Snapper Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Brian Kimberling

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kimberling, Brian.

  Snapper / Brian Kimberling.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-90806-3

  1. Bird watching—Fiction. 2. Indiana—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3611.I4576S63 2013 813′.6—dc23 2012026589

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket images by John James Audubon reproduced from Audobon’s Birds of America: The National Audobon Society Baby Elephant Folio, published by Abbeville Press, New York.

  Jacket design by Jason Booher

  v3.1_r1

  For Sarah

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I. Some Old Horses

  II. Snapper

  III. Box County

  IV. No Offense

  V. Nationwide

  VI. Bang Bang

  VII. Squander Indiana

  VIII. How Do

  IX. Proof

  X. Happy Few

  XI. Bone

  XII. Aim High

  XIII. Elegy

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison I am not free.

  —EUGENE V. DEBS

  early-twentieth-century socialist from Indiana

  I’d left home just the week before,

  And I’d never ever kissed a woman before.

  —THE KINKS, “Lola”

  I

  Some Old Horses

  I got my job by accident. A sycamore tree landed on the roof of my predecessor’s 4 × 4 during a thunderstorm. He spent six months in a neck brace.

  “He shouldn’t have been in the car,” said the boss, Gerald, during my interview. “We work in all weather.”

  Gerald is pigeon-toed, with an aquiline nose and crow’s feet around his hooded brown eyes—a caricature of an ornithologist. He even picks at his food. He’s a Princeton professor now. Back then he was a PhD candidate surveying the effects of habitat fragmentation on neotropical migrant songbirds in south central Indiana.

  A mutual acquaintance named Lola had introduced us. All Gerald wanted to know was whether I could read a topographical map and identify common trees.

  I said I could.

  Prove it, he said.

  We looked at a map together and took a stroll through the Indiana University campus arboretum, which was slightly unfair since they weren’t common trees. But time was short and with a success rate south of 50 percent I still got the job.

  “Memorize these,” he said, removing an unmarked cassette from his shirt pocket. It was birdsong. That is what he listened to on his car stereo, too.

  “And Nathan,” he added, “to be in the field by five a.m. you probably want to set your alarm for four thirty.” Want is not the verb I’d have chosen. I was to work six days a week.

  I was lucky he didn’t test me on other things I would need to know.

  Trigonometry, for example, or what to do when you’re twelve miles from shelter and the sky turns soup green. Indiana doesn’t claim the most tornadoes annually in the United States, just the deadliest. This is partly a function of the number of trailer parks and mobile homes scattered throughout the state. “God hates white trash” is the vile refrain you hear everywhere after a lethal twister.

  “Lola,” I said, “how do you know Gerald?” I had found it better not to ask Lola how she knew other men, but Gerald seemed a safe bet. He didn’t have time for girls.

  “He saved my starlings from my cat,” she said. She had a nest in the eaves of the one-bedroom house she rented. “He lives next door.”

  “So they fledged,” I said. She had showed the nest to me one morning after I had scrambled some eggs and she had brewed some coffee and we sat at a little table on her front porch. But she usually came to my house, and I asked her about Gerald there over pancakes she had made. She used orange juice in the batter, which may seem counterintuitive but can’t be beat.

  “Virgil watched the nest for days,” she said. Virgil was the cat. “I dreaded it, but I didn’t know what to do. Then one afternoon this skinny bearded guy was hopping around in the yard with Virgil chasing him. He moved them to his yard and said the parents would do the rest if I could keep Virgil on my patch.”

  “But how did you get on the subject of the bird job?” I said.

  “He seemed sort of lost,” she said.

  “I thought he lived next door.”

  “I made him some banana bread to say thanks,” she said. “He just stood in the door blinking as though nobody ever gave him such a thing.” That may have been accurate, but I suspected that he had never encountered anyone as lovely as Lola before. Her charm lay not in her husky voice or delicate face or fluid figure, but in the way that all these things reflected her intense and genuine pleasure in seeing you. I would like to make that seeing me, but she wasn’t very discriminating. She had long coppery hair and freckled arms and calm blue eyes, but I think that was only when I looked at her. She could make herself instantly into anything you wanted to see. I pictured Gerald squirming under all the flattering attention she could put in a single glance.

  “After that he crawled back under his rock,” she said. “Of course. So I invited him over once. I had some friends around and I asked if he would like to join us.”

  “When was this?” I said. I wanted to know which friends. She ignored the question.

  “He didn’t show, and I got kind of bored with my party. Everyone talking about concerts they had been to. So I grabbed a couple of beers and slipped out. We sat on his front porch for almost an hour.”

  “That might be the longest Gerald ever sat in one place,” I said.

  “About once a week I go over and have a beer on his porch,” she said. “We talk.”

  “Do you throw him toast in the morning?”

  She scowled. She was not always honest, but she was never rude.

  “I’ve only been in his house once,” she said. “He has a sofa and two bird books. That’s all. I feel sorry for him.” The last man Lola felt sorry for proposed to her. Still, Gerald was Gerald, and I didn’t worry about that.

  On June 22 of that summer, between five and eleven in the morning, I found twelve nests. That’s more than most people accomplish in a lifetime. Two were Kentucky warblers and one was an ovenbird. The females of both species are deeply crafty. Locating their nests is not a question of looking carefully around: you have to outsmart them. The male, off bragging somewhere, gives you some idea what territory they claim. Within that territory the female is keeping an eye out for people like you (or foxes, raccoons, and hawks like you). You won’t spot her on the nest: a Kentucky warbler is bright yellow, but her nest is partially enclosed, and an ovenbird’s camouflage is perfect and she holds very still unless you get within six inches or so. Both are ground nesters. To a human eye one reed or branch looks much like another, but she’s on intimate terms with each of them. If you do spot the ovenbird away from her nest, she pretends her wing is broken and hops along the nea
rest ravine, hoping you will follow. The Kentucky warbler is more sadistic. She doesn’t feign injury, but she leads you away from the nest until you are ankle deep in mud or rattlesnakes or both. The only way you will find her nest is if she shows you, and she won’t show you if she knows you are there. It’s like staking out the girls’ shower block at summer camp. It can be done, but it takes skill.

  Gerald routinely reported more than twenty finds a day. For the first week I just shadowed him. We walked into the forest and abruptly, when I couldn’t tell when or why, he would sit down on a convenient log and close his eyes. Gerald was very angular, with a scraggly red beard and a semi-hunched back; he reminded me of a garden gnome. After ten minutes he would open his eyes and quietly announce that the Carolina chickadee I hadn’t heard probably nested in the hickory stump I hadn’t noticed on the way in, and at least four Acadian flycatchers were active in a nearby creek bed. He could tell what vegetation lay in which direction just by listening to which birds favored that area.

  At times I imagined that I didn’t hear any birds at all, so loud was the sound of Gerald’s calibrated brain absorbing and interpreting so much delicate information. The more familiar I became with the work, the more impressed I was with his mastery of it, and years later, with substantial experience under my own belt, I was never even a Watson to his Holmes.

  At first he sent me to find the flycatchers because they’re easy. They decorate the nest with dangling cobwebs.

  Gerald was not entirely without humor. Once when he spilled peanuts over his car seat he looked at them perplexedly for a moment and exclaimed “Nuts!”

  In the second week he showed me how to catch and weigh birds, band them, and draw blood samples from a vein beneath the wing. It involved a loud tape recorder and a nylon mesh called a mist net stretched between two poles. It looks like a little volleyball court in the woods, but the net is virtually invisible. A male, hearing a recording of his own song within his own territory, will fling himself desperately around in an attempt to find his rival, and eventually find himself captive.

  “What if you wanted to catch an owl or an eagle?” I said. I held a trembling wood thrush in my hand, my favorite bird. It has a flutelike song, and the female can build a nest in twenty-four hours. I couldn’t see how you’d apply the same techniques to a predatory bird twelve times the size of a wood thrush.

  “Same process,” he said. “Might not work on an ostrich, though.” He almost chuckled as he spoke.

  I had been working solo for about three weeks, reporting to Gerald every few days, when he showed up unexpectedly where I parked my pickup truck at the start of the Ten O’Clock Line. It’s a hiking trail now, but in 1809 it was an international border. To the north lay the Indiana Territory of the United States and to the south a loose coalition of the Miami, Delaware, and Potawatomi. Legend holds that a Miami chief called Little Turtle mistrusted the white man’s surveying equipment. After planting a spear in the ground, he decreed that its shadow at ten o’clock would mark the new boundary.

  “Howdy, Gerald,” I said.

  He held an enormous spool of measuring tape, a handheld gadget I didn’t recognize, and a clipboard.

  “We’re going to map the terrain,” he said.

  That seemed silly to me. We had topographical maps and the park rangers had GPS coordinates we could have borrowed, though GPS wasn’t common then. I said so.

  “In millimeters,” he said.

  The gadget was an inclinometer for measuring slope. Much as a sailor might hold a sextant up to the night sky, you aimed it at a tree trunk on a ridge or in a ravine and it gave you a number to write down. The measuring tape was for nest heights and the distances between them on the ground. Gerald mumbled, so I gathered this more by watching than from any coherent explanation from him. The only talk for the next three and a half hours was me cursing undergrowth and mosquitoes while we unspooled the measuring tape, sometimes several lengths in succession, took slope readings, and climbed trees to get the heights down. Gerald was 3,675.6 millimeters directly above me in a red maple when he spoke.

  “How’s your math?” he said.

  “Pretty good,” I lied.

  “Good,” he said. “You need to work out the distances between nests.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

  “We’re collecting variables that will enable you to work it out,” he said.

  Oh.

  “And when do I do that?”

  “After work.”

  Years later I took undergraduates out in the field on my own projects and they blatantly made stuff up.

  “I brought a book for you if you get stuck,” he said. It was a high school trigonometry textbook, but coming from Gerald it was a gift from the heart.

  “Some Old Horses Chew Apples Happily Throughout Old Age,” I told Lola. She had dropped by my house in the early evening. In summer she wore pretty floral-print dresses that left her shoulders bare and clung to her hips.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s a mnemonic device for trigonometry,” I explained. “Sine equals Opposite divided by Hypotenuse, and Cosine equals Adjacent divided by Hypoten—”

  She looked at my book.

  “Sweet Octopus Hash Can Alleviate Heart Trouble Or Acne,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “This is important. Triangles are important. They’re how you cross oceans and build stuff and study birds.”

  “Soft Orchids Hope Cats Ask Hippies To Ogle Azaleas,” she suggested.

  “I have to get this stuff down,” I said.

  “Let me see,” she said, leaning over me. Her hand lay on my shoulder and her hair brushed my ear. She wasn’t bone-thin and bedraggled like most of the student body, including me. She was composed of natural curves, not alien angles. Her lips were red from wine.

  “Surveying stuff,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So that you can align your Kansas with my Missouri,” she suggested.

  “Kansas?”

  “And lay your panhandle across my Great Plains. My New Orleans next to your Boston.” She couldn’t quite keep a straight face or a level voice.

  We both laughed, and obviously I couldn’t concentrate on angles anymore. So we resumed our conversation in bed, where we flattened Switzerland and drained Australia of sand and drove Mexico straight over Egypt, until we sprawled spent over Canada with log-heavy limbs and nothing on our minds.

  I spent the following couple of nights at home alone, studying.

  Let D = ground distance. Let H1 and H2 be the nest heights. The distance between nests is the square root of D^2 + (H2 – H1)^2.

  Example: D = 12 feet, H1 = 20 feet, H2 = 25 feet. The distance is the square root of (12)^2 + (25 – 20)^2, which is the square root of 144 + 25, which is the square root of 169, which is 13. Therefore a pillaging crow flies 13 feet while a humanoid on the ground must walk 12 feet. This example assumes level ground.

  On site, the relationship between a nest and a tree looked pretty straightforward. Re-creating and modeling the entire topography of the square mile containing that and other nests, in a computer lab after months of data collection, would be like playing a symphony by yourself after hearing it once. Every painstaking measurement was a single note in the score.

  To deal with slope you need the angle, call it T degrees, from the bottom (call this A) to the top (call this B) of the hill, ridge, rock, bump, or other geoprotuberance. D becomes the horizontal distance underneath slope distance H, from A to B. You find it with D = H times cosine of T. A modern inclinometer will give you the sine, cosine, and tangent you need.

  Somehow, Gerald worked these things out in his head as he measured. Such exactitude was essential to study patterns of predation and parasitism between nests. It would not be required for a less specialized study. But it is worth noting that although the nests are long gone, and some of the trees, too, Gerald’s data set is still in use in ornithology labs around the world. In fact, all of Gerald’s
data sets are still in use. No hardware or software developed since then—or, I would hazard, in the near future—can match his meticulous mapping. He was pressed in vinyl, perhaps the last of his kind.

  On the third morning after I had seen Lola I was out in the field—that is, the forest—when a tornado struck. I had seen tornadoes from a distance—seen them forming briefly before rushing to the basement with a battery-powered transistor radio. I had not experienced one up close and out of doors.

  A proper Indiana twister looks something like God got fed up with his spinach. God in this instance is about six years old, but his spinach bowl is ample to seal the whole world beneath it. Much as moonlight may turn everything silver or blue, tornado light causes great swirling wet wisps of green cloud, wavering green shadows on the ground. It doesn’t always rain much at first but the air is so moist you feel you are breathing algae. As the wind swells the trees sound like gunfire or fireworks with an occasional whoosh as a branch comes down.

  When the funnel cloud snaps from sky to earth, God has just turned sixteen and that is his middle finger.

  My truck was a mile away. Whether it was more or less safe than the open forest is a moot point: increments of safety are all negligible if you are not underground. Motorists far from shelter are advised to abandon their vehicles and fling themselves in a ditch, then hope that ditch is not prone to flash floods. I found myself pelted by leaves. They were so thick in the air I couldn’t see more than twenty feet and they were beginning to sting my face and hands. They did not whirl and dance in pretty concentric patterns; they raged. I was annoyed by them but strangely oblivious to my own safety. I was worried about my nests and the awful prospect of re-mapping devastated territory. When I saw blood on my hand I realized the rush of leaves was slicing my skin, and I looked for shelter from them rather than any other more dangerous thing. I lay facedown in the mud between two roots of a huge tulip poplar. I did my best to cover my hands with my sleeves and I covered my head with my hands.