Bittersweet

by Susan Wittig Albert

Mack was interested in drones, and curious, both personally and professionally. When she was a kid, her brothers had built radio-controlled model airplanes, and they’d let her fly them. Flying a drone must be a torqued-up version of flying a model plane, she thought, and the idea of being able to get a bird’s-eye view of the landscape intrigued her. She could think of a dozen ways that conservationists could use drones—for research, not as spies in the skies. Karen’s mountain lion, for instance. The tracking equipment was cumbersome, and it had to be carried on foot, over difficult terrain. What if she and Karen could fly a drone over the study area? It could pick up the radio signals from the lion’s collar and report the animal’s whereabouts, maybe even get video of it.

  Mack keyed Ms. Roth’s number into her cell phone. She had worked with PETA members on a couple of projects when she was an undergraduate. They were an important force for the protection of animals, and they often weighed in on Texas wildlife conservation issues—mostly on the right side, in Mack’s opinion. But they could be pretty aggressive in their methods, and they sometimes crossed the line. She had the feeling that she’d better find out about Roth’s drone project, whatever it was.

  But it looked like they were going to play telephone tag. Her call was routed to voice mail, so she left a brief and reasonably cordial message saying that she was interested in learning more about the project and went back to her work. She had opened her report file on her computer and was beginning to update it from her log book when her cell phone dinged. She saw that the caller was Derek, and when he spoke, she could hear that he was clearly upset.

  “I’ve just found six dead white-tailed deer in the pasture, Mack.” His voice was strained. “Can you come out and take a look? I have no idea what’s going on. What in hell am I supposed to do with all these dead deer? Do you know somebody who could haul them to the landfill for me?”

  She frowned. Six dead deer? “Dead how?” she asked. “Were they shot? Are they all in one place? Have the backstraps been taken?” Every hunting season since she’d been a game warden, she came across one or two deer that had been shot by hunters, licensed or otherwise, who took only the best meat, the so-called venison filet mignon, and left the rest for the scavengers. But six?

  “They’re all in one place,” he replied impatiently, “pretty close together. And no, they weren’t shot or butchered or anything like that. I mean, there’s maybe a little blood, but I don’t see any bullet holes or any sign that they’ve been killed by an animal—like that mountain lion that’s running loose, I mean.”

  “What do they look like?” Mack asked. “Malnourished? Normal?”

  It wasn’t an idle question. CWD, or chronic wasting disease, had recently cropped up in a couple of mule deer taken in far west Texas. Related to mad cow disease and epidemic among deer herds in nineteen other states and in Canada, CWD was the primary reason that deer breeders were prohibited from importing deer into Texas or moving breeder deer around the state without a permit. One infected deer could infect an entire captive herd. If an infected deer escaped, it could infect the wild deer. And if CWD got into the wild population, it could make a huge dent in Texas’ two-billion-dollar-a-year hunting industry. But the chances of deer dying of CWD as a group were remote at best.

  “No, I wouldn’t say they’re malnourished,” Derek replied. “One of them is a good-size buck. They’re just . . . dead, that’s all. Six of them, not very far from where I’m putting in that new pond.” He sounded petulant. “Dead wild animals. This is a job for a game warden, isn’t it?”

  “Definitely,” she said, in the I’ll-take-care-of-it voice that she used to soothe upset citizens. “I’m glad you called, Derek—you did the right thing. I’ll meet you at your house in, say, twenty minutes, and you can take me to the site. Meanwhile, don’t touch the animals. Okay?”

  “Don’t touch them?” he repeated, now sounding uncertain. “Why? You’re thinking some kind of disease, maybe? But if it’s a disease, it must be pretty damn contagious. I mean, there are six of them out there, and who knows how many out in the woods.” He gulped audibly. “Whatever it is, could it infect people? Maybe I should round up the girls and take them to a motel for a couple of days?”

  She thought that was going overboard, but she only said, gently, “How about if we don’t worry until we know what we’re dealing with? See you in twenty minutes.”

  Mack clicked off the call and immediately phoned Doc Masters, who ran a vet clinic on Highway 187 a couple of miles north of town. He was often out of the office on calls to outlying ranches, but luckily, she caught him in. She described the situation without any additional comment and asked him to meet her at Derek’s ranch. She already had her suspicions about the cause of the deaths, but the vet would be the one to take samples and send them to the Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory in College Station, where the lab analysis would be done.

  “I’ve got things to do this afternoon,” the vet said grumpily. “You sure this can’t wait?”

  “Tomorrow’s a holiday,” Mack said. “We’d better get this done today.”

  “Twenty minutes,” the vet said and clicked off.

  Mack had been introduced to Doc Masters at the café and had bumped into him at the General Store, but she hadn’t yet had a chance to work with him. To tell the truth, she’d been apprehensive about it. The old vet—gray-headed and gray-bearded—was known to be crusty and bad-tempered, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly. In fact, he didn’t suffer fools at all and was reputed to have no love for game wardens, especially female game wardens. Mack’s predecessor, Clyde Brimley, had warned her of the need to convince Doc Masters that she knew her stuff.

  “He’ll make life tough for you if you don’t,” Clyde had cautioned. “Master’s a shrewd old buzzard. He knows all the ranchers in this part of the county, and you need him on your side. But he’s got this thing about game wardens, like he thinks we’re not well trained or something. I never did figure that one out.”

  All Mack could do was shrug. She’d run into the anti-woman attitude before, and it always took some extra patience to keep from telling the guy, whoever he was, to go fly a kite. But Masters was the only vet in northeast Uvalde County. And a good working relationship with the local vet was as important as a good working relationship with the local law enforcement officials.

  “Not today, Mol,” Mack said, when Molly begged to go with her. “You can come tomorrow, for Thanksgiving, and we’ll take Cheyenne, for the girls to ride.” She bent over and rubbed the heeler’s ears. “But if this is what I think it is, it’s not going to be pleasant. And I don’t want you near it.” Then, thinking about the possibilities, she got a can of gasoline and a propane torch out of the garage, stowed them in the back of her truck along with a couple of extra rakes, and headed out to Derek’s ranch.

  When she pulled up in front of the impressive glass-and-stone ranch house, Doc Masters was already there, talking to Derek, who was wearing baggy shorts, flip-flops, and a Hawaiian print shirt. A slight, stooped man in his late sixties, the vet was dressed in stained khaki pants and a baggy vest with multiple pockets and wore a maroon Texas A&M baseball cap pulled down tight over his gray buzz cut. Nodding curtly to Mack, he put his bag in her truck and the two of them followed Derek’s red ATV over a rutted ranch road. After Mack’s greeting and Masters’ grunted response, the old man refused Mack’s efforts at conversation. Mack’s heart sank. They weren’t exactly getting off to a strong start.

  The sun had ducked behind a band of pewter gray clouds, and the wind was picking up ahead of a cold front that was predicted to slide through the county that evening, bringing wind and maybe some rain. After a fifteen-minute drive, Derek stopped his ATV and Mack pulled up alongside him. She could see vultures clustered around the dead animals, which seemed to be scattered across about a half acre of grassland, at the foot of a steep limestone cliff near a small creek. Not far away, a big bulldozer was si
tting idle beside a deep, wide basin and a pile of scooped-up soil and rock.

  “I counted six dead,” Derek said, swatting at a bug on his bare leg. In his shorts and flip-flops, he looked out of place in the rough country. He gestured toward the bulldozer. “I spotted them when I drove out to check on the pond I’m having built.”

  Mack followed Doc Masters to the nearest dead animal, a young doe. Peering over the tops of his round, metal-rimmed glasses, he looked as if he had seen almost everything in his long career—and he probably had. He had certainly seen this before, Mack knew, as she stood beside him, gazing at the scattered group of six dead deer, five does and a buck, in short grass. The carcasses were fairly fresh, but the day had turned warm and they were already pretty ripe. The vultures lifted noisily from their lunch and flapped off to watch from a couple of nearby hackberry trees. The dead animals showed little or no rigor, and in spite of the vulture depredation, Mack could see that small amounts of dark blood had oozed from their mouths and noses. A textbook case, she thought.

  Masters hunkered down for a closer look at the doe, then straightened up. He gave Mack a testing glance. “You want to hazard a guess, Miz Warden-lady?” There was a slightly mocking tone in his grainy voice. “What killed ’em?”

  Mack met his eyes, steady and sure. “It’s late in the year for anthrax, but that’s what it looks like to me. What do you think?”

  “Looks that way to me, too,” the vet agreed with a brusque nod. “Glad to see they’re teaching something useful at warden school these days. But o’ course we’ll have to see what they say about it over at College Station. They may have a different idea.”

  “I’ll bet they’ll agree with your diagnosis,” Mack said, suppressing a grin. She could have told him that she’d worked on anthrax during her junior field study summer and had been dispatched to two different epidemic sites. But that would have spoiled the old man’s fun.

  Derek was standing some distance away, his hands in his pockets, watching and listening. “Anthrax!” he exclaimed loudly, sounding panicked. “Anthrax? You think? Omigod! Where did it come from? Are we . . . is it some kind of terrorist attack? What should we do?”

  Mack turned around, surprised at his alarm. But he was new to this part of the country, she reminded herself, and to ranching. “You don’t have to worry,” she told him reassuringly. “We need to be careful, of course, but it’s not that kind of anthrax.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not that kind of anthrax?” Derek’s voice was shrill and barely under control. “Anthrax is anthrax, isn’t it? It gets into people’s lungs and kills them, doesn’t it? And it’s a hundred percent fatal, from what I’ve read. Shouldn’t we try to get some vaccine or something? Won’t it—”

  “No, it won’t,” Mack said firmly. “You’re thinking of aerosolized anthrax, Derek. Weaponized anthrax, the kind that makes the news. And yes, when people breathe it in, it’s nearly always fatal. The anthrax we have here in Texas is caused by the same bacterium, but it lives in the soil.We see occasional cases of wildlife and livestock poisoning, especially in the summer. We might even see a few cases of human anthrax across a decade, but nobody has ever died from it—at least, not in modern reporting history, not in Texas.” She turned and spoke over her shoulder. “Did I get that right, Doc?”

  “Pretty much,” the old vet said—grudgingly, Mack thought. “The last human case I heard about was a man over near Del Rio, who got cutaneous anthrax from skinning a buffalo. Fella recovered without a problem.” He eyed Derek, who was now pacing nervously back and forth. “You won’t have a problem, either, son, long as you don’t go skinning these critters. Or harvesting the antlers.” Sternly, he pointed to the buck, an eight-pointer. “Consider this an official warning. You leave that rack right where it is. Don’t even think about hanging it on your wall.”

  “But I don’t understand where the anthrax could have come from,” Derek protested. He stopped pacing, bewildered. “Did somebody do this? Did somebody poison them?”

  Doc Masters grunted. “Somebody sure did. You, most likely.”

  “Me?” Derek sputtered, incredulous. “That’s crazy. I had nothing to do with this.”

  Mack nodded toward the bulldozer that Derek had hired to build his new tank, which he’d said he planned to stock with fish so he and the girls could go fishing. “Doc Masters is saying that the guy who was operating that bulldozer could’ve scraped up an old anthrax grave site, where a previous rancher buried some diseased animals, or where they died and decomposed. Anthrax spores don’t need an animal host to reproduce themselves. In the right soil—high in calcium, as this soil is—they can go through their whole life cycle. They just keep replicating themselves.”

  Derek was regarding her with disbelief. “You’re telling me that the dirt around here is loaded with anthrax? The soil is poisonous?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly,” Mack replied cautiously. “But yes, there are spores in the soil. We got a good hard rain a few weeks back, and the weather was warmer than usual. The dirt your dozer operator turned up could have sprouted a fresh crop of green grass. White-tailed deer don’t normally eat a lot of grass, but they might have spotted your salad bar and decided to help themselves. That’s where they picked up the spores.”

  Derek turned to the vet. “This is right?” he asked, frowning. “They died from eating the freakin’ grass?” It sounded as if he had suddenly discovered some sort of natural treachery, as if the land itself had deliberately sabotaged him.

  “Happens,” Doc Masters said. “Or they could have got it from infected flies.” He opened his bag. “It’s late in the year for that, too, but the warm spell Miz Warden was talking about could’ve maybe caused another tabanid hatch.” He took out a pair of plastic gloves and a mask and held them out to Mack.

  “Tabanid?” Derek managed.

  “Horseflies,” Mack said, slipping on the gloves. “Or deerflies, they’re sometimes called. When several animals die together, flies can be the cause.”

  Doc Masters put on his mask and gloves. “Gotta watch them flies,” he warned with a sly glance at Derek’s bare legs. “They’d just as soon bite people, you know. Bloodthirsty. You might want to reconsider those short pants, son. Most men around here wear long pants and long sleeves, so’s they don’t get chewed up.” He put the slightest emphasis on the word men.

  Knowing that Masters was baiting Derek, Mack was about to say that the flies very rarely bit people. But the vet was taking out a sampling kit and scalpel and a package of syringes. He gestured to Mack. “Warden, if you’re not too squeamish, how about you doing the sampling on those three does over there? I’ll take the buck and the other two does.”

  “Sure thing, Doc,” Mack said, noticing that he had dropped the Miz. They were making progress. She pulled on the mask. “Both anthrax and CWD, right?”

  She was sure the animals hadn’t been killed by chronic wasting disease, but it was important to test as many deer as they could, because it could remain dormant, but transmissible, for years. She remembered reading about a 1997 shipment of infected Canadian elk imported into South Korea. The disease went undetected for nearly ten years. And now South Korea had CWD.

  “Yep, CWD, too,” the vet said cheerfully, and they both settled down to work. She took the necessary blood and tissue samples methodically and efficiently, feeling Doc Masters’ eyes occasionally on her, watching to see if she was doing it right.

  Derek had resumed his pacing. Now, he stopped for a moment and watched as Mack worked, then turned away, his face ashen, beads of sweat popping out on his forehead. “Sorry,” he muttered. “This kind of thing is new to me. I never expected to find anything like it here in Utopia.” He stepped hurriedly behind a tree. Mack could hear him throwing up.

  “City feller,” the old vet said with a scornful chuckle. “Folks come out here from Dallas and Houston, thinking that since the town is
named Utopia they’ve arrived in some kind of paradise. Gives ’em a good shock when they find out that old Mother Nature ain’t always a pretty lady.” He shook his head. “This place isn’t Disneyland, that’s for sure. There’s just as much bad stuff happens here as anywhere else in this blighted world.” Closing a sample bag, he muttered, half under his breath, “Maybe more.”

  Mack finished labeling her samples and gave them to the vet. Derek had rejoined them, his face pale and sweaty. He had tied a white handkerchief over his mouth and nose, as if to protect himself from whatever toxic anthrax spores might come flying in his direction—or maybe from the smell. He stood well back, his shoulders slumped, his hands in his pockets.

  Doc Masters packed the samples in his bag and straightened up. To Mack, he said, “If I get right on it, I’ll catch the afternoon mail truck at the post office. It takes the lab about twenty-four hours to grow the cultures and another twelve or so to do the analysis, so it’ll be early next week before we hear. Meanwhile—”

  “Meanwhile,” Derek broke in abruptly, “what am I supposed to do with these dead animals? Do you know somebody I can hire to haul them off to the landfill?”

  The vet was clearing his throat to say something—probably something sharply impolite—but this time, Mack headed him off.

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” she told Derek, pulling off her mask. “Since it’s almost certain that these animals were killed by anthrax, the Texas Animal Health Commission requires that you burn the carcasses right here.”

  “Burn them!” Derek exclaimed, his eyes widening over his handkerchief-mask. “You’re not serious, Mackenzie!”

  “Afraid so,” Mack said ruefully, and stripped off her gloves. “It would be best if that could be done today. You can see that the vultures have already started doing their thing, and if you leave them out overnight, the coyotes and foxes will join the party. The vultures aren’t susceptible to anthrax, but the other predators are. That’s one of the ways the disease is spread. In any case, the Animal Health Commission requires that it be done within twenty-four hours of discovery.”