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.