She couldn’t do it.
“You’re going home,” she told the snakes. She would release them. The king snake she let go in the empty field behind the Institute. Crotalus ruber amid the Joshua trees and chaparral. Crotalus stephensi was her excuse to wander through Red Rock Canyon away from the campsites hoping no one would see her. The rattlers would return to their native habitats. Her compassion for them would get her out of the building, out in the field, away from the Director.
“Que Dios te cuide,” said the atheist to the rattlesnake.
In those words, her mother had commended her to God’s care when she left home. Her mother, dead soon after of pneumonia. You’re not supposed to die from pneumonia.
Maria tipped the bin and kept it between her body and her Crotalus cerastes cerastes. Leave no trace. Does that mean you’re not supposed to return a venomous creature to the wild? It swished away. She’d chosen a bare place amid the chaparral. It left its sidewinder trace in the sand.
For the last rattler, she headed to Los Padres National Forest—part of the natural range of the Southern Pacific rattlesnake. She was very sorry to see this one go. Her snake had turned out to be a mixed breed with a good genetic share of Mojave rattler. Which had made the usually calm herp more aggressive. Which would have been an interesting variation to investigate—Crotalus oreganus helleri mixed with Crotalus scutulatus.
She found a dirt Forest Service road that ran past a shed that didn’t look to be in use. Probably budget cuts. She took the snake, left the car and found the trail. At a distance, the mountains were brown, but here there was shade among the drought-resistant Coast Live Oaks. Last year’s fallen leaves, curled and dry, made noise underfoot. She walked, rustle and crunch, the Rubbermaid in her arms, machete slapping her thigh, snake hook sticking out of her backpack like an antenna.
When the trail forked, she went left to climb out of the grove and into a hot open place where she set her snake free. He slithered, coiled, then disappeared into a cleft in the rock. She could have left it at that and turned around. But there was that smell. Maria went back to the trees and walked toward it.
She came up upon tadpoles, dozens of them, maybe a hundred, dead and dying. It wasn’t for lack of water. The bodies lay, floated, writhed in a stream, poisoned by chemical or fertilizer run-off. She thought, I know what this is. And yes, there it was, the black plastic tubing, like a harmless, endless pilot black snake. The PVC line would run to a marijuana plantation and the people she was running from. She thought, They are everywhere.