Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (38 page)

Back in 1744, a French explorer made the following entry in his journal: “We have [in Canada] cranes of two colors; some are all white, the others pale gray, all make excellent soup.” Well, it was as if some fiendish French fatso from the gluttony wards of Hell had cooked up a cauldron of Campbell's Cream of Whooping Crane, for squint as they might, Jim McGhee and his pilot could not spot a single whooper that day.

McGhee was puzzled, a trifle alarmed, maybe, but not freaked-out. The cranes must have moved, he reasoned. Their nesting grounds had been threatened twice by forest fires since 1970, and despite the Canadian government's maneuvers to bar sight-seers from the area, there had been increasing air traffic over the whooper nurseries in recent years. The five-hundred-square-mile enclave in which birds of this solitary flock chose to build their nests of heaped grass, deposit their mushroom-colored eggs and hatch their sparrow-sized chicks was a mere postage stamp on a vast package of forbidding terrain. It was part of a region that was as rugged and remote as any on the North American continent. Dotted with shallow, muddy lakes separated by narrow zones of spiky black spruce and twisting rivers too choked by fallen timber to be navigable, it had been trod upon by neither white man nor Indian. In fact, the whooper domain was so well hidden it had taken airborne searchers from both U.S. and Canadian Wildlife agencies ten years to find it. As McGhee theorized over a bottle of Uncle Ben's malt liquor in Fort Smith that evening, the cranes could have transferred their nesting area to a different part of the wilderness. Since the birds live in isolated family groups, often separated by as much as twenty miles, it didn't seem likely that the entire flock might have rejected the traditional nesting grounds as if of one mind, but McGhee knew that wild creatures sometimes did the unlikely. McGhee liked wild creatures. He had once elbowed his wife awake in the middle of the night to tell her, quite factually, “Wild animals don't snore.” That was a month before the breakup. Ah, well. McGhee ordered another Uncle Ben's, deciding not to sound a crane panic until he and his pilot had looked further.

The following day, the two men applied closer scrutiny to the usual whooper habitat. They flew so low they were practically sodomized by cattails. No birds. The day after that, they surveyed the area south of the traditional nesting grounds, whirring above the banks of the Little Buffalo River and its marshy tributaries, the logical (?) places for a whooper relocation. Not so much as a snowy pinfeather tickled their eyes. That evening, Jim McGhee radioed Ottawa.

From the capital came the skinny, pipe-smoking official of the Canadian Wildlife Service. He was not yet showing signs of nervousness, but he was soon to be rattling like the muffler on a hula girl's convertible. The official enlisted four additional helicopters in the search. For a week they went through the wilderness the way the Errol Flynn Memorial Panty Raid Society went through the coed dorms at Kansas State University that terrible night in 1961—but with nowhere near the success.

At last the official—O champagne of trembles, O waterfall of bones—had no choice but to notify the insufferable Americans. Both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Audubon Society responded at once. It was ascertained and ascertained again that fifty-one whoopers, in groups of one to three families, had left the Aransas refuge during the third week of April. Aransas's superintendent testified that the cranes' mating dances had been unusually athletic that year, but there was no reason to believe that they were having a last fling.

About midway in migration, the whoopers normally stopped for several days of rest and recreation along Nebraska's Platte River. There the stiff-legged birds would stride in agitated dignity, like so many Prince Philips pacing outside the quarters of the queen, as they hunted the river banks for frogs, scratched in the sandbars for mollusks or stalked grasshoppers in the open stretches of high grass. It was standard procedure for governmental agents to take inventory of the cranes during the Platte River stopover, but thereafter to rely for migration information upon voluntary reports from citizens until Jim McGhee made his annual nesting count. This year was no exception, and the wildlife wardens who monitored the cranes in Nebraska now reiterated their reports that the big birds had been all present and accounted for and looking as healthy as rich men's children before the ennui sets in. A farmboy and a telephone lineman had reported seeing separate whooper flights over southwestern South Dakota. After that, nothing.

Between Murdo, South Dakota, and the Alberta—Northwest Territories nesting grounds, the cranes had disappeared. Canadian officials eyed the Americans suspiciously. American officials eyed the Canadians suspiciously. Was the highest card in the Deck of Birds up somebody's sleeve?

An American plane traced the whooping crane flyway from Nebraska to the Saskatchewan border. A Canadian plane followed the migration route from the U.S. line to the nesting grounds.
Nada
.

“We're scheduling daily flights along the flypath,” announced the Americans. “We're scheduling daily flights along the flypath,” announced the Canadians. The first American flight passed just out of view of the Rubber Rose, where tiny Lake Siwash was shimmering like a pool of cowgirl tears.

The calendar had dipped its muzzle into late May—nearly two weeks after Jim McGhee's infamous “routine” flight—when the craneless news was broken to the public. A terse, unemotional press release from the Department of the Interior, an announcement that urged citizens to cooperate by reporting any and all sightings of tall white birds, hit the media like a ton of human interest bricks. Every TV network and most of the nation's papers gave the story major play. The scope of the coverage caught the government off-guard, as did public response. Interior's switchboards were flashing like a light-show gone stoned mad at the Fillmore, and every ecology-oriented organization from the Sierra Club to the Girl Scouts wired pledges of assistance. The following day the Secretary of the Interior himself was obliged to call a press conference (It made the six o'clock and eleven o'clock news). “Umm, ah, er, hum,” said the Secretary. “No cause for extreme concern.” Although the cranes constitute a single flock, they travel in smaller units of one to three families, the Secretary explained. And the families nest miles apart. There was no probable way the entire flock could have met foul play ("Ahem. No pun intended") either from humans or the natural elements. The whooper flyway passes almost entirely over isolated regions, and the Canadian wilderness is vast. Sooner or later these splendid birds will turn up. Even should they remain incommunicado all summer, they would certainly be back in Texas come fall.

The Secretary believed his remarks, as men of his station sometimes do. His underlings in the Fish and Wildlife Service believed them, too. Up in Canada, the skinny, pipe-puffing official shook like the icecubes in a fire-eater's highball and was not so sure. As for field biologist Jim McGhee, he sucked on a bottle of Uncle Ben's, signed another alimony payment, stared at aerial maps of the terrain he would search next day and muttered to no one in particular, “Wild animals don't snore.”

80.

DESPITE HIS TITLE,
the Secretary of the Interior was a shallow man. He was given to surfaces, not depths; to cortex, not medulla; to the puff, not the cream. He didn't understand the interior of anything: not the interior of a tenor sax solo, a painting or a poem; not the interior of an atom, a planet, a spider or his wife's body; not the interior, least of all, of his own heart and head.

The Secretary of the Interior knew, of course, that there was a brain in his head and that the human brain was Nature's most magnificent creation. It never occurred to the Secretary of the Interior to wonder why, if the brain, with its webs and cords and stems and ridges and fissures, with its glands and nodes and nerves and lobes and fluids, with its capacity to perceive and analyze and refine and edit and store, with its talent for orchestrating emotions ranging from eye-rolling ecstasy to loose-bowel fear, with its appetite for input and its generosity with output; it never occurred to the Secretary to wonder why the brain, if it is as awesomely magnificent as it purports to be, why the brain would waste its time hanging around inside a head such as his.

Maybe some brains just like the easy life. The Secretary of the Interior did not put many demands on his brain. Mainly, he wanted only to be informed if this or that action would be politically expedient. For example, the Secretary went to his brain there where it was lolling lazily in its cerebral hammock, sipping oxygen and blood, absently humming some electrochemical folderol culled from two billion years of continuous biological chatter; a brain that bore no neon scars of love, that showed no signs of having ever been dazzled or crunched by art, that obviously was not staying awake nights puzzling over what Jesus really meant when he said, “If a seed goes into the ground and dies, then it will grow"; a brain that would have appeared preponderantly placid were it not for the skinning knife, the automatic rifle, the bazooka, the machete, the napalm, clubs, arrows and grenades that were piled under its pillow where they might be employed instantly to chop, gut, bludgeon, burn and blast the very first mouse squeak that might threaten it; the Secretary went to his brain, prodded it and asked it how he might end this whooping crane hubbub in a manner advantageous to himself.

His brain's immediate reaction (yawn) was that the problem should be passed up the line to some other brain to solve. That, however, was not feasible this time. The only person up the line was the President, and the President's brain, having been finally cornered after a lifetime of cheating, conning, lying, hustling and vampiring greedily on jugulars public and private, was rolled up like a sick armadillo at the moment and could not be enlisted. Should he get through to the President he could expect only that the President would yell, “Shove those fucking birds up your goddamned ass! What are you doing to protect me?” or something, and the Secretary did not wish to be yelled at by the President. Should he speak to one of the President's intimate advisers, he would be told in an aseptic German accent that the matter should be turned over to the CIA, and while the Secretary was not entirely opposed to the high aides' method of putting annoying problems in the hands of the secret police, he wasn't certain that it was expedient to have his own authority thus usurped.

No, sorry, brain, fat old pal, but you and the Secretary must work it out yourselves.

Under normal conditions, the Secretary might have donned the Pendleton wool shirt his wife had given him for their twenty-second wedding anniversary (Or was it the twenty-third? His brain couldn't remember), requisitioned a jet and gone out personally to lead a massive crane hunt. Now that would have been good politics. Ha ha! Then, when those kooky environmentalists got in a snit because his branch of government was allowing industry to develop the land the way God intended it to be developed, he could say, “Trust me, friends; I have proven myself an ardent conservationist. I am the man who rescued our whooping cranes!”

Alas, normal conditions did not prevail. The major oil companies were in the act of pulling off a daring economic coup, a brilliant piece of business, on the whole, but one that had of necessity created a simulated shortage of petroleum products, and the citizenry, not understanding what was best for it, was bemoaning what had been labeled an “energy crisis.” The average working man was a helluva lot more concerned about the energy crisis than he was about a missing flock of goony birds, the Secretary reasoned quite accurately; the Secretary wasn't convinced the average working man gave a moldy tail feather about those missing birds. Were the Secretary to authorize a large-scale air search for the whoopers, there would most surely be adverse reaction to the quantities of fuel an expedition of that size would require. He simply could not justify such an expenditure of precious petroleum.

So he would do this: he would keep a single light plane plying the wide and capricious migration route; one plane, in the air daily. If the working stiffs complained, he could say, “We've got a little bitty economy-sized Cessna looking around for those birds, boys; that's it.” If the conservationists bitched, he could say, “I've got a modern up-to-date reconnaissance aircraft with radar and all the latest equipment in the sky this very moment searching every inch of isolated territory for those marvelous herons, and I won't rest until they are safely back where they belong.” Umm. Yes. Yes, indeed. All bases touched. Good work, faithful brain. You've earned a siesta.

Politics served, the Secretary reassured himself that the herons or cranes or whatever they were would turn up in the near future. Good Lord, there were hundreds of square miles of lowland marsh in Saskatchewan that hadn't even been peeked at yet. The birds were in there, probably, or nestled into some muskeg swamp in the Canuck boonies. They'd show up eventually, safe and sound. If only the media would let the matter drop, the public majority would forget it quicker than a Bufferin can dissolve in the cutaway belly of a TV doll.

Indeed, the media
might
have let the matter drop. And the masses
might
have forgotten the vanished birds. If it hadn't been for Jim McGhee.

One evening toward sunset, the Canadian field biologist stood up from his bottle of Uncle Ben's and walked away into the bush without pack or provisions.

On his third morning in the wilderness, after three chill nights among sleepers who do not snore, a bedraggled McGhee was sitting on a log when he saw a snake slink by. The snake was moving fast. It carried a card under its tongue. The card was the jack of hearts. “I must get to Delores del Ruby at once,” hissed the snake. It slithered away toward the south.

Behind in Fort Smith, McGhee had left a note. There was no mention in the note of McGhee's ex-wife or of his two little freckle-faced sons. But the note made numerous references to whoopers, closing, in fact, with the line “I have gone to join them in extinction.”