During lunch we all listened to the radio and news of Hurricane Chase. It had pummelled the DR and Haiti and was barrelling down on the eastern seaboard of the United States — touchdown estimated at Charleston, South Carolina. We were right in its path unless some unforeseen phenomenon steered it away. As a result we were on alert for evacuation within twenty-four hours. It was frustrating, exciting, and a bit frightening, all at the same time. Now that I had seen the island and realized we were really only as high above sea level as the mercurial dunes that formed the island, it kind of hit home what sitting ducks we were. But nobody seemed too perturbed about it so I assumed everything was under control.
Darcy and Trevor had boarded up all the windows in the mess and it was even more gloomy and oppressive in there now. After lunch, in the energy-draining heat of early afternoon, everyone disappeared or hung around in the lounge listening to news about the hurricane, reading books, or catching up on research. I chose the siesta in an effort to catch up on the sleep that Martha had stolen from me. I awoke in that nasty grogginess that seems to happen when you sleep out of turn. It was still drenchingly hot and I felt like a pancake, flat and sizzling. I looked at the clock on my bedside table. It was time to go in search of some buntings. I wondered where Martha was as I got my equipment together. I stuffed the recording paraphernalia into my packsack, hefted the parabola in my hands, and went off in search of my trusty steed. As Trevor had promised it was an old three-wheeler — an anachronism actually since three wheelers are no longer sold because they’re so tippy. I’d never ridden one before but I figured it couldn’t be much different from a motorcycle. There was no rack to put my parabola on, so I had to put it on my lap. She started like a dream but she stuttered and jerked as I backed her up. I was glad no one was watching as I finally got her turned around while gripping the parabola with my knees. It was awkward and I finally had to drive one-handed down the leaf-laden track to the island’s main artery — a wider leaf-laden track. I had the map in my pocket and a compass but I was pretty sure I knew where I was going, having studied the map earlier. Except when I got to the main line everything looked the same — a long tunnel through the oaks with many narrower tracks branching off. There were some quaint signs along the way and with their help I made it to the north end of the island where the forest thinned out, as if it had once been logged, and the territory began to look more like Indigo Bunting territory: open with good perching trees nearby. But it wasn’t big, and I began to worry about getting enough study subjects. I parked my three wheeler, got my equipment set up, earphones on, the electronic recorder slung over my left shoulder, the parabola hooked up to the electronic recorder and perched in my right hand. I took a GPS reading and moved down the trail slowly, listening to the birdsong of painted buntings, sparrows, hawks, and more. But no indigos. After half an hour of walking and stopping to listen I was starting to get discouraged. I had to wonder how all those biologists could sit in blinds for hours and hours. What was half an hour to that? And then I heard him, the lively, clear, complex notes of an Indigo Bunting. I turned on my recording gear and taped a bunch of his songs while I scanned the foliage to try and locate him, to see that beautiful brilliant indigo blue of his feathers. But he proved elusive. I took a GPS reading and walked on out of the range of the first little bunting, looking for a second.
Two hours later I had two male buntings recorded, which I considered a good day’s work. But I was thoroughly lost. I’d parked my three wheeler on the main road but had somehow found my way onto a secondary road. I took out my GPS and started heading back when the trail I was on broke into a clearing with a sign that said LIGHTHOUSE ROAD and I could see the beach in the distance, behind the line of dunes. I looked at my watch. Still lots of time before the sun set, so I stashed all my equipment under a lofty live oak and made my way out into the dunes. The sun had lost its heat but the air was still and thick. When I meandered my way among the ten-foot dunes I saw a line of orange stakes circling several of the dunes that had some vegetation on them. I figured they had to be Stacey’s dunes and I looked at them with some interest. How old were they? I wondered. Surely the life span of a dune on a barrier island had to be fleeting — unless of course vegetation took hold, as they had on these ones — they needed something to slow or stop the effects of the wind, which otherwise kept them in constant motion. I made a point of walking in the valleys of the dunes when I could, to keep my environmental footprint tiny — nothing quite as invasive as skidding down the face of a dune, bringing a cascade of sand with you. As I began to break out onto the beach above the high-tide line I could see the swells of the sea cresting over the shallow waters and crashing onto the beach. The water looked grey, leaden, greasy, as if it was gearing up for something — was this what a hurricane sea looked like in the days before the hurricane hit? There weren’t any shells on the beach as I headed toward the south end of the island, but I could see the tidal creek that separated Spaniel Island from its much bigger neighbour. It looked pretty benign — no sign of the current that had carried the spaniel and the little boy out to the sandbar. But then again the tide was coming in.
I climbed the beach and found a nice spot to take a rest among the dunes. But after ten minutes I grew restless and got out my binoculars to survey what I could see of the beach. I jerked the binoculars back when movement caught my eye and watched as one, two, and then three horses moved into view from behind a dune, their tails flicking at the wind and their heads down, snuffling the vegetation at high tide mark. Wild horses conjure images of magnificent stallions with gleaming black coats, heads thrown back, reading the wind. These horses were more like ponies with dull coats and little pot bellies. The two other horses joined the first one and the three of them stood in a tableau of indecision, standing on the threshold of flight. And then I heard a soft thwip sound and one of the horses took off, followed immediately by the other two. I watched, mesmerized, as Wyatt and Rosemary appeared from behind a dune, a modified rifle still clutched in Wyatt’s hand. Rosemary looked up then and saw me and I heard my name riding the wind that had crept up. She waved at me even as Wyatt made an impatient gesture with his hand. Did I go and join them at Rosemary’s invitation or leave at Wyatt’s? What the hell. I wanted to watch their operation so I walked down the beach.
By the time I got there the horses were long gone. Wyatt hefted the rifle over his shoulder and I said, “Is that how you do it? You just shoot the vaccine into the horse?”
“It’s a dart,” he said impatiently. “You dart the animal and the dart injects the vaccine and no more little foals.” He laughed. “One down, one to go,” he said as he patted the rifle.
“There are only two mares on the entire island?” I asked incredulously. I had just assumed that these three horses were a breakaway pod from the main herd.
“Yup. Seems a bit like overkill doesn’t it?”
Was it my imagination or was there a tinge of derision in those words?
I left Wyatt and Rosemary and meandered my way back through the dunes toward my equipment and then to my trike. I turned one last time to look at the sea and saw a man, his back to me, looking out across the vast expanse of ocean. There was something about him that seemed familiar. I grappled for my binoculars, brought them up to my eyes, and scanned the beach looking for him. He leapt into the centre of my lenses, suddenly far bigger than he had been, and I smiled. Duncan. He had said he was going to come down while we were here but he had been very vague about when. He had turned and was starting to walk away down the beach so I ran and yelled into the wind, the sand clawing at my feet and making the going slow. Finally my voice must have pierced through the wind and I watched him stop and then turn to face me. When I drew alongside him in the swirling wind the sun was shining in my eyes and I had to bring my hand up as a guard to see his face clearly, so he beat me to it and gave me a big bear hug. I was in danger of suffocating before he let me go, saying “Pretty nice, eh?”
I looked at the blond windswept beach and the flock of pelicans just skimming the water so that one little riffle of the wind might touch their wings and send them cartwheeling through the surf, and I looked at the sea, still resolutely determined not to let the sun make it shine, and I nodded. There really wasn’t anything I could say that could describe it.
“Well, my dear girl, I’ve seen that look before.”
I looked at him quizzically.
“It means you’re stricken, afflicted, besotted, bedeviled, smitten, enamoured, moonstruck, captivated, gaga …” and he waved his hand to encompass the island.
“Don’t worry,” he added. “It’s a common affliction.”
“And the antidote is?”
“Why, to buy a place on the island, of course.” He chuckled.
“And get involved in island politics?”
“That, I admit, is not idyllic, but it is worth the price.” Duncan turned and started walking down the beach. I followed.
“What do you know about this vaccination fiasco?” I asked as I caught up to him.
“Good word for it. It heated up into a really messy situation with both sides trying to strong-arm the membership to vote their way.” Duncan stooped and picked up a small moon shell that had been rubbed raw and left dull and lifeless by the sand. He pocketed it. To each to their own, I thought.
“It was pretty ugly, actually,” he continued. “A lot of strong words, best left unsaid, have been said. It’s split the membership in two.”
“But it’s just two mares and a stallion,” I said, trying not to sound too astounded.
“C’mon, Cordi. You’re the zoologist. These horses have only just arrived here from the other island. The herd grows one foal at a time. One mare at a time. Eventually the herd will be big enough to harm the island because of the horses’ grazing.”
“I take it you’re for the vaccination?”
“Damn right. How could you think otherwise? But it’s caused a lot of bad blood and people are pretty fired up over it. Not sure how it’s going to end, but I hope sanity prevails.”
We walked along the beach for a little while, the wet sand dark and glistening against the dazzling white of the dry sand. The wind had picked up considerably and we were having a hard time hearing each other. Duncan pointed off to my left and yelled in my ear. “My cabin is just behind the third dune on the left — if you come by the main road it’s the first left after Hunter’s — you and Martha will have to come for supper one night.”
I yelled back into his ear — I had to stand on tiptoes to reach it — “We may have been evacuated by then.”
Duncan laughed and waved his hand dismissively. I didn’t catch what he said.
“You mean we won’t be evacuated?” I guessed.
He shook his head again. “No, I mean I won’t be evacuated.”
“You mean the authorities won’t evacuate you for some reason or you won’t evacuate when ordered.”
“The latter,” he said it as if it made eminent sense.
“But the island could be annihilated. It is a barrier island after all.”
He laughed again. “I’ve been under evacuation orders five times since I bought my cabin and not once have I left.” He sounded proud of it.
I was about to say “isn’t that stupid?” but caught myself in time. Instead I said, “Do you think that is a wise idea?”
He chose to pretend he didn’t hear and shortly after that we parted ways and I headed back toward my trike. I had to use the GPS because all the dunes looked the same. I found the trail out to the beach where I had stowed my stuff and headed down it to find my trike, amazed at how the oaks and the dunes and the palmetto silenced the sounds of the sea and blocked the sun. The sun was low in the sky and my growling stomach made me wonder what happened if you missed dinner at the station. Most biology stations had a system for latecomers — they had to. Biologists are notorious for queer working hours — you had to work the shifts of the animals you were studying, day or night. At any given time at a research station a handful of researchers would sleep through the day, their clocks at odds with everyone else.
I was hot, dirty, sweaty, and tired when I got back to the cabin. Martha had set up her printer on my bed and had printed out a slew of photos. A lot of them were taken last night and were remarkably clear, although the green tinge from the night-vision technology was unfortunate. The screen door screeched open and in she walked, carrying a humungous sandwich and a can of pop, both of which she handed to me.
“Latecomers’ leftovers,” she said. “How did it go?”
“Two buntings.” I patted the recorder.
“Sure they’re both buntings?” She was never going to let me live down my colossal mistake when I first started recording birds. I had recorded fifteen individual birds over a week, but when I got the recordings back to the lab and printed out the sonograms it turned out that half the birds were of a different species entirely from the one I was supposed to be studying. In my defence, I never claimed I had a good ear.
I waved my arm at her photos to change the subject. “I see you got some pictures last night.”
“It’s actually a video, but you can take stills from it.”
She picked up one of the photos of a blurry little blob that looked like an owl in a tree and said, “I have to try and get a better picture of this little guy. My hand must have jerked.” She sighed and dropped the photo back on my bed, the one I wanted to go to sleep on. “Don’t worry, Cordi. When you need me I’ll be around.” It took me a minute to realize what she was saying.
It sounded vaguely accusatory and I rose to my own defence. “I’ll be needing you for some of the analysis, but the field work is solitary. You know that, Martha.” Martha was an inveterate talker and the only time I had ever taken her with me to record birds she hadn’t been able to keep quiet, and keeping quiet is an essential tool in a biologist’s arsenal.
“I’ll get you sonograms of these two birds then. There’s a machine in the lab.” She still sounded hurt but there was nothing I could do about it.
“They have a sonogram machine? That would be great. By the way, Stacey is taking me out turtling tonight. Would you like to come?” My little salvo of reconciliation.
She hesitated. “Sam is going to take me batting tonight. He’s doing a quick and dirty experiment. We’re going to mist net ten bats and fit them with tiny capsules full of phosphorescent and let them go.” Martha’s face was lighting up like the phosphorescent capsules and I marvelled at how fast she could change and at Sam’s total failure to communicate to me what sounded like a great research project. All he had said was that he was going mist netting. Anyway, I’d accepted Stacey’s invitation.
“Everyone will be stationed near a place called Hunter’s,” she said, oblivious to my envy, “with walkie- talkies, and we’ll call in our observations on where the bats are, if they’re flying high or low, east or west. If you don’t go turtling you should come with us.”
No one can ever say that biology isn’t interesting, even amusing sometimes. I had pictures of phosphorescent bats zooming around at canopy level, below canopy level, palmetto level, and every level in between, with people hidden at strategic places spying on them. Were biologists the animal kingdom’s version of a private eye?
I watched Martha cleaning up the photos from my bed. When she was finished I sat down and said, “You’ll never guess who I saw on the beach.”
“Duncan,” she said, without hesitation. Not even a little bit to make me think she didn’t know. No surprises for Martha.
“He dropped by here while you were out birding. The only person coming to the island when everyone else is leaving.”
“He told me that if an evacuation order came down he would not be leaving.”
Martha chuckled. “Stubborn old bastard.”
“I could think of a better word.”
“Yeah, he’s probably a little bit crazy too, but he told me his cabin is on the highest ground on the island next to the lighthouse.”
“The lighthouse?” I remembered the sign I had seen when I was taping birds and wondered how close I had been to it.
“You haven’t seen the lighthouse? You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s huge and the tallest thing by far on the island. You can see it for miles. How did you miss it?”
“I guess I wasn’t looking the right way.”
“I climbed to the very top today and you can see the whole beach and the next island over too. There’s even a catwalk at the top, but it looked kind of dicey.”
By the time Martha had packed herself up in preparation for batting she looked like a walking advertisement for MEC. She was wearing long crimson pants tucked into her white socks and a long-sleeved green button-down shirt with every button buttoned up. In final preparation she took out a bottle of bug dope and rubbed it on her face, neck, and hands. Then she fastened a bandana on her head and covered it with a big mosquito and no-see-um-proof bug hat. By the time she left I had more or less fallen asleep and awoke with a start five minutes from being late for my 10:00 meeting with Stacey.
The wind was pretty impressive. Even in the shelter of the dunes the great oaks were thrashing and writhing about when I left my cabin and walked into the clearing. Stacey was leaning over a four wheeler equipped with an open cargo area at the back, parked under the one light illuminating the clearing. She acknowledged me with a grunt. She was futzing around with some of the guts of the vehicle, but her great girth was giving her trouble. Biologists the world over have to become good at jury-rigging various pieces of mechanical and electrical equipment. Either that or see their research stall for lack of an electrician or a mechanic in the far flung parts of the earth where they find themselves.
Stacey finally finished what she was doing and sat down behind the handlebars, but she took up the entire seat and I had to ride in the trunk at the back.
The night was overcast, and the forest was inky dark. We bounced and jangled down through the tunnel of trees and around a corner into the blinding glare of headlights. They seemed to have come from nowhere. Stacey swore and swerved the bike viciously to the right. A half-ton truck went left in a spray of sand and grinding gears.
We’d barely come to a standstill when Stacey started yelling. “You idiot,” she shouted, as Trevor opened the door of the truck, jammed a baseball cap on his head, and stepped out.
“Why the hell were you going so fast? You could have killed us. Or was that the intent?” Trevor smiled that sickly sort of smile that signals contempt, derision, and agreement, which made me wonder why he might want to kill us, or rather, Stacey.
“No harm done, now is there?” he said slowly.
Stacey glared at him and he touched his cap at her and turned back to his car. “Sayonara,” he said, but his smile said something else.