At his curious glance she went on: “You know, Joni Mitchell? ‘Carey’?” A sigh: “I forgot, you didn’t have Ralph shaping your musical tastes as a teenager.” She began to sing in a husky soprano:
“All right, all right,” he said. “Yeah, I have heard that golden oldie.” He gave a snort of laughter. “I like that man’s sense of humor.”
“Rock music’s still faintly scandalous in the Commonwealth,” she said. “So there! You thought I was a fuddy-duddy for liking the classics.”
There was a rush of feet and blasphemous cursing from the crew as they came into the U-shaped pier on the north bank, thick ropes were made fast, and the ramp at the front of the vessel was let down with a clattering thud.
Their Hummer was first on and first off; several two-and-a-half-ton trucks loaded with boxed cargo followed, and another with a huge coil of cable. Adrienne took the wheel, letting the other vehicles pass her as she drove through a pleasant, sleepy-looking village nestled among trees and then past a formidable turf-covered earthwork and ditch. The road forked there, one branch heading northeast, the other more sharply west of north, where it cut like a winding ribbon through the rolling hills and crossed their creeks on trestle bridges. Those looked odd, until he realized the huge size of the interlocked timbers.
There was no fringe of cultivation beyond the town’s gardens; a mile later she turned off the road, downshifted and splashed through a small stream, and then tackled the side of a thirty-degree hill’s slope. The Hummer took the uneven steepness with ease; he’d always liked the way the power-shifting system to the four wheels made them grip like giant fingers. Coming upslope they startled a flock of ostriches into explosive flight, and halted beneath a single small oak near the crest of a hill.
The cooling engine ticked; the cries of birds and the endless sough of the wind were louder. The smell of hot metal was quickly lost beneath the aromas of laurel, ceanothus and minty yerba santa crushed beneath the wheels. Long champagne-pale grass rippled in the cool wind off the water, thickly sown with late California poppies in drifts of small golden coins; nearer the water’s edge, vast fields of tule rushes tossed like a rolling poplin-green sea. Freshwater marsh lined every stream among the many that meandered southward toward the bay. There were trees on their edges, and clumps elsewhere, but everywhere the land stretched immense to the blue horizon.
She handed him the binoculars, and he silently looked about, restraining an impulse to swear and exclaim alternately. A group of brown-and-cream eland wandered along the edge of a patch of blue oak in a swale between two hills, big antelope the size of an ox but with longer legs, dewlaps and spiral horns. A herd of about two hundred elk were scattered in fawn dots up a farther hill; scattered among them were pronghorns, wildebeest, mule deer, and what he thought might be Thomson’s gazelle. A distant drumming of hooves heralded a group of wild horses, flowing over a rise like a wave and then down into a vale; water and birds splashed up as they breasted the damp ground there and vanished over the next hillcrest. Scattered bison grazed, and a grizzly rested under the shade of a blue oak, while two yearling cubs wrestled and fell around her.
“Is there anything that maniac of a grandfather of yours didn’t turn loose here?” Tom asked.
“Well, chimps didn’t do so well in California; they didn’t like the winters. But see that edge of swamp over there? Those knobs and twitchy things are the nostrils and eyes and ears of a bunch of hippos. They’re finally adjusting well. The chimps and the gorillas are doing fine down in Central America. We didn’t introduce just African animals, of course: tigers from China, snow leopards and the ordinary variety, European wild boar—”
“Arrrgghh!” he said, a cry from the heart. “Feral swine are organic bulldozers! They—”
“Don’t worry; the wild pigs aren’t as much of a pest as they are FirstSide. The cougars and wolves and lions and tigers and leopards keep ’em down. And it turns out golden eagles love raw suckling pig. Tom, there are a lot more predators large enough to tackle a boar here than there are FirstSide. Not to mention we hunt them.”
“I certainly hope so,” he mumbled.
“This acclimatization was a really big thing with the Old Man; he spent a pile of his own money on it, and a fair bit of the Commission’s, as soon as the first mines were going. We used this reserve to establish breeding stock, then spread them around—by riverboat, truck, overland drives, sometimes by air. On the east coast and down in South America by ship too, a little later. You should see what the pampas are getting to be like in Argentina; it makes the Serengeti on FirstSide look like a paved-over parking lot.”
“Arrrghh!” Tom said again. He clutched his head in his hands, and Adrienne laughed in a clear peal of mirth.
“You remember that book, Ecological Imperialism?” Tom nodded. “Well, it looks like Crosby’s thesis about the pre-Columbian Americas having a lot of vacant ecological niches after the Pleistocene extinctions was right. At least, nearly everything we introduced spread like dandelions—including dandelions, by the way. The total biomass is up, and the variety of large mammals is way up. Plus the introduced Old World beasties coevolved with human beings. They aren’t helpless like the ground sloths.”
“That’s the reason your grandfather did this, Crosby’s book?”
“Oh, no, he just thought all the new animals looked cool and improved the hunting,” she said, turning the engine back on. “Read too much Tarzan when he was a kid, I suppose. But he felt very vindicated when I pointed the book out to him!”
On the one hand, releasing exotic species like that is insanely risky, he thought. On the other hand, it does look cool. Hunting here would be a bit too much like shooting a dairy herd, though.
He turned his head to say so, and yelped. A twelve-foot-long, five-ton mass tipped with a massive curved horn on its snout and another, shorter one above that had risen from a muddy wallow. It looked at them with little piggy eyes, twitching its ears in bad temper. Tom’s mind gibbered for a second, but his voice was calm as he said, “Adrienne, I think there’s one enormous rhinoceros looking us over about fifty yards thataway. And your grandfather is fucking insane.”
Long bronze-colored hair whipped across his face as she turned her head to look. She also hit the gas hard enough to send a spray of gravel shooting rearward. That decided the beast; it put its head down and began churning the tree-trunk pillars of its legs. Gravel spurted from under its feet as it hit the roadway, and Tom thought he could feel the ground shaking under the massive thudding impact of those broad three-toed feet.
Hummers had excellent acceleration, for a diesel-engined vehicle. Experiment showed that for a while a rhinoceros could do even better. The thick dust spewing out from behind the little truck partially hid the giant beast, but the continuous rain of stones thrown up by the rear wheels enraged it further; he could hear its hoarse squeal and the great bellows panting of its breath. That was the problem with animals too big and tough to have natural enemies—their impulse was to charge anything that annoyed them. Charge it and gore it with that huge horn and stomp it under those pile-driving feet…
“That’s a white rhino!” Adrienne shouted over the rushing air and the engine’s growl. “I thought all the ones in this reserve had been trapped and relocated!”