He peered out at the rain. “The radio said this storm is going to be a bad one.” On the nearby shore, wind was whipping the waves into a frenzy.
“Yes,” Ginger purred. “Very bad for fishermen. But since we are not fishermen . . . I’m sure we can think of other things to do as the storm passes.”
Anjou snorted. “I was thinking about Cortez and the herd. What will they do when the storm reaches them?”
“Luis and Brandon are strong young men. They will not mind a bit of rain. As for the herd—mammoths survived the ice age. They will be fine.”
Feeling restless, Anjou disentangled himself from Ginger’s grip. “Where are they now?” He moved to the laptop, set up on a table made of split logs, an anachronism he considered on par with Julius Caesar wearing cowboy boots.
He brought up the Alaska map, marked with the pulsing blips that represented the GPS locations of the mammoths. Two blips indicated Silver and Gold in a pasture a few miles away. They’d been confined and hidden from sight behind a ring of shipping containers holding all the equipment from Anjou’s lab.
Anjou zoomed in on the blips bunched together five hundred miles to the east. “It looks like Luis has got the mammoths a few miles away from the Dalton Highway. How long will it take him to get them to the target ground?”
“Two to three weeks. Be patient.”
“Patient?” Two to three weeks in this cabin would have him climbing the walls. “Maybe we should start the ball rolling on the publicity. After all, the sooner we get the word out, the sooner we can get back to a civilized life.”
“Not yet,” Ginger purred. “While the herd is close to the highway, they may be too easy to locate. Better to wait. Let all the pieces fall into place.” She nudged him toward the bed. “Trust me.”
Anjou knew people thought them an odd couple, but Ginger had been so much more to him than an occasional tumble into bed. She’d coached his professional development, written every grant application, and boosted his self-esteem during the early failures.
Anjou had always been deemed brilliant at the science—but that would never have got him more than a bench position in a corporate genetics lab. Until he’d met Ginger, he’d been clueless about the politics, the game-playing, the subtle machinations that seemed to be vital to real success. The smartest thing he’d ever done was to team up with her during his post-doc year. She’d been no better than competent at genetic manipulation—she’d never have gotten her doctorate without his help—but it was her other skills that made her such a good ally.
Ginger had engineered his career the way Anjou engineered a genome. She’d dictated which journals he’d publish in, which conferences he’d attend, what panels he’d chair, the parties he went to, even the clothes he wore. And of course, she’d managed the coup of getting the DevCom grant. She hadn’t done it for love—even he wasn’t arrogant enough to believe that—but because her ambition equaled his own.
“You’re probably right, my dear,” he said, joining her on the bed. “You usually are.”
CHAPTER 8
Chance of storms
By five the next morning, Luis and Brandon had the tent, sleeping bags, and the rest of the gear repacked and stowed in saddlebags. Breakfast would be fast food—in the form of a granola bar atop a moving mammoth washed down by filtered creek water.
“Ready?” Luis asked, arching his back to stretch. The sleeping pad hadn’t provided much cushion from the hard ground.
“I guess.”
Luis checked the blips on his tablet. The mammoths were loosely bunched half a mile away.
He set the tablet on the ground, volume set high, and keyed a command.
Rrrrrrrr. A deep rumble vibrated from the tablet, at the limits of human hearing and even lower. The recorded sound of an elephant matriarch’s location call, the one he’d used to train the mammoths from birth. “Come to mother,” he murmured.
For half a minute, the blips didn’t move. Then Ruby’s blip began a perceptible progress. The others fell into line behind her. That’s my good girl.
In minutes, the herd had returned to the clearing. Working as a team, the men harnessed the four burden-bearing females quickly. Luis checked each mammoth in turn, blowing greeting breaths and distributing caresses and getting trunk strokes and puffs in return. Emerald had a stone in her footpad; Luis used his pocketknife to remove it. Jet was teething—his first set of baby teeth was crumbling away as new, larger molars replaced them. Opal seemed rested and well, Pearl a little flighty with the beginning of estrus.
Luis had spent years with them, making himself part of their herd, keeping them conditioned to accept his presence and his commands, but soon he would disappear from their lives. “I wish there was some way I could warn you,” he whispered to Ruby. Would she miss him? Call for him? Wonder why he’d abandoned her? Would she think he’d died?
Elephants understood death as few other animals did. They mourned when one of their own passed. Even when they came upon dry bones, they distinguished their own kind from other animals’, tenderly stroking them. But for elephants, death was something they could see and smell and touch. For the mammoths, Luis’s disappearance would remain a mystery.
“Hey-up, Ruby. Kneel.” She lowered herself to let him mount. “Move out, girl. Tcha.”
The second day saw the herd climbing a treacherously steep ridge of dry stone. With little brush to eat and no water to drink, Ruby forged ahead, picking her way between boulders.
