Sandpiper Island (The Bachelors

by Donna Kauffman

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, lowering her hand as a few clouds drifted by and blocked the sunlight. She took another one of those freedom moments to simply enjoy the salty tang of sea spray as it misted her face, the feeling of the much stronger sea breezes whipping her hair into a frenzy. Remembering, suddenly, the last time she’d been out in the open on the island, she abruptly ducked her head and glanced up. “Helmets?”

  “Not on this side, not now anyway,” he said, glancing back from the spot where he stood, a few feet in front of her, right at the edge of the hard-packed dirt ground before it became a surge of rock.

  He took her breath away, standing there with that amazing backdrop framing him. His expression was all business now as he scanned the shoreline and she shamelessly took the opportunity to enjoy scanning him.

  “Where do the puffins burrow?” she asked, as she came to stand next to him. His taller, broader frame blocked the wind, but the lack of direct sunlight due to the cloud cover still left her feeling a chill, even with the sweatshirt on.

  He pointed to the rocky ledges and jumbles of rock on either side of them, up above the waterline. “They like crevasses and tucked-away places to have their chicks. Helps to protect against elements and predators.”

  “Also against invading humans, I’m guessing. Pretty inaccessible unless you can fly in for a landing.” She wrapped her arms around her waist, willing the clouds to pass. It wasn’t surprising how much chillier it was out in the middle of the bay, but there was a marked difference even between this side and the side of the island where they’d landed. Probably because the natural cove created by the top of the heart provided it with a bit of protection from the elements. “How can you tell where the burrows are?”

  “They tend to use the same ones every year, but we also keep a lookout when the birds first come in, to see if we spot comings and goings from any new locations.” He pointed again. “See the pink and orange marks on some of the rocks? Those are our marks, so we know where each burrow is.”

  Delia immediately saw the spray-painted numbers and scanned the ledges and tumbles for more. “There’s a lot of them,” she said, surprised.

  “Not all puffins. Some are razorbills, guillemots. The terns like the grasses, and overgrowth, so they prefer to nest around the southerly turn of the island coastline, where there is a wider band of growth between rocks and trees.”

  “So many different species, and so spread out. I don’t know how you keep up with it all,” she said, her teeth just on the edge of chattering now. One of the downsides of playing stowaway was the lack of time to prepare for the potential consequences of said stowage. Thank goodness he’d had the hoodie to loan her or she’d be more frozen than the herring Blue had packed in that cooler.

  “At times, neither do I,” he replied, setting the cooler down, pulling his notebook out, and sliding free the pen that he’d tucked in the coils. “Thank God for enthusiastic interns with indefatigable levels of energy.” He’d slipped his glasses on and was quickly thumbing through the notebook, keeping it half curled to prevent the wind from catching the pages.

  He was all scientist now, and even sexier for it. PhD brains and military brawn. Professor Rambo. Lethal, lethal combination, that, she thought, mentally fanning herself.

  In an effort to keep from jumping him where he stood, she nudged him with her elbow, and went for friendly. “You say that like you’re ancient.”

  “Spend a summer crawling around on these boulders and then report back to me on that.” He glanced down, a surprising hint of dry amusement in his expression, given how distracted he seemed.

  Her gaze might have drifted to said mouth, lingering there for a moment longer than was wise. So much for the friendly banter remedy.

  He looked away first, back to his notes, though he suddenly seemed to have lost his place and spent a few moments flipping pages forward, then back again.

  She cleared the sudden dryness from her throat, and shifted her gaze back to the rocky tumble. “Where is the burrow with the chick?”

  He continued consulting his notes, then motioned to his right. “Number thirty-two. Orange paint. The pair using that burrow have been here every year since Claude—Dr. Pelletier—started monitoring the island and have successfully fledged a chick in all but two of those seasons, which is a remarkable statistic. The final notes from the interns monitoring that burrow say that their chick seemed to do well this season. It wasn’t one that was banded so I don’t have more specific data. Just that it didn’t make it to fledging. It’s not surprising, even given their success rate.”

  “Is that common? I mean, do you go in after the fact and do any kind of, whatever they call a bird autopsy?”

  “If there’s been a dramatic change in fledging that doesn’t seem related to weather or food supply, yes, we have. But in general—”

  “You let nature takes its course,” she finished for him. “So, some . . . thing will come along and . . . you know.”

  He looked to her again, all wire rim glasses and stubble and lumberjack plaid jacket. Oh, my. “It’s the life cycle. Even predators have to eat. All creatures are hunting something for their food supply.”

  “I know, you’re right, just . . .” She rubbed at her arms, not wanting to think about anything called a puffling being snatched out of its nest. “So, what do we do now?”

  “My notes say the parents hadn’t left the nest as yet when the last interns were done for the season, but there had been no activity with the chick for the previous forty-eight hours that they could see on the monitor. Since both parents were still actively attending the nest, they didn’t interfere. That’s why the monitor was still active, but with the chick marked DNS, I wasn’t watching it closely.”

  Because he’d been called in to watch her closely, she thought, feeling even more miserable about that if it cost some poor baby puffball its life. “But you didn’t see the parents on the monitor?”

  He shook his head. “I’m pretty sure they’re gone. The fact that they stayed after their chick passed isn’t abnormal. Some parents will still attend a nest even after a chick has successfully fledged.” He paused, looked at his notes again.

  She knew he was probably thinking the same thing she was thinking. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If your coming back to Blueberry took you away from the final nest checks, or whatever it is you do. I feel awful if—”

  “I made the decision to come back,” he said, cutting her off. “And let’s shelve the rest until I get out there and see what’s going on.”

  “Can I help? Or will I just get in the way?”

  “The tide is out, which gives us a few more paths in to the burrow that aren’t as strenuous as having to go down over the boulders from the edge where solid ground meets rock.” He looked down at her feet. “You going to be okay in those?”

  “These feet haven’t let me down yet.”

  He nodded, but still looked concerned. “Just be careful, pick your spots. There’s a lot of kelp and seaweed on the rocks exposed by low tide, and it’s very slippery.”

  She smiled up at him. “I might not have spent much time on the water as a kid, but I did spend my fair share climbing all over the shoreline of Blueberry Cove, including rocks, boulders, beach, in low tide, frozen winter crust, you name it. Of course, in my case, there was usually food involved. Clams, blueberries.” She could see by his expression he wasn’t convinced and put a hand on his arm. “You saw me tie off the boat, right? Some skills you don’t forget. If I feel like I can’t keep up, I won’t hold you back waiting for me, I promise. Deal?”

  “Deal,” he said. He opened the cooler and took out a short stack of fresh herring, then stuck them in the pocket of his jacket. He followed her gaze to his pockets, and the barely concealed grimace. “Pufflings don’t have a five-second rule,” he said.

  “I wasn’t thinking so much about the puffling as the jacket.”

  He shrugged. “That’s what washing machines are for.”


  “Remind me if we’re ever stuck using the same one to do my stuff separately.”

  He’d already begun making his way over boulders and down closer to the exposed sea bottom. “Because diner owners never get anything on their clothes,” he shot back over his shoulder. “I’m thinking a little herring slime would be nothing compared to what you come home with.”

  She laughed at that. “Point to you. I guess I wasn’t thinking about my work clothes when I said that.”

  He shot her a fast glance over his shoulder, and then paused to reach a hand back and help her jump down from one particularly large rock. “I wasn’t aware you had any other kind.”

  She could feel the warmth in her cheeks, so she gave him an exaggerated cheeky smile, and said, “I tend to keep what I wear under my aprons in a separate wash load. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

  His lips twitched at that, but he quickly turned back to the matter at hand. He’d slung the gear bag over his back with the strap diagonally across his chest, freeing up his hands to help with balance. She wasn’t carrying anything and still wasn’t close to half as graceful in her maneuvers as he was. “So, maybe some bikes take a little bit of getting used to when you get back on them again,” she muttered under her breath, huffing and puffing slightly as she scrambled and crawled.

  He glanced back again, and paused when he saw she was quite a bit behind him, but she waved him off. “I’ll catch up eventually. I’m fine. Just trying not to break anything I might need later,” she called out good-naturedly.

  He paused for another second, observed her less-than-graceful clamber over a few more boulders, then apparently satisfied she wasn’t going to break her neck, he continued. She smiled in relief, liking that he credited her with being able to take care of herself. Not that you mind it too much when he steps in to help if he thinks you can’t.

  From the promontory the orange-painted burrow number hadn’t looked all that far away, but she felt as if she’d been scrambling up and down rocks forever and it was still a ways off. She turned around at one point, to use the divots in a smooth boulder as handholds, as there was no other down route from that particular rock, only to turn around . . . and find that Ford was nowhere to be seen. How was that possible? They were, for all intents and purposes, at sea level, and the boulders were not so big that she couldn’t see his tall frame more often than not.

  She waited a moment, but he didn’t magically reappear. She scanned the rocks again to orient herself, looking for the orange-painted number thirty-two, and didn’t see that, either. “Don’t panic. It’s not like they both got beamed up or something.”

  Then she saw movement. To be exact, she saw Ford’s ass. Wriggling. He was on his belly, shimmying over the edge of a rock, she assumed to get down as far into the crevasse where the burrow was as he could, so he could look inside. His body had been blocking her view of the painted number and his clothes made him sort of blend in with his surroundings. “Pretty nice ass, though, as it turns out,” she murmured, thinking she’d spent so much time focused on the front side, she’d somehow missed a very fine backside. “And you shouldn’t be thinking about either of his sides. Focus, for God’s sake.”

  She continued her quest to reach the burrow while keeping all of her bones and joints still functioning properly. How had he scampered over them as quickly as he had? And he was older than she was. And you thought running your own butt off while taking care of an entire diner’s worth of people was hard work.

  When she finally reached him, she wasn’t sure whether to say something so she wouldn’t startle him, or if speaking would somehow disturb the poor chick.

  Then he was edging backwards, back out of the crevasse he’d been leaning half into, and she scrambled out of his way. Once out, he rolled over and sat up. He held some kind of device on the end of a wire, which was attached to a cord that ran into some other device she now saw sticking half out of the gear bag he’d propped on the rocks.

  “So? What did you find?”

  “I poked the camera in first,” he said, waving the wand-like device in his hand, “and we do have a live chick, only not doing all that well at the moment.”

  Her expression had brightened and collapsed within seconds of each other as he finished the sentence. “So, what do you do next?”

  “It’s managed to get its foot wedged between two of the rocks. I’m not sure what kind of damage it’s done to itself trying to get unstuck, but it’s worn itself out.”

  “Didn’t anyone see it flailing or something, on the cam?”

  “The cam doesn’t expose every inch of the burrow, and the chick is on its side, below the rock where the cam is positioned, so movement was only seen when part of the feather fuzz lifted above the rock edge as it moved. No one watching could see what was going on, or enough of the feather fuzz to tell there was distress. I’m guessing it wore itself out to the point of exhaustion and was likely still so long, the interns marked it DNS.”

  “Did you give it some fish?”

  “Not yet. Can’t reach in that far from this angle. We went in from a sliver between the rocks over the burrow to insert the cam. I can try to do it that way, but the angle would make it hard to get the fish close enough for the stuck chick to reach it. I don’t want to torment it with food out of reach. Even if I can get some herring in there and the chick does eat it, that’s only going to prolong the inevitable.”

  She gaped. “You’re going to leave it in there to die?”

  He shifted and dumped his gear in the duffel, then propped his forearms on his bent knees and looked up at her. “Not if I can help it. Just not sure what options I have at the moment. This is one of the trickier burrows to get access to. We lucked out with the sliver in the rock to get the cam inserted. The only reason we even went after it is because of the success rate of the pair that nests here. Cams aren’t cheap and monitoring and maintaining them in the weather conditions out here takes a lot of time, so we only have them in a very few burrows, one or two per species. Most of our data comes from firsthand observation, taking detailed notes on the comings and goings of the parent pair. We can tell a lot by their actions.” He rubbed a hand over his face, and she could see that his mind was spinning out possible scenarios, so she stayed quiet, and let him think.

  “The thing is, even if there’s a way to move some of the smaller rocks without collapsing anything, it disturbs a burrow that has been a very successful nest.”

  “So you save one chick at the risk that the parents might not want to nest there again? Or find as good a nest elsewhere?”

  He nodded. “Nature happens and disturbs burrows all the time, so it’s not something they don’t deal with, even without human intrusion. But one of the reasons we think this burrow has been so successful is that it’s tucked in a natural crevasse between two pretty big boulders, which protects the nest from the elements, the kinds of things that can change rock formation, et cetera.”

  Delia sank down to sit cross-legged next to him. “I feel awful. For both of you.”

  “New meaning to ‘between a rock and a hard place,’ ” he muttered.

  For all his calm recitation of various and sundry scientific facts, she could see that he was very concerned. Upset, even. She knew it was part of his job to witness, routinely, the unsuccessful breeding attempts of the seabirds he studied. Given his previous life as an army ranger, his long tenure in special forces, and the things he had to have seen—and done—during that time, she’d assumed he was the perfect guy to handle the harsher aspects of his new career.

  Looking at him now, she wasn’t so sure of that.

  He was looking out to sea, maybe gauging the time they had before the tide came in and blocked their most direct path back to the promontory. Then he looked directly at her. And not just her face, but at all of her, as if taking inventory. He turned around, still seated, and looked back down into the crevasse. Then he looked back at her.

  “What?” she asked, not sure she liked where his thoug
hts seemed to be going.

  “You might fit.”

  Well, so much for easing into the subject. “Might?” “Might,” he said, either completely missing the overt skepticism in her voice, or simply not caring. He turned away and grabbed his notebook again, only to set it aside to dig farther into the gear bag.

  Indiana MacGyver to the rescue. She had no idea what he was rooting around for, but would only be half surprised if he pulled out something that magically became a crane, complete with pulley rope to lower her, headfirst, into the crack between the two boulders. The two big-ass boulders.

  Turned out she wasn’t far off. He came up with a harness, a length of nylon rope, and carabiners, the hook links that hikers used. “I’ll keep you tethered to me the whole time,” he said. “We have a head strap that the camera device hooks to. You’ll wear that, and I’ll keep the base unit and help to guide you in. There’s a little light coming in from the sliver in the rocks over the burrow, but it’s going to be shadowy, and though you’ll have the cam on you, I’ll be the only one seeing what it’s sending back.”

  He hooked the camera into a nylon strap that had Velcro on one end, then handed that to her, along with her green helmet and a pair of leather work gloves.

  She took the strap and wrapped it around her forehead, pulling it snug before overlapping the Velcro end piece. Then she propped her hard hat on, this time taking the chin strap out from where it had been tucked up into the dome and clicking it shut beneath her chin. She smiled and struck a pose. “I’m sure it’s going to be all the latest in island wear next season.”

  She looked at the gloves. “I’m not worried about my manicure. I run a diner.” She flashed her fingers. “Short nails, no polish.”

  “Peg has nails. Talons, actually.”

  “Peg is bionic. Or she’s part Borg. I’ve thought so for years. I look at the talons as proof of that.”

  Ford chuckled. “Well, the gloves are not just to keep your hands protected while I lower you in, it’s also because the chick—”