Deep Past

by Eugene Linden

  Praise for Eugene Linden and his books

  The Parrot’s Lament

  “Wonderful, humane, touching. You cannot read it and remain unmoved.”

  —Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep

  THE WINDS OF CHANGE

  “A lucidly written guide to the near future and a provocative manual of public policy.”

  —Edward O. Wilson

  “The Winds of Change is fascinating—a tour de force. Linden has accumulated a greater comprehension of paleo-climatic and oceanographic issues than all but a very few scientists. I have nothing but admiration for this book, which is just what we need right now.”

  —George Woodwell, Founder of the Woods Hole Research Center and former president of the Ecological Society of America

  The Future in Plain Sight

  “May well be the most important book of the decade.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  Silent Partners

  “Mr. Linden knows the minefield well and guides us through it with intelligence and unfailing good humor … A great display of science as snake pit, and those who liked The Double Helix can get the same evil glee from it.”

  —Ursula K. Le Guin in the New York Times Book Review

  “The ultimate fate of a group of primate research animals in Silent Partners poses deeply disturbing questions about science and society. Eugene Linden’s handling of this important material is poised, compassionate, and insightful.”

  —Barry Lopez, author of of Wolves and Men and Arctic Dreams

  The Ragged Edge of the World

  “The Ragged Edge of the World is a call to arms—albeit one that may already be too late, given humankind’s astonishing ability to destroy the environment. It underlines the need for those organisations most concerned with understanding the natural world and its fragile complexities to do much more to reverse the tide.”

  —Financial Times

  “Thoughtful and compelling.”

  —National Geographic

  “The Ragged Edge of the World offers a fascinating tour of vanishing places. Eugene Linden is a keen observer who never loses sight of the bigger picture.”

  —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe

  “In days of yore, our explorers had vast tracts of wild and often very little in the way of self-awareness. Our world has shrunk, but Eugene Linden goes to its farthest corners with a great deal of hard-earned wisdom, not to mention constant good humor.”

  —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth

  Deep Past

  Copyright © 2019 by Eugene Linden

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information, please contact RosettaBooks at marketing@rosettabooks.com, or by mail at 125 Park Ave., 25th Floor, New York, NY 10017

  First edition published 2019 by RosettaBooks

  Cover design by Mimi Bark

  Interior design by Janet Evans-Scanlon

  Illustrations by Diana Wege

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018960907

  ISBN-13 (print): 978-1-9481-2237-5

  ISBN-13 (ebook): 978-0-7953-5223-2

  www.RosettaBooks.com

  I dedicate this book to all those researchers who have gone to live in the far corners of the planet in order to understand nature and, once there, discovered a deeper mission in protecting earth’s last remaining wildlands.

  “ … if consciousness is important to us, and it exists in other animals it is probably important to them.”

  —DONALD REDFIELD GRIFFIN

  (1915–2003)

  TRANSTEPPE

  INTRODUCTION

  There are places on the planet whose scale reminds us that we are but a crushed bug on the windshield of time. The great Kazakh Steppe is one such place, bounded by the endless grasslands of Mongolia to the east, the formidable mountain ranges of Russia to the north, the arid deserts to the south, and the Caspian Sea and Europe’s forests to the west. It stretches over one thousand miles, and travelers making their way across this landscape encounter interminable empty vistas to remind them of their insignificance.

  There are also places on the planet where the weather serves as a constant reminder of just how tenuous is our hold on life, places that serve notice that the clement circumstances that permit us to grow crops and prosper is not a right, but a lucky break. In the Sahara, it’s the heat and aridity that provide this useful lesson; in Antarctica, the cold; while on the Kazakh Plain, it’s all of the above—and the constant wind. The scale of the place, its uninterrupted expanses, its position between the cold north and the hot south, and the very turning of the planet combine to channel and augment the winds into an implacable force.

  And when these winds hit, say, the Quonsets erected for the camp of an archaeological expedition, they give voice in protest, rising intermittently from a moan to a shriek and then fading, but never dying. The sound is desolation itself.

  The wind also shapes and scours. Carrying dust over thousands of miles, it buries the present and, very rarely, uncovers the past. Most often it’s the near past that’s revealed, scrap from Soviet-era military maneuvers, a fire pit from a nomadic encampment. Rarer still, the wind might uncover the long-buried detritus of the ancient cultures that transited the plain: a weathered sword sheath worn by one of Genghis Khan’s warriors, an ornament from the Botai culture, the first nomads to leave any trace of their presence.

  Rare is a term that has no meaning when the wind has had eternity to remold the plain. In this context contradictions collapse, and the impossible becomes the inevitable. And so, amid an epic storm, the wind blew the last bits of dirt off a mound lying where scrubland gave way to desert, and something that by any probability should never have seen the light of day lay exposed to the sunlight; something impossible, but also—it would later come to be understood—inevitable.

  1

  By expedition standards, the Quonset was relatively snug, albeit stiflingly hot. The wind from the steppes howled outside as it had for three days, confining the archaeological team to their huts. It was late May, a time of year when temperatures were soaring and dust storms frequent as the winds picked up dirt and sand from the desert.

  Still, only stray bits of grit blew in on those occasions when Claire had ventured out to the mess during the storm. The hot air in Claire’s hut was dry enough to mummify the plum she had left sitting in a bowl. She had pretty much stripped down as she sat at her plywood desk. She thought back on the whirlwind of events that in a few short weeks had brought her from a well-established life doing research in Florida to the searing heat of the Kazakh Steppes. It had all begun with a site visit from her funders, a visit that had gone well—too well, as it turned out. She thought back to the day.

  One of the sweetest moments was the shower demonstration. Claire smiled as she thought of baby Teddy.

  “No, no, sweetie, you’re doing it all wrong.” Claire had walked over and pushed the lever. “See,” she said, looking into the soft brown eyes of the toddler, “you push the lever and the water comes out.” Claire had extended her arm to push a long handle so that she didn’t get doused by the shower. The baby cocked his head and looked at Claire expectantly but didn’t reach for the lever.

  Claire sighed and turned behind her. “Come here, Mona. Why don’t you try.”

  At the mention of her name, Mona, who had been standing placidly by, perked up and began lumbering forward.

  Claire turned back to the baby. “OK, Teddy, Mommy’s going to show you how.” Then she nimbly and quickly stepped back to make way for the massive elephant. />
  Mona walked under the twelve-foot-high showerhead in the enclosure and pushed the lever with her trunk. She gave a soft rumble of pleasure as the cool water offered relief from the hot Floridian sun. Then she stepped back and, with her trunk, gently nudged baby Teddy forward. Teddy looked at Mona, glanced over at Claire, and then turned to the lever. Mona emitted another soft sound and put her trunk on the lever. Teddy tentatively extended his trunk and put it on the lever, too. Then Mona pushed the lever and water gushed down on the five-hundred-pound baby. Teddy jumped and gave an alarm call.

  Claire laughed. She turned to two men and a woman standing behind protective mesh and said, “I know I shouldn’t say this, but I’d guess Mona was laughing, too.” That produced chuckles in the group, who were sweltering in business attire and mopping their brows with handkerchiefs. Claire took pity. “OK, let’s get out of the sun, and we can talk about the real work going on here.”

  Later, as she waved goodbye, Claire had skeptically replayed the site visit. Not knowing what it was really about, she’d thought it had gone well. On surprisingly short notice, the Delamain Foundation, which funded her work, had sent a group of two trustees and the executive director to visit. Claire knew where her bread was buttered, and she’d made sure to mix the hard science—experiments to determine what information elephants conveyed through ultrasonic communication, and how they perceived it—with the fun stuff.

  They’d loved the fun stuff.

  Apart from the shower demonstration, Claire had set up a pitching contest between one of the elephants, Flo, and one of the volunteers at the park who had previously played baseball in high school. Delamain was headquartered in Chicago, and so Claire had put a Chicago Cubs blanket on Flo’s back. The first two times she tried to put the blanket on, Flo shook it off. When Flo finally seemed to accept that Claire was determined to keep the blanket on her back, Claire patted Flo behind her huge ears before climbing down, saying, “You could have told me earlier that you’re really a Mets fan.”

  Separated by a wire mesh, the elephant and a somewhat nervous volunteer had taken turns trying to throw softballs through a tire about forty feet away. Flo was rewarded with a treat for every successful throw, as well as lusty cheers from the Delamain delegation. While the delegation was delighted and dumbfounded when Flo won, Claire was not surprised. She knew that Flo’s favorite game was throwing things. Indeed, the reason Flo had ended up at the park—which had been set up to serve as a refuge for superannuated elephants—was that one of her games in her former life at an Ohio zoo had been to throw rocks at the monorail that brought tourists through the elephant enclosure. Her accuracy had properly unnerved the administrators. Once Flo had arrived, Claire had set up the tire as a way of redirecting Flo’s interest in throwing things in less destructive ways.

  Following the Delamain group’s departure, Claire stopped by the trailer where the postdocs and grad students were collecting and analyzing data. She thanked them for taking the time to explain their work. “Should I be polishing my résumé?” asked Thelma, an acoustic specialist from Arizona State.

  Claire smiled. She had really promoted the team, telling the delegation that the project basically ran itself. She’d noticed that when she made that point, one of the trustees had caught the eye of the other and arched an eyebrow. What was that about? With the vantage of hindsight, Claire now realized that this should have put her on full alert. At the time, though, she had simply thought that the trustee was signaling that he’d been impressed. That’s what she told the staff.

  “I think we’re good for the duration. Fingers crossed, anyway.”

  “Hope so,” said Pete, a statistician and pattern recognition expert, “and if it’s so, I’d bet it was Flo, not us, who sealed the deal.”

  Claire shrugged amiably. He was right. “Could be, but they’re not funding Flo’s baseball career. They’re funding us—you. This is good, solid work, and you all should be proud.”

  She then took her leave and stopped by to thank Flo and Mona, but mostly to spend a few moments with Teddy. She couldn’t get enough of Teddy, who was, without success, chasing a flock of squawking geese. Teddy’s earnest clumsiness had endeared him to every elephant and human he encountered.

  The park was situated on land donated by an elephant-loving farmer, and a converted bunkhouse served as Claire’s lodging. That evening, with a warm breeze rustling the palmettos, Claire sat on her tiny porch, sipped a glass of wine, and took stock of her situation.

  Sitting in the Quonset, Claire shook her head at her naïveté of just a few weeks earlier. Back then, she’d thought she was set on a solid career path. She had settled in to the work and her experiments. The team was producing pioneering research on ultrasonic communication. Byron Gwynne, who was writing a comprehensive and highly anticipated monograph on elephant evolution, had written that he would be citing one of her papers. And the head of the Center for the Study of Evolution at Rushmere University, where she was attached as an adjunct professor, had told her that if she continued producing solid research, she was up for a tenure-track associate professorship.

  She had made compromises. She’d had to put aside the study of animal intelligence—her true passion—but she felt well situated for a productive career in academia.

  A slight frown had wrinkled her features as she considered her romantic life, which might best have been described as idling on care and maintenance. It consisted of an on-again, off-again, long-distance relationship with an utterly unreliable writer (they’d met when he interviewed her for an article on elephant communication—he called her for what he termed “follow-up” two weeks after the article was published).

  It was something of a wonder that the relationship continued at all. True, John was very funny, which ranked him high in the attributes Claire considered important, and he was anathema to her mother, which also gave him a certain cachet. Her mother would regularly send her clippings about how writers earned less than baristas at Starbucks—hell, Claire thought, many were baristas at Starbucks—while reminding her that she was thirty-two and not getting any younger. Or, as her mother, with her inexhaustible store of mixed metaphors, had phrased it, “You don’t want to be rushing for the train after the ship has left port.”

  With regard to the prospect of children, her mother had a point, though Claire would have happily co-parented with Mona and devoted her maternal feelings to raising Teddy to be a successful young elephant. She smiled at the thought of her mother’s expression if she presented that idea. John would probably start looking pretty good in her mother’s eyes.

  Human factors notwithstanding, Claire had thought she was in a good place. In a world where talented scientists scrambled for any work, she had a good position and it involved meaningful research. If she played it right, a tenured professorship could be hers. She decided that she would put her all into that prospect. Then she might turn her attention to upgrading her love life. In truth, her mother needn’t worry about her marrying John. She smiled at the thought of how John, who had a very lofty opinion of his place in the universe, would react if he knew that he was serving as a placeholder. “Don’t screw things up,” she murmured to herself as she took her last sip of wine.

  2

  It was three weeks after that day that Claire got the news. It came in the form of a phone call while she was with the research staff.

  Pete had looked with alarm at Claire’s stricken face after she put down the phone. “What? We didn’t get the funding?”

  Claire shook her head. “Oh, we got the funding, all right. All we wanted.”

  Pete sighed with relief. “If you don’t mind me saying, you’ve got a strange way of conveying joy.”

  Claire was distracted. “Oh, sorry, Pete. That was just something that has come up at Rushmere that I’ve got to deal with. I’ll be back in a bit.” As she left, she patted Pete’s hand. “Don’t worry, funding’s secure.”

  Claire went back to her cabin to think about the call. She shoo
k her head at the irony. Things with Delamain had gone well—too well.

  The call had come not from Delamain, but from William Friedl, the chairman of her department at Rushmere. Like Flo, a baseball fan, Friedl had begun the conversation jovially, saying, “Well, Claire, you hit a four-bagger with Delamain.”

  Claire was instantly on her guard. Friedl, a legendary sourpuss, did not do jovial without some ulterior motive. “Thanks, Bill. I’m glad. But why did they call you, not me?”

  Friedl had cleared his throat. “Well, turns out that they have a problem, and it’s actually a problem for Rushmere as well.” He paused, as though gathering his thoughts, and then said brightly, “And they were so impressed with you that they think you’re the solution.”

  At this point, Claire thought back with bitter irony to her taking-stock moment of a few weeks ago when she had thought that she had a predictable and satisfying glide path to her career. “That’s flattering, Bill, but what can I do for Delamain from Florida that I’m not already doing?”

  There was a long pause. “You’re right, Claire. You can’t solve our problem from Florida.” He let that sink in.

  Claire could barely get out the words. “So where would I have to be to solve their and your problem?”

  Again Friedl cleared his throat. “Maybe I should give you a bit of context.”

  Claire was alarmed, “Where are we talking about, Bill?”

  “Hold your horses.” Friedl laughed for reasons that soon became apparent. “I think you know that yours is not the only project affiliated with Rushmere that Delamain is funding.”

  Friedl went on to explain that the lead investigator of a project investigating the domestication of horses, Russell Clausner, had become gravely ill. He’d been picked up by medevac and flown back to the US, and it was unclear when he would be able to return to the field.