The Darwin Conspiracy Read Free

return address, his name printed in large confident letters. He felt his cheeks redden as if he had been slapped: it was from his father.
    “Thanks.”
    He folded the envelope and shoved it in his back pocket.
    After dinner they sat around the fire on the sawed-off tree stumps imported from San Isabel. Hugh was tired after a day of showing them around the island; it had felt odd pointing out the fixed points in his shrunken world—the crater’s bottom, the dry, cracked bushes, the mostly vacant nests, the traps baited with bits of banana. “How many finches are not yet banded?” Nigel had demanded. “Six,” Hugh had replied. “And they’re smart as thieves. I don’t think you’ll catch them.”
    “We’ll see about that.”
    Hugh’s stomach churned—he wasn’t accustomed to meat and Nigel had unpacked two thick steaks and fried them in oil, flipping them in the air like pancakes. Afterward Beth produced a quart of Johnnie Walker Black and poured each of them a strong one. Hugh felt it burn his throat as he leaned back to watch the smoke and embers shooting up into the darkness.
    “As I calculate it,” said Nigel, after knocking back half his scotch,
    “this drought is well on its way to becoming one for the record books.
    Isn’t that right? When was the other one again?”
    “Nineteen seventy-seven,” said Hugh.
    “And how long was that? Something like a year?”
    “Four hundred and fifty-two days,” said Beth. She was seated on the rock, leaning back upon the stump, her brown legs curled to one side.
    The fire lit up her high cheekbones and her eyes, framed by her black hair, gleamed.
    Nigel whistled. “And how long has this been?” He looked at Hugh.
    “Two hundred thirty-five days.”
    “That’s good for the study.”
    “Good for the study, bad for the birds.”
    “What’s been the effect so far?”
    “Seeds are in short supply. Not much mating. Some chicks have died in their nests. They’re listless. Some are desperate.”
    “Which ones? What are the variations? The beak sizes?”
    “God’s sake,” put in Beth. “He’s not your graduate student.”
    “That’s all right,” Hugh said. The truth was he liked having someone to talk about it with. “The fortis are hurting, especially the smallest ones. Their beaks are too tiny. They can’t handle Tribulus. You see them trying—they pick it up and turn it around and then drop it. Some of them get into this herb—it’s called Chamaesyce —and the leaves coat their feathers with this white sticky latex. It bothers them and they rub their crowns against the rocks until they go bald. Then they get sun-stroke. You see them lying around dead, these little bald finches.”
    “And the next generation?”
    “It’s too soon to tell, but it’ll be like the last drought. The ones who survive will be the ones with the deepest beaks. And they’ll go on until one year there’ll be heavy rainfall and then you’ll suddenly see a multitude with narrow beaks.”
    Nigel mimicked the tone of an announcer: “Darwin’s living laboratory. Step up and watch as natural selection works its daily miracles.
    How does it go? How did the great man put it?”—he tilted his head back slightly, as if trying to remember, but the words came so easily he  clearly knew them by heart— “daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers.”
    Hugh didn’t mind the showing off. The scotch was warming his system and rendered him charitable. He looked across the fire at Beth but couldn’t read her reaction.
    “But of course Darwin didn’t quite get it, not when he was here, did he?” Nigel continued. “I mean, he mixed up all his specimens, took finches from the various islands and put them all in the same bag. He had to go begging to FitzRoy to look at his