Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

by clear masks attached by ribbed hoses to the breathing apparatus on their backs. They could well have been soldiers looking for a missing nuclear warhead or DEA agents about to take down a clandestine drug lab, but they were neither. They were biologists from the state and the county, and for months they had come to this spot in Auburn State Recreation Area to empty traps they'd been setting for rodents.

The routine this particular June morning was a little different. The men set up their equipment but didn't put on their suits right away. As the first hint of pale gray tinged the eastern sky, they walked away from their vehicles into the woods, carrying dark bundles. Ahead of them the Foresthill Divide fell away steeply into the canyon of the North Fork. They set down their bundles and carefully unrolled them. They were lengths of delicate but sturdy netting, made of gossamer threads. The men began fastening them to trees and shrubs. In the pools of light from their flashlights, the woods were unusually green for June. The grass between the oaks was tall, flexible, and dewy. There were wildflowers everywhere, and the cool air was damp and carried the rich scent of April, not the drying-hay odor of the foothills in a typical June.

It had been a rainy winter and the rains had continued halfway into June. In the bottom of the North Fork, below where the men were, the college students I had hired to keep an eye on Lake Clementine were spending their days sitting huddled in their trucks, running the heaters to keep warm. Seasonal workers were required to purchase their own uniforms and fearing they would spend too much of their wages, I had hinted that it was warm in the foothills by Memorial Day, so they might well get through a summer without owning the hundred-dollar jackets. But at 7:30 A.M. when they went to work, the lake was gray and misty, and they froze in their shorts and short-sleeved shirts in the drizzling rain. I encouraged them to take refuge in their pickups and to improvise whatever greenish sweaters or jackets they could until the unseasonable weather ended.

My seasonals were not the only ones who were wet that year. In the early part of 1997 the easterly trade winds that normally push sun-warmed equatorial seawater toward the Asian side of the Pacific, to be replaced along the coasts of North and South America by upwelling of cold nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean, had weakened. Warmer-than-normal water temperatures in the eastern Pacific increased evaporation and cloud formation, driving great wet storms onto the west coasts of the Americas. In Peru torrential rain flooded villages, destroying homes and killing their occupants. The rainwater pooled in low areas, mosquitoes bred in it, and some areas of the country suffered three times the average number of malaria cases. This phenomenon in the Pacific also had far-reaching effects elsewhere in the world. In Kenya and Somalia heavy rains led to outbreaks of waterborne disease, Rift Valley and dengue fevers. But in other areas the 1997–98 Niño had the opposite effect, causing drought, crop failures, and forest fires. My fellow park rangers on Southern California beaches saw unusual numbers of sea lion pups wash up dead in the surf. They looked like rumpled bags of bones. The failure of the nutrient-rich cold upwelling along the coast had led their mothers' prey—squid and small fish—to leave the sea lions' hunting grounds seeking colder water, so the mothers were starving and had little milk for their pups. But on the American River, whitewater rafting outfitters had a banner year, because all the rain and snow in the mountains kept the North Fork at high flows into the beginning of July.

***

But the men at Eight Mile Curve were not there about El Niño.

When they finished hanging the nets, they extended like invisible fences through the forest, about nine feet high and almost forty long. As the morning light came to the sky between the silhouettes of the oaks, the men quietly retreated into the shadows to wait. Around them the forest awakened in a profusion of birdsong—the plain calls of towhees, the buzzing recitations of Bewick's wrens, the sweet piping of hermit thrushes and Nashville warblers, the raucous squawks of jays. The birds began to flit through the limbs of the trees and along the ground through the underbrush, seeking bugs, grubs, and caterpillars. Some flew into the nets and were entangled. The men emerged from the shadows, gently extricated the frightened birds, and put them in containers, alive and unhurt.

The biologists were employees of the California Department of Health Services and the Placer County Health Department. They had been trapping at Eight Mile Curve since February of the previous year. They had begun by live-trapping dusky-footed woodrats and deer mice. As they would do today with the birds, they had been taking all of the animals to the tables in the cordoned-off work area. When they worked with rodents, no one was allowed into that area without a suit and a respirator, because by now rodents in the Sierra Nevada had occasionally been found infected with bubonic plague and hantavirus, the latter disease previously unknown. These potentially lethal pathogens could be picked up from rodents by humans who handled them.

By this time, creeks in remote wildernesses in the West also contained a human and animal parasite called Giardia lamblia, and backpackers now carried high-tech water filtration systems as a matter of course. Such precautions would have seemed ridiculous at the time of my boyhood, when my parents and I traveled widely in the higher elevations of the Sierra, drinking from any creek we pleased. At home my younger brothers and I sometimes found mouse nests in woodpiles and held them wonderingly in our cupped hands, admiring the pink babies with their blind eyes, for none of us had ever heard of hantavirus, or Valley fever,