Migrations(67)
I wait to be sure he is finished, and then I ask, “What can we do?”
He breathes in and out, in and out. “I don’t know.”
He has spoken before of a tipping point. A point where the extinction crisis would pick up speed and things would begin to change in ways that directly impact humans. I can hear in his voice that we have reached that tipping point. “There’s something to be done,” I say. “You know it better than the rest of us. So what do we do, Niall?”
“There’s a conservation society in Scotland. They’ve been predicting this for decades, breeding more resistance into some of their creatures, trying to grow new habitats, rescuing wildlife.”
“Then we’ll go to Scotland.”
“You’ll come with me?”
“I’m already on my way.”
“What happened to Yellowstone?”
“It’s too lonely without you.”
He doesn’t say it back. He always says it back, but not this time. Instead he says, “I don’t think I can do this again.”
And I believe him.
“I’m coming home,” I promise. “Wait for me.”
LIMERICK PRISON, IRELAND TWO YEARS AGO
* * *
“Hey, Stone, wake up.”
I don’t want to. I’ve been dreaming myself a seal, watching sunlight move through water. When I open my eyes it’s to see Beth and our cell and everything warm slips away.
“Come on. They spotted one.”
“One what?” I ask, but she’s already moving.
I rise grumpily from bed and follow her into the rec room. All the women are crowded around the television this morning, and the guards, too, even them.
It’s a news bulletin.
A lone gray wolf has been discovered and captured in Alaska, amazing scientists who believed them extinct. Authorities were alerted to its existence after it killed a flock of livestock south of the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Experts say this behavior only occurred because its own natural habitat and food sources have all perished, but they fail to understand how this solitary creature—a female—could have survived so long undetected and alone.
I move closer to see the footage, everything tightening and hurried inside me. She is thin and scrawny and magnificent. They have her in a cage and together we watch her prowl back and forth, gazing out at us with eyes of such cool wisdom I shiver.
The farmer whose livestock was slaughtered has called to have the creature destroyed but the public outcry over this has been loud and unrelenting, so much so that state government has stepped in to forbid the harming of the gray wolf—speculated to be the last of any wolves in the world. She will be moved to and cared for by the wildlife conservation team Mass Extinction Reserve, based in Edinburgh. People from all over the world are reportedly flocking to Scotland to see the gray wolf, the very last of her kind.
Which brings us to our final reminder that if you or anyone you know wishes to visit the remaining forests of the world, you need to join the waiting lists immediately, for it is becoming more likely that the lists will outgrow the life spans of the forests.
I barely hear the reporter, locked in the black eyes of the wolf. I imagine her at MER, with its eager, heartbroken volunteers and scientists, and know she will be beloved. But given there is no way for her to reproduce even in captivity, I can’t help but wonder if she should have been left to live out her solitary life in the wild. I can’t help but think no animal, ever, should live in a cage. It’s only humans who deserve that fate.
MER BASE, CAIRNGORMS NATIONAL PARK, SCOTLAND SIX YEARS AGO
* * *
The people who live and work at the Mass Extinction Reserve conservation base are all one of two breeds. The first: earnestly, irritatingly optimistic. The second: outraged, and not interested in being anything otherwise.
Niall is the only one of them who seems to exist somewhere in between. I say “them” because there is no one on this base who would pretend for a second that I belong here. I can’t contribute anything except to cook and clean, and to the scientists this means very little. They are profoundly single-minded. As they should be. They are in a battle to stop the turning of the world.
We were greeted at the airport in Edinburgh by a young couple who acted as though Niall was the second coming. Everyone on the base has read his work and knows it intimately—they refer to it in meetings. (I only know this because Niall sometimes invites me to sit in on them, and I do so swollen with pride.) We stayed a week at the headquarters there, and then were driven north to the Cairngorms National Park, which is where their wildlife sanctuaries are located and has blessedly clean air. What I have gathered here is that the conservationists have made amazing progress for certain species and no progress for the rest. It was always going to be this way, Niall tells me. They had to choose the more important animals, the ones we need and those with a chance of survival, letting the no-hopers fade into extinction. Interestingly, insects are high on their list—bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, ants, and some types of beetles, even flies. As are hummingbirds, monkeys, possums, and bats. All these animals are pollinators; without plant life we are truly fucked.
This was where Niall and I felt our hearts sink in unison. Saving specific animals purely on the basis of what they offer humanity may be practical, but wasn’t this attitude the problem to begin with? Our overwhelming, annihilating selfishness? What of the animals that exist purely to exist, because millions of years of evolution have carved them into miraculous being?