He asked Apryl to hand him her pistol, and when she refused, surprising exactly no one, he reached over and pried it from her grip. The second coyote stopped shooting to reload and Rice leaned out with a pistol in each hand and emptied both magazines in the coyotes’ general direction, firing seventeen shots as fast as he could pull the triggers, lots of noise and flash and more ricochet, hoping they would think he and Apryl were better armed than they really were. He slapped his second magazine into the .45 and dragged Apryl twenty yards up the wash to a rock outcrop, pushed her down behind it, and fell on top of her. The coyotes fired off another thirty or forty rounds on full auto, shooting at nothing while Apryl squirmed under him like the cat in the old Pepé Le Pew cartoons and hissed in his ear to get the fuck off her and give her back her fucking pistol.
Eventually the coyotes seemed to run out of ammunition and retreated to round up their charges. They all must’ve climbed up out of the wash because Rice and Apryl didn’t see them again. Apryl’s take on the incident had been pretty typical. After threatening to shoot him if he ever tried to take her pistol away from her again, her pronouncement was simply “We need to gun up.” He couldn’t disagree, and a few weeks later the two of them attended a three-day tactical rifle training course near Phoenix. Three days of rubbing elbows with genuine Arizona gun-nut subculture. Their co-trainees were all decent-seeming citizens, many of whom openly admitted they were preparing for (a) the Islamic or socialist insurgency the new socialist-Muslim president was about to unleash on the country, (b) the narco insurgency the Mexican cartels were going to mount across the weakly defended border, and/or (c) the always-imminent black-helicopter takeover of the United States by the United Nations.
Based on what they’d learned, Rice and Apryl decided they needed to carry one military style semiautomatic rifle when they were working along the border. Apryl researched the subject with her typical thoroughness, weighing the relative merits of various calibers, of piston mechanisms versus the “direct impingement” design, tactical optics, slings, and so on. He told her she was acting like the cartel loonies and mafia poseurs she despised, but he knew the paramilitary Zetas had changed the game in the past few years. As Apryl put it, “this military shit is de rigueur anymore.”
Rice used to think he’d developed a reasoned approach to the use of weapons, neither hair-shirted pacifist nor wild-eyed operator wannabe. He enjoyed shooting, but he’d never been a full-on gun nut, and he was at least ambivalent about the wisdom of stirring a bunch of highly lethal weapons technology into the soup of everyday human society. Apryl, when condemned by her vegan pacifist friends for owning and carrying not just a gun but a handgun, would respond that there was little point in eschewing the technology, that by doing so you only put yourself at the mercy of mean stupid people who had no such compunction. “This particular technological cat,” she would say, “is out of the fucking bag.” The technological cat she referred to included, Rice supposed, everything from sharpened sticks and steel blades to .22 pistols and semiautomatic carbines with high-capacity magazines, but did not include—yet, anyway—your .50-caliber machine guns, RPGs, MANPADs, Hellfire missiles, Apache attack helicopters, and so on. He told her it was just a line-drawing exercise, like so much else. For him it had come down to a practical approach, a kind of arms race: if the violent thugs he might have to face carried a particular weapon, then he wanted one too.
A few weeks after the course, they drove back up to Phoenix and met an obese white guy with a New Jersey accent who sold gray-market firearms out of his pickup truck, blew three grand on a desert-tan FN SCAR 16S. An upmarket rifle, according to Apryl, would send a signal, and this one was the shit, a new Belgian carbine in 5.56mm with a folding stock, easy to hide in a backpack and handy in a close-quarters firefight, but still accurate past three hundred yards. They also bought a bunch of expensive magazines and a sling and a compact Trijicon scope that cost half as much as the rifle. It was a hell of a weapon, and he carried the thing in his pack for most of a year—taking it out to watch over Apryl’s solo meetings with cartel reps—and though he never had to shoot anyone with it, he did grow disturbingly fond of the confidence it gave him, the sense of invincibility. Near the end, when he’d started to suspect Apryl’s new friend Mia Cortez wasn’t what she claimed to be, he’d buried the rifle way up in the Chiricahuas in a sealed PVC pipe like a good prepper, thinking if he was wrong about Mia he could always go back and dig it up.
Sixteen
Rice was half-listening to the news on the clock radio in the kitchen, hoping for a weather forecast, when he remembered this was the morning Sara was supposed to show up. A sports report followed the news. He switched it off and watched out the kitchen window as the sky changed from not quite black to a dark, noncommittal gray. Cloudy, felt like rain.
He told himself again it had been a mistake to call Sara the other day. He was still surprised at himself. After all these months of contented solitude, what, he was suddenly lonely? Nothing to be done about it now. He started a second pot of coffee and decided he’d better shower. When he’d dressed, he found her sitting outside on the front steps, writing in a spiral notebook, her hair in a thick blond ponytail that hung down her back. A blue plastic chest cooler on the porch.
He pushed the screen door open and stepped out. She turned at the noise and smiled.
“There’s coffee,” he said.
“I smelled it.” She held the door while he picked up the cooler. “So where’s my cat?”
“I caught a possum instead. He wouldn’t get out of the trap. I had to shake him out.”
In the kitchen, she transferred several plastic containers and a glass casserole dish from the cooler to the refrigerator. Two bottles of Australian Shiraz appeared on the counter. When she took off her jacket, she caught him looking for the stun gun.
“I left it in the car,” she said.
“Leap of faith?”
“Something like that.”
They made peanut butter and honey sandwiches to bring for lunch. The sandwiches went into her pack because Rice would be carrying the trail cameras and mounting hardware in his, and he didn’t want that stuff to smell like peanut butter. Trail cameras caught enough hell from bears without smelling like food.
Rice kept his pace moderate on the way up the mountain, but Sara had no trouble keeping up. She watched quietly while he attached the first camera to a tree, but he could tell she was restraining herself, and as soon as he reached behind his neck and rubbed some of his own sweat on the case, she started to object. He explained that black bears liked to destroy the cameras, and he’d had to figure out ways of securing and concealing them so you could get some decent data. A little bit of man-scent wouldn’t scare them off but might keep them from biting the camera housing. Depended on the bears; some trial and error would be required no matter what.
She asked how he knew this and he explained that he’d worked on a science tech contract for a conservation group deploying and monitoring trail cameras along the Mexican border. This was the study he and Apryl had partially funded, through Byzantine channels Apryl had come up with, to assess the impact of the planned border fence on large mammals that crossed back and forth between U.S. and Mexican habitat, especially the rare ones like jaguars, jaguarundi, and Sonoran pronghorn. They’d nearly finished it when everything went to hell last year, but Rice hadn’t seen a published study. Probably got buried by the Homeland Security types.
None of these details were things he would pass along to Sara, of course. Instead, he described the pictures: scores of immigrants, a few smugglers carrying weed in huge improvised backpacks, deer, coyotes, raccoons, coatis, javelinas, the occasional lion and jaguarundi, and a lot of blurry close-ups of curious black bears. During the months they worked on this study, out of thousands of usable fauna images, they’d taken three confirmed jaguar pictures.
Sara deferred to his expertise after that, walking back and forth in front of the cameras so he could adjust the mot
ion detectors and providing an almost unbroken narrative about subjects ranging from the indigenous lizards and salamanders to Zoology Department politics. She talked about her skink project, which compared the genomes of the preserve’s coal skink population with those of populations in less protected areas. She’d apparently spent a lot of time chasing the lizards around with nail clippers, snipping off scales or pieces of their tails or toes for DNA samples.
She said she’d been the caretaker for nearly two years, but her teaching schedule had required her to spend a couple of nights a week in Blacksburg during the fall and spring semesters. It was much better, she thought, to have someone at the preserve full-time, especially now, with the bear poaching. He waited for her to elaborate on her story about catching the bear hunters on the property last year, but she still seemed reluctant to talk about it.
By the time they finished with the cameras, the clouds had thickened, a low drizzling overcast, cooler than it had been and threatening real rain. They decided to leave the transect and walk to the cliff overlooking the inner gorge, and they stood near the edge for a while without talking. The view was compelling: a hundred feet down, the ragged, uneven canopy of true old growth filled the canyon. Towering crowns of hemlock, red and white oak, hickory, gum, ash—at least a dozen species, all giant specimens, all shuffling in the wet breeze, hazy with mist. Here and there, bare snags thrust from the canopy like bony fingers. While they watched, the cliffs on the far side disappeared behind low clouds coiling up from the river several miles downstream. The energy coming off that forest, so close now, thrummed in Rice’s chest, like he was standing next to a pipe organ.
Sara unpacked their sandwiches and they ate leaning against one of the car-size limestone blocks that lay scattered along the top of the cliff like giant dominos. Rice walked around one of the boulders and into the brush to have a piss, and on the way back he snapped a stick underfoot. A ruffed grouse roared straight up from the rocks nearby and then set its wings, gliding down into the gorge until it flared and dove behind the top of an enormous white pine.
“You’re not very stealthy.” She produced an apple from her pack and offered it but he shook his head. “We’ve been scaring wildlife all day,” she said.
She was right. They’d seen animals, but only as they fled: a big gang of turkeys had flushed off the fire road, a few deer had thumped away with tails flashing, then near the spring a large animal they couldn’t quite see had crashed through thick brush ahead of them, probably a bear. He refrained from mentioning that he didn’t have the same experience when he was alone, but it did happen from time to time, and it occurred to him that spooking animals could give away his position to lurking poachers.
She watched his face.
“What are you thinking about? You just lit up.”
“Do you know what a ghillie suit is?”
She shook her head.
“Ghillies were Scottish shepherds; they got so good at stealth and camouflage that rich landowners started hiring them as gamekeepers and wardens, they’d prowl around the estates catching poachers. They invented these camouflage suits, big bushy things with leaves and sticks woven into them, and they stink, to mask your scent. Military snipers still use them. If you know what you’re doing with a ghillie suit, you can disappear. It’s like magic.”
“You’re kind of a ghillie yourself. If you had one of those suits maybe you could catch the bear poachers.” She bit from her apple and after a moment she spoke from behind her hand. “What makes it stink?”
“Anything with a strong scent, I guess. Possum shit, cedar branches. You leave it in the woods for a week, let the bears piss on it.”
They were silent for a while. Rice stared at the spot in the forest where the grouse had disappeared and imagined how he would construct a ghillie suit. Sara finished her apple, wrapped the core in a plastic bag, and tucked it into an outside pocket on her pack. The drizzle turned to rain and they pulled their hoods up to shelter their faces.
“Have you ever walked around down there?” Her voice was muffled by the hood. He looked over, watched the rain running in little rivulets down the back of her blue rain shell.
She turned back to look at him. “Rice?”
“No. No, I haven’t.”
“You’re kind of out of it.”
“Sorry. I don’t sleep much anymore. Usually it’s not a problem.” He blinked and tried to focus. “I’ve walked all the way around on the ridges, but I’ve never climbed down to the bottom. I was told to keep out.”
“They told me that, too.”
Except for the one habitat survey transect through the northwestern end where the cliffs were lower, the inner gorge was off-limits. In the so-called Anthropocene epoch of global warming and ubiquitous invasives, the idea of keeping any place “pristine” had fallen out of vogue with conservation biologists, but the Traver family had been protecting the place for so long that this most remote part of the preserve served as a practical baseline, a rare—possibly unique—fragment of primordial Appalachian forest where most of the pieces were still in place.
The no-humans-allowed policy was strict, and had become more so over the years as the importance of minimizing intrusion by invasive species had become better understood. You had to apply to the foundation’s board of trustees for permission to enter the inner canyon, and you had to have a good reason. As far as Rice knew, no one had applied yet during his tenure, but he’d seen in the logs that one or two individuals or groups were granted access every year. They were mostly scientists, but the foundation had also admitted poets, musicians, painters, photographers, Native American groups, and “spiritual seekers.” If Sara’s database was successful, he expected they’d start to get a lot more requests. The preserve would become a popular and important research forest. Maybe that’s what everyone wanted.
Sara grinned at him from the blue cave of her hood. He didn’t think this hard rain could last much longer, and on cue it began to slacken.
“It’s only a little after noon,” she said. “We can climb down and make it to the river before it gets dark.”
He hoped she wasn’t serious. All the way to the river would be a hell of a hike. He pictured the maps from the wall of the office, followed the broad creek bottom as it narrowed to a deep cleft after another mile or so, the contour lines in the lower gorge smashed so close together they merged into solid brown shading, the blue line of the creek twisting and turning. Even on a 7.5-minute topo, it was impossible to tell exactly what was there.
A hard breeze moved through the gorge and pushed against the crowns of the giant trees, heaving them back and forth in slow motion. The air was calm where they stood, and the rain had stopped. He pulled his hood back from his head, the usual minor revelation: new sounds, big sky, peripheral vision. After a few moments Sara did the same. She shook the rain from her arms.
“I’ve always wanted to see what herps are down there. Starr said she could get me permission to go in and do a survey, but I was afraid. I know that sounds strange.”
He thought about that. It did seem strange, and he almost asked her what had changed her mind before he caught himself. He hadn’t been through a tenth of what she’d experienced, and he felt sometimes like his DNA had been scrambled.
Pale sheets of rain blew in again and obscured the far green slope of the gorge, then the opposite cliff, wind thrashing the treetops below them. The sky overhead was a dense swirling gray. He figured it was going to rain off and on all day.
“It’s spooky down there,” he said. “Ancient.” He stood and lifted his pack. “Let’s go if we’re going.”
Seventeen
They found a steep chimney, somewhat less vertical than the cliff face and anchored with big solid rhododendron bushes. Rice descended first, facing the cliff. He tested each foothold and handhold with his weight, but the rock was craggy, with plenty of easy holds, and the springy trunks and branches of the rhododendron were like the rungs of a ladder.
The l
ight changed when they descended below the top of the forest canopy. They paused to rest on a ledge, leaning back against the lichen-crusted rock and gazing out into rain-dripping leaves and great wet reaching branches. The air was cooler, sharp with the scent of hemlock growing along the creek, but something else was different as well. Neither of them spoke. To Rice it seemed they’d crossed into another country, dark and green and primeval. Even the sound of water rushing another hundred feet below sounded unfamiliar and exotic.
When they’d climbed the rest of the way and stood at the base of the cliff, Sara asked in a whisper, “Do you feel that?” He just nodded.
She crept along the creek, peering under stones and pawing through piles of old leaves, naming unusual species of plants, bugs, herps. With her phone, she began photographing the animals she found. Still whispering, she called him over and pointed out a small black salamander she said was a Jefferson salamander. She covered it back up with leaves, led Rice to a rotting stump where she moved a chunk of rotted wood and pointed out another, larger salamander with vertical stripes on its body, an Eastern tiger salamander.
“I’ve never seen either one before in the wild,” she said. “Jeffersonianum is uncommon, tigrinium is rare, it’s endangered in Virginia and only found in a few places, certainly not here.”
She crawled around some more on her hands and knees, scribbling in her notebook. He leaned against a tree and let his mind drift through the old forest. Now that he was actually in the canyon, the effect seemed less powerful, but only because it was more spread out here, distributed among individual entities. The giant trees were like dormant gods, vibrating with something he couldn’t name, not quite sentience, each one different from the others, each telling its own centuries-long story. On the forest floor, chestnut logs dead since the blight had rotted into chest-high berms soft with thick mosses, whispering quietly. Something called out and he turned to face a looming tulip tree, gnarled and bent like an old man, hollowed out by rot, lightning, ancient fires. His skin tingled.
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