Endangered Species

ENDANGERED SPECIES

BY NEVADA BARR

Water slammed into Anna's back, Brushing over her shoulders and down the

front of her shirt.  Closing her eyes against the salt sting, she clung

to the turtle's carapace and concentrated on keeping her footing as the

wave dragged against her legs, sucked the sand from beneath her

sneakers.

The loggerhead wouldn't be washed unwillingly back into the Atlantic.

There was little the turtle couldn't handle in the sea.  It was land,

that unfamiliar and ever-changing universe, that had baffled her.  For

miles she'd swum from God knew where to lay her eggs on the beach of

Cumberland Island, one of the Golden Isles off the coast of Georgia.  In

her tiny brain-or perhaps her great heartinstinct had programmed a map

with such precision that out of thousands of miles of coastline she'd

found her way back to this narrow ribbon of sand.

Anna ducked as another wave broke across her shoulders, and embraced the

animal hard against her.  The ripples of the loggerhead's armored back,

nearly a yard across, dug into her cheek where flesh thinned over bone.

She could feel the powerful scrape of the creature's back flipper

against the sodden fabric of her trousered thigh.

Water flooded around her, warmer on the back of her neck than the mild

summer air, and Anna wondered how turtles thought, how this turtle

thought.  On the chart that instinct tattooed on her soul, was there a

picture?  In whatever passed for a loggerhead's mind's eye, had she

seen, remembered the flat welcoming beaches?

" Sorry, old girl," Anna muttered as she heaved against several hundred

pounds of sea beast.  A capricious tide had trenched out a

four-foot-high sand and shell escarpment along fifty yards of ocean

front.  A week ago the sand had been flat; two weeks hence it would be

again.  Tonight it was proving impassable.  Still, with the eternal

patience that seemed endemic to turtles, rocks, and other longlived,

slow-moving creatures, the loggerhead had beached herself and started

her trek inland.

Loggerheads coming ashore north and south of the ephemeral cliff were

making their appointed rounds.  Between drenchings, Anna could hear the

delighted cries of park rangers, volunteers, and researchers celebrating

the renewed cycle of this threatened species.

Over the past hour, since she'd been drafted into the turtlemidwifing

business, Anna had received a crash course in the reproductive habits of

the loggerhead.  In an ideal world, they made their way up onto the

beach, above high tide, dug a nest, laid the eggs, and buried them.

Their role in the universe completed, they returned to the sea, and, it

was presumed, never looked back until four or five years rolled by and

they again felt the urge to come home to nest.

The Turtle Anna danced with in the crashing surf could not negotiate the

sand cliff and was exhausting herself with the effort.

Too tired to fight any longer, she was giving up.

"Dear Lord, she's laying.  Give me your hat," came an exasperated cry

near Anna's ear.  The words were carried on a gust of foulsmelling air.

For an instant Anna thought she'd shoved her face too near the east end

of the westbound turtle.  When she realized it was Marty Schlessinver's

breath, she began to believe the rumors that the biologist ate roadkill.

The Atlantic drew back and the full weight of the loggerhead was laid

again in Anna's and Marty's arms ." Don't hurt her," the biologist

warned as Anna felt the little muscles in her sacroiliac stretch and

complain.

"Fat chance," she grumbled, but she braced herself, forearms on thighs,

shoulder against shell, and held on.

In a sudden peace left behind by the receding waters, the moon pushed

over an inky horizon to paint a path in silver over the ocean and onto

the back of turtle under Anna's chin.

By the clear light she could see Marty Schlessinger's face inches from

her own.  Fifty years were etched in the lines of determination carved

on either side of an uncompromising mouth.  Long hair, worn in pigtails

like an aging Pippi Longstocking's, fell in white ropes across the

loggerhead's shell.

The returning ocean forced Anna to her knees.  Her thigh was wedged

against the turtle's carapace, the animal's flipper hard against the

outside of her leg.

"Hat, hat, hat," Schlessinger growled.

Anna snatched off her baseball cap and poked it into the biologist's

groping fingers.

"Hold her," Schiessinger ordered.

"Christ!" Anna breathed as the other woman relinquished her grip on the

turtle to gather the eggs.

Unlike many sea turtles, the loggerhead's egg-laying machinery was

recessed beneath the rear of its shell, and Anna could not see the eggs.

By the ecstatic chirps percolating from the biologist, she guessed the

laying was a success.

"No!" Schlessinger cried suddenly.  Such was the pain in her voice that

Anna was unpleasantly reminded that the coast of Georgia was the

breeding grounds for the great white shark.

"What?" she demanded.

"Lost a baby."

Anna was relieved but had the good sense to keep quiet.  Schlessinger

would consider the loss of a ranger's leg somewhat less heartrending

than that of an embryonic loggerhead.

Minutes ticked by.  Waves banged at Anna's back, tried to buckle her

knees.  Sand gritted between her teeth and salt sealed her eyes.  The

muscles in her arms and shoulders had progressed from ache, to jelly, to

constant torturous throb.  All sense of glamour.  and adventure was long

since gone.

"This is getting to be work," she grunted.

"Quiet," Marty said.

Anna \wedged her knee more firmly under the loggerhead's shell and began

counting back from one hundred.  When she reached zero, she decided,

Marty and the little loggers were on their own.

Time came and went and still she held on.  Numbers blurred .

"I'm losing it," she said.

" No.  Not yet."

Various retorts bottled up behind Anna's teeth but she lacked breath to

voice them.

A wave rushed between her knees, buoyed up the turtle, and gave her

shoulders some respite.  When the water receded and the weight settled

again, she cried out.

"Hold her still," Schlessinger snapped.

Anna tried ." In my next life I'm gog to be bigger," she hissed.

Quiet Schlessinger said again.  Then: "Okay.  I guess that's the lot.

Let her down.  Gently.  Gently."

Anna couldn't unlock any part of her body ." Can't," she said finally.

"Oh for Christ sake." With the next wave Schlessinger eased the weight

of the turtle from the tripod Anna had made of her body ." At least you

can hold these." The biologist proffered Anna her National Park Service

cap.  It was full of leathery orbs a little larger than golf balls ."

Careful," she warned as Anna stretched stiff arms to receive them ." I

counted."

There was no mistaking the threat.  Marty knew how many eggs were there.

Should one turn up missing on Anna's watch, there would be hell to pay.

She held the cap between her hands as if it were the Holy Grail.

Cooing, the biologist turned the massive turtle back toward the sea and

watched her shining shell till the ocean took her ." Fun's over," she

said curtly ." Time to get to work."

Oddly, Anna felt invigorated.  The magic of the turtle eggs she carried

was seeping into her tired bones.  The glory of the loggerhead's fight

and her part in it filled her with a sense of accomplishment that

diminished the ache in her back and legs.  Slopping sand and water with

every step, she squished up the darkened beach after Marty Schlessinger.

just above the high-tide line Schlessinger stopped, locked folded arms

across her chest, and surveyed the dunes between the water and the

tangle of oak and palmetto that choked the interior of the island.

A three-quarter moon, free now of the sea, cast its light over the sand.

Each twig and blade of grass was etched on one side with unnatural

clarity, and on the other plunged into impenetrable shadow.  The jungle

beyond was lightless, a jagged wall of pine and live oak silhouetted

against a faint glow from the mainland.

" This'll do," Schlessinger said, and dropping on all fours, began to

dig like a dog after a particularly tasty bone.  Sand, first dry, then

clumped and wet, sprayed out between her legs and over Anna's shoe tops.

A shovel would have expedited the process.  Anna didn't know if

Schlessinger was unprepared, a purist, or a fanatic.  She suspected the

latter two.

On Cumberland Island just over a week and already Anna knew all about

the marine biologist.  To be more precise, she knew all the gossip.

Tonight was the first time she'd actually laid eyes on the woman, though

the first day she'd arrived the tarpaper shack Schles singer called home

had been pointed out along with other island landmarks.

The residents of Cumberland granted Marty Schlessinger the status

usually reserved for witches and mad scientists.  In her mid fifties,

she lived in a ramshackle house she'd inherited when wid owed by a crash

some fifteen years before.

Schlessinger's bizarre reputation was not unearned.  In her wake

headless turtle carcasses and the mutilated corpses of animals killed on

the island's rudimentary road system turned up with nauseating

regularity.

The loggerheads, Anna knew from watching, washed up on the beach with

all parts intact.  Shrimpers plied their trade offshore .

Turtles were caught in the nets and drowned.  Schlessinger retrieved the

skulls and brains, Anna guessed, for dissection and study.

The butchered roadkili was a little harder to explain.  Maybe

Schlessinger did eat it.  Behind her house Anna had noticed a hog pen.

Maybe they were the beneficiaries.

Rumors of varying morbidity and credibility dwindled down from these two

provocative habits.  The rumor Anna dearly hoped was true was that

Schlessinger ate blood-fat ticks from the carcasses of the animals ."

Pops 'em like M and M's," Guy Marshall, her crew boss on this venture,

had assured her.  That was something she wanted to see.  The poetic

justice of it tickled her.

Eccentricity made Schlessinger well suited to Cumberland Island National

Seashore.  Once a vacation home for the very rich, Cumberland had been

privately owned until the 1970s.  In the past fifty years most of the

flashier millionaires had moved to more fashionable addresses, leaving

only a handful of moneyed and powerful families behind, but the ghost of

those glory days remained in the crumbling mansions and burned-out

relics.

In the early 1970s, eighteen thousand acres of the twentythousand acre

island was deeded over to the federal government to be preserved as a

national park.  Those who were less than charitable suggested the land

had been given to the NPS more to keep the riffraff from buying up

parcels the rich were tired of paying taxes on than to "conserve the

scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein .