Bittersweet (10 page)

“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.”

“I'm friggin' not believing this,” Derek muttered darkly.

“I'll be glad to give you a hand,” Mack offered. “I brought a can of gasoline and a propane torch. If we get started right away, we'll have the job done by dark. I'll radio the county dispatcher and let her know what we're doing and why, in case somebody sees the smoke and calls it in. There's no burn ban right now, but dry as it is, folks will be keeping a pretty good eye out for wildfires.”

Doc Masters grunted. “You're gettin' some special treatment,” he said to Derek. “There's no law that says the warden has to help.”

But Derek didn't answer. He turned on his heel and headed for the ATV. Mack stared after him, wondering whether he intended to do the burning or not. If he didn't—

“Well, I guess everybody's got to learn somehow, someway,” the vet said philosophically. “Why don't you take me back to my vehicle and then you can thump on him about that burning.”

“Yeah, sure.” Mack sighed, wishing that Derek had made things a little easier. “Let's go.”

As they reached Mack's truck, the vet said, in a casual tone, “I heard that you and that biologist woman nabbed yourselves a nice male lion this morning. What'd y'all do with it?”

“News travels fast,” Mack said, not quite sure what she should say. She opened the door and got in. Better tell him the truth. “We collared the animal and took it up to Karen Wilson's study area the other side of Boiling Mountain.”

The vet slung his bag in the back and climbed into the truck. “Some folks'll be pissed when they hear, but I gotta say I'm glad you didn't shoot that cat. There's not near enough of the wild left in this world, and the big predators have their own part in the general scheme of things. Shoot the cats, and the deer go like gangbusters. Too many deer means that they eat off all the vegetation along the streams, and what you get is erosion. Silt in the water kills the fish and other aquatic life, which—” He slammed the truck door. “When the big cats and the wolves and the grizzlies are all gone, we'll be the only predator left. And we're pretty sorry predators. We kill for the wrong reasons. Nature culls the weak ones. We kill the best of the best.”

“You said a true thing there,” Mack agreed, putting the key in the ignition. She added, “At least we'll learn something from that cat, as long as that collar functions.” She started the truck and swung out to follow Derek's ATV down the two-track to the ranch house.

Doc Masters stretched out his legs in the foot well and leaned back. After a moment, he said, “I've got something chewing at me.” He pulled his cap brim down over his nose. “I've been pondering what to do about it. Wondering if maybe you'd have a thought or two on the subject.”

Mack wondered if this was another of Doc Masters' tests, or an indication that she had already passed muster. “What's up?”

He chewed on his lower lip. “Well, I'm not just a hundred percent sure. I know it's bothering me, is all.” He turned toward Mack, studying her under the brim of his cap. “You seem pretty well trained and reasonably observant, for a warden. You been out to Three Gates yet?”

Trained and observant.
Pleased, Mack thought this was probably the best compliment she was going to get out of the old vet.

“The assistant foreman gave me the grand tour a month or so ago,” she said. “Quite an impressive setup. I'm not an admirer of deer farming operations, but it looks like the owners have pumped a ton of money into the place—and they've had some advice from the pros.” She backed the truck around and began to follow Derek's ATV back to the ranch house. “The barn is definitely state-of-the-art. I understand that Dr. Boise designed it.”

The Three Gates deer-handling barn was surrounded on three sides by a system of high-fenced containment pens, where the deer were kept from birth until their release onto the ranch. The two-story barn contained several handling rooms; a cradle designed like a cattle chute to immobilize the deer for various procedures; and a laboratory with all the
latest technology for semen collection and storage, artificial insemination, and disease diagnosis and treatment. It even had an observation room on the second floor, where potential buyers could watch the breeder bucks and does in their pens. After she got back to her computer, Mack had done a Google search for Dr. Arthur Boise, who turned out to have outstanding credentials as a deer biologist. He was a member of the team that created Dewey, the first white-tailed deer clone, some twelve years before. Dewey had produced an incredible thirty-eight-point rack—in Mack's opinion, an incredibly grotesque rack, like nothing ever produced in nature.

Grunting sourly, the vet fumbled in his pockets until he found a package of chewing gum. “The Gates family friends of yours, are they?” He offered her a stick but she shook her head.

“Not friends, no. But I felt I ought to see the facility—a duty call, you might say. I don't like designer deer, and I don't have any respect for canned hunts.” She was probably saying more than she should, but she couldn't stop herself. “My father taught me to get out in the woods and look for deer on my own two feet, not sit in a comfy blind and point my rifle at the game manager's pet buck wearing antlers the size of the UT goalposts.”