by CJ Hauser
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The exact location of the third site was unclear. According to Ian’s notes, it appeared to be near Gates’s and Esther’s houses, which was strange, because they knew the cove there to be small and sandy. It was not a place the ducks were likely to be.
Nolan led them swiftly. When the terrain got rocky, Elsa took Nolan’s hand and allowed him to guide her. When they arrived, they found the cove empty, except for Mariana Gates.
She had a blanket stretched out on the spit of sand and was walking the shoreline, feet in the water, tallying in a notebook the small crabs that scuttled away from her. There was a green morning smell off the water. Her hair was pulled back and she wore a sweater over a striped red t-shirt. She approached a small device on the shore with a long rubber tube stretched into the water. She stooped over the readout on its face, then returned to the blanket. On the blanket was a shotgun.
Jinx trotted over to see her. Gates startled. She looked as though she wasn’t sure whether to put down her notepad or continue what she was doing. She looked as though she knew she ought to hide the gun, but that it was too late. She took in how dirty the dog was.
What are you doing? Nolan asked.
Measuring water salinity. Counting food sources, Gates said, even though it was clear she knew this wasn’t what Nolan meant.
What’s with the gun? Elsa asked.
The gun is for safety.
Not really.
Gates looked around, scanning for other people, maybe Esther.
Safety and hunting, she said.
Hunting? Nolan said.
Holy shit, Elsa said. Because Gates was on the beach near Site Three with a gun, which meant that Gates was looking for the same thing they were. She was looking for Duck Twelve.
Like you care, Gates said.
Elsa said, You’re the only legitimate scientist left on this island and you’re hunting the Paradise Duck?
Don’t call it that, Gates said. Only your father called it that.
You’re going to kill it? Nolan asked. You’re going to duck-hunt your own research?
Just one duck, Gates said.
Why? asked Nolan.
Duck Twelve shows the reversal isn’t so bad, Elsa said.
Your father never proved anything. Gates scanned the far edge of the beach.
He messes up your article, Elsa insisted.
Twelve doesn’t fit, Gates said. The only way we’re getting published in Nature is if we put out one clear theory. All the other data we’ve got hangs together.
So study him! Nolan said.
If we don’t get that article published we’re going to lose the island. She tossed down her notepad and picked up the shotgun.
Maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing, Nolan said.
I know your father took DNA samples, Gates said.
Doesn’t that mean it’s pointless to kill the duck?
Not if you give me the lab results, Gates said, squinting out over the water, jostling the gun. That duck represents a series of weird fucking mutations I can’t even begin to understand without the report.
We don’t have any lab results, Elsa said.
Nolan said, So Duck Twelve is actually—
Proof of a reversal that goes beyond the undowny feathers. A reversion back to multiple traits common in distant past generations that we have no way of proving are necessarily disadvantageous.
He’s special, Nolan said.
Happy, Elsa said.
He doesn’t fit, Gates repeated.
Elsa shook her head. So you’re just going to wipe it out?
Maybe eventually we’ll figure this thing out and be able to publish properly with a different specimen but…The sun was coming over the trees, shining right in Gates’s eyes. She shielded them with her hand. Right now, we just need more time, she said.
Publish Ian’s work in Nature, Elsa said. We’re not going to stop you.
Gates laughed. Nature will take our theories for a soft piece, because they sound halfway plausible and the crazy factor sells copies. But Ian’s work? Rejecting unidirectional progress? Ducks improving their quality of life by meditating? His being right sounds even crazier than us being wrong.
They won’t take it, even if it’s true? Elsa asked.
There’s a difference between what’s true and what people will believe, Gates said. And the thing they’ll believe is more useful.
You don’t really think that, Nolan said.
Elsa said, She’s just afraid to leave the island.
* * *
——————·
Mariana Gates grew up in Texas. Her mother was Greek and her father was a Texas oilman, and so they sent her to cotillion, taught her to cook lamb, insisted on attendance at the orthodox church, and showed her how to shoot a shotgun, just in case.
The first time she saw the cranes, Gates was seven, playing alone in her yard in a very nice dress and patent leather shoes, excavating mica shards from the dirt and wishing her mother would deliver on her promise of a baby brother. Before she saw them, she felt them: the air around her shifted. When Gates looked up she saw twelve migrating whooping cranes. It was like the underside of one of her mother’s tapestries, their bellies smooth and white, their wings fit into tessellation. They had stern faces and dark bills and were each allowed one splash of red feathers. They were silent as they flew, and this was the first time Gates fell in love.
Gates got her PhD in biological sciences. Took a position at Sam Houston State as an aquatic ecosystems ecologist. She confounded her parents by never marrying and spending all her time in the mud, watching her birds.
When she wasn’t teaching, Gates facilitated a program called Operation Migration that bred the cranes in captivity. When the chicks were born, Gates wore a white full-body suit, one arm painted to look like the face of a mother crane, and fed them. They played the chicks the sound of an aircraft engine so they would not be frightened when they needed to be taught how to migrate by a small plane.
Without the generation before them as guides, the cranes didn’t know what migration route to take or where to winter. And so, when they were ready, Gates piloted the small, open craft with wide white wings along the old crane route to the Gulf, showing the adolescents which way to fly. She wore her white suit, steered with her crane hand, and she and her cranes flew in formation. A woman at the center of a flock of birds; a humming mother in the sky. She was never happier. She taught the birds how to be themselves.
But success was unpredictable. One generation of adolescents forgot their route home and died down south. Another group thrived for a whole year before a lightning strike knocked the birds out and they drowned in their own waters. It was hard work, and it hurt when it went wrong.
Gates spent twenty years trying to save those goddamn cranes.
When she was asked by an ecotourism company to run a trip for nonscientists to aid in data collection about the cranes’ habitat, she said no. She preferred to work alone when possible and could think of nothing worse than shepherding a bunch of know-nothing tourists through the disappearing wetlands the cranes called home.
But then they told her they would fund her research, so she started running trips for tourists to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge.
Three years and a dozen expeditions later, the thing that confused Gates most about the experience was how, even though the volunteers got teary when the trips were over; even though they would friend the ecotourism company on Facebook and post snapshots of themselves in waders with the hashtag #savethecranes and little heart emojis; even though they would buy bumper stickers and baseball hats and key chains that read GIVE A WHOOP!; even though they loved the cranes, once they left, they did nothing to advocate for preserving the cranes’ habitat. Made no contributions, signed no petitions, and change
d their habits not at all.
It was easy to get someone to care about something beautiful. Impossible to make them protect the muck it relied on. Gates found herself operating from a place of low-grade fury at all times.
It was on her last trip—she swore it would be her last—that she met Esther Stein, and this was the second time Mariana Gates fell in love. The first day of data collection, Esther walked straight into the muck and settled in to patiently await the data she would log in her notebook. She was beautiful the way a woman with a sense of purpose can be. Beautiful like a well-formed bowl. Beautiful like a smooth ax handle. The utter peacefulness of Esther in the mud, chin tilted skyward, was almost enough to restore Gates’s faith in people.
A few days into the trip, two of the tourists had been found smoking weed in a nesting area, which they’d specifically been told not to go near, and now the territory was spoiled and the cranes would refuse to return to it, a clutch of eggs lost. Gates was outside her bunkhouse that night, wearing a headlamp to fill out a report to explain the spoiled nest. Her bird sighting scope was still set up next to her, optimistically pointed at the ruined nesting ground, and this was when Esther marched over and said: Everyone on this trip is a moron. Doesn’t it seem like people are just becoming awful? How can you stand it?
It was such a relief to hear someone else speak these words out loud.
Gates gestured for Esther to sit with her. The tourists had bought a sack of oysters off a passing boat and from the next bunkhouse over they could see them cracking the shells open, yelping as the shucking knife slipped into the meat of their palms. A half-dozen feral cats padded around, licking the spent shells.
Gates said, Sometimes I think I’ll just become a hermit.
This was when Esther explained to her about the island.
You should come see it, Esther said.
At first, Gates thought she was joking, so she laughed. But when she realized Esther was serious, Gates was frightened by how much she wanted to agree with anything the older woman said. She demurred, saying that after the trip she had to get back to campus to start prepping a grad seminar on coastal ecology she’d not taught before. But Esther gave her a business card that read LEAP’S ISLAND INSTITUTE FOR REVERSALISM and told her to think about it. Esther stood up as if to leave, but then took the handle of the sighting scope, pivoting it toward the sky.
It’s too dark to see anything, Gates said. Esther waved her over.
Gates bent over the scope, and when she looked into the sight she saw that Esther had framed for her the moon. It was all but full, and through the lens Gates could read the whole swing of time and accident on its face.
When she looked up from the scope, the nearer world rushed up to meet her: Esther was still staring at the moon, blue bandana around her neck, smelling of lemongrass, wire-rimmed glasses slipped down her nose. Gates envied how sure of herself she looked. So certain.
The moon is good tonight, Esther said.
She returned to the tourists’ cabin and left Gates alone with the moon.
Gates had been using that scope for years, had framed hundreds of birds in its sight. She brought them close. But she had never thought to twist the thing upward. It had never occurred to her to look at something so large as the moon.
And maybe it was the bigness of the moon, the bigness of Esther, that she wanted to give herself over to. Because after that last trip, Gates did migrate south, following the older woman’s trajectory to Leap’s.
These days, Gates often wondered why she’d come to the island, and why she’d stayed. Gates had been young. She had been frustrated, but she hadn’t been out of options. She could have kept rehabilitating the cranes. She could have kept teaching her students. She could have done any number of things. What she did instead amounted to running away.
That first day when Gates’s boat approached the island, she saw Esther standing on the dock, hand cupped to her mouth.
She was whooping. Specifically, Gates recognized the call the cranes made when they assembled to migrate.
Everyone on Leap’s had a story about why they came, and sometimes Gates felt like hers didn’t stack up. Gates had followed Esther. Like the cranes following her small humming aircraft, she had followed the path laid out for her and not questioned it until it was too late.
Now she was here. Had been here for too long. Long enough that she could not bear to go back.
* * *
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It’s not just me, Gates said. Do you think Esther wants to leave the island? Remy certainly doesn’t. The brothers. Gwen. Can you imagine sending them back to the mainland after all these years? It’d ruin them.
It’s not that bad out there, Nolan said, hoping someone would tell him if this were true.
And you don’t seem particularly happy here, Elsa said.
Gates laughed. She sat down on the blanket and began drying her feet. Putting on socks. The gun lay next to her.
No one is particularly happy ever, Gates said. But at least out here, you don’t have to pretend.
Our father was happy out here, Elsa said. Wasn’t he?
It was such a stupid question, Elsa hated herself for asking it. Because the Ian Grey who had lived on the mainland, who had lived with them, had never seemed particularly happy. But the Ian she found in the field journals and Reversalists’ stories sounded, to Elsa, positively ecstatic. He had been swept up in the novelty of his discovery, and that was part of it, but it also sounded as if there was something to the way he was spending his days, traipsing through the woods, living like that duck. Wading and hiking and scrounging food and catching naps and listening to Bach and bedeviling Mitchell. Dragging along the boys. Being kind to Gwen. Bothering Remy about his writing. Elsa barely recognized the man in those journals. The kind of Ian who would rush naked into the warmth of the sea without bothering to fold his clothes on the shore.
Was he happier out here than he was before? Elsa asked.
Before, Gates said, was before I knew him. Listen, all I need are the lab results—
Whatever you want, we can’t give it to you, Nolan said. He was alarmed by how desperate for answers Gates sounded. He’d thought she had it all figured out. And Nolan had placed her among the ranks of omniscient adults he was always trying to impress.
But maybe there were no adults in charge of anything. Maybe it was just children above children, all the way up the chain.
Greys! came a voice. It was Esther. She was trundling down the path from the Lobby, headed home with a grocery bag in hand. She appeared shrunken, wearing an enormous pair of rubber boots. A green kerchief held back her frizzled hair. She took in the scene, Gates with the gun on the shore.
Put that away, Gates, Esther said, scolding, and Gates’s face faltered.
Children, are you leaving? Esther said.
Yes, Elsa said, on the post boat at three.
We’re leaving, Nolan said.
Won’t you come in for a minute before you go? Esther said. She shuffled up the steps to her shack, turning back to say, I’m making sandwiches, before she disappeared through the door.
Gates stood up. She collected her gun, her instruments, her notebook.
You really don’t have it? she asked the children one last time. You would tell me if you did?
Elsa said, Everything out there doesn’t get any less bad just because you don’t have to see it.
Safe travels, Gates said, and headed toward the Lobby.
The children followed Esther into her shack.
* * *
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Esther enlisted them in making sandwiches. From the bag of supplies came apples and cheese and wheat bread and mustard. She poured glasses of iced tea and put everything on a turquoise platter, along with a large pair of clippers.
Out of knives? Nolan sai
d.
That’s for later, Esther said. Let’s see if we can rustle up any company on the deck.
Outside, they sat around a small patio table and ate. Across the deck was a second table with the baby pool on it. The water level was lower than it had been a week ago, and the breeze rippled across its surface.
I’m sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for, Esther said.
What were we looking for? Nolan asked.
I can’t bear to see Gates bullying that poor duck, Esther said. A shotgun. Really.
Have you seen it? Elsa asked. You said before—
Esther hushed Elsa. The crusts of her bread remained on the plate. She got up and placed it on the railing next to the baby pool.
Nolan was still holding his sandwich. He put it down. Then he picked it up again and ate the remainder in two large bites. Then he flipped open the field journal and looked at the notes for the third site where Ian had seen the duck.
No way, Nolan said. Is this—
Ta-dah! Esther pointed at the baby pool. The buffleheads lived in the lobby pool when they were first introduced, she said. I’ve wondered if that’s why they find this one homey. She inched the plate of bread crusts closer to the baby pool. The third site.
Elsa stood. She couldn’t quite bring herself to curse out an old lady.
Oh! And here he is, Esther said.
The children heard the flapping of wings.
* * *
——————·
The Paradise Duck splashed into the baby pool and shook himself all over. He snatched one and then two bread crusts from the plate Esther had left out. He raised his head and shook it, choking down the sandwich crusts.
He looks, Nolan said, just like all the other fucking ducks.
Oh, but he’s sweet, though, Esther said.
Elsa and Nolan slowly inched toward the pool so as not to disturb the duck, though they needn’t have worried.
The duck did not pay them any attention at all. He dunked himself in the water, disappearing his whole body in the shallow pool. Then he came up shaking and honking, lolling his squat, bulbous head from side to side. He seemed to delight in this. He lolled again, honking as if showing off. Around his ankle, they could see the green plastic band with a Sharpie marker 12 penned in their father’s hand.
