Pecked to death by ducks (7 page)

Smith's enemy angels apparently consider earth a dull duty. They are getting restless and impatient down here, waiting for the moment when we all become sterile. These antsy angels are handcuffed by an immutable law of the cosmos that states that human beings, created in the likeness of God, may not be dissected for scientific purposes. Cattle, however, live in close proximity to man, and the angels know well that mutagenic agents, such as plutonium, migrate to the gonads in both cattle and man. If your prize bull's balls are full of plutonium, so are yours. The extraterrestrials, these warriors from heaven beyond the solar system, spend a lot of time mutilating cows and studying bovine genitals in order to figure out just how much longer they are going to have to wait until Judgment Day. And that is the Unspeakable Truth.

People like Smith, "mutologists," save their harshest comments for conventional scientists and men like Kenneth Rommel, a former FBI agent who headed up a fifty-thousand-dollar government study of the phenomenon. "If surgeons are doing it, they're doing it with their teeth," Rommel said at a news conference, and he backed up his contention with a series of color slides showing predators such as coyotes and wild dogs gnawing away at the soft parts of down cows. The precision-surgery effect, Rommel explained, is caused by shrinkage and desiccation of the tissues. Crows or magpies take the eye, flies mass in the resultant pulpy mess, sun and wind dry the tissue, which then shrinks away from the wound in a perfectly rounded circle. A coyote may start his meal with soft and accessible delicacies like the genitals. Every one of the twenty-four New Mexico mutilations Rommel investigated was caused by natural predators: coyotes, wild and domestic dogs, eagles, crows, vultures, and flies.

The predator theory—disappointing and anticlimactic as it is— seems the most convincing to me. Still—gory close-up photos notwithstanding—blowflies lack the pizzazz of enemy angels in UFOs, and this, I think, partially explains the persistence of con-

voluted theories about the mutilations. I mean, really, isn't it more fun like this:

The ship sits on an alfalfa field near the pond on Poison Creek. It is no saucer, but a quivering, jelly like cell, and it glows from within with a color out of space, a color out of time: a blue and strangely hypnotic incandescence in the long shadows at the end of a long Montana summer day.

The cattle scatter in panic. One yearling, slower than the rest, is seized from behind, and it bellows in lusty protest. The Mutilators gibber and click, then set up a gurgling dirge as laser scalpels flash into readiness. The genitals first, then the anus — oh so carefully now — and eyeballs and lips and tongue. The yearling's bellows rise in pitch, then subside into hopeless sheeplike bleats and end in a single, strangled, tongue less croak.

The tentacles of the Mutilators drip with certain fluids of delight, and the cell of the ship pulses with a deeper incandescence. The cattle are bunched in dumb horror in a corner of the fence line, and the Mutilators from Outer Space lurch toward them in cold reptilian glee.

Ah, but here come the boys, the cowboys, protectors of the cattle, human beings. They are bouncing over the field in an old Jeep, and they are clutching shotguns and gleaming hunting knives, fury spinning like fire in their eyes. The ship keens out a warning and pulses red, a burning red, like molten steel. The Mutilators cower in terror. Their tentacles are dry as parchment, and they recoil before the rough and thunderous rage of the boys. Now there is brutal carnage in the alfalfa field. The boys have fired all their shells, and they are hacking about with the razored hunting knives. Green reptilian blood erupts out of jagged wounds: cold green blood, thick as vomit. The boys are whirling, thrusting, piercing, ripping. It is like some sick, Martian samurai movie out there in the alfalfa field. . . .

Alas.

And so I had arranged to spend several days in the mountains, alone, with no particular goal and nothing to do. No Walkman, no book. Just me and my journal.

The first day, as always, was the worst. I worried about the phone calls I was missing, about the work I had to do, about the book and the outline. I slept badly. By the second day, however, my body began to fall into the desultory rhythms of camp life, and it dragged my mind along with it, so that I was thinking, rather lazily, not about outlines or commitments, but about moving to a new site, on a windy ridge. The idea was that the wind would scatter the deerflies. Still, sitting there on the ridge, being battered by a ceaseless wind for a couple of days, didn't sound like all that much fun, either. Which is when I hit on the perfectly obvious idea of moving up above the flies the way the elk do.

It was a reasonably challenging climb. I set up my tent and lay back in the bright afternoon sun, thinking about how much fun it was not thinking. My mind was puttering about, cleaning up minor details it had recently ignored. Every once in a while, I made a little note in my journal.

If I had been sentenced to sit in my chair at home, to empty my mind and think about nothing and everything all at once, I couldn't have done it. The phone would ring, and someone would say, "You are twenty days overdue on your mortgage payment, and a late fee has been charged to your account." The doorbell would ring, and a pleasant, older woman would ask me if I knew that "Satan rules the world," and then she'd try to sell me a Watchtower magazine, which would explain everything.

Even without these interruptions, I'd have found several hours of emptiness oppressive. Who sits for three hours without picking up a book, listening to music, watching TV, drinking?

What happens in the woods is this: The mind is forced to deal with certain niggling but elemental details. Those things we take for granted—shelter, food, basic conveniences, comfort, brute survival—require all our attention and must be attended to. When a storm is blowing in and the tent isn't set up, worrying about mortgages and outlines is a luxury. Later, such concerns

seem an imposition. Primitive necessity, it seems, can snap the thread of linear thinking. It can send us skittering from deerflies directly into the cosmos.

Or so I thought, lying on my back in the high-country wild-flowers. Directly above, the sky was a thin, shimmering blue, that bright, soaring blue you see high in the mountains, a blue that seems to rise forever. Staring into it, I had the sense of space beyond and a feeling that, if I really worked at it, squinted a little, I could see them up there, all those exploding stars and swirling nebulas dancing their mad galactic polka.

I was visualizing the shape of the galaxy—I have a lawn sprinkler that throws out water in the same pinwheel pattern—but I had just returned from flying over and then into a full-blown hurricane with the air-force hurricane hunters, and I had a feeling. Photographs of that storm, taken from the GOES satellites, showed a mass of clouds arranged in the precise same pinwheel shape you see in high-resolution telescopic photos of spiral galaxies. There seemed to be some cosmic significance here beyond the mere conservation of angular momentum. From certain distances a galaxy could be mistaken for a hurricane.

No one who has to deal with deadlines is allowed any such mildly cosmic insights. When camping, however, I tend to go right from the turkey tetrazzini to Alpha Centuri. I was thinking about our galaxy—a flattened pinwheel system of stars, gas, and dust—with Earth positioned about two thirds of the way out on a spiral arm. The evening promised to be clear, and I would be able to stare into the galactic center, the Milky Way, spread out across the sky. There the great mass of stars are concentrated, and gravity sends them spinning in various figures about one another. If there are planets, they may spin around one sun for a time until the gravity of another takes them on a quick do-si-do.

And if there is intelligent extraterrestrial life, surely it evolved in that galactic center rather than out here in the boondocks of a spiral arm. Life-forms waving at one another as their planets go square dancing around the spinning stars, a federation perhaps, feeding on technical cooperation: Intelligent gas clouds swooping down with visiting comets to see how we're doing here in the

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A $6

outback, thinking we're just as cute and cunning as can be with our hydrogen bombs, waiting for us to finally come to it, the insight that unites life, the Universal Principle that, I imagined, could be deduced in the similarity of shape between galaxies and hurricanes.

The note in my journal about this little flight of science-fiction fancy is a drawing of a pinwheel and the words "galaxy" and "hurricane" followed by several emphatic exclamation points (!!!!!!!!!). Which, apparently, indicated that this concept, whatever it was, when properly elucidated, would change the face of physical and astronomical science as we know it. Without putting too fine a point on it, I have to report that the face of physical and astronomical science remains unchanged. On the other hand, three days later, back home, I started the book, working from my finished outline.

The writing went well, better than it had in months, and it occurred to me that my trip to the Beartooths had helped. Helped a lot. Some folks sleep on a problem, but you can camp on one as well. Camping is for the mind what a high-speed run on the highway is for a car. It tends to blow out all the sludge that accumulates in the type of urban driving most of us are forced to do in order to earn a living.

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS ▲ 60

But here it was, and I was holding it in my hands at four in the morning with a cool Montana wind beating against the windows and one dim lamp burning against the night. I emptied the cylinder, cocked the hammer, and aimed at the light. "This is stupid," I said aloud. "Useless." I locked the gun away and walked into the living room. My pack and boots were laid out on the floor, where I'd put them the night before.

What I needed was a few more hours of sleep, but even the TV at 4:00 a.m. didn't have its usual somnambulant effect. There was a man selling financial security through real estate, another selling salvation through Jesus, and a cartoon about a boy with large, perfectly round eyes and no pupils who could fly. I flicked off the set and sat on the couch in the darkness for two hours, fully dressed.

Tom Murphy rang the bell promptly at six, as I knew he would. We got into his car and drove south, through Paradise Valley, toward Yellowstone Park, fifty miles away.

"I thought about bringing my pistol," I said.

"What have you got?"

"A .38."

"Not much use."

"I know."

The sun was rising over the Absaroka Mountains, rising behind some high, thin clouds so that the light that spilled into the valley was shadowed and broken. It was a moving watercolor of a morning: Waves of subtle pastels were flowing gently across golden August pastures.

"Nice sunrise," I said.

"It's pretty," Tom allowed.

"Should we tell someone where we're going? I mean exactly. In case he leaves us bleeding."

"Bonnie knows," Tom said. Bonnie is Tom's wife, and she's used to this sort of thing. We drove in silence. The light reached the river, and for a moment the living expanse of water was a rippling mirror of shimmering pink and gold.

"For bleeding," Tom said, "you know about pressure points?"

"I don't know where they are."

"Well, the best thing is direct pressure. If that doesn't stop it, press on the pressure points."

He showed me where they were as he drove: under the arm, up by the armpit. "You can feel that real strong pulse there. Press it against the bone." For the legs the pressure point was up front near the groin, and you pressed it against the pelvic bone. "Tourniquets are out completely," he said. "People lose limbs they don't have to lose with tourniquets. And, of course for head wounds, direct pressure is the only thing. You wouldn't want to use the jugular as a pressure point, cut off the flow of blood to the brain."

"No," I said, "you wouldn't want to do that. Or worse, use a tourniquet." We laughed—a tourniquet around the neck, wahoo, what a knee-slapper—but the laughter sounded brittle and a little forced in the car.

"You pretty sure he'll be there?" I asked.

"He'll be there all right," Tom said. "He had something buried, a bison carcass, I think. The hole was deep. I couldn't see into it from where I was, but he was feeding on it all day."

"What's the land like where he is?"

"It's a prairie situation," Tom said. "Rolling hills and sage."

"No trees to climb in case he, uh ..." I didn't know what he might do. Nobody knows what a grizzly bear might do. They are entirely unpredictable. One grizzly might simply ignore a man on foot, while another one could feel obligated to rip him to shreds. A popular theory holds that because grizzlies evolved on the plains, where there is no place to hide, their flight-or-fight mechanism is heavily weighted toward fight.

The bear possesses two football-sized slabs of muscle on either side of its head and these power jaws that can, according to Tom McNamee in The Grizzly Bear, "crush a Hereford's head like an eggshell." Additionally, "the large shoulder hump—the grizzly's most distinctive feature and the one which usually distinguishes his appearance from that of the black bear—is ... an enormous wad of muscle, the engine that powers the mighty digging and death-dealing machinery of the front legs." And they're fast, grizzlies. A National Park Service employee once clocked a run-

ning subadult Alaskan grizzly at thirty-six miles an hour. I didn't like the idea of standing behind a two-foot-high tangle of sage in the middle of the prairie a couple of hundred yards from five hundred pounds or more of thirty-six-mile-per-hour grizzly. There would be no place to run, no place to hide.

"There're some trees," Tom said, "but they're about a quarter of a mile away."

"We have binoculars," I said. "We could watch him from the trees. It'd be safer." Grizzlies have long, slim claws that will not hold the weight of a full-grown bear. They can't climb, the big ones anyway.

"I don't think we want to be in those trees," Tom said. "First, they're directly upwind. The bear is sure to scent us there. Second, this is a big bear, a mature male with a little bit of gray on him. . . ."