Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 05 - Endangered Species Read online

  Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 05 - Endangered Species

  Water slammed into Anna's back, Brushing over her shoulders and down the front of her shirt. Closing her eyes against the salt sting, she clung to the turtle's carapace and concentrated on keeping her footing as the wave dragged against her legs, sucked the sand from beneath her sneakers.

  The loggerhead wouldn't be washed unwillingly back into the Atlantic. There was little the turtle couldn't handle in the sea. It was land, that unfamiliar and ever-changing universe, that had baffled her. For miles she'd swum from God knew where to lay her eggs on the beach of Cumberland Island, one of the Golden Isles off the coast of Georgia. In her tiny brain-or perhaps her great heartinstinct had programmed a map with such precision that out of thousands of miles of coastline she'd found her way back to this narrow ribbon of sand.

  Anna ducked as another wave broke across her shoulders, and embraced the animal hard against her. The ripples of the loggerhead's armored back, nearly a yard across, dug into her cheek where flesh thinned over bone. She could feel the powerful scrape of the creature's back flipper against the sodden fabric of her trousered thigh.

  Water flooded around her, warmer on the back of her neck than the mild summer air, and Anna wondered how turtles thought, how this turtle thought. On the chart that instinct tattooed on her soul, was there a picture? In whatever passed for a loggerhead's mind's eye, had she seen, remembered the flat welcoming beaches?

  " Sorry, old girl," Anna muttered as she heaved against several hundred pounds of sea beast. A capricious tide had trenched out a four-foot-high sand and shell escarpment along fifty yards of ocean front. A week ago the sand had been flat; two weeks hence it would be again. Tonight it was proving impassable. Still, with the eternal patience that seemed endemic to turtles, rocks, and other longlived, slow-moving creatures, the loggerhead had beached herself and started her trek inland.

  Loggerheads coming ashore north and south of the ephemeral cliff were making their appointed rounds. Between drenchings, Anna could hear the delighted cries of park rangers, volunteers, and researchers celebrating the renewed cycle of this threatened species.

  Over the past hour, since she'd been drafted into the turtlemidwifing business, Anna had received a crash course in the reproductive habits of the loggerhead. In an ideal world, they made their way up onto the beach, above high tide, dug a nest, laid the eggs, and buried them. Their role in the universe completed, they returned to the sea, and, it was presumed, never looked back until four or five years rolled by and they again felt the urge to come home to nest.

  The Turtle Anna danced with in the crashing surf could not negotiate the sand cliff and was exhausting herself with the effort.

  Too tired to fight any longer, she was giving up.

  "Dear Lord, she's laying. Give me your hat," came an exasperated cry near Anna's ear. The words were carried on a gust of foulsmelling air. For an instant Anna thought she'd shoved her face too near the east end of the westbound turtle. When she realized it was Marty Schlessinver's breath, she began to believe the rumors that the biologist ate roadkill.

  The Atlantic drew back and the full weight of the loggerhead was laid again in Anna's and Marty's arms." Don't hurt her," the biologist warned as Anna felt the little muscles in her sacroiliac stretch and complain.

  "Fat chance," she grumbled, but she braced herself, forearms on thighs, shoulder against shell, and held on.

  In a sudden peace left behind by the receding waters, the moon pushed over an inky horizon to paint a path in silver over the ocean and onto the back of turtle under Anna's chin.

  By the clear light she could see Marty Schlessinger's face inches from her own. Fifty years were etched in the lines of determination carved on either side of an uncompromising mouth. Long hair, worn in pigtails like an aging Pippi Longstocking's, fell in white ropes across the loggerhead's shell.

  The returning ocean forced Anna to her knees. Her thigh was wedged against the turtle's carapace, the animal's flipper hard against the outside of her leg.

  "Hat, hat, hat," Schlessinger growled.

  Anna snatched off her baseball cap and poked it into the biologist's groping fingers.

  "Hold her," Schiessinger ordered.

  "Christ!" Anna breathed as the other woman relinquished her grip on the turtle to gather the eggs.

  Unlike many sea turtles, the loggerhead's egg-laying machinery was recessed beneath the rear of its shell, and Anna could not see the eggs. By the ecstatic chirps percolating from the biologist, she guessed the laying was a success.

  "No!" Schlessinger cried suddenly. Such was the pain in her voice that Anna was unpleasantly reminded that the coast of Georgia was the breeding grounds for the great white shark.

  "What?" she demanded.

  "Lost a baby."

  Anna was relieved but had the good sense to keep quiet. Schlessinger would consider the loss of a ranger's leg somewhat less heartrending than that of an embryonic loggerhead.

  Minutes ticked by. Waves banged at Anna's back, tried to buckle her knees. Sand gritted between her teeth and salt sealed her eyes. The muscles in her arms and shoulders had progressed from ache, to jelly, to constant torturous throb. All sense of glamour. and adventure was long since gone.

  "This is getting to be work," she grunted.

  "Quiet," Marty said.

  Anna wedged her knee more firmly under the loggerhead's shell and began counting back from one hundred. When she reached zero, she decided, Marty and the little loggers were on their own.

  Time came and went and still she held on. Numbers blurred.

  "I'm losing it," she said.

  " No. Not yet."

  Various retorts bottled up behind Anna's teeth but she lacked breath to voice them.

  A wave rushed between her knees, buoyed up the turtle, and gave her shoulders some respite. When the water receded and the weight settled again, she cried out.

  "Hold her still," Schlessinger snapped.

  Anna tried." In my next life I'm gog to be bigger," she hissed.

  Quiet Schlessinger said again. Then: "Okay. I guess that's the lot. Let her down. Gently. Gently."

  Anna couldn't unlock any part of her body." Can't," she said finally.

  "Oh for Christ sake." With the next wave Schlessinger eased the weight of the turtle from the tripod Anna had made of her body." At least you can hold these." The biologist proffered Anna her National Park Service cap. It was full of leathery orbs a little larger than golf balls." Careful," she warned as Anna stretched stiff arms to receive them." I counted."

  There was no mistaking the threat. Marty knew how many eggs were there. Should one turn up missing on Anna's watch, there would be hell to pay.

  She held the cap between her hands as if it were the Holy Grail.

  Cooing, the biologist turned the massive turtle back toward the sea and watched her shining shell till the ocean took her." Fun's over," she said curtly." Time to get to work."

  Oddly, Anna felt invigorated. The magic of the turtle eggs she carried was seeping into her tired bones. The glory of the loggerhead's fight and her part in it filled her with a sense of accomplishment that diminished the ache in her back and legs. Slopping sand and water with every step, she squished up the darkened beach after Marty Schlessinger.

  just above the high-tide line Schlessinger stopped, locked folded arms across her chest, and surveyed the dunes between the water and the tangle of oak and palmetto that choked the interior of the island.

  A three-quarter moon, free now of the sea, cast its light over the sand. Each twig and blade of grass was etched on one side with unn
atural clarity, and on the other plunged into impenetrable shadow. The jungle beyond was lightless, a jagged wall of pine and live oak silhouetted against a faint glow from the mainland.

  " This'll do," Schlessinger said, and dropping on all fours, began to dig like a dog after a particularly tasty bone. Sand, first dry, then clumped and wet, sprayed out between her legs and over Anna's shoe tops.

  A shovel would have expedited the process. Anna didn't know if Schlessinger was unprepared, a purist, or a fanatic. She suspected the latter two.

  On Cumberland Island just over a week and already Anna knew all about the marine biologist. To be more precise, she knew all the gossip. Tonight was the first time she'd actually laid eyes on the woman, though the first day she'd arrived the tarpaper shack Schles singer called home had been pointed out along with other island landmarks.

  The residents of Cumberland granted Marty Schlessinger the status usually reserved for witches and mad scientists. In her mid fifties, she lived in a ramshackle house she'd inherited when wid owed by a crash some fifteen years before.

  Schlessinger's bizarre reputation was not unearned. In her wake headless turtle carcasses and the mutilated corpses of animals killed on the island's rudimentary road system turned up with nauseating regularity.

  The loggerheads, Anna knew from watching, washed up on the beach with all parts intact. Shrimpers plied their trade offshore.

  Turtles were caught in the nets and drowned. Schlessinger retrieved the skulls and brains, Anna guessed, for dissection and study.

  The butchered roadkili was a little harder to explain. Maybe Schlessinger did eat it. Behind her house Anna had noticed a hog pen. Maybe they were the beneficiaries.

  Rumors of varying morbidity and credibility dwindled down from these two provocative habits. The rumor Anna dearly hoped was true was that Schlessinger ate blood-fat ticks from the carcasses of the animals." Pops 'em like M and M's," Guy Marshall, her crew boss on this venture, had assured her. That was something she wanted to see. The poetic justice of it tickled her.

  Eccentricity made Schlessinger well suited to Cumberland Island National Seashore. Once a vacation home for the very rich, Cumberland had been privately owned until the 1970s. In the past fifty years most of the flashier millionaires had moved to more fashionable addresses, leaving only a handful of moneyed and powerful families behind, but the ghost of those glory days remained in the crumbling mansions and burned-out relics.

  In the early 1970s, eighteen thousand acres of the twentythousand acre island was deeded over to the federal government to be preserved as a national park. Those who were less than charitable suggested the land had been given to the NPS more to keep the riffraff from buying up parcels the rich were tired of paying taxes on than to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein..."

  Those selfsame cynics also intimated that the fire crew, of which Anna was part, had been bivouacked on Cumberland to soothe the nerves of those privileged few with the ear and purse strings of various congressmen.

  Cumberland was in the midst of a drought. The palmetto that carpeted much of the island would burn hot and fast if ever ignited.

  It could be argued that the natural areas would benefit from such a cleansing by fire. But the palmetto grew up to some very influential doorsteps.

  Whatever the politics, firefighters from the National Park Service had been housed on the island in a presuppression capacity for the past ten weeks. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, over the course of their three-week rotations, they wandered around racking up overtime in heavy boots and two derelict pumper trucks on the off chance something would happen.

  So far the sum total of excitement had been the ongoing chemical warfare with Cumberland's voracious tick population and the discovery in an inland slough of fourteen baby alligators still living at home with an impressive mom the locals called Maggie-Mary. Maggie hadn't been seen in so many years, apocrypha added more to her length and girth than the mere passage of time could have managed.

  And, tonight, the loggerheads. According to Marty they nested May through August. Usually they came up on the beaches at night, usually at high tide. The eggs incubated for eight weeks; then the little hatchlings clawed their way out of their protective graves and, with luck and the fierce intercession of Marty Schlessinger, found their way to the Atlantic Ocean.

  Each new nest was recorded, protected, and timed. The next hatching was due in nine days. In a rare unguarded moment Marty had divulged this bit of information and Anna had pounced on it.

  When the baby loggerheads made their dangerous dash for the sea she wanted to be in the turtle vanguard.

  "Eggs!" came a curt demand and Anna was snapped out of her brown study. She dropped to one knee and presented Marty with the cap in an unconsciously courtly gesture.

  One by one the biologist lifted out the treasure of turtle eggs and settled them into the sand. When they had been arranged to her liking, eggs in all, she ordered Anna to stand back. With great care she refilled the hole and gently tamped it down. To Anna's amazement the woman then collapsed, elbows and knees on the ground, and began flailing her forearms and shins in frenzied arcs.

  After half a minute of this she stood and dusted the sand from her trousers, looking as sane as anyone." Loggerheads aren't particular," she explained." They scuff over the areas with their flippers but don't seem to feel a need to disguise the nest carefully."

  Marty handed Anna back the ball cap and she absentmindedly pulled it on her head. An unpleasant trickle of water and turtle slime crawled beneath her collar.

  Up and down the beach, easily visible against the pale sand, the great shapes of the loggerheads moved with startling agility back toward the sea. Dark clusters of humanity, self-appointed guardian angels, cheered.

  "Quiet!" Marty growled.

  "Does the noise bother the turtles?" Anna asked.

  "Of course it does," the biologist snapped.

  As near as Anna could tell, anything less serious than a shark with a bullhorn went largely ignored by these phlegmatic amphibians. She cheered with the others, but silently lest she set Schlessinger off.

  "Want to come back to the fire dorm for a beer?" Anna asked on impulse.

  "Never touch the stuff," Schlessinger replied.

  "Me neither," Anna said, to see if it still felt like a lie.

  "Recovering alcoholic?"

  Anna said nothing.

  "That's BS," the biologist declared." I don't drink because I don't need it."

  Any warm fuzzy feelings the turtles had engendered in Anna evaporated.

  Marty Schlessinger turned and stalked toward the black curtain of inland foliage. Anna fell in step beside her, simply because they were headed for the same place. On their daily circuits of the island the firefighters customarily drove the trucks down the beach in one direction, and kept to the dirt lanes on the island's interior on the other. In deference to the turtles, all night travels were confined to the inland roads. One such track ended in a sandy spur a quartermile north of where the egg laying was concentrated.

  Volunteers, rangers, and the rest of fire crew had started back in the direction of the parked vehicles as Anna and Marty reached their destination. Schlessinger began rearranging boxes, a broom, and two new-looking shovels on the back of a battered all-terrain vehicle she used to get around the island.

  An obnoxious, if infectious, hooting laugh cut through the lesser sounds and was answered by what Anna could only describe as a snarl, or as close to a snarl as a beast without claws and fangs can come.

  "That man's on my Better Off Dead list," Marty Schlessinger said." Mitch Hanson has no more business here than Hitler at a bar mitzvah."

  "Maybe he likes turtles," Anna said, just to see what kind of reaction she'd get.

  Schlessinger snorted and Anna was impressed at the range and accuracy of her animal sounds." Hah," Marty said as if translating.

  "Maybe he thought we were serving Jack Daniel'
s." She stabbed her shovel into the sand. The handle quivered like the shaft of a harpoon.

  For several seconds Anna watched as the biologist slammed around pieces of equipment. Wet white braids smacked against her bare arms and she made little plosive noises as if she was carrving on a heated conversation with herself.

  Anna lounged against the fender of one of the rusting green trucks they'd inherited from the crew they had replaced. Along with the salt scent of the sea and the fecund perfume of the jungle, a faint sickly- sweet odor made it to her nostrils.

  Her flashlight lay on the seat of the truck. She retrieved it and combed the ground with its yellowing beam till she found what she was looking for. Pushed partially off the road several yards from the rear wheels of Marty Schiessinger's Afy was the carcass of a young raccoon. From the looks of it, it hadn't been dead long. Scavengers had yet to disembowel it. Whether it had been struck by a vehicle or had died of natural causes, Anna couldn't tell. She played the light over the little corpse invitingly but Schlessinger didn't give it so much as a glance.