The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

by Deborah Blum

  This became the rhythm of the rest of the winter: two weeks alone, Dan for an extended weekend, repeat. It was part of the most profound years of my life, at the end of which there were many things I could do that few others could, and many things I could do that I never imagined I could. And none of what I had learned really mattered in the larger world. I was pleased to discover that trapping rewards a mind that is organized, creative, and neurotically interested in details. Which is to say: trapping is an activity made for a mind just like mine. I became a trapper.

  For the next five years, I spent a few weeks every year trapping with Dan and a month or two trapping on my own back home on the Leech Lake Reservation. In 2002, after having trapped beaver, mink, marten, fisher, and otter, my brother Micah and I decided to expand our trapping techniques to include more snaring. We hoped to snare a fox. We talked to as many trappers as possible, read books, went to trapping forums online, and after buying and treating (boiling, dying, and waxing) our snares, we were ready to begin.

  We hung our first snares at the beginning of the holidays in December. It was warm and there wasn’t much snow and we didn’t know what we were doing. We set our snares too high or too low; we set them on rises and humps so they were too clearly silhouetted on the trails. We set a snare in an area that we thought was a fox run and came back the next day to find a porcupine caught by the neck and foreleg. He squirmed in a kind of slow agony. We used natural funnels—places where the game trails narrowed to squeeze through dense brush or swamps or between deadfalls—but we didn’t trust the snares themselves and blocked up the trail with sticks and branches so that the fox would have nowhere to go but into our snares. It must not have looked right to them: no fox came near our sets. We did almost everything wrong. Every morning we got up, excited at the prospect of fox after fox dead in our snares. Day after day our snares hung empty. Christmas came. It went.

  On the twenty-sixth of December our mother called all of us over to her house—her partner, Ron; my siblings; and our spouses. She had news, she said: she hadn’t been feeling well for some time. She had been coughing a lot. Her ribs on her right side hurt her constantly. She was tired and had lost a lot of weight. She’d gone to the doctor, and they had taken X-rays and made scans and had detected a large lump, a tumor, in the lower lobe of her right lung. The tumor had grown so large as to push past and envelop her ribs. These had become brittle and had, at some point, broken—the source of the pain. They had taken a sample to be biopsied and she would, she said, know more soon. She had been a steady smoker for over forty years. It was, in all likelihood, lung cancer.

  I can’t remember how we reacted. Some cried, I’m sure. Some didn’t. Some started strategizing—as though the cancer were an enemy we could fight. I think this was probably my response. It would be a week before we got the results of the biopsy. In the meantime we carried on. We got groceries. We went to the bank. We watched movies. We argued. We did everything we could. We did nothing at all.

  When Micah and I went to check our snares, I noticed that the fox we had been trying to snare had begun using the ruts my truck tires left in the fields of big bluestem we crossed. So, on a whim, we cut down a small jack pine, dragged it close to the tire tracks, and wired a snare to it.

  On New Year’s Eve my mother gathered us together again and told us that she had lung cancer. The doctors planned to operate within the week. I don’t remember much of that time. I don’t remember living in any conscious way—that is, making decisions or acting purposefully—but I must have. I do remember thinking a lot about snaring.

  Snares are elegant tools—there is something beautiful about a snare, whereas there is little that is beautiful about a metal trap. Metal traps, no matter what kind, are nasty, brutish things. A snare is so simple: a piece of wire formed into a loop. One end is anchored to the ground or to a drag stick; the other ends in a lock through which the wire passes. When an animal walks through a snare, the lock slides down the wire and the snare tightens around the animal’s neck. The animal struggles, and the snare gets tighter and tighter, until the animal can no longer breathe and it dies. With a piece of wire and not much more than that, a man can survive for a long time.

  As I contemplated my mother’s operation, it seemed to me that seen in a certain way, snares, unlike traps, don’t actually kill the animal. The animal’s habits are what kill it. Same with my mother. Every animal has its habits—where it walks, where it hunts, where it dens, where it mates—and snares more than any other kind of trap take advantage of those habits. Trapping beavers at their houses or dams or channels is a matter of taking advantage of geography—if you put a trap in a doorway, the beaver will have to go in or out sometime. Fisher and marten traps are baited and as such use hunger against the animal (a weasel must eat two times its body weight a day just to stay alive). But snares use an animal’s habits. Instead of using lures or attractants or bait, instead of trapping the entrances of a den or digging out the den or burrow, you set a snare where an animal goes, and a good snare set works because it is unobtrusive. And there they hang—a nice clean loop, no mechanical springs or parts, nothing but gravity and the animal’s own struggles to help with the kill—and could hang forever, waiting. It is tempting to think of snaring (and trapping) metaphorically—we already speak of things like “snares of love,” for example—but the real beauty of it is literal: this wire, on this trail, will choke to death a fox whose life is not that of all foxes, but was his and his alone.

  Four days after my mother received her diagnosis, we went, as we did every day, to check our snares. We drove out into the fields and checked our line along the old fencerows and among the jack pine and down near the slough. Nothing. We drove back out into the fields and Micah yelled, “Stop, stop!” I stood on the brakes, and above the dead brown grass we saw a fox jumping and twisting. He would disappear into the grass and then jump in the air and fall back down. We bailed out of the truck and ran toward it. He was caught in the snare we’d set in the open field on the tire track. It was a clean catch. Tight around his neck. But he must have gotten into the snare just a short while ago. The stick to which the snare was wired was too big for the fox to drag very far.

  A few days later my mother went into surgery; they resected her ribs and removed the lower two of the three lobes of her right lung. All of us were waiting for her in intensive care when they wheeled her bed in. She was still unconscious and on a respirator. A long translucent tube snaked from a hole in her side down to a bag filled with blood and a slimy yellowish fluid. She was gray and ashen, and though she wasn’t awake and couldn’t have spoken if she were, the way the tube went down her throat distorted her face. She looked like she was screaming. But her body was limp, her eyes shut. The only sound was that of the respirator and the squeak of our chairs. I wanted her to live. I wanted it more than I had reason to expect she would. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else—of something other than her pain, and whatever the future might be, something other than our collective hopelessness. I could think of nothing.

  The fox we’d snared had also wanted to live. That, after all, was his purpose. He’d wanted it so much that when he felt the snare tightening and he couldn’t breathe, he tried to run away, to get his body far from the snare and the log to which it was attached. He jumped again and again, and it was something both strange and beautiful. He lifted clear into the air—a bright flash of red against the sky—and then disappeared below the grass, which was about 3 feet high. First his nose, then his body, and then his black-and-white-tipped tail cleared the grass and was jerked back down by the weight of the log. He jumped and jumped and jumped again. All his traits and everything he had learned, the land itself and what it offered him, forced him to choose this path, on that patch of land on that day, and it was killing him. His instincts were killing him, but it was his instinct to live, too.

  Finally we drew close enough to knock him on the head with the ax handle and down he went. I felt the quickness
of his breath as I knelt on him with one knee. With one hand on his head and the other on his chest, I felt his heart and the life in it. Who knew a heart could beat that fast? I felt, too, in those beats and under that fur, in that quick, elegant body, how much it strained toward life, how much it jumped for it. Everything in that animal’s body was bent on it. It wanted to live. And we, too, gathered around our mother, wanted to live. And she wanted to live. We and all the others and everyone—regardless of the lives we’d led, and more than anything else, and beyond the agonies and dangers that attend every act and action of ours in this life, we all wanted to live. And that desire, if not the result, is something to think about.

  E. O. WILSON

  The Rebirth of Gorongosa

  FROM National Geographic

  IN THE SUMMER MONSOON SEASON of late November to mid-March, the rain clouds ride the trade winds of the Indian Ocean west into Mozambique. Crossing the coast, they refresh the miombo woodlands of the Cheringoma Plateau, then the savanna and floodplain grasslands of the Great Rift Valley. Finally they run aground on the slopes of Mount Gorongosa, where they release great torrents of rain, like a benediction.

  The Gorongosa massif, which reaches a height of 6,112 feet, captures more than 6 feet of rainfall a year. That is enough to support a lush rainforest on the summit—and, to the east, in the Rift Valley, a park that was once one of the richest wildlife refuges in the world. Before Mozambique’s civil war ravaged it, Gorongosa National Park was roamed by elephants, African buffalo, hippopotamuses, lions, warthogs, and more than a dozen species of antelope. Now some of those animals are coming back, thanks largely to Greg Carr, an American businessman and philanthropist who is leading a project to restore Gorongosa. In 2010 the park marked a milestone: Mozambique’s government fixed an error made at its creation, expanding its boundaries to include Mount Gorongosa, source of its life-sustaining rivers.

  In the summer of 2011, I went to Gorongosa to support Carr’s efforts and also to work on my new digital textbook for high school biology. The park is an excellent place to convey the high stakes and the excitement of doing wildlife biology today. The summit rainforest on Mount Gorongosa, about 29 square miles in extent, is an ecological island in a sea of savanna and grassland. It is hard to get to, and so it has remained largely unexplored by biologists. Ants, my own specialty, were entirely a blank on the map when I arrived. For a naturalist there is no more powerful magnet than an unexplored island. When I visited Mount Gorongosa, on my first trip to Africa, I felt highly charged with the prospect of surprise and discovery.

  During my stay at the park my assistant was Tonga Torcida, a young man born on Mount Gorongosa. He was one of the first of his village to graduate from high school, not a mean feat, since schooling past the seventh grade requires tuition and a uniform that few local families can afford. While we were together, Torcida learned that he would receive a scholarship to attend a Tanzanian college. Speaking four languages and working off his intimate knowledge of Gorongosa, he plans to be a wildlife biologist.

  Torcida told me a creation story of his people and why they consider Mount Gorongosa sacred. In early times, he said, God lived with his people on the mountain. Humans were giants then and not afraid to ask God for special favors. In a drought they would say, Bring us water. The Creator, growing tired of their constant importuning, moved his residence up to heaven. Still the giant people persisted, reaching up from the mountain. At last, to put them in their place, God decided to make them small. Thereafter life became a great deal more difficult—and so it has been to this day. I told Torcida that this folklore and the moral lesson embedded in it sounded very much like parts of the Old Testament.

  Gorongosa certainly suffered a precipitous fall from grace. Three years after Mozambique won its independence from Portugal in 1975, a civil war broke out and raged for seventeen years. The park, which had been established by the colonial government in 1960, became a battleground. Its headquarters and tourist facilities were destroyed. Roving soldiers, hungry for food as well as for ivory they could trade for weapons in South Africa, killed many of the large animals. After peace accords were signed but before order could be restored at Gorongosa, commercial poachers killed an even larger number of animals, peddling the meat at nearby markets. In the end, nearly all the big-game species were gone or nearly gone. Only the crocodiles, quick to slide down muddy banks into the safety of the rivers, escaped with little harm.

  The clearance of big game had important environmental consequences. Where zebra herds no longer grazed, grass and woody shrubs thickened, and lightning-strike wildfires became more threatening. With no elephants knocking over trees to feed on the branches, some forests increased in density. With the scat and carcasses of big game severely reduced, the population of some scavengers fell sharply.

  Yet the ecological base of vegetation and small animals, including the myriad species of insects and other invertebrates, remained largely intact. Gorongosa Park contains a great variety of habitats—besides the valley grasslands and the mountain’s several vegetation zones, it includes forested plateaus and limestone gorges—and even today it supports tremendous biodiversity. In the whole of the park, 398 bird species (of which about 250 are residents), 122 mammals, 34 reptiles, and 43 amphibians have been found. Probably tens of thousands of species of insects, arachnids, and other invertebrates await discovery.

  For a decade following the end of the civil war, while a new, democratic Mozambique established itself, Gorongosa remained in ruins. Meanwhile, Greg Carr had gotten interested in the country and was looking for a way to help; after making his fortune in voice mail and Internet services, he had turned to philanthropy. In 2004 the government of Mozambique and Carr agreed that he would help plan the park’s restoration. Carr has since done much more: he has undertaken to restore Gorongosa himself, largely at his own expense, and has made it his full-time occupation. Mozambique’s Ministry of Tourism has entered into a long-term partnership with him to manage and develop the park.

  Today, after less than a decade, Gorongosa is well on its way to recovery. Large animals, including African buffalo and elephants, have been imported from nearby South Africa and are multiplying rapidly. Eland and zebra are next. Though still well below their prewar maximum, herds of grazers and browsers swarm once more across the savanna and grassland. Ecological balance is returning with the megafauna, and so are visitors from Europe and North America. Excellent facilities have been built at the central Chitengo Camp and at explorer camps in the interior. At Chitengo a bullet-pocked concrete slab has been preserved as a war memorial.

  The accomplishments of Greg Carr’s team and of the people of Mozambique are impressive. But restoring a damaged park is much harder than creating a new one, and Gorongosa—especially its mountain—is far from being out of danger. During the civil war, as marauding soldiers invaded the mountain, subsistence farmers began to clear little plots up the slope. The taboo of the sacred mountain was largely forgotten. In time the farmers reached the summit rainforest and began to fell the tall trees and convert the moist, fertile ground into corn and potato fields. In the past decade the area of original rainforest has been reduced by more than a third.

  The retreat of the forest already means that fewer species of plants and animals, some likely endemic, can survive. The complete removal of the forest, which at the current rate of destruction might easily occur within ten years, would be catastrophic for the entire park. The mountain’s ability to capture, hold, and gradually release monsoon rainwater would be gone. The water would then run off quickly, and the moisture supplied to the rest of the park would be rendered seasonal instead of year-round. In the face of the new aridity, life in and around the park would be less sustainable for both wildlife and people.

  Now that the mountain is part of it, the park has the authority to secure the forest perimeter. The forest won’t be truly secure, though, until those who are destroying it are given alternatives. Tourism is part of Carr’s answer, but
he has also hired teams to create numerous nurseries to grow seedlings of the rainforest trees and begin the decades-long, perhaps centuries-long process of returning the forest to its original area. The park is creating schools and health clinics for local people at the base of the mountain, below the rainforest. Finally, a center for scientific research and education is planned for the Chitengo Camp. The emphasis will be on the environment inside the park and on the preservation of its biodiversity.

  To sample the current biodiversity on Mount Gorongosa, Greg Carr and I decided to hold a “bioblitz” there and to engage the community living on its lower slopes. We asked Tonga Torcida to help organize the event and to recruit local children as our helpers. Bioblitzes are counts of species found and identified in a restricted area over a fixed period of time, usually twenty-four hours. They follow simple rules: participants search within a set radius around a focal point, assisted by local naturalists who are familiar with one or more groups of organisms and can identify the species discovered. The first bioblitz I helped organize was at Concord, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1998, with Walden Pond as the focus. Naturalists came from all over New England. The effort was so successful and well publicized that similar events have since been conducted all over the United States (including two in New York City’s Central Park) and in at least eighteen other countries.