaining warmth of her own showered and talcumed body wrapped tightly in her sleeping bag—two things happen. The first involves the transient appearance, at the far edge of the rough table of dirt and rock on which they’re sitting, of a pair of labile snouts and four startled eyes, and the second, the eruption of the dogs in a moil of slashing limbs and frenzied outraged yelps. In an eyeblink, they’re gone, the whole business, transient pigs (there were two of them, weren’t there? Medium-sized: shoats?) and all four dogs. Frazier leaps to his feet, cursing.

“Aw, shit,” A.P. spits, but he never moves. Nor does Clive. “I told you”—to Clive—“we should’ve kept the dogs chained.”

“But who would’ve thought—I mean, the fucking pigs coming right up to us like we had a bucket of slops and it’s feeding time?”

“Aw, shit,” A.P. reiterates.

The barking—baying—is already fading away downslope when Frazier, who’s made no move to shoulder his pack or pluck up the rifle propped against it, begins to break down the fire, separating out the burning brands and kicking dirt over the coals. “Well,” he says, glaring first at Clive, then A.P., “aren’t you going to get up off your sorry asses and trail those dogs?”

Reluctantly, with exaggerated stiffness, they get to their feet. They look put-upon, angry, stung by the reproach—they don’t want to be out in this weather, nobody does, and they were only waiting for her to throw in and say
Yeah, I’ve had enough, let’s go back
. But that isn’t going to be possible now. Now they have to follow the dogs because the dogs are on the scent and they can’t just leave them out there on their own.

“Alma?” Frazier, who’s still poking at the remains of the fire in a shifting robe of smoke that clings to his legs, falls open and wraps itself round again, is watching her. “You up for this? I can take you back, if you want—”

And what’s she going to say? Is she going to say
Take me back
like some secretly pregnant pencil pusher, like a woman, or pull the damp sweatshirt over her head, wriggle into her clear plastic poncho and heft her pack like the others? “I’m fine,” she says, and then the tarp is rolled up and packed away and the fire stamped out and they’re following Clive and A.P. down into the throat of the canyon, rain overhead, mud underfoot.

She’s not really keeping track of the time—she’s too exhausted for that, too wiped even to lift her wrist and peel back the wet sleeve of her sweatshirt to glance at her watch—but it seems as if they’ve been walking for hours. Trudging down one slope and up the next, the world as wet as it must have been when the continents first emerged from the rolling waters and nothing in sight but more hills, more chaparral, more streams, runlets, rills and cascades, it becomes apparent to her that they won’t be finding the pigs, not today. They might not even find the dogs. Or the road. Or the truck, for that matter. The hunters are out there somewhere, Clive and A.P., moving like machines, like pistons, up and down, up and down. And she’s stuck here behind Frazier, who—and she’s acutely conscious of this—is hanging back for her sake, picking his way carefully across the landscape, silent now, grinless, thinking his own thoughts. They’re working along the ridge, lower down, much lower—so low she can see the looping brown upper reaches of Willows Creek and hear the deflected roar of it as it blasts its way to the sea, water piling atop water—when she spots something below. Movement. A flash of color. It can’t be A.P. or Clive. It can’t be the dogs. Or the pigs. Or any pig. Because the color—it’s moving, definitely moving—is all wrong. The color, and here she calls ahead to Frazier to stop while she drops her backpack at her feet to retrieve her binoculars from the side flap, is pink.