We watch the Saghani for as long as we can. As he navigates south into the most perilous stretch of ocean left on this planet the captain weeps unashamedly.
I am too numb for any more tears. Too animal now.
PART THREE
25
When my daughter is born without breath, drowned by my body, part of me goes to sleep.
I go in search of something to wake it.
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, UNITED STATES SIX YEARS AGO
* * *
I waited for him at the airport. There is that. I always ask him to come with me, but he is a different kind of creature. He has his own grief to bear and his own strength to gather, and he finds his in work, not in freedom from responsibility, not in journeys or movement or turning resolutely forward and not looking back. So I’ve left him once more, when I promised I never would again.
I will stop making that promise now. It demeans us both.
I’ve found my way to Yellowstone, to one of the last pine forests. It is an empty place now, not as it once was. The deer have all died. The bears and wolves went long ago, already too few to survive the inevitable. Nothing will survive this, Niall says. Not at the current rate of change. There is no birdsong as I walk among the trees and it is catastrophically wrong. I regret coming here, to where it should be more alive than anywhere. Instead it is a graveyard.
As my boots crunch on the carpet of dead bark and leaves I can hear her crying as she should have done when she was born. I must be going mad. Panic sets in, silver eddies over my skin as light moves upon the iridescent scales of a fish.
It’s been many months since I’ve seen Niall, though we write religiously, always. Right now a letter is not enough. I need to hear his voice. My eyes are blurry as I hike my way to the nearest lodge. I am shaking as I rent a room and close its door and switch on my phone. The walls spin a little and I can’t get this pain out of my chest, out of my insides, I have to leave here.
The phone dings as dozens of missed calls and messages flood in. They are all from Niall, and I turn cold with fear because this isn’t normal, he doesn’t call me unless there’s something wrong.
He answers on the second ring. “Hello, darlin’.”
“Are you all right?”
He is quiet a moment. Then, “They’ve declared the crow extinct.”
The air leaves me in a rush. Like that, all panic is gone. All this self-absorption dissolves and what I have left is the memory of twelve friends offering me gifts from their perches in the willow tree. I have an enormous sadness—and I have concern for my husband to outweigh it all. I know what this will do to him, what it has been doing to him.
“All of the Corvidae family have gone,” Niall says. “The kestrel was the only raptor left, and the last one of them died in captivity last month…” I can hear him shaking his head, losing his voice. I can hear him gathering what’s left of him. “Eighty percent of all wild animal life has died. They say most of the rest will go in the next decade or two. We’ll keep farmed creatures. Those will survive because we must keep our bellies full of their flesh. And domesticated pets will be fine because they let us forget about the rest, the ones dying. Rats and cockroaches will survive, no doubt, but humans will still cringe when they see them and try to exterminate them as though they are worth nothing, even though they are fucking miracles.” There are tears in his throat. “But the rest, Franny. Everything else. What happens when the last of the terns die? Nothing will ever be as brave again.”
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.