Invasive Species

by Joseph Wallace

  First south from Mpack, then west back along the rutted red-dirt Massou-Djibo Road. He passed the field where he and Malcolm had landed—the plane had been hauled off to Ziguinchor—and seen that it was now populated with cows that, had they been there last time, might have defeated even Malcolm’s ingenuity.

  On past this landmark another twenty miles before finally reaching the junction of another dirt road. Nearly hidden behind the underbrush that grew at the forest edge, this one took him south again, into the rain forest itself.

  Or maybe “road” was too generous a term. It was more like a wide path, a half-imagined thread winding this way and that between the forest’s buttressed trees. Trey fought the wheel over ruts and exposed roots, past vines and branches that shrieked as they scraped the car’s body, through patches of mud that grasped at the tires.

  All the while, as he left the forest’s edge behind and approached its heart, the trees around him gained in height and breadth. The canopy rose until it formed a roof 150 feet above him, leaving the forest floor as dark as if night had fallen. Only his headlights and an occasional stray beam of sunshine illuminated his way.

  The road petered out for good at the base of a giant kapok tree. Trey turned the ignition key and sat there for a moment, listening to the engine making snapping sounds as it cooled. Then he took a breath, opened the car door, got out, and started walking.

  * * *

  HE DIDN’T WORRY about getting lost. Trey had been born with an unerring sense of direction, as if there were some metal inside of him that could always sense the magnetic pole. He knew from the moment he set forth where his destination was, and how long it would take him to reach it.

  Just as he was always aware of the world around him. Categorizing. Cataloging. It wasn’t even a conscious effort. He registered the whooshing sound of a hornbill’s wings as it flapped through the canopy, the distant peeping of the rain frogs, the low grunts of a troop of mona monkeys and the sound they made leaping from limb to limb, like surf crashing against a stony shore.

  He saw a giant katydid stride on spindly legs across a leaf, a woodpecker creeping up a massive trunk, a Maxwell’s duiker—a small forest antelope—crouching in a muddy depression, hoping he wouldn’t spot it.

  There was very little Trey missed.

  He paused for a moment to squat beside a colony of slave-making ants in the midst of a raid. The attacking horde of big, red ants was routing the nest of smaller black ones. Corpses were strewn across the ground, and the victors were carrying off the eggs and larvae they would hatch out and enslave.

  He wondered whether human slaves passing by here—Senegal had been full of them—had ever watched a slave-maker raid and thought: All life on earth is the same.

  When Trey stood, the sudden movement brought forth a low, angry snarl from behind a nearby tree. A leopard was watching.

  Trey was calm. Aware of his heart beating, the blood moving through his veins, the prickle of moisture against his skin. Aware he was alive.

  But not the master here. Not the boss.

  He had no primacy in the rain forest. He was just a package of meat and bone, a creature with remarkably few defenses. Soft and fleshy, with no hard shell. No sharp claws or teeth. No ability to run fast or climb effortlessly or leap from branch to branch.

  How easy it was to kill a human, if you got one away from the big cities, the stone and steel structures the species built as defenses, as hiding places. As easy as killing a worker termite if you pulled it away from its hardened-mud mound.

  The leopard snarled again, from farther off. Today, at least, it would let him live.

  Trey smiled. Right then, right at that moment, there was nowhere else on earth he would rather be.

  * * *

  WHEN HE WAS five years old, Trey’s family went on a trip out west. They visited four states and a half dozen national parks, but Yellowstone was the place he recalled most clearly, with its bubbling mud pits like something from Mars, its big geysers, its bison and elk and moose. One day there was a storm so violent that a hailstone came down from the sky and cracked the windshield of their car.

  It was in Yellowstone that Trey first felt that pull, the desire to just walk away from the car, the road, his mom and dad and brother, to get out and just . . . see what was there.

  They were picnicking in some rest area, surrounded by tall conical evergreens, a clear brook running down a nearby hill. Christopher, who was eight, was fascinated by the chipmunks that raced around the picnic area, standing up on their hind legs, chattering, begging for food.

  But Trey found them boring. Why come all the way out here to look at chipmunks? They had chipmunks back home in New York. So these ones were bigger, with different patterns of spots. Chipmunks were chipmunks.

  He was far more interested in the big gray-and-white bird that picked apart a pinecone with a thick, sharp beak. The salamander, longer than his foot, he found under a rock by the side of the brook. The grasshoppers that went whirring away from him like tiny toy helicopters.

  And the enormous creature that moved cautiously among the trees, keeping out of sight of the picnickers.

  Trey, who already had sharper eyes than anyone else he knew, was the only one to see it.

  A bear. They’d spotted a few during this visit to Yellowstone, though Dad said that he’d seen many more—forty-eight, in fact—during a trip he’d taken here when he was a kid. Black bears, they were called (though one had been brownish red), with cute rounded ears and eyes like black buttons.

  “Don’t be fooled,” Mom had said, as they watched one scratch its back against a tree. “They can be dangerous.”

  Trey had found that hard to believe.

  Sitting as still as possible on the edge of the picnic area, Trey watched the bear move through the woods. He could tell that this one was different from the others they’d seen. Its gray-brown fur, tipped in silver, was thicker, longer. Its eyes, as it focused on Trey, were dark and deep. When it moved, the muscles rippled along its legs and its thick, humped shoulders.

  Trey stood to get a better view.

  Watching him, the bear made a low grunting noise that he could feel in his chest. He expected someone else to notice, to shout, to come running, but no one did. They were all too busy laughing and tossing peanuts to the begging chipmunks.

  The bear backed away deeper into the shadows of the pine trees. Without hesitation, Trey followed.

  Missing the caution gene. That was how his mother already described him.

  The bear grunted again as Trey came up to it. He could feel the heat radiating from its body, smell its earthy odor when it blew its breath out through strangely delicate lips.

  Then it reared up on its hind legs and peered down at him. To Trey, it seemed as tall as the pine trees, as massive as a hillside. It was unbelievably big and powerful, so Trey did what he would have done with anything whose existence he doubted, despite the evidence of his own eyes.

  He reached out and touched it.

  The bear’s fur was coarse, thick, oily but still as scratchy as his dad’s cheek when he didn’t shave for a few days. It felt hot to his touch, though Trey never knew whether the heat was the bear’s or his own.

  But mostly what he sensed was the power radiating outward from beneath the fur. The incredibly strong muscles, and beneath them, the engine, the core of the beast beneath his palm. An unharnessed energy that he’d never sensed in his family, in any person, and for the first time he realized that the world was not a pyramid, with humans sitting on top.

  The bear flinched and let out a strange, whining cry, but did not move.

  Trey closed his eyes. The pure connection between the two of them did not require vision.

  But apparently the bear’s cry had been loud enough to attract the attention of others. After that, Trey’s memories were blurred. He remembered screams, shouts,
being knocked down—by human hands—his head banging against the ground. Being carried by someone running, then thrown into the backseat of the car, the feel of vinyl against his cheek.

  His mom saying, “Oh, my God, oh, my Christ,” over and over.

  Both Mom and Dad touching him, lifting his shirt, holding his hand, checking his legs, again and again, as if trying to discover wounds they’d somehow missed the first twenty times they’d inspected him.

  Or maybe they were just trying to make sure he was real, just as he’d done with the bear.

  The grizzly. That was what Christopher told him it was called. A grizzly.

  * * *

  IT WASN’T UNTIL years later, when he found some newspaper clippings hidden in the bottom of his father’s desk drawer, that Trey learned the fate of the giant bear.

  Turned out it already had a criminal record, that bear, having previously been convicted of wandering too close to campgrounds and picnic areas. It had never been aggressive, had done nothing more than watch, but you never could tell with grizzlies, so twice it was anesthetized and taken to more remote parts of the park to be released.

  Its encounter with Trey was the third strike. The National Park Service brought in a marksman with a high-powered rifle, and the curious bear was shot no more than a mile from the picnic ground.

  Reading about the bear’s death, alone in his quiet house, Trey felt his eyes prickle. And at that moment, at age eleven, he made himself a promise.

  Not to avoid the presence of the wild creatures on earth, but to seek them out.

  And to keep them safe by going alone.

  * * *

  TREY WALKED THROUGH the dim forest for nearly two hours. Then, when and where he’d known he would, he saw it: a brightening in the forest ahead, as subtle as the first wash of light in the eastern sky an hour before dawn.

  But nothing as natural as that.

  Trey stopped for a moment, looked, listened, and went on.

  FOUR

  HE DREW CLOSE to the dying forest. The green, stained-glass light that glowed through the unbroken canopy behind him gave way to something brighter, harsher. The wind changed direction for a moment, blowing into his face, and with it came the now-familiar bitter odor.

  Only then did Trey realize that the forest around him was silent. Even healthy rain forests can be surprisingly quiet, but this was different. He heard no birdsong, no frogs calling, not the midday shrill of cicadas or whisper of crickets. It wasn’t the quiet of a vast natural engine concealing its secrets, but a stillness more like death.

  Perhaps a hundred yards ahead he could see a tangle of underbrush. Inside a healthy forest, very few plants grow in the understory; not enough sunlight reaches the ground. Only where a great tree falls, creating a light gap, do vines and thorn bushes and saplings sprout.

  Only where a great tree falls, or all the trees are stricken.

  What the hell was going on here?

  * * *

  HE STOOD IN the angled afternoon sunlight beside peeling trunks, beneath bare, twisted branches. Every step he took, he was forced to kick through piles of leaves, sodden and rotting.

  Something was out of whack, and Trey couldn’t figure out what. This pissed him off.

  He knew that people tended to think of natural landscapes as immutable, never-changing, but of course it wasn’t true. Through time—eye blinks, really—glaciers had carved pathways across the world, forests had sprouted and withered, oceans had turned to desert. Nothing stayed the same forever.

  And the balance was fragile, especially in the rain forest. Clearing for farmland or industry, the arrival of an invasive pest from elsewhere, humans hunting out keystone species—any one, or a hundred others, could doom an entire ecosystem.

  So what was messing with this one?

  Only one plant seemed to be thriving in the gap created by the blight: a kind of sprawling, woody vine that Trey had never seen before. Its leaves were a dark glossy green, and here and there he could see its tiny, fleshy fruit, red like a cranberry but smaller and more oval.

  The vines spread from tree to tree, sometimes climbing five or ten feet up a trunk before reaching out toward the next. Examining the tree nearest him, Trey saw that the vine didn’t appear to be the cause of its blight, at least not in any way he could see.

  It gave off a spicy odor that reminded him of ginger.

  A hundred feet ahead, directly in his path, lay a thick wall of half-dead brambles, yellow-green leaves and spiky branches interwoven like a cage. Again, this was something Trey had never seen in the healthy forests he’d explored.

  Another unfamiliar plant taking advantage of light gaps in this forest. Though, unlike the glossy vine, the brambles didn’t seem immune from whatever was killing the trees.

  Something jumped near Trey, right at the periphery of his vision. His pulse quickened, but he did not flinch. With careful, slow movements, he turned his head. A pair of bright black eyes regarded him from the depths of a tangle of the vines. A squirrel, it was, a small forest squirrel, its fur mainly dark gray but with a rufous patch on its back.

  It stared at him, curious but seemingly unafraid, for a good ten seconds before it turned, revealing a thick, bushy tail, and disappeared into the tangle. Unseen, a second one greeted it with a chuckling call.

  Then the forest was silent again. Even the wind had died.

  Silent . . . until Trey took two more steps forward. Then he heard it, a sound that made the back of his neck prickle.

  Not a rustle like the one the squirrel had made. Not birdsong, or the crash of some large animal navigating the thicket of brambles ahead.

  No: a low humming, almost beyond the reach of even his exceptional hearing. He felt it, a vibration in his bones, in the tips of his fingers and deep in his skull, more than heard it.

  Moving silently, he came up to the brambles. The thorny branches wrapped around each other and the trunks of the nearby trees. Though their leaves were yellowish, scraggly, sickly, they were thick enough to block the view.

  Ahead, the humming sound rose in pitch and intensity, then quickly died away.

  Trey glanced around for some way to climb over the wall of brush, but saw none. The only way through was . . . through.

  He began to edge his way into the mass of thorns. One step at a time, clearing the tendrils away, letting them go when they were behind him. Feeling them tugging at him, restraining him, as if in warning.

  The smell was much stronger here.

  After a half hour, scratched and bleeding, he was almost through. Hidden by the ten-foot-tall stump of a dead tree, he stopped moving and, with great care, pulled away one last half-dead shoot and peered in.

  Circled by the wall of thorn bushes was a clearing measuring about twenty-five feet in diameter. The sandy ground within the clearing, as clean and leafless as if someone had just raked it, was molded into strange little hills and hummocks. Atop each mound was a hole, perhaps two inches around.

  For ten seconds, fifteen, Trey had no idea what he was looking at. Then something ejected a spurt of sand from the hole nearest to where he stood, followed by a tiny pebble and a piece of twisted root.

  And he did know. Partly.

  It was the home of a colony of some kind. But of what? The holes were far too big for any ants he knew of, any bees, any wasps. Maybe some minuscule mammal?

  Too many questions.

  He crouched down beside the stump to wait. Ten minutes later, the answers started coming.

  * * *

  IT BEGAN WITH a rustling on the opposite side of the clearing. At first little more than a slight, dry sound, like fabric rubbed between a thumb and forefinger. Then it grew louder, and a patch of brambles began to shake. Something big was coming through them, something that let loose with a moaning sound as it approached.

  For a moment it paused, as if
resting. Then, with a last squeal, it burst through the brambles and staggered across the ground into the middle of the clearing.

  A monkey. A red colobus, and a big one.

  There was something wrong with it. As Trey watched, it stumbled and fell, lying spread-eagled on the ground for a moment. Then it struggled back to its feet, its legs shaking, and turned slowly toward him. When it did, he could see that the skin over its stomach was hugely swollen, as if it were carrying a large tumor beneath its fur.

  He drew a little farther behind the tree stump, then held his breath to stay as still as possible. He didn’t know what to expect. Would it panic if it knew he was there?

  When it turned its face toward him, he saw that its eyes were a silvery white. Was it blind? He couldn’t tell.

  The monkey took three wavering steps across the clearing before its foot caught on one of the mounds and it fell. This time it just lay there, its patchy fur rising and falling in time to its breath.

  Again something moved at the edge of Trey’s vision. He shifted his gaze to the nearest mound, the one whose hole he’d seen being cleaned out a few minutes before.

  As he watched, a triangular head topped with bulbous, iridescent green eyes emerged. A freakishly thin, black, arched body topped by a pair of crimson wings followed, the wings flickering so quickly they seemed to leave a bloody smear in the air.

  It was a wasp. An enormous wasp, maybe three inches long. Trey had never seen one like it before, of any size.

  He felt something wriggle in his stomach. There was something about the way it tilted its head to regard the fallen monkey. Something alert, intelligent, calculating.

  The wasp perched for a moment atop its mound, unmoving. Then it flew up on humming wings and swooped low over the colobus.

  The monkey twitched. Perhaps it could see through its silvery eyes, or perhaps it sensed or heard the vibrations of the wasp’s speed-blurred wings. It seemed, in an abject, helpless way, terrified.

  The wasp returned to its perch, and only then did Trey notice that it was no longer alone. Others had emerged from their tunnels while he was watching the first. Six more, each seemingly identical, bloodred wings flickering like flags, green eyes turned toward the monkey.