Invasive Species (3 page)

Mpack, Senegal

IF YOU SPENT
most of your life in the wilderness, you learned to be a light sleeper.

Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe only people who could awaken instantly chose to spend so much time alone in places inhabited by poisonous snakes, scorpions, and spiders, not to mention bigger creatures with sharp teeth and irritable dispositions.

Trey came alert in his one-room stone hut. For the briefest instant—as always—he was surprised to find that he was under a roof, not canvas, the forest canopy, or the sky. Then he was off his cot and getting dressed even as he registered what had woken him.

The sound of a man shouting, followed by a high and keening cry, a woman's voice, quickly cut off.

By the time Trey was out the door, into the damp morning air, there was little to see. A few young boys, already in their uniforms, were kicking a soccer ball around the town square as they waited for school. The doors to all the houses around the square were closed, which was unusual even at this early hour.

Trey knew these schoolboys. He'd caught their attention—and earned their laughter and catcalls—on the town's soccer field as soon as he'd arrived. And some real respect when he'd started to learn Kriol, their local lingua franca, right away.

Since then, they'd usually come running whenever they saw him, asking endless questions about America or showing him the latest lizard, frog, or insect they'd caught.

But now, as he walked into the square, they looked away, refusing to meet his eye. If anything, they seemed a little afraid.

This was interesting. Trey walked up to them, focusing on Moussa, the boy he knew was their leader.

Tall, thin, the most athletic of the group, Moussa held his ground as Trey approached. The other boys scattered, though all stayed within earshot. There was a hum of tension around them that Trey hadn't seen before.

“What was that shouting about?” he asked Moussa.

The boy said nothing, but Trey had expected no different. The unspoken answer, from several of the others, was just as clear as words would have been. They all looked at the medical clinic on the opposite side of the square.

The Diouf Health Center, a compact building of red stone erected within the past decade. A gift from the French government, complete with state-of-the-art scanning and surgical technology, as penance for two centuries of colonization and slavery.

Moussa followed Trey's gaze. “You cannot go in there,” he said.

That was never the right thing to tell Trey.

*   *   *

THERE WAS A
trail of blood, drying black in the warming sun, leading across the square toward the clinic.

As he approached, Trey saw a young man carrying a Kalashnikov rifle step out the front door. Dressed in a ragged camo uniform, complete with the square cap Senegalese soldiers all wore, he looked confused, shaken. Trey wondered if he'd been told to guard the entrance but wasn't sure exactly how. Was he supposed to shoot anyone who came in for Band-Aids or aspirin?

The blood trail led up three stone steps, between the soldier's feet, and under the closed door. Trey walked up the steps and said to the soldier, “Pardon me.”

“It is closed,” the soldier said. He was eighteen, maybe, with a child's smooth cheeks and no authority but what his gun gave him.

“Look,” Trey said, pointing at the sign hanging beside the red wooden door. It read,
Toujours Ouvert
. Always Open.

The man stared at the sign without apparent comprehension. It was quite possible he only knew how to read Diol or one of the other local dialects, if he could read at all. When his gaze returned to Trey's face, Trey said, “Seydou Honso wants to see me.”

The guard frowned. While he was pondering his response, Trey walked around him, opened the door, and stepped through into the waiting room.

The room was empty and dark inside. Someone had turned off the bright fluorescent lights that usually made everyone, pink skinned or brown, look jaundiced. The only light came from the blue-green glow of a computer monitor.

Trey took in a breath. The clinic was suffused with the smell of blood. And something else, too, a bitter, acidic odor.

A smell Trey had encountered once before.

The door leading into the examination room hung open, and through it Trey could see a single light burning. Four figures stood there, little more than backlit shadows clustered around the steel examination table.

There was something on the table. The light was focused on it, so Trey could see what it was.

As he made to step closer, two of the figures moved toward him. They came through the door, which they closed behind them.

Even in the shadowy light, Trey knew who they were. Seydou Honso, the physician who ran the clinic—and, according to legend, all of Mpack—and his daughter, Mariama.

Seydou was about sixty-five, with a face so lined and furrowed that it was easy to miss how clear his eyes were, how sharp his gaze. The people at the International Conservation Trust had urged Trey to stay on his good side or risk finding that no one in town, in the Casamance, would help him.

They'd also warned Trey to avoid Mariama Honso like the plague. Slightly built, with a square, determined face and the same piercing gaze as her father, she was no more than thirty. She had already made a name for herself in Senegal. Several names: Activist. Troublemaker. Agitator. She'd spent more than one stint in jail for speaking out against the government's treatment of the people of the Casamance.

Heeding ICT's warning as much as needed most, Trey had invited Mariama out for a drink the day he'd arrived. They'd gotten to know each other a little, and so far the world hadn't ended.

Now the two of them were looking at Trey, as if trying to figure out what he knew, what he'd guessed. How smart he was.

“You must leave,” Seydou Honso said in French. “Now.”

Trey didn't move. “What is that smell?” he said.

The old man's hands twitched at his sides. His daughter's chin lifted.

“I've smelled it before, you know,” Trey said.

Neither spoke.

“Over a stretch of dying rain forest five miles south of the Massou-Djibo Road.”

Trey never forgot the reaction this last statement provoked. Seydou Honso's face clenched, his eyes nearly disappearing behind the bunched ridges of his wrinkles. But Mariama's seemed to light up, her eyes gleaming even in the dimness.

“Papa,” she said, “we have to—”

“No.” The word rang out in the silent room. An instant later, Trey heard the front door open. Footsteps. The end of a rifle poking into his back.

Trey's arm rose to knock the gun away. Then, just barely, he restrained himself and allowed the soldier to push him toward the door.

Mariama's voice came from behind him. “Papa, listen—”

“No,” said Seydou Honso again.

*   *   *

SOMETHING TREY HAD
learned during his long solitary years in the world's last wild places: Pay attention to anything that doesn't fit. It's usually what's most important.

So as he crossed the square, the young soldier standing on the steps behind him, gun at the ready, he thought about what he'd glimpsed in the examination room.

The four figures: Seydou and Mariama Honso and two soldiers, both as young as the one who'd been guarding the door. The soldiers' faces, Trey had seen, had been filled with fear, even horror as they gazed down at what lay on the steel table.

Trey could understand why. They were looking at another soldier in uniform, lying on his back. Even at a distance, Trey had seen he was dead. His unmarked face had been frozen in its last expression of shock and horror, his eyes wide, his mouth pulled back to expose clenched teeth.

His face might have been untouched, but his midsection—everything from his waist to the middle of his rib cage—was an unrecognizable mass of shredded fabric and meat, glistening with black blood and bits of white bone.

As the Honsos came through the door and blocked his view, Trey had noticed one more thing: The fabric, and some of the man's flesh, was scorched. He'd been shot at closer than point-blank range. Someone had jammed a gun, something powerful like a Kalashnikov, into his belly and fired a burst from it.

Maybe the dead soldier had done it himself.

*   *   *

MOUSSA WAS CROUCHED
in the center of the square, examining the splatter pattern of dried blood. Already tiny black ants and a beetle the color of an emerald had come to feast on it.

The boy stood when he saw Trey. “Phone,” he said.

Trey thought about this. Mpack had no cell-phone service. The only public telephone was located in a concrete shack at the far end of the square, a building people called “the office,” because it contained a desk, a chair, and that phone.

Who was calling? It was unlikely to be Malcolm Granger, who was fully occupied repairing the Piper. Anyway, Malcolm hated telephones as much as Trey did. If he needed to say something, he just showed up and said it.

Someone from New York, the closest thing Trey had to a home base? Equally unlikely. He had no family there, and not many friends, few of whom had any idea where in the world he was at any given time.

His brother, Christopher? No. Since Christopher had settled in Queensland, Australia, two decades earlier, he and Trey had spoken only once or twice a year. After their parents died, there hadn't seemed much reason to stay in touch.

Trey sighed, thanked Moussa, and walked toward the office, knowing before he picked up the receiver whose voice he'd hear and what she'd have to say.

He'd heard it all before.

*   *   *

“WE'RE PULLING YOU
out,” Cristina Kendall, his boss at ICT, said.

What Trey had expected. “No,” he said. “I'm not done here.”

“This is not a request.” Cristina was calling from Dakar, the capital city, but she sounded like she was right there in the room lecturing him. “We got the order today,” she went on. “You're not welcome in the Casamance, in Senegal, effective immediately.”

Trey was silent.

Her sigh came clearly over the line. “So,” she said, “who'd you piss off this time?”

He didn't reply. Some strange, clanging music rang down the line.

When Cristina spoke again, her tone had hardened. “Trey, it's—what, about a seven-hour drive from Mpack to Dakar?”

After a moment, he said, “Yeah.”

“Well, throw your stuff in your car and start driving. I've told our staff to expect you by evening.”

Trey was quiet.

“You hearing me?”

He said, “Yeah.”

“Listen,” she said, her voice now little more than a venomous whisper. “You're dancing on very thin ice this time, Trey. One of these days you're going to fall through, and no one's going to care enough to pull you out. Got that?”

Trey hung up the phone.

CRISTINA KENDALL HAD
ordered Trey to return immediately to Dakar. Instead he drove his Land Rover three hours in the wrong direction.

First south from Mpack, then west back along the rutted red-dirt Massou-Djibo Road. He passed the field where he and Malcolm had landed—the plane had been hauled off to Ziguinchor—and seen that it was now populated with cows that, had they been there last time, might have defeated even Malcolm's ingenuity.

On past this landmark another twenty miles before finally reaching the junction of another dirt road. Nearly hidden behind the underbrush that grew at the forest edge, this one took him south again, into the rain forest itself.

Or maybe “road” was too generous a term. It was more like a wide path, a half-imagined thread winding this way and that between the forest's buttressed trees. Trey fought the wheel over ruts and exposed roots, past vines and branches that shrieked as they scraped the car's body, through patches of mud that grasped at the tires.

All the while, as he left the forest's edge behind and approached its heart, the trees around him gained in height and breadth. The canopy rose until it formed a roof 150 feet above him, leaving the forest floor as dark as if night had fallen. Only his headlights and an occasional stray beam of sunshine illuminated his way.

The road petered out for good at the base of a giant kapok tree. Trey turned the ignition key and sat there for a moment, listening to the engine making snapping sounds as it cooled. Then he took a breath, opened the car door, got out, and started walking.

*   *   *

HE DIDN'T WORRY
about getting lost. Trey had been born with an unerring sense of direction, as if there were some metal inside of him that could always sense the magnetic pole. He knew from the moment he set forth where his destination was, and how long it would take him to reach it.

Just as he was always aware of the world around him. Categorizing. Cataloging. It wasn't even a conscious effort. He registered the whooshing sound of a hornbill's wings as it flapped through the canopy, the distant peeping of the rain frogs, the low grunts of a troop of mona monkeys and the sound they made leaping from limb to limb, like surf crashing against a stony shore.

He saw a giant katydid stride on spindly legs across a leaf, a woodpecker creeping up a massive trunk, a Maxwell's duiker—a small forest antelope—crouching in a muddy depression, hoping he wouldn't spot it.

There was very little Trey missed.

He paused for a moment to squat beside a colony of slave-making ants in the midst of a raid. The attacking horde of big, red ants was routing the nest of smaller black ones. Corpses were strewn across the ground, and the victors were carrying off the eggs and larvae they would hatch out and enslave.

He wondered whether human slaves passing by here—Senegal had been full of them—had ever watched a slave-maker raid and thought: All life on earth is the same.

When Trey stood, the sudden movement brought forth a low, angry snarl from behind a nearby tree. A leopard was watching.

Trey was calm. Aware of his heart beating, the blood moving through his veins, the prickle of moisture against his skin. Aware he was alive.

But not the master here. Not the boss.

He had no primacy in the rain forest. He was just a package of meat and bone, a creature with remarkably few defenses. Soft and fleshy, with no hard shell. No sharp claws or teeth. No ability to run fast or climb effortlessly or leap from branch to branch.

How easy it was to kill a human, if you got one away from the big cities, the stone and steel structures the species built as defenses, as hiding places. As easy as killing a worker termite if you pulled it away from its hardened-mud mound.

The leopard snarled again, from farther off. Today, at least, it would let him live.

Trey smiled. Right then, right at that moment, there was nowhere else on earth he would rather be.

*   *   *

WHEN HE WAS
five years old, Trey's family went on a trip out west. They visited four states and a half dozen national parks, but Yellowstone was the place he recalled most clearly, with its bubbling mud pits like something from Mars, its big geysers, its bison and elk and moose. One day there was a storm so violent that a hailstone came down from the sky and cracked the windshield of their car.

It was in Yellowstone that Trey first felt that pull, the desire to just walk away from the car, the road, his mom and dad and brother, to get
out
and just . . . see what was there.

They were picnicking in some rest area, surrounded by tall conical evergreens, a clear brook running down a nearby hill. Christopher, who was eight, was fascinated by the chipmunks that raced around the picnic area, standing up on their hind legs, chattering, begging for food.

But Trey found them boring. Why come all the way out here to look at
chipmunks
? They had chipmunks back home in New York. So these ones were bigger, with different patterns of spots. Chipmunks were chipmunks.

He was far more interested in the big gray-and-white bird that picked apart a pinecone with a thick, sharp beak. The salamander, longer than his foot, he found under a rock by the side of the brook. The grasshoppers that went whirring away from him like tiny toy helicopters.

And the enormous creature that moved cautiously among the trees, keeping out of sight of the picnickers.

Trey, who already had sharper eyes than anyone else he knew, was the only one to see it.

A bear. They'd spotted a few during this visit to Yellowstone, though Dad said that he'd seen many more—forty-eight, in fact—during a trip he'd taken here when
he
was a kid. Black bears, they were called (though one had been brownish red), with cute rounded ears and eyes like black buttons.

“Don't be fooled,” Mom had said, as they watched one scratch its back against a tree. “They can be dangerous.”

Trey had found that hard to believe.

Sitting as still as possible on the edge of the picnic area, Trey watched the bear move through the woods. He could tell that this one was different from the others they'd seen. Its gray-brown fur, tipped in silver, was thicker, longer. Its eyes, as it focused on Trey, were dark and deep. When it moved, the muscles rippled along its legs and its thick, humped shoulders.

Trey stood to get a better view.

Watching him, the bear made a low grunting noise that he could feel in his chest. He expected someone else to notice, to shout, to come running, but no one did. They were all too busy laughing and tossing peanuts to the begging chipmunks.

The bear backed away deeper into the shadows of the pine trees. Without hesitation, Trey followed.

Missing the caution gene. That was how his mother already described him.

The bear grunted again as Trey came up to it. He could feel the heat radiating from its body, smell its earthy odor when it blew its breath out through strangely delicate lips.

Then it reared up on its hind legs and peered down at him. To Trey, it seemed as tall as the pine trees, as massive as a hillside. It was unbelievably big and powerful, so Trey did what he would have done with anything whose existence he doubted, despite the evidence of his own eyes.

He reached out and touched it.

The bear's fur was coarse, thick, oily but still as scratchy as his dad's cheek when he didn't shave for a few days. It felt hot to his touch, though Trey never knew whether the heat was the bear's or his own.

But mostly what he sensed was the power radiating outward from beneath the fur. The incredibly strong muscles, and beneath them, the engine, the core of the beast beneath his palm. An unharnessed energy that he'd never sensed in his family, in any person, and for the first time he realized that the world was not a pyramid, with humans sitting on top.

The bear flinched and let out a strange, whining cry, but did not move.

Trey closed his eyes. The pure connection between the two of them did not require vision.

But apparently the bear's cry had been loud enough to attract the attention of others. After that, Trey's memories were blurred. He remembered screams, shouts, being knocked down—by human hands—his head banging against the ground. Being carried by someone running, then thrown into the backseat of the car, the feel of vinyl against his cheek.

His mom saying, “Oh, my God, oh, my Christ,” over and over.

Both Mom and Dad touching him, lifting his shirt, holding his hand, checking his legs, again and again, as if trying to discover wounds they'd somehow missed the first twenty times they'd inspected him.

Or maybe they were just trying to make sure he was real, just as he'd done with the bear.

The grizzly. That was what Christopher told him it was called. A grizzly.

*   *   *

IT WASN'T UNTIL
years later, when he found some newspaper clippings hidden in the bottom of his father's desk drawer, that Trey learned the fate of the giant bear.

Turned out it already had a criminal record, that bear, having previously been convicted of wandering too close to campgrounds and picnic areas. It had never been aggressive, had done nothing more than watch, but you never could tell with grizzlies, so twice it was anesthetized and taken to more remote parts of the park to be released.

Its encounter with Trey was the third strike. The National Park Service brought in a marksman with a high-powered rifle, and the curious bear was shot no more than a mile from the picnic ground.

Reading about the bear's death, alone in his quiet house, Trey felt his eyes prickle. And at that moment, at age eleven, he made himself a promise.

Not to avoid the presence of the wild creatures on earth, but to seek them out.

And to keep them safe by going alone.

*   *   *

TREY WALKED THROUGH
the dim forest for nearly two hours. Then, when and where he'd known he would, he saw it: a brightening in the forest ahead, as subtle as the first wash of light in the eastern sky an hour before dawn.

But nothing as natural as that.

Trey stopped for a moment, looked, listened, and went on.