Most dated back to the 1500s and before, so that by now they were grassy, treeless hillocks, smooth and symmetrical, anywhere from a hundred to five hundred feet high. It was these old
While they trudged single-file up a narrow horse trail that wound around the hill, Axel, in the lead, prattled happily on about ranch operations without requiring much— without requiring any—feedback. The Little Hoaloha was a “cow/calf” operation, meaning that they raised calves but didn’t “finish” or butcher them. At six hundred pounds they were shipped by container ship to Vancouver, Canada, where they grazed on local grain until they reached nine hundred pounds, whereupon they were trucked to feed lots in Calgary, fattened for a hundred days until they reached twelve hundred pounds, and then slaughtered.
Now, Axel proudly pointed out, if John and Gideon looked around, they would see not a sign of over-grazing, even though they ran eight thousand head of cattle on their eleven thousand acres; a heavy load on the land—had Gideon known it took almost seven pounds of grasses to put one pound of meat on a cow? The lushness of the landscape was the result of a fenced paddock arrangement that Axel himself had devised, in which the cattle were rotated to a new grazing section every three days...
John, who had heard all this before, was mostly looking out at the view, humming a little to himself. But Gideon, who hadn’t, was also drawn to the constantly changing scene as they rounded the hill. They were at an elevation of four thousand feet. Around them were clumps of scrub oak, prickly pear, a few small trees, and some rocky outcrop-pings, but the overwhelming impression was of a wonderfully green, rolling grassland, dotted with groups of grazing cattle, that fell gradually but spectacularly away to the ocean in one direction, and flowed equally gradually and spectacularly up toward the distant, two-mile-high summit of Mauna Kea in the other. That, he realized, was why this stupendous landscape could be so peaceful, so calming. There were no vertical surfaces, no threatening precipices or jagged mountain walls. Just these welcoming, gently upsloping fields of green and brown, so gentle that it looked as if one could begin at the coast and easily, even pleasantly, stroll right to the top of the immense volcano, given the time.
From here he could see all the way to the gorgeous, gleaming hotel- and resort-lined Kohala Coast, thirty miles away, three-quarters of a mile below, and seemingly existing in some future century. Farther off and looking like Bali H’ai itself, was the island of Maui, from this distance a huge, mysterious, fog-wreathed mountain growing straight out of the ocean.
“. . . is piped by gravity-feed to on-ranch reservoirs,” Axel was saying, “from where it goes via one-inch plastic pipe to troughs that have been placed through mathematically computed—oh, gosh, where did the time go? We better go back. Gideon, I know you must have some questions.” He waited inquiringly.
Gideon searched his mind. The last thing he’d really heard was that the cattle were trucked to Calgary, but that had been a while back. He looked desperately around for inspiration. A quarter of a mile away, on a nearby hillside, were a dozen or so peacefully grazing cows. They were brown. They did not have white faces.
“I see,” he said with more confidence than he felt, “that you raise Jerseys here. Do you have Herefords as well?”
“That’s a really good question,” Axel said as they turned around and headed back down, with Gideon now in the lead. “We used to have Herefords on the old ranch—you remember, Johnny.”
“Sure do,” John said.
“But in the last few years we’ve phased them out. White-faced cattle don’t bring as much on the market. Isn’t that interesting? Nobody knows why. You know what I think? I think it’s because they make people think of milk cows, not beef cows.”
“Yeah,” John said. “I guess nobody wants to eat Elsie.”
At the bottom of the hill they separated, with Axel going to the back of the house to bring around a truck for the short drive to Inge’s. John looked at Gideon and made an odd face.
“What?” Gideon said.
John screwed his mouth up into a little knot and put on what he must have thought was a professorial tone of voice, throwing in a prissy English accent for good measure and tipping his head back as if he were looking through a monocle. “I see thet yaw raise Jehseys heah. Do yaw heve Heffahds as well?” he said.
And then dissolved in laughter. “I love it.”
Gideon laughed, too. “I think I got away with it.”
“THIS place, Maravovo Atoll, where they found the plane,” Inge began when she’d finally got everyone settled, “is part of something called the Republic of Kiribati—”
“Actually, it’s pronounced
Felix exploded with a shout. “Axel, for God’s sake! I mean, Jesus Christ!”
“Sorry,” Axel said, blinking, clearly wondering what Felix was so upset about.
Inge covered her mouth. It was hard not to laugh. It was so like Axel, so like Felix. What a pair.
“This island, or atoll, or whatever it is,” she continued, “is totally uninhabited. No one ever went there until two months ago, when Odysseus Cruise Lines started offering a ten-day Hawaiian Islands cruise out of Honolulu and included a two-day round trip to the place for a beach picnic. See, they have to do that because Odysseus is Greek-owned, and non-American ships aren’t allowed to travel between American ports without including at least one foreign call on their itinerary, and Maravovo Atoll was the closest—”
“For God’s sake, Inge,” Auntie Dagmar snapped, “we don’t need a lecture on United States maritime law. You’re getting as bad as Axel. Get to the point.”
“What did I do now?” Axel bleated.
“Dammit, Auntie,” Inge said, “all I’m trying to do... all right, okay, yes, sorry.” When Dagmar was in one of her cranky moods there wasn’t much point in trying to reason with her. Besides, it was natural enough for everybody to be a little edgy.
A week ago, she explained, a group of snorkelers from the cruise ship had paddled in an inflatable boat to a relatively distant part of the atoll’s lagoon, where they had seen the old Grumman sunk in five or six feet of water, its tail protruding. They had dived down to it, looked through a missing window, and seen some bones inside. The
