Last Resort Read Free

become a cuddly shorthand symbol for the threatened extinction of North American mammalian species. He had made Wilkie’s fortune, and his name a household word.
    But now, whenever Wilkie recalled this endangered rodent, he felt a shudder of self-hatred and despair. In spite of the hundreds of thousands of copies they had sold, his books had in some ways done more harm than good. Many salt marsh mice had been illegally kidnapped for sale as pets; others had been acquired by zoos that wanted to display this now-famous mammal. As a result, just as in Wilkie’s worse-case scenario, Salty was now nearing extinction in the wild, and the world was going to hell in a nonbiodegradable plastic handbasket.
    Last week, against his better judgment, he had given yet another interview to a student from the local high school newspaper.
    “How many species do you figure you have helped to preserve, Professor Walker?” the child, a pimply girl, had inquired.
    Wearily, Wilkie gave his standard reply, displaying his famous modesty, declaring that he had been only one of several working in the field. But other words screamed for utterance. I preserved the species Wilkie Walker, that’s what I preserved, he had wanted to tell her. And not only this one specimen of the species, but hundreds, thousands of imitation Wilkie Walkers: noisy, posturing, sentimental amateur naturalists. He visualized them as half-human Yahoos: packs of ugly, hairy, ungainly two-legged goats in cheap outdoor jackets and boots, tramping heavy-hooved over the fields and woodlands of North America, crushing flora underfoot and frightening fauna, baaing, nibbling, preening.
    It was clear to Wilkie now that if he had stayed with serious science he might have made some significant discovery. Instead, horrified by what was happening to the world around him, he had become a popularizer. A propagandist. He had brought upon himself the fate of all successful popularizers: he had made his point so well that it had become banal. Once his name had been used to describe and recommend the works of writers like Ed Hoagland and Annie Dillard; now their names were used to recommend his work. His books, at first popular with adults, were now read mainly by children and teenagers, and it was now mostly high school and college students who asked to interview him. If you’re over seventy, he had realized belatedly, nobody important in the media wants to hear from you anymore. Their attitude is, Wilkie Walker? Is he still alive?
    Once Wilkie had dined at the White House and been the featured speaker at important conferences, earning very large fees (often donated to good causes afterward). Now his typical honorarium had shrunk. He had been reminded of this a while ago by the brash young man with sideburns who had taken over the business of his former lecture agent, now retired. “Let’s face it,” this disagreeable youth had said, leaning confidently toward Wilkie across a table in a pretentious Italian restaurant and breathing garlic on him. “You’re an established name, sure, but you’re no longer the flavor of the month.”
    Wilkie’s left hip, which he had injured five years ago climbing a cliff in New Mexico to observe jackrabbits, ached tonight: no position on the sofa was comfortable. He could picture how the bones must look, lumped with calcium deposits that grated against the adjoining muscles, tendons, and nerves. That hip would never totally heal now; probably it would get worse and worse, until he was permanently stiffened and crippled, permanently in pain.
    Except he probably wasn’t going to live that long. For six months he had been aware of an intermittent ache in his lower gut, and in October, in a graffiti-scrawled toilet stall at the college library, he had seen blood. He knew what that meant: cancer of the colon. He couldn’t feel it yet, but somewhere in his bowels his life was diseased and bleeding away. When that fool Dr. Felch asked him if there were ever