The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery Read Free Page B

towildlife experts in western states, as they try to preserve it in the face of growing public objections.
    A nice meal for a raptor. The prairie dog is called a “keystone” species, that is, a prey base for many other animals and birds, including the raptor. Some people keep them as pets. Tan, with an unprepossessing countenance, the “dog” has a fetching habit of standing on its hind legs, reaching its tiny paws heavenward, and barking like a puppy. It sends twenty distinct calls to its companions in neighboring burrows. But most astoundingly, scientists have shown that it can recognize people by their clothing. That must be why this rodent has fan clubs of people willing to carry them bodily from the harm of others to new safe havens. (Sometimes they even gently vacuum the little fellows out of their holes.)
    Once, prairie dogs proliferated widely in North America, companions to the vanished buffalo. They beat down and smoothed the ground, a good thing for herds of buffalo—though not so good for domestic animals. They now occupy only two percent of their former range, and their numbers and habitat continue to shrink, as they are routinely poisoned, shot, and driven from their homes. Enemiesare not only the bulldozers that come through the fields plowing up their underground homes, but also farmers and ranchers who consider them a pest. Though they enrich the soil, they also eat the ground bare, and are competition for cattle and sheep for grazing grass. Another admitted downside is their penchant for picking up the plague. The disease will rush through a colony, quickly obliterating it, but the idea of “plague-ridden prairie dogs” makes some people think of these innocent creatures as dangerous to the environment.
    The prairie dog’s place in nature’s plan . The people willing to go out with cages and move whole populations of prairie dogs are environmentally aware folks who know this verbose creature is part of nature’s plan. Ironically, one of the animals that depends on prairie dogs for food is the endangered black-footed ferret, which is the object of a multimillion-dollar recovery program of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Others besides ferrets and raptors that feed on prairie dogs are coyotes, burrowing owls, and mountain lions. As long as there are these other wild beasts still among us, surely the prairie dog has its place, too.

Chapter 2

    L OUISE STARED OUT OF THE window of the covered pickup, praying the man and woman who were her companions on this trip did not expect too much of her until she’d had time to adjust. She’d just packed off her family, Bill in his rental car to parts unknown, Janie off in a van to go to the wilderness camp in Estes Park. As she had watched her beloved husband disappearing down the driveway of their rental house, all she could think about, unfortunately, was the remotepossibility of nuclear disaster—and the much more likely prospect of continued marital discord.
    Then she was picked up in this giant vehicle, and she had no more time for fretting. The pickup was designed for important male activities such as work, sports—or just showing off. But she wasn’t sure it had shocks. They were jouncing up a nightmarish road, a steep washboard of a road that shook her innards, and she wasn’t sure what she would do first—throw up, faint from vertigo, or die from lack of oxygen. Then she made the mistake of looking out the side window, and was terrified to see blue sky where there should have been road. Before she had time to scream, the driver saved them from the washout by swerving the vehicle to the left, then violently to the right to avoid colliding with a sandstone cliff on the other side.
    “Whoa, there, baby!” he chortled, as if this were just part of the fun of traveling the miserable mountain thoroughfare. “Don’t worry, we’ll soon be pullin’ in t’ Porter Ranch.”
    “Oh, God.” She felt like Odysseus, with Scylla on one side and Charybdis