by John Sayles
“I’ve got one in my desk,” she says.
“When was it written?”
“Ethics for Tribal Officials, 1936.” Doris has an incredible memory for facts but not much imagination. “To think they needed them way back then.”
THE DOG-SUCKER ARRIVES ABOUT an hour before the killing at the back of the colony begins. A yellow truck, the kind that used to come to clean out their sewer back in Minnetonka. The driver hops out and strides over to Leia with his hand out, grinning. His ball cap has a prairie dog wearing a safety helmet on it.
“Jett Tutweiler,” he announces. “And you’re the Wildlife Girl.”
“Behaviorist. I’ve got a grant.”
He keeps smiling. “Right. So how many of the little buggers are we talking about?”
“The sample is two dozen, but I’d like to pull as many as we can, give them some neighbors.”
Only a few of the p-dogs have stuck their noses out to see her this close, the coterie reappearing to forage a couple days back after the three weeks of snow and zero-degree temperatures. They don’t hibernate, just hunker down in the burrows and live off their stored fat, and the very old and the very young often don’t make it through the season. Leia has the cages piled at the edge of the highway, a housing chart prepared to minimize the potential for fights between cellmates. She points to the first hole.
“I thought we’d start here and work our way to the end.”
“Sounds like a plan,” says Jett, who manages to be bouncy even when he’s not moving. “I’ll pull the rig over.”
The traffic, a steady day-and-night rumble of pickups and sixteen-wheelers, has not altered the behavior within the colony, and Leia has had to cross the highway to observe with a clear field of vision, the p-dogs gradually ignoring, possibly even expecting, her presence. Odysseus has filched some out-of-coterie nookie, mating with a couple bimbos from the west side during their annual half-day of estrus, and if persistence is a genetic trait it will be well represented in future generations. She’s lost only one of the sample, Clytemnestra, to a ferruginous hawk that lugged her just twenty yards before landing and proceeding to pull her guts out, the other dogs pretty much burrow-bound for the rest of the afternoon.
The truck rolls up beside the first hole and Jett bounds out to deploy the thick, green hose coiled at the side.
“I got a four-inch gauge here,” he says, wiggling and pushing the hose down the hole, “which might seem a bit narrow for some of the fat ones, but if they can squeeze into these holes, they can fit through my extractor.”
“It doesn’t hurt them?”
The hose bows as if it’s gone as deep as it can. “Not too bad, usually. They’ll be going two-fifty, three hundred miles per hour when the hose spits em out, but I got the chamber all padded up with foam. You see them NASCAR fellas these days, they hit the rail going who knows how fast, and like as not they bounce right off. Beats the hell out of a couple hay bales.”
He flips a switch on the side of the truck and it begins to thrum noisily, the volume steadily increasing till the hose twitches and there is a dull thud, like an old softball hitting a brick wall, from within the side of the truck. Jett waits till there is another twitch and thud, then another. He listens, wiggles the hose a bit more, then switches the machine off.
“You got you a couple.”
Leia pulls on her rubber gloves, brings up a cage. Jett opens a little hatch next to the hose port.
“You gonna have to just reach in and feel around some, but they ain’t too lively right after.”
“Stunned.”
“I figure them people say they were taken up in alien spaceships,” says Jett, “feel about the same way.”
It is Demeter, Psyche, and little Daedulus, no cuts, only Psyche seeming a little out of it once deposited in the cage. ‘The Effects of Extraction-Induced Concussion on Cynomys ludovicianus,’ thinks Leia, with before-and-after MRI readouts of their little walnut brains and her photo on the cover of the Journal. Careers have been made on less.
“What do people usually do with them after they’re, you know– sucked out?”
“Varies.” Jett is jockeying the hose down into the next hole. “I’m of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell persuasion, unless folks feel a need to let me in on it.”
She had a story about an out-of-state habitat already set up and waiting for the evacuees, and is relieved not to have to tell it. She figures she’ll wait till after he’s gone to start with the translocation.
“Some folks that just don’t want them zapped– like by the fella who pumps propane and oxygen down the holes, lights it with this remote spark-plug thing–”
“Crispy critters.”
Jett turns from his work to smile at her. “Yeah, it ain’t pretty to think about. Anyhow, there’s folks who leave it up to me as to the disposal. Disposition?”
“The fate of the dogs.”
“Right. I got a Japanese fella, buys the pups for twenty-five dollars a head, probably makes a killing over there selling them for pets.”
“The Japanese are seriously into cute.”
“And then with the grown-up ones, there’s these folks who breed this kind of weasely thing.”
“Black-footed ferret.”
“That one. Which is like endangered so’s they got to throw a live prairie dog in with em every once in a while.”
“They like it better than thawed rat.”
Jett has the hose jammed down another hole. “Whatever. Watch your ears.”
He flips the switch and the huge vacuum groans, transporting another dog into the padded chamber.
It is perhaps the worst time of year to be doing this, the breeding cycle incomplete, several of the females pregnant, the animals reduced in bulk from scanty winter feed, predators extra hungry and on the prowl. A few of the females haven’t come into estrus yet, and strange surroundings plus conflict with new neighbors might just hit the ‘off’ switch. This could be the prairie dog Trail of Tears–
“This is a deep one,” says Jett, switching holes and dealing more hose off the spool. “I’m already down six, seven feet.”
“They’ll go deep, sometimes. There will be two, three, maybe even four entrances to a burrow and nobody’s got exclusive rights to it.”
“Kinda like a hippie commune.”
She doesn’t want to get into the infanticide and cannibalism, which disgusts most people outside the field, which disgusted her when she first learned about it. Marauding mothers killing and eating their own sisters, cousins, grandchildren, gaining protein and possibly, in the briefly bereaved neighbor, recruiting a future nursemaid for their own pups once they first emerge at six weeks. What happens underground stays underground–
“I always figure there must be a few stuck between in the tunnels that get left behind,” says Jett. “But so far I gotten no complaints.”
“There’s a couple individuals I need.” The extracted animals seem fine, testing the limits of their cages, Echo even nibbling the grass that sticks up through the bottom wire. “You need a certain number of mature adults to start breeding again, or the coterie won’t be viable.”
Jett nods. “Like in the Bible, where you start with just Adam and Eve, and then get Cain and Abel– but who was their wives?”
“Laverne and Shirley.”
Jett grins and scratches the back of his head the exact way his brother does.
“Yeah, but where did they come from?”
It is not quick work, Jett placing and pulling the hose, having to move the truck every few withdrawals, and they’ve only accounted for half the coterie and a few outliers when the Eradicator eases off the highway, bumping over the hummocky ground past them, the brothers, who she realizes now must be twins, waving almost shyly to each other in passing. Jerry parks at the extreme rear of the colony and begins to sow his death pellets, sealing holes with wads of wetted newspaper, with a teenaged boy, maybe his son, to help with the task.
“Rained last night,” mutters Jett, wrestlin
g the hose into a particularly dog-legged hole, “you got me just in time.”
“Did you two ever work together?”
“Oh, we had a lawn-mowing operation when we were in high school. People couldn’t tell us apart or thought there was just one, used to call us ‘Jimmy.’ Made us some money, but when you got different philosophies of life”– Jett gets the hose past the obstruction, pushes it down till it’s snug– “it don’t profit none to force the issue. We get along fine Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas.”
Odysseus is hard to get ahold of once he’s in the chamber, shrinking back into the far corner beyond her reach, and Leia has to ask Jett for help. He pulls on a work glove from a back pocket, sticks his arm in up to the shoulder, makes a pensive face as he fishes around. Odysseus is bicycling his rear legs when he’s pulled out into the daylight.
“Lively little feller.”
“Odysseus.”
“You got names for em.”
“Easier to remember than B-13, B-14.” Leia takes him from Jett, places him in an empty cage. “You see the dye markings.”
“That must of took you a while.”
“Field work can be labor-intensive. You need a lot of patience.”
“So you, what– hang out and watch what they do?”
“Observe, record, analyze.”
“And when they go down in their burrows?”
“You wait for them to come up.”
Jett mulls this over, the boredom factor of the job striking him as it does most people outside the field.
“Could you get like a small camera down there?”
“With a light on it? Sure. But that would monitor only one spot in a whole network of tunnels. Like a security camera stuck in the drainpipe of your sink.”
“Not gonna get great ratings from the home audience.”
“So we have to assume a lot from their behavior when they’re up top.”
“And the rest of it is in the dark.”
“We figure they sniff each other out, make noises. This bunch”– she indicates the holes around them, numbered stakes pulled from the ones they’ve already vacuumed– “have a special call for when they see me.”
“They know who you are?”
“Same person, same clothes– I’ve recorded it. I set up to observe at daybreak and it’s like ‘There she is again.’”
“Wow.” Jett turns the motor on and almost immediately there is a snick in the hose and a thap, slightly off-key, in the chamber. He flicks the switch, the noise dying, a frown on his face.
“Didn’t like the sound of that.”
Jett moves to the passenger side of the truck, digs under the seat.
“Not strictly my business, but this bunch doesn’t have the plague or anything, do they?”
“No. I’ve been lucky. The fleas around here– that’s what spreads it– don’t seem to have been infected. But it’ll wipe out a whole colony in no time.”
“Don’t tell my brother, he’ll have it in a bottle.”
Jett comes out with a long, pirate-looking telescope and some equally long salad tongs, as well as a flashlight, which he hands to Leia.
“Gonna need your help.”
He props the trap door open with the telescope and Leia kneels to point the flashlight beam into the padded chamber. Jett bends to look through the telescope, swiveling it left and right, then reaches in with the salad tongs.
“Not exactly brain surgery,” he says, probing with the tongs, “but I’ve gotten the hang of it with practice.”
He seems to grab onto something with the tongs, pulling the telescope out to drop it on the ground and taking a few deep breaths as he looks at Leia.
“You take that flashlight and clear over to the far side of this patch. I’m gonna have to move quick.”
Leia backs away, turning the flashlight off and watching him. When she stops twenty feet away Jett gives out something like a board-smashing karate yell and whips the tongs out of the chamber, flicking them hard past the rear of the truck. It is a moment before Leia can distinguish the wrist-thick rattlesnake wrapped around the tongs, the serpent quickly uncoiling itself to flow straight and fast into the nearest empty hole. Jett is laughing.
“Rabbits, gophers, field mice, salamanders– they might be pissed off when you pull em out, but none of them’s gonna lay a killer bite on you. But rattlers.” He shakes his head. “You wonder do they kill whatever prairie dogs are in the holes they claim or make some kind of deal with em?”
Leia retrieves the salad tongs. “My next grant proposal– ‘Viper/Ground Squirrel Cohabitation– Predation or Symbiosis?’”
Jett looks at her, smiling, but not the what planet did this geek come from? kind of smile.
“So you get paid for this study or whatever?”
“There’s a living stipend included in the grant.”
“That pays for rent in Yellow Earth?”
“It did before the boom started.”
“Yeah.” Jett looks back to where his brother is methodically poisoning burrows. “A rising tide lifts all boats– except for the ones it sinks.”
She has often wondered about the possibility of a group consciousness, a mammalian version of what goes on in an ant colony or beehive, a kind of knowing shared by all the town residents and somehow passed from generation to generation. How long has this outfit been here? Since before the first humans arrived? The insect jocks posit that you can consider the whole colony as a single organism, individual ants something like cells with discrete functions and communication paths to other cells. And this colony, this organism that may have existed for thousands of years, is being eradicated. Does it know? Do those dogs still below sense that something incomprehensible is happening? That the end is near? And if she takes a cutting and transplants it, has she saved the colony or created something new, some monster of intervention, freaks in a zoo without walls? The department will certainly be inclined to throw her data out, to censure her misuse of scarce funding and her anthropomorphic meddling with life in the raw. She can shift her focus to the effects of translocation, of course, compile data on digging behavior and survivorship. One of her favorite words– “Mom, Dad, I’m taking a course in survivorship.” A real study would have an elaborate preparation, the new host site carefully vetted and modified, wildlife officials notified. But this drilling is like a prairie fire, and you have to save what you can–
It will smell something like garlic when the pellets begin to react to the moisture in the holes, phosphine gas filling the tunnels and chambers quickly, the animals breathing it in, their lungs immediately edematous, rib cages pulsing as they struggle for air, mitochondria beginning to break down throughout the body, their hearts losing function–
“You have any favorites?”
The question brings Leia back to the task at hand, three-quarters of her cages filled to capacity, the late-winter sun already starting to sink, a stiff wind picking up.
“There’s a certain– detachment– required if you’re going to do real science,” she says. “It’s not like they’re your pets.”
“We raised cattle, beef cattle.” Jett is forcing the hose down the next burrow. “Both me and Jerry did the whole 4-H deal with calves. Looked after their feed, cleaned their stalls, kept track of their weight gain. Mine was Ren and his was Stimpy.”
“Excellent cow names.”
“And we showed em at the big state fair in Minot. You groom em, right, make sure there’s no cowflop hanging from their behinds when you lead them into the ring, you even got this stuff they use in theater to color people’s hair, Streak N’ Tips?”
“You put makeup on your calves?”
“Sometimes they’ll have like a spot that don’t look so good, more like a patch of scrofula than a regular marking– anyway, Ren won the blue ribbon even though Jerry had worked a lot harder raising Stimpy.”
“A point of some contention.”
Jett nods. “And then they grew up and joined the rest of the h
erd and we sold em to get et at the Ponderosa Steak House.”
“Could you recognize them when they matured?”
“Oh sure. The markings are all a bit different. Not like your critters here, got to paint code numbers to tell em apart.”
The oil workers, when they are togged out in their hardhats and safety vests, look pretty clone-like to Leia, and they’ve displayed a predictably narrow range in their mating behavior so far. And then there’s Jett and Jerry, identical except for the species of rodent featured on their ball caps–
The sheriff’s department car comes by then, slowing on the dirt shoulder of the highway, Himself looking out behind the authority-figure sunglasses and then hitting the gas and taking off with a whoop of siren, flasher strobing above as he kicks up dust blasting past the stream of inbound traffic.
“Will Crowder,” says Jett over the sound of the sucking machine. “Good fella.”
Will. She was going to cyberstalk him some more tonight, look again for any consumer reviews–
“The sheriff.”
“Not on this side of the road. You did check in with Harleigh, didn’t you?”
“Harleigh.”
“The big honcho of the Three Nations. This is his land.”
“Oh– sure.”
She has assumed that nobody could protest removing animals about to be poisoned from land about to be fracked.
“I don’t think they got like a prairie dog clan or totem or whatever, but Indians can be touchy about whatever’s on the rez property.”
She knows that one of the tribe’s foundation stories begins with them living underground, that their traditional houses resembled prairie dog mounds–
Another thump, Ajax, if she has her dogholes straight.
Jerry and his assistant are coming closer, mass murder quicker than rescue.
“They have problems with their teeth.”
“Pardon?”
He has to shout as the motor begins to whine, perhaps something too wide stuck in the hose. “Their teeth. I been told that afterwards, from the crash when they shoot in or getting a dislocated jaw or whatever, some of em get problems with their teeth. You’ll want to look into that.”