Creature Discomforts

by Susan Conant

  “What’s special,” said Effie, tossing a superior glance toward her husband and Tiffany, “is that besides having investors and grantees, the Pine Tree Foundation also has donors—benefactors, they’re called—which is what makes a lot of the grants possible and makes the foundation such an attractive investment. So, the investors—like the people here, some of them, and lots of others—can put their money in the foundation instead of in stocks or bonds or whatever, and do very, very well, and benefit the environment, all at the same time. It’s a perfect example, actually, of what I meant about Norman Axelrod. He saw everyone and everything around him benefitting from the foundation. He even knew the people, like Malcolm—everyone knows Malcolm Fairley—and knew that they were committed to Acadia and to preserving the island and to keeping Maine green and all the rest. Everyone else knows what a good thing the foundation is for everyone! It’s obvious! So, naturally, Norman Axelrod wouldn’t have anything to do with it and didn’t have one good word to say about it.”

  “Cutting his own throat,” Quint remarked.

  “Quint! Now look who’s using the wrong—”

  “Sorry,” Quint said. “What I meant was he could see for himself that the investors had done very well. My aunt, for example. Gabbi was one of the initial investors, and she did so well that she keeps reinvesting, and so do plenty of other people. So Norman Axelrod knew what a good investment the foundation was, and he still turned down the opportunity. Just to be oppositional.”

  I tried to speak in a tone that was half statement and half question. “But he and Gabrielle stayed friends…?”

  “Oh, that’s Gabbi.” Effie said it affectionately. “If you want an extreme case in point—”

  Quint interrupted her with a soft, growly, “Effie, not here!”

  Tiffany helped me out by whispering, “Quint means Opal and Wally Swan.”

  I swallowed a clam. “And…?”

  Tiffany looked aghast. As if confiding that Wally and Opal were convicted child molester serial chainsaw murderers, she whispered, “They’re developers! Swan and Swan. They build houses! And condo complexes, when they can get away with it. The whole idea of the foundation is keeping Maine green. And the whole idea of Swan and Swan is cutting down every tree on Mount Desert Island. Quint hates the Swans just as much as Effie does.”

  Despite Tiffany’s low volume, Quint must have overheard, because, in normal tones, he said, “Mount Desert Island has a fragile ecosystem. We’re bombarded by threats from the outside, like air pollution blown in from the Midwest, acid rain, acid fog, acid snow. But we’ve also got water pollution that originates here. And habitat fragmentation. You can’t preserve a habitat bit by bit, one spot here, one spot there. It’s an integrated whole. Take the rain forests. What happens there has a direct impact on what happens here. That’s why Malcolm is involved with Guatemala, too. The big problem right here, really, is overuse. You can literally see it on the popular trails. You can see and hear the cars, and you can smell the exhaust in the air. And yes, you can encourage the tourists to go to the less frequented places, but it just shifts the problem. It doesn’t solve it. And the more development there is, the more houses, the more motels, the more everything, the more overuse there’s going to be.”

  “You can’t ban visitors from a national park,” I pointed out.

  “More’s the pity,” Effie said.

  “Mr. Axelrod used to joke about shooting tourists on sight,” Tiffany said brightly. “That was his favorite joke: If it’s tourist season, why can’t you shoot them?”

  “What makes you think he was joking?” Effie asked.

  Chapter Eight

  “SHORT OF BRINGING poor Norman back to life,” said Gabrielle, “it seemed like the most useful thing I could do.” She was explaining how Axelrod’s mini poodle, Isaac, happened to be in her care. “Especially because Isaac hadn’t been feeling well—he’s fine now—and I wasn’t sure who else had a key to Norman’s house. Norman was not the most trusting individual. So I went over and let myself in. Poor Isaac! He was so happy to see anyone. He came dancing to the door, and I scooped him up, and I grabbed a few of his toys and his crate and brought him back here, poor boy. He’s no trouble. If anything, he’s not enough trouble! He’s a funny little duck. Some of these show dogs are all too used to being stuck in their crates and ignored for days at a time.”

  After a swim in the Atlantic, the happy-looking Isaac was far from ready to enter the show ring. In what I now see as a positive prognostic sign, however, I took pleasure in recognizing the link between Isaac’s enjoyment of his dip in the Atlantic and his breed’s origins, which despite the pop term “French poodle,” are German. Pudeln: to splash in water. The standard poodle, the largest of the three varieties—standard, mini, toy—was originally a water retriever. The miniature poodle, with a height between ten and fifteen inches at the withers, was bred down from the standard poodle and was never meant as a sporting dog. Even so! Here before my delighted eyes, his mane of apricot curls and his apricot pompoms drenched, his shaved hindquarters bare to the world, the adorable little Isaac unconsciously proclaimed his functional heritage. An unsettling reflection cut short my joy. How, I wondered, can someone possibly recall the derivation of the word poodle and the origin of that wonderfully intelligent breed while struggling to remember her own name?

  Darkness was now falling, but the temperature remained surprisingly mild, and the air was still. Although most of the food had been eaten, people continued to pick at their lobsters. After sucking the juice out of a leg, Gabrielle went on. “Horace Livermore, Molly’s handler, is always after me to send Molly on the circuit, but I can’t see it. He’s always pointing out that we could finish Molly in no time and get her Canadian championship if I’d turn her over to him the way Norman did. Horace Livermore has what’s called a string of dogs. Like a string of prostitutes. Isn’t that grand! But I want Molly with me, and Buck”—Gabrielle beamed at me—“tells me that I’m perfectly right. What we do is called ‘ringside delivery.’ There’s also something called ‘ringside pickup.’ Isn’t that a wonderfully licentious expression? But Molly and I don’t do that. We make advance arrangements to meet Horace at the shows, except that half the time I have trouble finding him. Anyway, before Norman got into one of his snits and fired Horace, Isaac was hardly ever here. He was always with Horace Livermore.”

  I was about to ask a gossipy question about why Norman Axelrod had fired his handler, Livermore, when Opal commented that it was just as well, in retrospect, that Isaac hadn’t had the chance to get too attached to Norman. If something happened to her or to Wally, Pacer would be grief stricken. And what would Molly do if Gabbi died? She’d be heartbroken!

  “But Isaac knows!” Gabrielle insisted. “Or he’ll figure it out. Sooner or later, he’ll know something is dreadfully wrong. He’s so bright! I keep thinking there ought to be a way to help him understand what happened. If I could just explain it to him—”

  “Since the rest of us don’t know what happened,” Wally Swan said in grouchy tone, “I don’t know how you expect to explain it to a dog. I, for one, don’t have a clue about what Axelrod was doing near the Ladder Trail. As I understand it, he fell on the upper part of it, above the ladders. And Malcolm, I have to say…Well, it’s already been said. Norman Axelrod was a crank. Let me tell you, when he heard about Opal and I volunteering to help on the Homans Path, he didn’t have a good word to say about that project or anything else you were connected with, Malcolm. And that’s the truth.”

  Tiffany, the Pine Tree Foundation secretary, again filled me in. “The Homans Path goes up Dorr from the Nature Center,” she said quietly. “It’s one of those old trails with stone steps, but the Park Service abandoned it ages ago, for no good reason. They cut down trees at the bottom and top to block it off. So, Malcolm got people together to restore it, and he got permission, and the foundation gave a grant. Malcolm does a lot of the work himself, and he got Opal and Wally to be part of his trail crew,
and also a new guy named Zeke, who isn’t here tonight. That’s what Malcolm’s like. He doesn’t just want to sit in an office and talk about the environment. He gets right out there and does the work.”

  “Opal and Wally?” I whispered back. “Swan and Swan?”

  “That’s Malcolm Fairley! Who else would’ve asked developers? I mean, talk about hands-on learning about the environment! He’s actually got them involved, really involved, not just on paper. You aren’t going to get developers to change their attitudes by yelling at them or lecturing them. It’s a waste of breath. But Malcolm’s got them out there clearing brush and moving logs and opening up the trail, so eventually they’ll figure things out for themselves. No one else would even have thought about asking them, never mind gotten them to do it. And the Homans Path is really beautiful. The steps aren’t even in terrible shape. Once you see it, it’s just so obvious that it’s worth saving. If you ask me, once it’s done, the park ought to rename it after Malcolm Fairley.”

  When I tuned back in to the general conversation, Malcolm Fairley was saying that yes, Norman Axelrod was the last person you’d expect to find hiking anywhere. “You’d hardly call it hiking,” Fairley said ruefully. “I knew he wasn’t fit for a real hike, but I had no idea he was in such bad shape. He was only about my age, and he had to stop every five or ten steps to catch his breath. When we started out, it was raining, not hard, but the stone was wet, and he had a rough time with the footing. We hadn’t gone more than a quarter of a mile when I started asking him if he didn’t want to call it quits. And this was on Kurt Diederich. Anyone who can walk up an ordinary staircase ought to be able to do Diederich. Or that’s what I thought.”

  Fairley was in radiantly robust condition. His notion of a slow, gentle walk might be most other people’s idea of an exhausting climb. And two males? Contrary to popular stereotypes, self-confident females, especially malamute females, do lift their legs, but it’s males who are driven by an unreasoning compulsion to mark everything, especially anything that has been or could be marked by another male. With males, one and one doesn’t equal two; it equals competition. Human beings? Well, yes, certain trivial interspecies differences exist. A male dog, for example, isn’t going to keep turning around to ask the loser in the you-know-what contest whether he wants to call it quits. He’s just going to…Well, never mind. Sorry. Talk about bias! For all I knew, Malcolm Fairley’s dedication to Guatemala, the rain forests, and the global environment extended to the social environment of his own species. Maybe the two men had strolled cooperatively up the trail. Still, Ann’s letter had used the word overbearing. And there’d been a third person, hadn’t there? A man or a woman whose voice hadn’t reached me. An anonymous third person.

  “I still don’t understand why Norman was there at all,” Effie said vehemently, “and why he was there with you, Malcolm. He hated exercise, he hated trees, and he was more than slightly antagonistic to the Pine Tree Foundation.”

  “There was no personal animosity,” Malcolm Fairley replied. “Norman disapproved of the Beamon Reservation, too. He needled Gabbi mercilessly about it, if you remember. But they remained friends.”

  “Was it his idea to go hiking?” Effie demanded. “Or yours?”

  “Mine.” Fairley looked a little embarrassed. “What can I say? I’m an incurable proselytizer. I’m convinced that if you can make the environment real and meaningful to people, they’ll make good decisions. And the old stepped trails up Dorr make a better argument than I can for conservation.”

  “They’re man-made,” Quint objected. “They aren’t a natural part of the environment.” He paused. “Oh, I get it. So there was a chance that Axelrod might actually like them.”

  Fairley smiled. “The truth is, I offered him a lure in the form of something to complain about. If you remember, one of his gripes with the park was about signs. He wrote letters about how there weren’t enough signs, they were confusing, and—”

  Gabrielle gave a peal of glee. “And the trail signs on Emery and Kurt Diederich and that whole area really are confusing if you don’t already know your way. Isn’t Diederich misspelled on one of them? And it’s hard to keep straight what’s the Emery Trail or the Emery Path or the Dorr Mountain Trail or the East Face Trail. Very clever, Malcolm! Well done.” She caught herself. “Well, in retrospect, not precisely.”

  “They’re typical Acadia trail signs,” said Quint, graciously covering Gabrielle’s enthusiasm for a tactic that had ended in Axelrod’s abrupt demise. “There’s nothing wrong with them if you use a map. They’re traditional old-style signs.”

  A brief discussion about the merits and failings of the trail markers on Dorr ensued. Everyone eventually agreed that Norman Axelrod would’ve leaped on the inadequacies of the small wooden markers as a fresh cause for public complaint.

  “Something really ought to be done about the markers near the summit,” Malcolm Fairley said. “That’s where we were headed. On a foggy day, it’s easy to lose your bearings up there and get yourself twisted around a hundred and eighty degrees. When I told Norman about that, he wanted me to take pictures. I said he had to see for himself. Damn! For once, he was right.”

  Night had fallen. Everyone but the mosquitoes had finished eating. Although Gabrielle provided aerosol cans of bug repellent, the creatures were feasting on us. To help drive them off and to give some light, Wally Swan had transformed the site of the clambake into a campfire. As he tossed a piece of driftwood onto the fire, I heard Effie whisper, “Quint, please! Make him stop.”

  “It’s Gabbi’s business, not mine,” Quint whispered back. “It’s her reservation.”

  “We’re the caretakers,” Effie argued softly. “It’s not right. She’s your aunt! You speak to her! Honestly, a blazing fire! And aerosol cans!”

  Meanwhile, Malcolm Fairley continued his narrative. “There’s not a lot more to tell. I wish there were. We finally got to the top of the Diederich Climb and onto Emery, and by then, Norman’s breath was labored, and we took a lot of rest stops, but he wouldn’t quit. You know that fork where the trail to Dorr goes to the right, and if you go left, well, straight, you’re on the Ladder Trail. There are trail signs. They’re old style, but they’re unambiguous. Anyway, Norman said he needed to rest, and he looked around for a rock or log to sit on, but everything was wet. It seemed like he was going to stand there for a while, so I, uh, went off into the woods to answer a call of nature. And when I got back, he wasn’t there. I couldn’t’ve been gone more than… I don’t know. Two minutes? Three minutes? Of course, now I’m hollering for him. The first thing that occurs to me is that he’s gone off looking for a dry place to sit down, not that there was one. But I couldn’t figure why else he would’ve left except to look for a place to park himself. Or maybe, like me, he’s answered a call of nature. I look around, keep calling for him, go a little way back down Emery, take a few steps down the Ladder Trail, and there’s not a trace of him. Sound does funny things in that thick fog, and I keep stopping and calling for him and listening. Then, finally, it occurs to me that he’s decided to get a head start on me, beat me to the top, so instead of just going in all directions around that fork, I head up Dorr. By now, I’m worried. I’m moving right along. If he’d gone that way, I’d’ve caught up with him in a few minutes. But I kept thinking that if he got above tree line, before the summit, he’d get lost and end up God knows where. I’m up there in, say, ten minutes. Twenty maybe. It’s not far. And he’s not there. I retrace my route, back down to where the trail forks. And then I come to my senses and I think, this guy isn’t going up a mountain or down some ladders. He’s going to turn around and follow the steps back down to my car.”

  And where was I all this time? I wondered. Lying comatose on the slope below? Had I seen Norman Axelrod, Malcolm Fairley, or both? Had I been seen? What about my dogs? We’d all been wearing red.

  “So at that point,” Malcolm Fairley continued, “I beat it back down to the Nature Center, where we’d left the ca
r, and as I’m going down, I’m still hollering for Norman and trying to scan all around, because you know how slippery those steps are when they’re wet. And the fog’s as thick as ever, thicker, and no one’s hiking up that I can ask. And I’m telling myself Norman’s inside the Nature Center, or he’s pacing around in circles by my car, sorry he ever got out of it.”

  What about the other person? I wanted to ask. I heard you! I heard you talking with someone!

  “You must have been terribly worried by this time,” Gabrielle said.

  “Well, yes, I was! But I expected to hear some kind of explanation. That some hikers had been going down and Axelrod had decided to go with them. Something. It crossed my mind that maybe he twisted his ankle. Maybe he was hurt. Never occurred to me he was dead. I still can’t understand it.”

  “So how did you find out?” Gabrielle asked.

  “Soon as I got to the Nature Center, I saw three or four park rangers. And you could tell something was up from the look on their faces. So I asked them. His body had already been found. Hikers, a young couple, husband and wife, were going up the Ladder Trail. Experienced hikers. Didn’t care about the fog. They were trying to hike every trail in the park. They found him. He was lying right on the Ladder Trail, on that long flight of steps near the top. He hadn’t even made it down to the top ladder. From what I heard, he must’ve fallen and rolled, smashed his skull.”

  “Probably a blessing he didn’t survive,” Opal commented.

  “A lot of people don’t realize it,” Fairley said, as if agreeing with her, “but Dorr’s the steepest mountain on the island. Not the highest. The steepest. A guy like Norman had no business on God’s earth wandering around there alone. I can’t for the life of me figure out what he thought he was doing.”

  Yes, I had been in the vicinity at the time of Axelrod’s fatal fall. But only in the vicinity. If I’d been hiking alone, I might have done the Ladder Trail. But Rowdy and Kimi had been with me. Scraps of memory remained: Dogs were banned from Acadia’s ladder trails. Even if they’d stupidly been allowed! There was no way I would’ve started down any ladder trail with two big dogs.