When the Killing's Done (8 page)

“Just the facts,” he says. “I mean, that’s all you can expect, right?”

It’s somehow surprising to see it there in print, this thing she’s been wrestling with privately for the past week made official, set down for the record in the staid familiar type she scans every morning for the news of things. Here is the fact of the news revealed: that she will appear at the place and time specified to make the Park Service’s case for what to her seems the most reasonable and obvious course of action, given the consequences of inaction. And if that action requires the extirpation of an invasive and pernicious species—killing, that is, the killing of innocent animals, however regrettable—then she will show that there is no alternative because the health and welfare, the very existence of the island’s ground-nesting birds, will depend on it. The entire breeding range of Xantus’s murrelet lies between Baja and Point Conception. There are fewer than two thousand breeding pairs. Rats, on the other hand, are ubiquitous. And rats eat murrelet eggs.

“Not much of a come-on, though, is it?”

“No,” she admits, straightening up and then stretching as if she’s just rolled out of bed, and maybe she should have a cup of green tea, she’s thinking, for that extra little jolt of caffeine. She stands there stationary a moment, gazing down at him, at the back of his head and the curiously fleshy lobes of his ears, at the way the hair, medium-length and mink-brown shading to rust at the tips, curls over the collar of his T-shirt and the ceramic beads he wears round his throat on a string of sixty-pound test fishing line. (“Why sixty pounds?” she’d asked him once. “So they won’t break in the surf,” he told her, matter-of-factly, as if he were stating the obvious. “They never come off?” “Never.”) She lays a hand on his shoulder, the lightest touch, but contact all the same. “But then, when you think of what happened last week in Ventura”—she looks into his eyes now and then away again, her lips compressing over the memory, the wounds still fresh and oozing—“maybe we don’t really want a crowd. Maybe we want, oh, I don’t know, maybe thirty people who’ve read the literature—”

“Thirty ecologists.”

Her smile is quick, grateful—he can always lighten the mood. “Yeah,” she says, “I think that’d be about right.”

He’s smiling now too, suspended there above the perspective line of the table like a figure in the still-life painting she’s composing behind her eyelids: the pita on the counter, the late sun breaking through to slant in through the window and inflame the stubble of his cheek, the freeway gone and vanished along with the mood of doom and gloom she’d brought with her into the front room. All is well. All is very, very well. “But I just wanted to be sure,” he says, breaking the spell, “in case you want me out front for crowd control.” He gives it a beat, reaching out to take her hand and run his thumb over her palm, to and fro, caressing her, bringing her back. “No rat lovers, though. Right? Are we agreed on that?”

On the second of December, 1853, the captain of the SS
Winfield Scott
, a sidewheel steamer that had left San Francisco the previous day for the two-week run to Panama, made an error in judgment. That error, whether it was the result of hubris, overzealousness or a simple mistake of long division, doomed her, and as the years spun out, doomed generations of seabirds too. She had been launched just three years earlier in New York for the run between that city and New Orleans, but in 1851 she was sold and pressed into service on the West Coast, where passenger demand had exploded after the discovery of gold in northern California. Built for heavy seas, some 225 feet long and 34½ feet abeam, with four decks and three masts, she was a formidable ship, named for Major General Winfield Scott, lion and savior of the Mexican War, a gilded bust of whom looked out over her foredeck with a fixed and tutelary gaze. On this particular trip, she carried some 465 passengers and $801,871 in gold and gold dust, as well as several tons of mail and a full crew. Where she picked up her rats, whether in New York or New Orleans or alongside the quay in San Francisco, no one could say. But they were there, just as they were present on any ship of size, then and now, and they must have found the
Winfield Scott
to their liking, what with its dining salon where up to a hundred people at a time could eat in comfort, with its galleys and larder, its cans of refuse waiting to be dumped over the side and all the damp sweating nooks and holes belowdecks and up into the superstructure where they could live in their own world, apart from the commensal species that provided them with all those fine and delicate morsels to eat. There might have been hundreds of them on a ship that size, might have been a thousand or more, for that matter—no one could say, and the ones that turned up in the traps set by the stewards were mute on the subject.

Captain Simon F. Blunt was a man of experience and decision. He was familiar with the waters of the channel, having been a key member of the team that had surveyed the California coast two years earlier, shortly after the territory was admitted to the union. Coming out of San Francisco the previous day, he’d encountered heavy seas and a stiff headwind, which not only put the ship off schedule but kept the majority of the passengers close to their bunks and out of the drawing room and dining salon. In order to make up time, he elected to enter the Santa Barbara Channel and take the Anacapa Passage between Santa Cruz and Anacapa, rather than steaming to the seaward of the islands, a considerably greater distance. Normally, this would have been an admirable—and expeditious—choice. Unfortunately, however, while dinner was being served that evening, fog began to set in, a frequent occurrence in the channel, resulting from the collision of the California current, which runs north to south, with the warmer waters of the southern California countercurrent, a condition that helps make the channel such a productive fishery but also disproportionately hazardous to shipping. As a result, Captain Blunt was forced to proceed by dead reckoning—in which distance is calculated according to speed in given intervals of time—rather than by taking sightings. Still, he was confident, nothing out of the routine and nothing he couldn’t handle—had handled a dozen times and more—and by ten-thirty he was certain he’d passed the islands and ordered the ship to bear to the southeast, paralleling the coast.

Half an hour later, running at her full speed of ten knots, the
Winfield Scott
struck an outcropping of rock off the north shore of middle Anacapa, tearing a hole in the hull and igniting an instantaneous panic amongst the passengers. People were flung from their berths, baggage cascaded across the decks, lanterns flickered, shattered, died, and the unknowable darkness of the night and the fog took hold. No one could see a thing, but everyone could feel and hear what was happening to them, the water rushing in somewhere below and the ship exhaling in a series of long ratcheting groans to make room for it. As they struggled to their feet and made their way out into the mobbed corridors, terrified of being overtaken and trapped belowdecks—water sloshing underfoot, the hands of strangers grasping and clutching at them while they staggered forward over unseen legs and boots and the sprawl of luggage, spinning, falling, rising again, and always that grim hydraulic roar to spur them—there was an immense deep grinding and a protracted shudder as the hull settled against the rock. Curses and screams echoed in the darkness. A child shrieked for its mother. Somewhere a dog was barking.

The officer of the watch, his face a pale blanched bulb hanging in the intermediate distance, sent up the alarm, and the captain, badly shaken, ordered the ship astern in an attempt to back away from the obstruction and avoid further damage. The engines strained, an evil tarry smoke fanning out over the deck till it was all but impossible to breathe, the great paddle wheel churning in the murk as if it were trying to drain the ocean bucket by bucket, everything held in suspension—the captain riveted, the officers mouthing silent prayers, the mob thundering below—until finally the ship broke loose with a long bruising sigh of splintering wood. She was free. Trembling down the length of her, lurching backward, but free and afloat. It must have been a revivifying moment for passengers and crew alike, but it was short-lived, because in the next instant the ship’s stern struck ground, shearing off the rudder and leaving her helpless. Almost immediately she began to list, everything that wasn’t secured careening down-slope toward the invisible rocks and the dim white creaming of the breakers four decks below.

Captain Blunt, at war with himself—lives at stake, his career ruined, his hands quaking and his throat gone dry—gave the order to abandon ship. By the light of the remaining lanterns he mustered his officers and crew to see to an orderly evacuation, but this was complicated by the gangs of desperate men—prospectors who’d suffered months and in some cases years of thirst, hunger, exhaustion, lack of female company and the comforts of civilization to accumulate their hoards over the backs of sweat-stinking mules—swarming the upper deck, dragging their worn swollen bottom-heavy satchels behind them and fighting for the lifeboats without a thought for anything but getting their gold to ground. At this point, the captain was forced to draw his pistol to enforce order even as the stern plunged beneath the waves and ever more passengers emerged from belowdecks in a mad scrum, slashing figures in the dark propelled by their shouting mouths and grasping hands. He fired his pistol in the air. “Remain calm!” he roared over and over again till his voice went hoarse. “Women and children first. There’s room for all. Don’t panic!”

The boats were lowered and the people on deck could see, if dimly, that they were out of immediate danger, and that went a long way toward pacifying them. It was a matter of ferrying people to that jagged dark pinnacle of rock the boat had struck in the dark, a matter of patience, that was all. No one was going to drown. No one was going to lose his belongings. Stay clam. Be calm. Wait your turn. And so it went, the boats pushing off and returning over the space of the next two hours till everyone but the crew had been evacuated—and then the crew, and lastly the captain, came too. What they didn’t realize, through the duration of a very damp and chilled night with the sea rising and the fog settling in to erase all proportion, was that the rock on which they’d landed was some two hundred yards offshore of the main island and that in the morning they’d have to be ferried through the breakers a second time.

It was a week before they were rescued. Provisions were salvaged from the ship before she went down, but they weren’t nearly enough to go round. Fights broke out over the allotment of rations and over the gold too, so that finally Captain Blunt—in full view of the assembled passengers—was forced to pinion two of the malefactors, gold thieves, on the abrasive dark shingle and horsewhip them to the satisfaction of all and even a scattering of applause. A number of the men took it upon themselves to fish from shore in the hope of augmenting their provisions. Others gathered mussels and abalone, another shot a seal and roasted it over an open fire. When finally news of the wreck reached San Francisco, and three ships, the
Goliah
, the
Republic
and the
California
, steamed down the coast to evacuate the passengers, no one was sorry to see the black cliffs of Anacapa fade back into the mist. The ship was lost. The passengers had endured a night of terror and a week of boredom, sunburn and enforced dieting. But no one had died and the gold, or the greater share of it, had been preserved.

As for the rats, they are capable swimmers with deep reserves of endurance and a fierce will to survive. Experiments have shown that the average rat can tread water for some forty-eight hours before succumbing, can grip and climb vertical wires, ropes, cables and smooth-boled trees with the facility of a squirrel and is capable of compressing its body to fit through a hole no wider around than the circumference of a quarter. And too, rats have a superb sense of balance and most often come to shore adrift on floating debris, whether that debris consists of loose cushions, odd bits of wood planking, whiskey bottles, portmanteaux and other flotsam or rafts of vegetation washed down out of canyons during heavy rains. Certainly some of the rats aboard the
Winfield Scott
, trapped in the hold when the baggage shifted or inundated before they could scramble up onto the deck, were lost, but it’s likely that the majority made it to shore. Of course, all it would have taken was a pair of them. Or even a single pregnant female.

In any case, as Alma is prepared to inform her audience, the black rats—
Rattus rattus
, properly—that survived the wreck of the
Winfield Scott
made their way, over the generations, from that naked rock to middle Anacapa and from there to the eastern islet, and finally, afloat on a stick of driftwood or propelled by their own industrious paws, to the westernmost. Only luck and the six miles of open water of the Anacapa Passage, with its boiling spume and savage currents, has kept them from expanding their range to Santa Cruz. And no one, not even the most inveterate rodent lover, would want that.

The Prius is aglow with the soft amber light of the dashboard as it slips almost silently along the streaming freeway, Tim relaxed behind the wheel and offering a running commentary on the news leaking out of the radio, his way of calming her, of pretending that there’s nothing out of the ordinary about this little jaunt to the museum. As if they were going to stroll arm-in-arm through the exhibits, examining the Chumash
tomol
and the skeleton of the Santa Rosa Island dwarf mammoth for the twentieth time, drawing down their voices to laugh and joke and feel at home amidst the dry stifled odor of preservation. Alma would have driven herself, except that she likes to free her mind before speaking in public and has learned from experience that the focus required of driving—however minimal and however short the distance—distracts her. There always seems to be some sort of problem on the road, an accident, a lane closure for repaving or reshouldering or whatever it is they do along the freeway at night—or mayhem, simple mayhem, bad manners, cell phone abuse, people with their heads screwed on backward—and the delay upsets her equilibrium. When you see brake lights ahead you never know if you’ll be stopped for five minutes or an hour. Or your life. The rest of your life.