by Will Hobbs
“This is really bad,” my mother said. “I just hope those pothunters get caught. Let’s hope they’re still at the motel.”
But when the BLM ranger called back twenty minutes later, we found out they were gone without a trace.
My father couldn’t go back to work. He stewed all morning, trying to get ahold of the sheriff himself. I was so worn out I thought I might fall down on the floor. My mother was encouraging me to take a nap, but I had to know what was going to happen.
Finally, during lunchtime the sheriff called back. My dad was upset when he got off the phone.
“The sheriff said they were obviously professionals, and they’re no doubt long gone by now, probably in another state. They used false names at the motel, but with Tep providing their first names and their physical descriptions, plus the fact that they were brothers, the computer just might spit out who they are—especially if they have a history of pothunting. Even so, the sheriff said it’s really hard to get a conviction in these kinds of cases. Hates to waste his time, he kept saying.”
“But I saw the whole thing!” I objected. “I can say where they got the seed jar and the medicine bundle. They dug them up on public land, and that’s a federal crime!”
“You’re right,” my dad said. “I agree with you. But the sheriff said that just your word wouldn’t be enough. They’ll need proof—they’ll need the seed jar and the medicine bundle. I guess he’s tired of all these cases just getting dismissed in court. But he did say that if they happen to catch those guys and recover the artifacts, this time they won’t be able to claim they dug them up on private land. That’s what usually happens. You’ll be a witness that they dug them on public land, and then they’d be convicted.”
My mother and my father began to talk about the fine points of the pothunting laws, and a minute later I gave in to my weariness. My elbow slipped off the edge of the table and my soup spoon fell to the floor. I caught my head falling sideways and snapped back awake. Dusty was licking the spoon, and my parents were smiling.
“You’re exhausted,” my mom said. “Why don’t you go to sleep now?”
“I think I will,” I agreed. “Soon as I take a shower.” I was going to scrub a long time, to see if I could somehow wash off this whole mess. I was already wondering if the packrat had given me hantavirus.
“Good job, Tep,” my dad said. “I love how you scared them off with the flaming tumbleweed.”
I nodded dumbly, unable to take any satisfaction in this whole episode.
I slept the afternoon away. In the early evening I woke up, relieved in the moment I awoke to find myself in my own body. But then, the sun hadn’t gone down yet. I found my parents working at the big table, answering letters from fans of our seeds and addressing the labels on seed packets that were going out in the next day’s mail. I mustn’t have looked very good. “Are you feeling sick?” my mother worried. “Can I get you anything? Some soup? Tea with honey? We’re going to have dinner after a little bit.”
“I feel fine,” I said, but really I wondered if I was starting to get hantavirus. On top of that, I was full of dread that I might turn into a packrat once again.
“I know how sad you are about Picture House,” my mother added.
“It’s not just that….”I said.
Both my parents were looking concerned. “Can you tell us?” my mother probed gently.
I thought about it. I really thought about it. But I shook my head. “I’m just tired, I guess.”
“Even nighthawks need some sleep,” my father said helpfully. “You have a lot to catch up on.”
After supper, I excused myself before dessert. I’d been watching the sun carefully, and it was dropping low. With a heavy heart, I climbed the ladder.
My last glance before I closed the door on the landing of the loft was of Dusty down at the bottom of the ladder, looking up at me solemnly with those huge brown eyes of hers. Old Faithful. Was she wondering if it would happen to me again tonight?
I shut the door behind me and got to work on what came first: plugging up Ringo’s entry hole. I wedged a chunk of petrified wood in there, and it fit perfectly.
Now, what of my own things did I need to protect from the rat? I didn’t have any food in my room, that’s what he’d go for first.
That’s when I remembered the seeds I’d brought from Picture House, the ancient corn I was going to plant before the summer rains came. The handful of kernels was still in my jeans, which I’d thrown in my dirty-clothes basket. I retrieved the seeds and sealed them in an old fruitcake tin where I kept my dad’s very first tepary beans and other small treasures I’d collected over the years. I jammed the lid down extra tight.
Looking for some hope, my thoughts drifted up to Picture House. I hoped that the Indian elders had come this evening, that they’d already hid the medicine man away somewhere. If they said the right words, then maybe the magic would let me go.
It wasn’t fair, I thought, that I was paying for the pothunters’ crime. They were the ones who should have turned into packrats. I lay in bed shivering, terrified, as my room darkened and it happened again.
I can’t say I wasn’t responsible for the rampage that followed, because I saw it all happening. But it felt as if I was looking through a tiny window. It didn’t seem my willpower could begin to resist the cravings and compulsions of the rat.
The first thing I went after was the corn inside the fruitcake tin. I was clawing and scratching at the lid trying to pop it loose. Finally I had to give that up, but then I started carrying things around in a frenzy, picking one thing up and dropping another. Every small object in the room was ending up in one corner, I didn’t even know why. When I’d made a pile of everything from my room that was portable, I squeezed under the door and onto the landing.
Fortunately my parents had gone to bed. Dusty had been put outside for the night. If she’d been indoors, maybe she’d have saved me somehow from making such a fool of myself.
All the lights were out, but a packrat’s large eyes are made for the dark, and I scurried down the ladder in search of anything I might bring back to my pile. Carried away in all the excitement and confusion, I must have made a hundred trips up and down that ladder. I’d find something that looked perfect, like a book of stamps, and then I’d drop it in favor of something else, like a spool of thread. On top of my parents’ desk I discovered the seed packets that had been prepared for the mail, and I chewed into them voraciously, eating some seeds, spilling others, packing some upstairs.
And then, halfway up the ladder, I dropped a spoon. It crashed on the cabin’s wood floor, and I ran the rest of the way up the ladder. The light came on with a blinding glare. I froze, trembling. It was my mother, and she was looking right at me, up on the landing.
She smiled a curious half-smile, and then she turned off the light and went back into their room.
7
When dawn came and I was myself again, I woke to find a mound in the corner of my room made of Popsicle sticks, pencils, pens, most of my fossils, my socks and underwear, my toothbrush, everything that had been in the trash can by my desk, my father’s truck keys, stuffing from the couch downstairs, a squashed aluminum can, paper clips, rubber bands, torn seed packets, two dimes, three nickels, and a fork. In another corner of my room I found a pile of seeds. I was appalled. I picked up the fruitcake tin, which had been knocked to the floor. There were scratches all over it, but the lid had held.
Over and over, as I put my things back in place, I asked myself, What am I going to do? I threw the toothbrush in the trash. Fortunately I had another one up in my medicine cabinet.
I hated having to go downstairs. I didn’t want to know what it looked like down there. But I knew I’d have to face it sooner or later.
At first glance, downstairs didn’t look more of a mess than usual. But my dad was picking seeds off the floor and sorting out the ones strewn around on the table. “Looks like we had a visitor last night,” he said, and he wasn’
t pleased.
“I even saw him,” my mother chimed in from the kitchen. “A bushy-tailed woodrat!”
“Your mother thinks they’re adorable,” my father said. “Her partners in science! She didn’t wake me up because she was afraid I might do him some damage. Where was Ringo?”
I looked around and my eyes quickly found the hole in the couch where the stuffing had been pulled out. “I didn’t let him in last night,” I said. “I really needed the sleep.”
“The rat didn’t get under your door, did he?” my mother asked.
“He sure did,” I answered cautiously. “He left a big pile of stuff in the corner.” I fished my dad’s keys out of my pocket and handed them over. “Including these.”
“We’ve gotta get that rat,” my father said firmly. “We don’t know for sure about what-all carries hantavirus. Look at these droppings on the table!”
My eyes went to the tabletop, and I cringed.
“Let’s for sure give Ringo the run of the house tonight,” my father said.
My mother looked doubtful. “I don’t know if Ringo’s big enough to take on that rat. It looked fullgrown to me, maybe two feet long counting the tail.”
“Traps,” my dad said. “That’s what we’ll do.”
“Live traps,” my mother insisted. “We can move him down the road, but let’s not kill him.”
At breakfast I chewed my cereal very slowly. My father was going to be after me. He was worried that I could infect everybody with hantavirus, and he was right to worry. I had to move out. Since I had to let Ringo back indoors anyway, I didn’t have any choice. “You know,” I told them, “It’s getting kind of hot upstairs—too hot to sleep.”
“It’s that time of year,” my mother agreed. “Are you going to start sleeping under the stars again?”
That’s what I usually did once summer heated up. If the rains came, I’d pitch my tent. I didn’t have much time to think about it, but I was scared to death picturing myself sleeping in the open now, or even in a tent. I said, “I think I’ll try the Silver Bullet.”
The Silver Bullet was the ramshackle little travel-trailer halfway up the fields toward Big Pink, the old mud house where the college students lived.
The stairs down to my mother’s lab in the basement are outside the house. The storm doors just above ground level were thrown open for ventilation. It was midafternoon and hot, and I knew it would be cool down there. But mostly I just wanted to talk. Once, when I’d asked my mother if she believed in magic, she’d said something like, “There’s more on heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy.” I’d asked, “What does that mean?” She replied, “There’s a whole lot more that we don’t know than what we do know.”
My mother looked up when she saw me coming down the stairs. She was at her desk, picking at a baseball-sized packrat glob with tweezers and a dentist’s pick. She was wearing her mask, but when she saw me she wheeled away from her work and took it off. “Hi, Tep,” she greeted me, cheerful as ever. “Have you seen my ‘partner in science,’ as your dad calls him—or her?”
It’s a him, I thought painfully. “He must be lying low,” I replied. “Probably he heard dad talking about him.”
“I have a bet with your father that our bushytailed woodrat is much too smart for that old live trap of his. All he ever caught with it was a skunk, and you remember how that turned out.”
I laughed, remembering. I said, “You really do like those bushy-tailed woodrats?”
“Oh, absolutely. You should have seen the one last night. His whiskers were as long as your little finger. He’s got a rich, reddish-brown coat on his back, a white underside, white hands, and the tail is precious. You know there are six species of packrats all together, and the other five have those naked tails.”
“Those’d be disgusting,” I said.
“I agree. The one in the house was bushy-tailed, that’s for sure, just like the ones up at Picture House, where this specimen came from.” With a nod, she indicated the yellowish lump on her worktable. “If it weren’t for the hantavirus scare, and for Ringo of course, I’d love to capture our visitor and keep him for a pet.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Sure. We’d have to keep him in a cage, though, and it’d be a shame to take away his freedom.”
I was so disturbed by the idea, I could only nod in agreement as I was looking around at her lab. “You’ve got a good breeze going through here. What about hantavirus? Could it be in this stuff you take apart?”
“I really don’t think so,” my mother assured me. “This stuff is so old it’d be like catching a virus from an ancient Egyptian mummy.”
I thought about the ancient corn from Picture House that I wanted to sprout. “But is it possible?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” she admitted. “But really, there are a lot of people at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta who are working on the hantavirus outbreak, and they’re all pointing their fingers at the deer mouse.”
She took a clipping from her bulletin board and handed it to me. “You’ll enjoy this,” she said. It was from one of her scientific journals. “Read the part I highlighted. It’s quoted from the diary of a lost prospector in the gold rush of 1849.”
I read it out loud:
Part way up we came to a high cliff and in its face were niches…. and in some of them we found balls of a glistening substance looking like pieces of candy…. it was evidently food of some sort, and we found it sweet but sickish, and those who were hungry, making a good meal of it, were a little troubled with nausea afterwards.
“That’s sick,” I said, with great appreciation.
“I knew you’d like that.”
My mother hardly ever talked about what she was doing, nothing compared to how much we all talked about our seeds. She didn’t want my father to find out about her conclusions until she could surprise him. I asked her, “What all’s in this ‘candy’ that you study?”
“Well, all sorts of things: sticks, plant fragments, bones, animal dung, and their own pellets of course. They’re great collectors, and they bring back to the nest all the trash they can find—collectibles, I’d guess you’d have to say, from their point of view. Of course, everything gets saturated with urine, which evaporates and crystallizes, making a big, hard lump over time. Did you know packrats have been living at Picture House for about forty thousand years?”
“No kidding? Forty thousand years is a long, long time.”
“They started the midden I’m studying about thirty-eight thousand years before the pueblo ancestors arrived at the cave and started building pit houses. That’s what the radiocarbon reports I get back are telling me. Carbon-14 breaks down at a perfectly continuous rate, so it’s a marvelous tool. The natural radioactivity in anything organic—the plant fragments, the fecal pellets—tells quite a story. Tep, what I’ve been doing is like making a movie, really. I’ve been taking samples from the midden, dating them, looking at the changing picture of what grew and what animals lived within two hundred feet of the nest—that’s the range of a packrat.”
“That’s the part I never really understood,” I confessed. “I mean, where does that get you?”
“People lived at Picture House for a thousand years,” my mother said solemnly, “and then they went away. Why? The packrats might provide the answer. I’m trying to find out what grew here before the people moved in, and how that picture changed during the time they were here—not just around the cave, but two miles and four miles and six miles away as well. I’m studying four different packrat middens altogether. I want to see if the people changed their own environment while they were here.”
“And the packrat middens are going to tell why the people left?”
“Why they left might be a puzzle with a number of pieces, but packrat nests might give us an important one.”
“Are you getting close?”
“Real close.”
I gave her a little poke with my elbow. “You can te
ll me. I won’t tell Dad.”
“You know how scientists are—I have to be sure. I hope other paleontologists will study middens at other ruins around the Four Corners. It’s so unusual, what happened in this region. Between about the years 1000 and 1250 thousands and thousands of sites were abandoned. Every single one. There’s a lesson there for us today, I’m sure of it.”
“You got a book on packrats I could borrow?”
She reached for her bookshelf and put her hand on one, just that fast. “Sure, here’s my Field Guide to Southwestern Mammals. It has a section on ringtails, too.”
I’d intended to climb up into the cottonwood tree a little ways down the creek, sit in my favorite spot, and read up on bushy-tailed woodrats, but a commotion up toward Big Pink caught my attention. Heading that way, I could see Dusty was in the middle of it. The college students, standing around her in a circle, were sure excited about something. Carlos had seen me coming and was waving me over. “Tep, hurry up! You aren’t going to believe this!”
What I saw was Mickey and April, on their hands and knees, working in the dirt with knives and forks and spoons, excavating a perfect black-on-white pitcher.
8
Those college students loved Dusty before, but now she was their absolute hero. “We were all sitting on the porch,” Heidi reported breathlessly. “I noticed Dusty poking around and then digging. She kept looking at us like she wanted us to check out what she was doing, so I did.”
Heidi had long red hair and a nose ring, but her distinguishing feature was her large eyes. When she was excited, like she was now, the whites showed all the way around and made them seem even bigger. “She was digging so delicately. I could see something circular, and then I realized I was looking at the top of an ancient pot!”
Now April and Mickey had the pitcher free, and April held it up. It was a beauty, all right, with a parrot’s head atop a perfect handle. The body of the pitcher was decorated with connected spirals that looped gracefully from one to the next.
