Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  Harleigh looks disappointed with the turnout.

  “I can’t believe we can’t at least slide it into the water.”

  “The Coast Guard.”

  “We’re not operating the yacht casino, we’re not sailing it, we’d just whack it with champagne, slide it into the water and then tie it to the dock.”

  “The dock we haven’t gotten permission to build yet. And then have to haul it out again the minute the ice starts forming.”

  Last year he’d had to talk Harleigh out of the idea to ignore Daylight Savings Time on the rez. People here have enough difficulty showing up on time as it is, he’d argued, without confusing them even more.

  “I still don’t see how the Coast Guard gets involved. We’re not a coast.”

  Coast Guard are a minor nuisance compared to the Army Corps of Engineers, who oversee all water access and have been busting his balls about the proposed dock–

  “The young man was very hungry from all his climbing,” says Storyteller. “So he cut meat from the shaggy monster, which he decided to call ptí-i– buffalo. It was the best thing he’d ever eaten.”

  “I explained to you how once a boat gets to that size–”

  “But we’re not taking it off reservation land.”

  “The lake,” says Rick, knowing that Harleigh is fully aware of this, “and the river it is part of are controlled by the Feds. As long as we keep the boat on shore we can do whatever we want with it.” He sees his mother approaching, braces himself for the cold front.

  “So the young man climbed back down the vine, always easier on the descent, bringing a robe made of the monster’s hide, and told the People about the wonders he’d experienced. There were many more hours of debate, but finally it was decided that the People would migrate up to this bright, warm world above, to fish in the mighty river, to chase and kill and eat the shaggy monster.”

  “Hello, Teresa. Beautiful day for it, no?”

  Harleigh has mastered the art of greeting his enemies with a smile. Rick has been working on it, but his face or his voice always betray him. His mother doesn’t even meet his eye, homing in on the council chairman.

  “How much did it cost?”

  “They’re really excited about the upside at the casino,” says Harleigh. “Besides the gambling, it will be available for rentals– a party boat kind of thing– weddings, business retreats, birthdays for rich kids– for a thousand a day. Seats a hundred fifty, plus standing room in the bow and stern and up on the top deck–”

  “How much?”

  The figure, if she ever gets it out of Harleigh, will not include the shipping, taking the top off and sticking it back on, the operating costs, the salaries of the certified skippers they’ll have to hire–

  “Next financial report, it’ll all be laid out for you. We had kind of a time-sensitive bargain situation, so I had to make a move.”

  The only bargain Rick knows about is that the owner threw in the dry-dock blocks for free. For two and a half million it was a small gesture.

  “So the young man led the way, and one by one the People began to climb the vine up to the new world. A couple dozen of them had made it to the earth-plain and were marveling at the winding river and the warm sun and the huge herds of the shaggy monsters whose meat would feed you and whose hides would keep you warm, when a very large lady, a little too fond of her fry-bread–”

  A big laugh here, the audience imagining the woman trying to climb–

  “–tried to make it to the earth-plain, and the vine snapped and sent her hurtling back into the underground. There was no other way up, and from that day our People have been divided, a few here on the surface, never forgetting those many left behind under the ground.”

  Warm applause, Storyteller saying a few good luck blessings in the three languages, and Harleigh uses the opening to hurry away from Rick and his mother.

  Rick has been aboard the boat, all shiny surfaces, tidily arranged cook space and bathrooms, everything smelling new though it’s been in service on Lake Superior for at least two years. He wishes every member of the tribe could come aboard and take a cruise, sit in the cushy leather seats and look out the high-tech windows and think, ‘We deserve this, this is ours.’ As his mother always says, the important battle is for hearts and minds–

  “The government and the Army Corps of Engineers took our river away from us,” says Harleigh from the platform, his voice rolling outward with microphone-amplified echo. He lifts an arm to indicate the massive white vessel behind him. “And now we are taking it back.”

  Enthusiastic applause, though Rick sees that some, maybe one out of ten, are not clapping at all. ‘They don’t trust anything that’s new,’ Harleigh is always saying, ‘and don’t trust a word you say unless you hire two white men in suits to come out and back you up.’

  Teresa Crow’s Ghost sighs. “Oh my people, my people,” she mutters, and walks away without acknowledging the presence of her son.

  THEY NEED TO OUTLINE the town before they can destroy it. GPS for location, setting boundaries with the ‘total station theodolite’ (sexy-looking surveyors’ equipment), then going old-school to hustle around with wooden stakes and yellow tape. The p-dogs pop up to watch from time to time, and Leia records their man-warning chitter from across the highway despite the traffic rolling in between. For what– evidence? To present to whom?

  In some states there are volunteer relocators, out with a water truck, pushing soap suds into holes till the dogs splutter up (Jeff used to call it ‘fracking for Sciuridae’), mostly soft-hearted suburban moms who greet the refugees with towels and eye drops and often have a dozen or so back home digging up their yards and making the neighbors nervous. But not up here. At school her thesis advisor was a major ferret-head, vital in the eleventh-hour conservation of the species, and Leia was in thrall to him for a couple years. A man with a cause, not too old, good cheekbones, not that anything unprofessional happened despite her efforts to emit the appropriate pheromones. Professor Chad had a source for the live prairie dogs that Leia and his other student minions would toss into the preconditioning enclosure and then take notes as the long, lithe apprentice ferrets darted out of their burrows or PVC pipe snuggeries to streak after them, pinning the befuddled creatures against the wood and chicken-wire walls, rolling around and breaking free, rolling around and breaking free, until they either succeeded in clamping the dog’s windpipe shut long enough to suffocate it and drag it down into the burrow to feed on, or give up. More than a few times a rookie ferret, bred and raised in a university cage, would throw in the towel, retreat to lick its wounds, and at least one was killed by desperate bites from a p-dog while Leia and the rest of the team watched. Weeping and the gnashing of teeth in Ferretopia. She preferred the days when no live prey was available and she’d stroll in with several sections of sliced rat, dangling by the tails, calling till the young ferrets popped their little periscope heads out to snatch-and-go with their dinner.

  The worst were the days she was instructed to jam a live p-dog right down into the ferret holes, the quick and violent yelping and thumping and wet tearing sounds that followed making her nauseous. Jeff always went sarcastic when she’d complain about it.

  “It’s a jungle out there, Babe,” he’d say. “Deal with it.”

  Of course Jeff was in Herpetology, one of a half-dozen grad students her friend Melanie called the Slithers, and hand-fed an inexhaustible supply of wriggling white mice to his various snake and lizard test subjects on a precise schedule.

  “You feel so bad for the poor little ground squirrels,” he would say, accurate as to subfamily but condescending nonetheless, “why don’t you study them?”

  It had been a revelation to her, the one valuable thing to come out of the relationship, which ended with a screaming fight in their tent on a department field trip, attacking not only each other but each other’s doctoral species, with Jeff labeling both the ferrets and prairie dogs as ‘flea-ridden varmints’ and Leia resp
onding that ‘at least they’re homeothermic!,’ an observation that Jeff chose to take personally. It was at night during a wild thunderstorm, and they were stuck silently fuming at opposite ends of the air mattress, backs to each other, till the sun rose gently over the Rockies.

  It has something to do with the shale oil, she knows, this marking, this vast yellow-taped rectangle that encompasses her target coterie and perhaps a dozen others. ‘Destruction of habitat’ is always cited as the principal cause of the sinking numbers of the prairie dog, for the near-extinction of the black-footed ferret, and she chose this spot because it seemed too remote, too firmly in the back-of-beyond, to ever be encroached upon by human endeavor. Rodential academics love to cite the vast Texas colony that lasted nearly into the twentieth century, a kind of Aztec Empire of the Cynomys that covered twenty-five thousand square miles and held more than four hundred million individual p-dogs. How many ferrets and eagles and swift foxes and coyotes must have feasted off that mass! You think you people dig holes in the ground, she mentally beams across to the Company men still pacing around the doomed colony, try to match that.

  Iphigenia gives a nervous chirk and the dogs are suddenly up and alert. They spend over a third of their above-ground time scanning for predators, which must be incredibly stressful. No wonder the females are sexually receptive for only a half a day each year, and the males rarely live more than three years. Not tonight, honey, I’m worried something is going to eat me.

  Whatever set them off seems to be a false alarm, and a half dozen perform the ‘all clear’ jump-yip in unison, leaping straight up and sprawling to the dirt like a line of demented cheerleaders. Leia has a stuffed badger back at the apartment, along with a kite that looks exactly like a hawk when flown, which she used in the early days of the study to elicit and record warning calls. Each was eventually permanently rejected as a threat by the coterie, who would jump-yip only minutes after she deployed them. You can fool some of the prairie dogs some of the time–

  This is one of the days she misses Brandi. Not the greatest assistant, bit of a space-shot, constantly implying they were in some field biologist version of Heart of Darkness, but lots of times you just need another pair of hands, somebody to hold the subject’s front end securely in a cloth wrap while you perform some operation on the back end. ‘Too weird here, can’t hack it’ was the extent of the note she left on Leia’s observation pad, her few belongings gone from the apartment, although she didn’t clean out the half-eaten Weight Watchers easy meals in the fridge. Leia knows she should have informed the department to demand a new assistant or even pulled the plug on the study, but somehow the die seemed cast and she has gotten used to going it alone.

  “So if this is the Congo,” she asked Brandi at the Applebee’s one night, “I’m like what– the guy who goes down the river and observes and narrates–”

  “No, that’s Marlowe,” said Brandi over her fettucine Alfredo with a side of parmesan. “You’re Kurtz.”

  The Company men are taking pictures of their handiwork when the Eradicator pulls up beside her in his death machine. He is a little bowlegged guy wearing jeans with mud-caked knees and a T-shirt and ball cap that both bear the logo– a skulking, coarse-haired Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus, originally native to northern China) with a thick red X drawn over it.

  Everybody hates rats.

  He steps over to Leia with a tentative half-smile on his face, eyes flicking up to check out the streaks in her hair.

  “Humane Society?” he asks. “PETA? ASPCA?”

  “I’m a scientist,” says Leia, though lately she feels more like a crank or a stalker, one of those humorless zealots who send death threats to animal-testing labs. SCUMCUB, she thinks, the Society for Cutting Up Men who Cut Up Bunnies.

  “Oh.” He seems confused. “Geologist?”

  “Biology,” she says, nodding across the road toward the colony.

  It takes a moment for it to register. “You study prairie dogs?”

  Worse than that, she thinks– I used to live with a guy who kept pet snakes in his clothes drawer and named them after famous chess masters.

  “I have a grant,” says Leia, feeling she might be about to be ordered to move on.

  “Wow.” He looks at her with mild awe, as if he’s never beheld a grantee in the flesh before. She is emboldened.

  “You ride horses?”

  She realizes the bowlegs have prompted the question, blatant profiling, but lets it stand.

  “Not much lately,” says the Eradicator, whose hat also bears a sewn-on tag announcing that his Christian name is Jerry. “But when I was a kid, yeah.”

  “You ever have a horse break a leg in a dog-hole?”

  “No.”

  “You ever hear of it?”

  He actually tilts up the back of his hat so he can scratch his head. Leia wonders if there were Nazis running the death camps as friendly and folksy as this Jerry.

  “It’s a story you always hear, yeah, but I can’t say as I recollect anybody I knew that lost a horse– or any cattle.”

  “Cause the ranchers all claim–”

  “Well, back when there was a lot more prairie dogs and a lot more horse traffic, people riding fast after buffalos and whatnot, I’ll bet it was quite a problem.”

  Leia nods, points across to the Company men finishing up. “What’s the deal over there?”

  “That’s for a platform. Drilling platform. They’ll level all that off.”

  “With, like, a bulldozer–”

  “Right. And the thing is, there’s some kind of regulation that they can’t just plow your animals under.”

  “They’re not mine.”

  “–can’t bury em alive, so we got to come and gas em first.” He holds his arms out, looking a bit embarrassed. “Crazy, huh?”

  “Gas.”

  Jerry nods. “We started out with carbon monoxide pellets, but with that you got to stand over it with a leaf blower to keep the gas down in the hole long enough to do the job. Hated that. Even with the ear protectors on I’s pert near deaf when I come home at night. And then the time you got to spend per kill– it just don’t add up. So this time of year we’ll hope for a little precipitation and go with the aluminum phosphide.”

  “Which makes them bleed internally.”

  “No, that’s Rozol. Nasty stuff– your predators and scavengers eat the varmints when they come out to die, and then they got problems with their coagulation. Like a chain reaction. Naw, this stuff just turns to gas when exposed to moisture, goes for their lungs.”

  “Effective.”

  “If you’re thorough, plug up all the holes with newspaper as soon as you toss it down, yeah. Something special about this bunch?”

  He is looking through the stream of passing pickups and eighteen-wheelers toward the yellow-taped rectangle around the hodgepodge of mounds, hands in his pockets. How to explain the implacable courage of Ajax, the Machiavellian sexual strategies of Odysseus, Niobe’s strange fixation with the one-eyed Iphigenia, without sounding like a crackpot?

  “It’s my study group,” she says. “You observe a specific coterie over time, through the cycles of mating, of birth and death, contraction and expansion of territory, and begin to understand their behavior.”

  Jerry nods. “I’m like hooked on Animal Planet, watch it with my kids all the time. Pretty heavy for them when that fella Steve bought the farm.”

  Leia finds herself nodding in sympathy. In grad school they’d all developed vocal impressions of the Crocodile Hunter, tried to inject a bit of excitement into the most wearisome lab chores by describing them in a breathless Australian accent.

  “So once they’re all gassed, you– what?”

  “We come by a couple days later, pick up the ones that have wandered out of their holes– they tend to be pretty out of it, you can walk right up to them– and then the earth machines move in. I’ve mostly cleared for golf courses and shopping malls before, but this oil boom has got us hopping.”


  He looks her over again, eyes sympathetic. “Today I just come to scope it out, so we got a little bit to wait before– you know– the pellets go in.”

  “But no stay of execution from the governor.”

  It is not the most generous grant one could hope for, nothing compared to what the ferret crowd gets or what private donors throw at the whale and dolphin savers, but it is hers and she’s made her stand out here on the high plains. The Journal tends to look askance at papers submitted that end with “And then they all got run over by a truck.” If only it was the very last passenger pigeon, or some lovable furry critter Pixar had just made a movie about–

  “I’m not really sposed to do this,” says Jerry, handing her a business card from his pocket, “but there’s this guy.”

  BURROW BUSTERS EXCAVATION SERVICE it says, with a cartoon of a cute p-dog in a work outfit and safety glasses holding some kind of vacuum hose.

  “What he does is suck em out of their burrows, pretty much in one piece. Where they go next is up to you.”

  Earlier in the day she had examined the failed Poker Flats colony behind them, virtually a prairie dog ghost town now, with scat and nose prints around only a handful of the burrows and most others caved in or with cobwebs across the entrance. She studies the card–

  ”You know this person?”

  Jerry shrugs. “My brother Jett,” he says. “He’s always walked his own road.”

  “THEY’RE LIKE GOING NOWHERE.”

  Fawn always has the nicest clothes, stuff from Bismarck or even Minneapolis, stuff she sends away for, but she’ll go to the Walmart with them and try on outfits she wouldn’t be caught dead in.

  “Unless it’s like, the army? They get to go places then, wherever they’re sent, but they almost always come back to the rez and they’re the same sorry-ass guys but with new tattoos.”

  “There’s other tribes, aren’t there?” Tina is fascinated with the reservation stuff, but cool about it. And she has a thing about yellow, which she shouldn’t wear, not with her so pale. Fawn can pull it off, with her skin it looks great on Fawn, but she wears mostly whites and patterns you can tell come from somewhere else.