Snapper (11 page)

The likeliest impediment to their reproductive success was a human observer bungling around twice a day, but their welfare was almost incidental anyway. The point was for patriotic human hearts to swell with pride on outdoor weekends, and convincing replicas would have sufficed; the compulsive monitoring was not good husbandry, just an expression of national guilt. I did what I was paid for. Privately I sided with the furred and feathered residents of the area who must have wondered why humans were loosing winged hyenas in their midst.

I began to embellish my notes—partly because nothing was irrelevant, but mostly because I was bored.

I e-mailed my field notes once a week to my liaison in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office, a man I knew slightly named Travis who liked to fish on the job and brag about it too, the standard work ethic in Jefferson. Whenever I had visited the office I found him ogling lures on a dial-up connection, and I had no idea he worked with someone else. I was certain he wouldn’t read my notes; they were just an indication that I wasn’t idle, too. On reflection, it couldn’t have been his idea to check nests twice a day, but that did not occur to me at the time.

One evening I received an e-mail from someone named Dana Bowen at the same office.

I replied immediately.

And almost immediately I received a reply.

I wrote straight back.

She replied:

I wrote:

And she replied:

Fearing some kind of audit, I picked her up outside the Fish and Wildlife office two mornings later. She was younger than I expected—thirty-three or thirty-four, the traditional age for a Jefferson girl to become a grandmother. She was very pretty, though severe and mandarin: black curls scraped back from a pale face with elegant black brows, a wide mouth, and a soft chin; she was dressed for bugs despite the heat in
a long loose shirt and long trousers, with exemplary posture like a yogi’s or a soldier’s, arms folded across her chest.

I had neglected to mention the
Gypsy Moth
in our e-mail exchange. She seemed alarmed when I pulled up and began speaking to her.

“Nathan Lochmueller,” I said through the window.

“You drive a magic bus,” she said.

“Have to get around somehow,” I said. “It’s the
Gypsy Moth
, as you can see.”

“Did you paint it yourself?”

“A friend did it for me.”

“You must like your friend,” she said. “A lot.”

And you don’t make friends easily, I thought.

“Dana Bowen,” she said. “Would you mind putting my telescope and tripod in the back?” They lay on the sidewalk beside her but she didn’t gesture toward them, just stood with her arms folded, calling things by their full names. When I had done that she asked me to open the passenger door for her too, and she walked around in the same strange chess piece pose, and climbed in without using her hands. I had never heard of a condition that pinned your arms to your chest. I had covered the seat in towels and blankets, because it was coated in ancient unidentifiable gunk.

“I don’t wear a seat belt,” she said.

“That’s good, ’cause the
Gypsy Moth
hasn’t got one anymore.”

I shut her door and climbed in on my side, wondering where to begin.

“Of course I agree with you completely,” she said as I started the engine. It caught on the fourth attempt. “They’re glorified vultures. An apex predator that never hunts. Absurd. But thank you for taking me to see them.”

I glanced at her in profile. She was even lovelier, with a high forehead, a long pale neck, and lashes like arrows beneath her black brows. The fingers of her right hand clenched her left elbow, nothing about them obviously deficient.

I drove to Nest 3 on the Wabash first to give us time to get acquainted, and I tried making jokes to put her at ease.

“First time I heard the term
apex predator
I thought it was a car alarm or a video game,” I said.

“You are exactly like your field notes,” she said.

“There is some walking at the end of this drive. At all the nests, actually. It’s not really walking, it’s squelching. Will that be a problem?”

“I’m looking forward to it,” she said. “My problem is that I have very limited control of my arms and hands. I am like a marionette at the mercy of a sadistic two-year-old.”

“Why?”

“Nerve damage. Every six months my doctor tries something new. It’s like an election. Nothing changes. Maybe some symptoms get rearranged. Mercifully my feet, knees, and hips are afflicted with only intense intermittent pain. Walking is not a problem.”

Although I contracted Lyme disease later myself, it is treatable in its early stages. Hers, she said, had gone undetected for years. The kind and extent of nerve damage it can cause is not predictable or well understood.

“My case is like chronic epilepsy of the arm,” she said.

“Are you married? Do you live alone?”

“I have a lot of plastic dishes.”

At the nest I put her telescope on her tripod (“I can’t use binoculars,” she said), but before I had finished she spotted one of the blinds I had built at a vantage point.

“What is
that
?” she said.

I had lashed several sturdy sticks together with bungee cords between three thick branches of a tall cypress. It was makeshift, but safe. Perhaps makeshift is an understatement. It would have made a bald eagle blush. I explained.

She turned and leveled her black brows at me.

“You can invoice us for climbing equipment and protective gear,” she said.

“It’s safe,” I said.

“I insist.”

On the way back to the
Gypsy Moth
she slipped in the mud. For an awful moment she lay on her back in dire convulsions, unclasped arms shaking violently from the shoulder, as though transplanted from an old crone, a parody of ecstasy she ended quickly by clutching her elbows again with difficulty. I helped her up by the shoulders. She blushed and looked down.

“Don’t you dare get that mud on my truck,” I said, and at last, she laughed.

At Nest 2 we examined small piles of rocks the archaeologists had made. I held them up where Dana could see them while she stood in her strange figurine stance, but we didn’t know what we were looking for. The settlement is thought to be four thousand years old, built by people so lost in time that we don’t know their name—they’re simply called the Caborn-Welborn culture after their discoverers.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” said Dana.

“No,” I said.

“I think a Tarzan like yourself should have a little Jane,” she said.

“You just made a joke,” I said.

“I sometimes do.”

“I’m more of a St. Francis,” I said. “Anyway, the girl who painted my truck. She’s very independent.”

“And you resent that.”

“
Resent
is the wrong word,” I said.

“You should resent it,” she said. “I was too independent once, and now I’m too needy.”

“Is that your assessment or someone else’s?”

“Whatever their faults,” she said, “at least eagles mate for life.”

As we continued, I learned that she had been engaged until her fiancé developed an interest in healthier specimens; that she had studied woodpeckers on the Mississippi (which she called “a vast national sow prone to rolling over her young”), even claimed to have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker, often called Elvis in feathers less for his gaudy plumage than for the regular sightings of him since he was declared extinct in 1944. Her job was “doing all the things Travis is supposed to,” making calls through a speakerphone and answering e-mails with voice recognition software. She was lucky to have the job, would never declare herself disabled provided she could still find a way to work, had been in Jefferson only three months, and had begun chipping away at a paralegal qualification in the evenings.

At Nest 3, both of us drenched in perspiration and covered in mud, I held a water bottle for her to drink from, and she announced that she would like to continue; see whatever else there was to see. I led her downriver to a lock and dam the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers laid across the Ohio fifty years before, and we stood on top watching blue catfish four and five feet long batter the concrete below with their armored heads. It’s unsettling to watch, and nobody knows why they do it.

“Simple,” said Dana. “The dams age. The fish breed. Check back in two hundred years.”

We found a molting copperhead on a flat rock, and keeping
well away, admired the hourglass pattern on his shining back while he glared at us, half-dressed.

Downstream from that lay the wreck of a steamer that ran aground in 1934. Later the U.S. Navy attempted to salvage it, resulting in a U.S. Navy salvage boat wrecked alongside. Both wrecks teem with frogs, thousands of frogs gorging on the millions of bugs clouding the air. In chorus they sounded like the rumbling of a great riverine intestine. I felt like a demented tour guide; everything I showed her was vaguely revolting. She loved it, she said, and thought me foolish and fortunate in equal measure, and said she hoped I wouldn’t fall out of a tree.

We neared the confluence of the two rivers, where green and blue churn and roil to create the reeking brown sludge that eventually becomes the Mississippi—or where, Dana said, the sultan Ohio impatiently awaits his Wabash concubine. On a small sandy strip of desolate shoreline Dana said she would like to swim. Would I turn around while she undressed? I did.

“I don’t wear things with buttons or laces,” she explained, but several minutes passed before she called out okay.

She was twenty feet out, shoulder deep in a wavering brocade of sunlight and water, laughing, blighted hands invisible.

“You could join me,” she said, and turned to face the river. At first I hesitated, and then I didn’t; she was too demure and too damaged for it to be anything other than a friendly invitation, and there was no one around but the bright blue Ohio and us.

Bowfishing, at least as practiced in Southern Indiana, combines hunting and angling while eliminating the need for the
skills of either. You sit in a rowboat firing arrows at large targets three and four feet away in three feet of water. It’s considered a good date in Jefferson: a lady can work on her suntan while her gentleman kills things, and the only expense is beer. Nest 2, the cypress nest and archaeological site, was subject to infrequent human contact in the form of bowfishing expeditions.

The eagles at Nest 2 observed these hunters closely.

I wrote.

The dominant species in that lake are paddlefish, a large silver animal unsurprisingly shaped like a paddle, and Asian carp, an invasive species. Each year the Jefferson Anglers Association bestows an award on the member who has caught the most illegal immigrants. You wouldn’t especially want to eat either one; you shoot them for sport.

I was in my own nest reading
Dr. Zhivago
a few days later when I became aware of a man in the water, carrying in one hand what looked like a piece of machinery he had wrenched from an old clock. He was knee-deep, alone, clad only in jean shorts, with strange coils of cord through his belt loops. He was facing away from me, moving deliberately but without obvious direction. He had immense linebacker shoulders and short military hair.