I stare at the machine. It’s not that I dread any calls in particular, just calls in general. Since leaving the coast, where I used to work with seals and other ocean creatures, I feel as if the curious comfort of being land-locked, one I welcomed at first in the temporary notion that I’d finally found someplace roomy and wild and deserted enough to call home, has mutated into smug isolation. Not loneliness, not quite, but a way of having to face that I’ve intentionally closed all the windows and doors of my soul (if you believe in souls, which, if pushed to a philosophical wall, I don’t). You’d never know this in public. At work, I’m the one who does the tough stuff, like calling Conehead when we need Daddy’s approval to trap a bear or let Sheldon loose to do a “procedure.” (Sometimes our work feels like a grown-up version of Captain May I. You can’t so much as trim a bear’s nails without permission. I exaggerate, but still.)
“Oh God,” I say when I play back my messages, because three out of five are from my sister. (The ones from Buzz and Jim, left the day before yesterday, are moot. NO ONE knows to look for me at R.B.’s place, and it has to stay that way.)
Five months ago, Louisa was diagnosed with breast cancer. Before she went in for the biopsy, her doctors told her it would be nothing, and I agreed. She was thirty-six, healthy, not living in Chernobyl, etcetera. So I did my scientific bit, told her about all the quirky benign possibilities, like a waitress reading the off-menu specials: Tonight we have cysts; we have calcifications; I need to check with the kitchen, but we might still have a necrotic gland or two. But I felt guilty, because somehow I knew. I just knew. And while I waited for the bad news to whip around and hit me, boomerang style, I couldn’t stop thinking how if anyone should have cancer, it’s me. Never mind that I’m younger.
Biology is the study of life, right? Yet sometimes I wonder if I chose this field as a grand compensation, not just something I happen to love. Sometimes I feel cut off from life, or from mine. I feel as if what I thought was going to be My Life (the Siamese twin) quietly severed our ties when I wasn’t looking, then snuck off on her own and chose a different fork in the trail. Sometimes our two paths cross, so I bump into My Life by accident, and I say, “Here you are! Where have you been?” My Life is cordial but cagey. And we hang out together at the same campsite, maybe for quite a while. We boil water from a nearby stream, heat our freeze-dried meals, eat in contented silence. We commune without speaking. We toast marshmallows. We wash our grungy clothing in the stream and hang it out to dry on the limbs of an overhanging birch. We consult our topo maps and hike about, pick berries, swim together, read novels on a sunny rock … but then one morning I wake up shivering alone in my sleeping bag. The campfire’s out, the coals have crumbled to dust, and once again My Life, that sneaky creature, has struck ahead on a route I can’t determine, taking with her all the maps (and the marshmallows, too). I pack up my gear and can only make a random guess at which path she might have chosen. Sometimes all I can do is flip a coin. I have to believe we’ll meet up again, though I’m never sure when that will be.
Meanwhile—because you can’t help compare—I look at Louisa, and even if I’d never in a million years choose New York or a job that’s so completely cerebral, I recognize that she’s made a life of color, ambition, the deliberate mess of wanting one true love and kids, the social kaleidoscope of living in a city. She’s made some crazy decisions, and sometimes it drives me nuts the way she wears her neuroses and her complaints like colorful floating scarves, but she lives with a boyfriend nearly everyone declares to be a Good Man, she invests her savings, and she seems to have all the right instincts, the nesting ones, the ones I’m missing. She holds her life tight, never letting it out of her sight for a minute. So how could she be marked?
It’s stage one, her tumor, which means there’s plenty of genuine hope. Louisa had surgery, then radiation. She called me every few days for a while, and I always called right back if she left a message. Sometimes she cried, and then she’d scold herself for not being a saint. (What I loved was when, in the same evening, Mom would call and go through the very same sequence. I’m going to lose a daughter!… I’m a horrible mother!) Other times Louisa was hysterically cheerful. I’m going to be fine, I have to believe that! My job is great, and everyone understands! At least I don’t live in Bosnia! That was worse than the crying. Sometimes I wondered if I should fly out and be there, but I never offered, and she never asked. It wasn’t the money; our parents, or even R.B. if I’d asked him, would have picked up the airfare. The truth is, I didn’t want to be near the disease. When I came to this conclusion, wide awake in the middle of the night about a month after Louisa’s treatment started, I just hated myself. You are a numb, misanthropic, self-serving bitch, I told myself. Now Louisa’s going through chemo, which is much worse, but she no longer calls that often. I think she’s joined a support group. So I have to worry now: three times in three days?
I finish the first beer and get a second before I pick up the phone.
“Sheldon,” I say, “something’s not right with that little guy.” We’re having our weekly meeting over breakfast in Dubois.
Sheldon looks at me skeptically. “ ‘Not right’?”
“He’s too small. I think we should put in for tagging them now, forget about relocation. Figure that part out later.”
“Trap them twice?” says Jim. “That seems excessive. I’m not even sure Doris will fall for the trap again. She’s no fool.”
“I think Sheldon needs to have a look at Danny. A close look.”
Sheldon’s glance meets mine, but only in passing—en route to the waitress, whose attention he ropes with his best Beach Boy smile. He does a little dance with his wrist to ask for a refill on coffee. She smiles in return and hustles over. Slowly, his handsome gaze circles the table. “Anyone other than Clem have a good look at that cub this season?”
“R.B.’s seen him,” I say, though it’s only a guess. R.B. doesn’t attend our meetings.
Sheldon stares at me. “The houndsman.” If he condescends to the biologists, he regards R.B. as inhabiting some sort of intellectual sub-sub-basement. Sheldon is an in-your-face vegetarian, openly contemptuous of hunters, even those who do it to feed their families. (“I’ve evolved past predator. Anyone can.”)
“Yeah. But what would he know,” I say. “Please excuse me.”
“It’s just that he’s not responsible for these decisions.”
Trying hard to lose the sarcasm, I tell Sheldon that I will take responsibility.
I say nothing more about R.B. I can’t tell if Sheldon suspects. I do know he’s never forgiven me for refusing to go home with him from a party the first month after I got here. So he has to wonder what I’ve got going instead. I couldn’t refuse him over nothing. Not gorgeous, brilliant him.
Vern, a peace-loving guy who offers no opinions except when we’re talking vegetation, when the bears are eating pine seeds or berries, signals for the check. He offers me a sweet, knowing smile. “Practice at five. Ball field across from the tackle shop.”
He knows how to cheer me up, just a little. He’s talking about our softball league. Games are about forgetting all the political and personal crap that builds up between us. They’re good that way. Despite his gymnified physique, Sheldon throws like a girl. And when I send a ball his way, he sometimes ducks. I’m sorry, but that does give me pleasure.
“If he’s ill,” I say to Sheldon, “you’d treat him, wouldn’t you?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“That is so complicated, you cannot begin to imagine,” he says.
“No imagination, count on me for that.” I throw a ten-dollar bill on the table, stand, and grab my jacket. I am shaking. I think about his lousy throw, all the catches he’s blown, all the runs he’s cost our team. Mild consolation.
“Clem, it’s not like I couldn’t,” he says. “You know how Marty is.”
“Don’t blame everything on Marty,” I say. But I know what he means.
He means the whole system, the pipeline. Marty’s just a valve.
R.B.’s breathing is inaudible; he never snores, as cunning in sleep as he is on a live trail. Maybe stealth is a habit. Against the wall, in their own beds, the hounds sleep, too, but more noisily: an occasional yip, a wet snort. The clock face taunts me with its lurid green: 4:12, fifty-five minutes since I last looked. All I can think about is Danny, that lethargic little cub. Marty called today, not long after the breakfast meeting. He says we’re to relocate before another “encounter situation” takes place at the condos. I was still on the phone with Marty, almost speechless at his sudden one-eighty, when Buzz passed me a note. One of the condos belongs to the daughter of a state representative who’d love to see the Endangered Species Act go the way of Prohibition. So just like that, Marty has a green light from the Feds and reluctant support from the Park County sheriff, who’d probably rather mount the bears over his mantelpiece than let them loose in his woods. You’d think we were sending him a trio of known child molesters.
We’ll drive the traps up the mountain tomorrow and hope for the best. Sheldon’s got a new fast-acting sedative they’re using on lions up in Glacier: it has a temporary paralyzing effect, which sounds just awful to me. R.B. can dart them by gun if the traps don’t work. Jesus Christ.
R.B. sleeps on his back. His mouth hangs dumbly agape, the skin in front of his earlobes weary and lax, the creases dating him like rings in a tree. I take the opportunity to examine his face, every pore. He’s got twenty-five years on me. Within hailing distance of sixty, married, wrinkled, an unapologetic killer. I’m with him?
Yet I know exactly how and why he suits me. I like his nose—so big, it’s a declaration—and his height, and the strength he never flaunts, and his way of keeping calm no matter what. I know, too, that falling in love is not an option. Because this, whatever we have, isn’t “real.” It can’t last, and I can’t let myself even begin to hope that it will. He knows that I know this, that he never has to say a word. That’s why it works so well.
I heard about R.B. my first week out here, when I met the rest of the grizzly team and the other pods of biologists, studying everything from pine blight to packs of wolves. Yes, students of LIFE in all the forms it’s chosen to take in this part of the world, some of those forms suddenly quite tenuous or fragile. R.B.’s an oddball here. He’s a guy who’s paid the rent for most of his life by bringing down wild animals, exotic fearsome animals. Twenty years ago, R.B. hunted tigers and elephants. He was a skilled hunting guide to some of the richest men in the world, the one who made sure they took home a prize. But his skills are just as useful to us, whenever an animal has to be tracked or brought down—sedated—without the use of a trap. (He says he thinks of this work as “karma correction.” He likes to see if anyone thinks he really means it.)
So I did not look forward to meeting this guy. I couldn’t imagine how I’d collaborate with someone who’d killed for sport; I don’t care if his gun license paid for the microscope on my desk or if deer need periodic “culling.” I know these things and don’t want them shoved in my face.
That first week, we were all in the field and it poured for two days straight. We made camp and sat there huddled in our ponchos and tents, even though we were drenched to the core. R.B., Jim, and a couple of interns told jokes. I was poker-faced the whole time. My humor had been soaked right out of my marrow. I was thinking, I left the ocean behind for this? Later, on the trail, R.B. asked if I was a lily-white squirrel-hugging liberal or just a judgmental bitch. It’s hard to shock me, but I was shocked. All the same, I had to laugh. “Both,” I said.
“Maybe ’cause somebody named you after a mollusk.”
“It’s Clem,” I said. “With an e, as in educated. Clement.”
“And are you?”
I get this jokey little question about my name more than you’d think. “You’ll never know me well enough to find out otherwise,” I said. “So I could ask you back, what kind of a mother named you after a fast-food joint?”
“Touché, doll,” he said. “Well, you can call me Rex, or you can call me Bwana.”
“Oh. So either way, you’re in charge. How clever is that.”
For the rest of the day, we communicated purely through sarcasm, knowing we’d made an alliance, each of us recognizing in the other the camouflage of insolence. We’re good at pretending we don’t give a damn what others think. Maybe he really doesn’t.
On my side, there’s a bizarre admiration: what I’ve come to see is that R.B. knows animals as well as any conservationist, but he’s free of all the bullshit. We talk a lot about survival and extinction, how people interfere with both. R.B. says our so-called interference, the selfish heedlessness we exert on other kinds of life around us, is as natural as any other force in the cosmos. But we have to face it. If we hunt elephants or tigers to extinction, he says, there’s a sadness to cope with—maybe even regret is fair—but don’t tell him it’s outrageous or criminal or some kind of abomination. Though he’s not the least bit religious, he likes to tell the story about the woman at a contentious hearing who stood up and said, more matter-of-fact than belligerent, “Maybe God’s just calling all these creatures home.” The way a rancher brings in his sheep or a suburban teenager calls her cat out of the night before she goes to bed. This is a famous story in preservation circles, where it’s held up as proof of the stupidity and navel-gazing we have to deal with, those of us fighting for ferrets and wolves, lady’s slippers and monarch butterflies. But when R.B. tells the story, he shrugs and says, “Who the hell’s to say the lady’s wrong?”
Maybe meddling to help these animals “survive” is just as benighted, just as selfish, as letting them expire. In Florida, animal-rights activists are trying to stop biologists, a team like ours but more aggressive, from taking panthers out of the most polluted part of the Everglades, from artificially broadening the gene pool with puma sperm, even though such schemes might mean, twenty years from now, the difference between survival and extinction. Let them be, the activists are saying. Just BE. Which would translate as, almost certainly, Let them go.
Louisa and I, we were never taught to let things be or even let things go. Maybe our dad, on his own, would’ve been a more Zen-like kind of parent, but don’t try that stuff on our mom. She may give genteel dinner parties where some of the guests own yachts, but she learned to drive a tractor the minute she was tall enough to step on the gas. She’s a scrapper, an adapter, an act-first-think-later kind of woman. We never heard Haste makes waste. We heard What thou doest, do quickly.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Never All that glitters is not gold.
Louisa left me those three phone messages because she’s both furious and heartbroken about what the chemo’s doing to her body, but not the stuff you’d expect, not the stuff that will pass (going bald, feeling queasy, losing touch with fingers and toes). She needed to rant as maybe you can only rant to family; let out all the stops on self-pity, contempt for hope and courage, loathing for the kind of sympathy offered by all the healthy friends around you. When I called her back last night, she sobbed into the phone that a friend of hers just had a baby in the same hospital where she goes for her treatments, so one day, after stopping in for blood tests, she took the elevator up to Maternity (the floor with the glorious views, of course). Just a week ago, Louisa realized that her period had stopped. She knows it’s stopped for good, that her chances of having a baby of her own are, but for a miracle, over. She held that friend’s baby and cried, pretending the tears were joy.
I could have said that it might not be for good, that the body’s unpredictable, or I could have said, ever so gently but firmly, that she knew this would probably happen—we talked about it while she was having her radiation, how on top of every other indignity and loss she might have to give this up as well—but I listened to her rage and mourn without once interrupting.
“I’m sorry, Louisa,” I said when she ran out of words. “I’m really sorry.
”
She was quiet for a surprising stretch, though quiet in that heaving, sobbing kind of way. She knows me as someone with an explanation for just about everything, or else a retort, and that’s what she must have expected.
So finally she said, “Aren’t you going to tell me I can adopt, some platitude like that?”
“Lots of other people will tell you that, so I don’t need to,” I said. “Besides which, you know that.” I asked her how Ray was doing with all this.
“He’s been away a lot. Working.”
“That’s too bad,” I said. “He calls you, doesn’t he?”
“Yes.” She blew her nose. “I’m sort of glad he’s away right now. I don’t think he really wants kids, so maybe this part’s a secret relief to him. And you’d sympathize, wouldn’t you?” That set her off again.
“God, Lou. Don’t you think I want you to have what you want?”
“You’re my sister. You’re supposed to want those things for me.”
“You can’t have it both ways, Lou. When things get bad, you can’t call me—which I’m glad about, I am!—you can’t do that and then imply I don’t give a shit about you.”
“That’s what I used to think.”
“I know.” I paused. Ending the conversation would have punished her for the way she brings up stuff that doesn’t matter anymore. But it would have brought all that stuff (grudges, regrets, ugly scenes) back to the surface again. “I guess the point is, what do you think now?”
“I think we … I think we’re beyond the growing up.”
“The growing up? What does that mean?” I asked her. “I’m nowhere near grown up, but I do a good job of hiding it.”
“Not that kind of grown up. Hardly! I mean we’ve reached this place where we understand why it’s all different from what we expected and that’s just the way it’s going to be. We’ve stopped assuming there’s justice.”