T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

More to the point: how can the animals? And yes, I admit it, I am concerned about them, or concerned all over again, because that's the way it is with insomnia — the brain, diligent organ that it is, will always manage to come up with something to forestall the inevitable shutdown. Very still now, Andrea between breaths, the wind making a snatch at the rain, and I swear I can hear one of the lions coughing two floors beneath me_ I'm not imagining this — there it is again. Sounds like Amaryllis. I can picture them down there, exploring their new quarters, scent-marking the walls, gutting the furniture, ripping up carpets, settling in.

The amazing thing is, no one got hurt.

All those claws, all those teeth, all those hundreds of pounds of irascibility and recalcitrance, the wind blowing up a tornado, the water waist-deep and running slick and fast, and me at seventy-five with my bad knee, savaged back and chewed-up arm and nobody to help but Chuy and five conscripts: this is a recipe for disaster. I didn't need April Wind, I needed the Marine Corps. But Chuy, never to be mistaken for a genius, especially since the pesticide seemed to have annulled most of the cognitive functions of his brain, really came to the rescue. He did. He saved the day and no doubt about it. Because his idea of roping the cats (and, ultimately, Lily and Petunia) and forcing them to swim for it, as ridiculous as it might sound, was the one thing that ultimately worked. While Mac and the women went off to hood the Egyptian vultures and prod the honey badgers into their carrying cages, I unlocked the gate on the chain-link fence and stepped into the lion compound, Chuy right beside me with a coiled-up rope. Al and Al sat in the Olfputt, flexing their muscles and looking very small in the face: they wanted no part of this, and who could blame them?

I never liked darting the animals. Too risky. We were using a mixture of Telezol and Xylazine, and it worked like a charm — if you got the dosage right. Too much, and you had a dead animal on your hands; too little, and you ran the risk of becoming a dead animal yourself. I'd worked out the dosage as best I could under the conditions (duress, flooding, excitable women and a hysterical Mac, inundated kitchen, floating table, that sort of thing), and I figured I'd try half a dose for starters-enough to make them groggy, but not so much that they couldn't swim behind the Olfputt and find their way through the open basement door to where dry accommodations, some hastily scattered straw and the freshly drowned carcass of an emu awaited them.

The water was waist-deep did I mention that? — and slipping by at a pretty good clip. Plus there were the damned catfish crawling up on every horizontal surface in their little gift-wrapped packets of slime. And how did the lions feel about it? Pissed off. Definitely pissed off. They were hungry and tired and sick to death of being wet and cold and clambered over by fish that had no right to exist in this environment at all. Dandelion fixed his tan eyes on us and let out a belly-shaking roar of complaint from his perch atop the lion house.

"All right, Chuy," I said, "I'm going to dart Dandy first, and when you see him go down on his haunches, fling that rope around him. That lasso, I mean. You can use it, right?" " Si, Mr. Ty, I can use, no hay problema. " (Among his many former occupations, Chuy listed" bronco-buster "and" vaquero. "When he was in his twenties, before he came north, he'd worked in a Mexican rodeo, roping dogies, whatever they were-calves, I take it.)" No worries, "he said now, grinning out of the wet mask of his face. The wind screamed, flapping the hood of the slicker against my elongated old man's ears, and I could hear Lily harmonizing in the distance: 0000-whup, 0000-whup!

"And if the other two come for us, I'm not going to dart them, so we're just going to have to back out of the cage and lock the door, okay? They're not all that fond of the water, so they'll probably stay put-"

"That is what I am thinking tambien, Mr. Ty," Chuy said, wading forward with deep thrusts of his legs till he was twenty feet from the gate and maybe thirty from the lions. And they were roaring now, all three of them, ears flattened, lips pulled back, tails twitching, their eyes locked on Chuy as he whirled the lasso over his head in the wind and driving rain. "Yippee!" He shouted. "Yippee-yi-ki-yay!"

I was worried, I admit it. I'm a worrier and cynic at heart, always have been-at least since Earth Forever! Came into my life. Or before that even, when a stinking little half-inch wasp that couldn't have weighed more than a quarter of an ounce took Jane away from me for good. I expect the worst, and I'll have to say that my expectations have been abundantly fulfilled through the seventy-five years of shitstorms and bad luck that constitute my life to this point. At best I expected three drowned lions; at worst, I pictured Chuy with his limbs separated from his body and me with my intestines rearranged in a way that would have caused real consternation down at the emergency room. That's why I had Philip Ratchiss' Nitro Express slung over my shoulder in addition to the Palmer dart gun.

My hands were trembling as I sighted down the barrel of the dart gun (old age, palsy, the sake shakes, undiluted terror — you name it), and the first dart took off like a guided missile, streaking high over the lions, out of the pen and into the dense fabric of the wind-whipped sky. The lions roared, Chuy yippeed and yahooed and twirled the rope over his head. I took my bifocals off and wiped them on the handkerchief in my breast pocket, the only reasonably dry thing on me, and then I lined up a second shot with the tip of my nose spewing water like a fountain and my fingers befuddled and the catfish crawling up my pantlegs, and let it go out of desperation, frustration and something very much like hate-hate for the animals, for Mac, for the U. S. Weather Service and all the polluters and ravagers and industrialists who had brought me and Chuy and the lions to this absurd and humiliating moment in the history of interspecies relations.

There was a sound like the final blow in a pillow fight — a soft w hump l — and there it was, the dart, dangling from Dandelion's flank like a-well, like a big yellow jacket. He turned and snapped at it, whirling round two or three times with a snarl more bewildered than fierce, and in the process inadvertently knocked Amaryllis off the roof and into the cold swirl of the muddy water. She didn't like that. Didn't like it at all. Thankfully, though, she didn't take her displeasure out on Chuy — or me — but instead scrabbled back up on the roof of the enclosure and gave Dandy a swat that would have crushed the spine of a zebra or wildebeest (if such things existed), but only managed to operate in concert with the drug and knock him off his feet. That was when Chuy's rope work came into play. He was a master, no doubt about it, the lasso snaking out, catching the wind and riding it in an elliptical trajectory right over Dandy's head, where it came down soft as a snowflake.

The rest was easy. (I'm speaking relatively here, of course-relative to a week ago, when all I had to worry about was what I was going to read on the toilet and which can of soup to open for supper, it was the seventh circle of hell.) Chuy cinched the rope, waded back to me and stood at the open door of the enclosure to watch the result — and slam shut the door if anything went wrong. I backed up, the current snatching at my old man's feet, the wind slamming at me in gust after gust, and slowly made my way back to the Olfputt, where I climbed into the back seat and fought the door closed. The two Als were up front, giving me the sort of look they reserved for anybody who got within five feet of Mac. They looked fierce and suspicious, puffed up like bullfrogs, the slabs of their shoulders rising titanically out of the black slickers Mac had provided them with. They also looked scared. "What now?" The one at the wheel said.