Galapagos Part 5

The courtship dance of the blue-footed b.o.o.bies, which Mrs. Ona.s.sis suddenly wanted to see so much in person, has not changed one iota in a million years. Neither have these birds learned to be afraid of anything. Neither have they shown the slightest inclination to give up on aviation and become submarines.

As for the meaning of the courtship dance of the blue-footed b.o.o.bies: The birds are huge molecules with bright blue feet and have no choice in the matter. By their very nature, they have to dance exactly like that.

Human beings used to be molecules which could do many, many different sorts of dances, or decline to dance at all-as they pleased. My mother could do the waltz, the tango, the rumba, the Charleston, the Lindy hop, the jitterbug, the Watusi, and the twist. Father refused to do any dances, as was his privilege.

21.

WHEN M MRS. ONa.s.sIS said she wanted to go on "the Nature Cruise of the Century," then everybody wanted to go, and Roy and Mary Hepburn were almost entirely forgotten, with their pitiful little cabin below the waterline. By the end of March, King was able to release a pa.s.senger list headed by Mrs. Ona.s.sis, and followed by names almost as glamorous as hers-Dr. Henry Kissinger, Mick Jagger, Paloma Pica.s.so, William F. Buckley, Jr., and of course *Andrew MacIntosh, and Rudolf Nureyev and Walter Cronkite, and on and on. *Zenji Hiroguchi, traveling under the name Zenji Kenzaburo, was said in the release to be a world famous expert in animal diseases, so as to make him seem more or less in scale with all the other pa.s.sengers. said she wanted to go on "the Nature Cruise of the Century," then everybody wanted to go, and Roy and Mary Hepburn were almost entirely forgotten, with their pitiful little cabin below the waterline. By the end of March, King was able to release a pa.s.senger list headed by Mrs. Ona.s.sis, and followed by names almost as glamorous as hers-Dr. Henry Kissinger, Mick Jagger, Paloma Pica.s.so, William F. Buckley, Jr., and of course *Andrew MacIntosh, and Rudolf Nureyev and Walter Cronkite, and on and on. *Zenji Hiroguchi, traveling under the name Zenji Kenzaburo, was said in the release to be a world famous expert in animal diseases, so as to make him seem more or less in scale with all the other pa.s.sengers.

Two names were left off the list as a matter of delicacy, so as not to raise the embarra.s.sing question of who they were, exactly, since they were really n.o.body at all. They were Roy and Mary Hepburn, with their pitiful little cabin below the waterline.

But then this slightly bobtailed list became the official list. So when Ecuatoriana Airlines in May sent a telegram to everybody on the list, notifying them that there would be a special overnight flight for any of them who happened to be in New York City on the evening before the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin was to sail, Mary Hepburn was not among those notified. Limousines would pick them up anywhere in the city, and take them to the airport. Each seat on the plane could be converted into a bed, and the tourist seats had been replaced with cabaret tables and a dance floor, where a company from the Ecuadorian Ballet Folklorico would perform characteristic dances of various Indian tribes, including the fire dance of the elusive Kanka-bonos. Gourmet meals would be served, along with wines worthy of the greatest restaurants in France. All this would be free of charge, but Roy and Mary Hepburn never heard about it. was to sail, Mary Hepburn was not among those notified. Limousines would pick them up anywhere in the city, and take them to the airport. Each seat on the plane could be converted into a bed, and the tourist seats had been replaced with cabaret tables and a dance floor, where a company from the Ecuadorian Ballet Folklorico would perform characteristic dances of various Indian tribes, including the fire dance of the elusive Kanka-bonos. Gourmet meals would be served, along with wines worthy of the greatest restaurants in France. All this would be free of charge, but Roy and Mary Hepburn never heard about it.

Yes, and they never got a letter that everybody else got in June-from Dr. Jose Sepulveda de la Madrid, the president of Ecuador, inviting them to a state breakfast in their honor at the Hotel El Dorado, followed by a parade in which they would ride in horse-drawn carriages decked with flowers-from the hotel to the waterfront, where they would board the ship.

Nor did Mary get a telegram King sent to everybody else on the first of November, which acknowledged that storm clouds on the economic horizon were indeed worrisome. The economy of Ecuador, however, remained sound, so that there was no reason to believe that the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin would not sail as planned. What the letter didn't say, although King knew it, was that the pa.s.senger list had been cut approximately in half by cancellations from virtually every country represented there but j.a.pan and the United States. So that almost everybody still intent on going would be on that special flight from New York City. would not sail as planned. What the letter didn't say, although King knew it, was that the pa.s.senger list had been cut approximately in half by cancellations from virtually every country represented there but j.a.pan and the United States. So that almost everybody still intent on going would be on that special flight from New York City.

And now King's secretary came into his office to tell him that she had just heard on the radio that the State Department had just advised American citizens not to travel in Ecuador at the present time.

So that was that for what King considered the finest piece of work he had ever done. Without knowing anything about naval architecture, he had made a ship more attractive by persuading its owners not to call it, as they were about to do, the Antonio Jose de Sucre Antonio Jose de Sucre, but the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin. He had transformed what was to have been a routine, two-week trip out to the islands and back into the nature cruise of the century. How had he worked such a miracle? By never calling it anything but "the Nature Cruise of the Century."

If, as now seemed certain to King, the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin would not set out on "the Nature Cruise of the Century" at noon the next day, certain side effects of his campaign would endure. He had taught people a lot of natural history with his publicity releases about the wonders which Mrs. Ona.s.sis and Dr. Kissinger and Mick Jagger and so on would see. He had created two new celebrities: Robert Pepin, the chef King had declared to be "the greatest chef in France" after hiring him to run the galley for the maiden voyage, and Captain Adolf von Kleist, the captain of the would not set out on "the Nature Cruise of the Century" at noon the next day, certain side effects of his campaign would endure. He had taught people a lot of natural history with his publicity releases about the wonders which Mrs. Ona.s.sis and Dr. Kissinger and Mick Jagger and so on would see. He had created two new celebrities: Robert Pepin, the chef King had declared to be "the greatest chef in France" after hiring him to run the galley for the maiden voyage, and Captain Adolf von Kleist, the captain of the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin, who, with his big nose and air of hiding some unspeakable personal tragedy from the world, had turned out to be on television talk shows a first-rate comedian.

King had in his files a transcript of the Captain's performance on The Tonight Show The Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson. On that show, as on all the others, the Captain was dazzling in the gold-and-white uniform he was ent.i.tled to wear as an admiral in the Ecuadorian Naval Reserve. The transcript went like this: CARSON: "Von Kleist" doesn't sound like a very South American name somehow.CAPTAIN: It's Inca-one of the commonest Inca names, in fact, like "Smith" or "Jones" in English. You read the accounts of the Spanish explorers who destroyed the Inca Empire because it was so un-Christian-CARSON: Yes-?CAPTAIN: I a.s.sume you've read them.CARSON: They're on my bedside table-along with Ecstasy and Me Ecstasy and Me, the autobiography of Hedy Lamarr.CAPTAIN: Then you know that one out of every three Indians they burned for heresy was named von Kleist.CARSON: How big is the Ecuadorian navy?CAPTAIN: Four submarines. They are always underwater. They never come up.CARSON: Never come up?CAPTAIN: Not for years and years.CARSON: But they keep in touch by radio?CAPTAIN: No. They maintain radio silence. It's their own idea. We would be glad to hear from them, but they prefer to maintain radio silence.CARSON: Why have they stayed underwater so long?CAPTAIN: You will have to ask them about that. Ecuador is a democracy, you know. Even those of us in the Navy have very wide lat.i.tude in what we can or cannot do.CARSON: Some people think Hitler might still be alive-and living in South America. Do you think there's any chance of that?CAPTAIN: I know there are persons in Ecuador who would love to have him for dinner.CARSON: n.a.z.i sympathizers.CAPTAIN: I don't know about that. It's possible, I suppose.CARSON: If they would be glad to have Hitler for dinner-CAPTAIN: Then they must be cannibals. I was thinking of the Kanka-bonos. They are glad to have almost anybody for dinner. They are-what is the English word? It's on the tip of my tongue.CARSON: I think I'll pa.s.s on this one.CAPTAIN: They are-they are-the Kanka-bonos are-CARSON: Take your time.CAPTAIN: Aha! They are "apolitical." That's the word. Apolitical is what the Kanka-bonos are.CARSON: But they are citizens of Ecuador?CAPTAIN: Yes. Of course. I told you it was a democracy. One cannibal, one vote.CARSON: There is a question which several ladies have asked me to ask you, and maybe it is too personal-CAPTAIN: Why a man of my beauty and charm should never have tasted the joys of marriage?CARSON: I've had some experience in these matters myself-as you may or may not know.CAPTAIN: It would not be fair to the woman.CARSON: Now things are getting too personal. Let's talk about blue-footed b.o.o.bies. Maybe now is the time to show the film you brought.CAPTAIN: No, no. I'm perfectly willing to discuss my failure to plight a troth. It would not be fair of me to marry a woman, since at any time I might be given command of a submarine.CARSON: And you would have to go under, and never come up again.CAPTAIN: That is the tradition.

King sighed ma.s.sively. The pa.s.senger list was on his desktop, with about half the names crossed off-Mexicans and Argentinians and Italians and Filipinos, and so on, foolish enough to have kept their fortunes in their own national currencies. The names remaining, save for the six persons already in Guayaquil, were all in the New York City area, easily reached by telephone.

"I guess we have some telephoning to do," King said to his secretary.

She offered to do the calling. He said, "No." It was not a duty he felt free to delegate. He had persuaded all these celebrities to take part in the cruise, had wooed the most potent newsmakers among them as a lover might. Now he was going to have to give them the bad news personally, as a responsible lover should. At least he wouldn't have much trouble finding most of them. There were forty-two of them, counting mates or companions who were nonent.i.ties, but they had organized themselves into a few dinner parties, duly reported in gossip columns that day, in order to pa.s.s pleasantly the hours remaining until limousines came to cushion and m.u.f.fle them away to Kennedy International Airport-for Ecuatoriana's special ten o'clock flight to Guayaquil.

And at least he wouldn't have to talk about getting back their money for them. The trip wasn't to have cost them a nickel-and they had already received free matched luggage and toiletries, and Panama hats besides.

For the sad amus.e.m.e.nt of himself and his secretary, King now played his joke with the stuffed marine iguana. He picked it up and held it alongside his head as though it were a telephone, and he said, "Mrs. Ona.s.sis? I am afraid I have some disappointing news for you. You're not going to get to see the courtship dance of the blue-footed b.o.o.bies after all."

King's apologetic telephoning was a gallant formality. No one still expected to board the plane at ten that night. By ten that night, incidentally, *Andrew MacIntosh, Zenji Hiroguchi, and the Captain's brother *Siegfried would all be dead, and would all have completed their short journeys through the blue tunnel into the Afterlife.

All the people on the pa.s.senger list that King talked to had already made new plans for the coming two weeks. Many would go skiing within the safe boundaries of the United States instead. At one dinner party for six, everybody had already decided to go to a combination fat farm and tennis camp in Phoenix, Arizona.

And the last call King made before leaving his office was to a man who had become a very close friend during the past ten months, who was Dr. Teodoro Donoso, a poet and physician from Quito, who was Ecuador's amba.s.sador to the United Nations. He had earned his medical degree at Harvard, and several other Ecuadorians King had dealt with had been educated in the United States. The Captain of the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin, Adolf von Kleist, was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. The Captain's brother *Siegfried was a graduate of the Cornell Hotel School at Ithaca, New York.

There was a lot of noise from what sounded like a wild party going on at the emba.s.sy, which Dr. Donoso suppressed by closing a door.

"What are those people celebrating?" King asked.

"It's the Ballet Folklorico," said the Amba.s.sador, "rehearsing the fire dance of the Kanka-bonos."

"They don't know the trip's been called off?" said King.

It turned out that they did know, and that they intended to stay in the United States in order to earn dollars for their families back home by performing in nightclubs and theaters a dance Bobby King had made so famous in his publicity-the fire dance of the Kanka-bonos.

"Are there any real Kanka-bonos in the bunch?" said King.

"My guess is that there aren't any real Kanka-bonos anywhere," said the Amba.s.sador. He had in fact written a twenty-six-line poem called "The Last Kanka-bono," about the extinction of a little tribe in the Ecuadorian rain forest. At the start of the poem, there were eleven Kanka-bonos. At the end there was just one, and he wasn't feeling well. This was an exercise in fiction, however, since the poet, like most Ecuadorians, had never seen a Kanka-bono. He had heard that the tribe was down to only fourteen members, so that their final extinction by the encroachments of civilization seemed inevitable.

Little did he know that in a matter of less than a century the blood of every human being on earth would be predominantly Kanka-bono, with a little von Kleist and Hiroguchi thrown in.

And this astonishing turn of events would be made to happen, in large part, by one of the only two absolute n.o.bodies on the original pa.s.senger list for "the Nature Cruise of the Century." That was Mary Hepburn. The other n.o.body was her husband, who himself played a crucial role in shaping human destiny by booking, when facing his own extinction, that one cheap little cabin below the waterline.

22.

AMBa.s.sADOR D DONOSO'S twenty-six lines of mourning for "The Last Kanka-bono" were premature, to say the least. He should have wept on paper for "The Last Mainland South American" and "The Last Mainland North American" and "The Last Mainland European" and "The Last Mainland African" and "The Last Mainland Asian" instead. twenty-six lines of mourning for "The Last Kanka-bono" were premature, to say the least. He should have wept on paper for "The Last Mainland South American" and "The Last Mainland North American" and "The Last Mainland European" and "The Last Mainland African" and "The Last Mainland Asian" instead.

He guessed right, at any rate, as to what was going to happen to the morale of the people of Ecuador within the next hour or so, when he said to Bobby King on the telephone: "Everybody down there is just going to fall apart when they find out that Mrs. Ona.s.sis isn't coming after all."

"Things can change so much in just thirty days," said King. "'The Nature Cruise of the Century' was supposed to be just one of many things Ecuadorians had to look forward to. Suddenly it became the only thing."

"It is as though we prepared a great crystal bowl of champagne punch," said Donoso, "and then, overnight, it turned into a rusty bucket of nitroglycerin." He said that "the Nature Cruise of the Century" had at least postponed Ecuador's facing up to its insoluble economic problems for a week or two. The governments of Colombia to the north and Peru to the south and east had already been overthrown, and were now military dictatorships. The new leaders of Peru, in fact, in order to divert the big brains of their people from all their troubles, were just about to declare war on Ecuador.

"If Mrs. Ona.s.sis were to go there now," said Donoso, "people would receive her as though she were a rescuer, a worker of miracles. She would be expected to summon ships laden with food to Guayaquil-and to have United States bombers drop cereal and milk and fresh fruit for the children by parachute!"

n.o.body nowadays, I must say, expects to be rescued from anything, once he or she is more than nine months old. That's how long human childhood lasts nowadays.

I myself was rescued from folly and carelessness until I was ten years old-until Mother walked out on Father and me. I was on my own after that. Mary Hepburn didn't become independent of her parents until she received her master's degree at the age of twenty-two. Adolf von Kleist, the Captain of the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin, was regularly bailed out by his parents from gambling debts and charges of drunken driving and a.s.sault and resisting arrest and vandalism and so on until he was twenty-six-when his father came down with Huntington's ch.o.r.ea and murdered his mother. Only then did he begin to a.s.sume responsibility for mistakes he made.

Back when childhoods were often so protracted, it is unsurprising that so many people got into the lifelong habit of believing, even after their parents were gone, that somebody was always watching over them-G.o.d or a saint or a guardian angel or the stars or whatever.

People have no such illusions today. They learn very early what kind of a world this really is, and it is a rare adult indeed who hasn't seen a careless sibling or parent eaten alive by a killer whale or shark.

A million years ago, there were pa.s.sionate arguments about whether it was right or wrong for people to use mechanical means to keep sperm from fertilizing ova or to dislodge fertilized ova from uteri-in order to keep the number of people from exceeding the food supply.

That problem is all taken care of nowadays, without anybody's having to do anything unnatural. Killer whales and sharks keep the human population nice and manageable, and n.o.body starves.

Mary Hepburn used to teach not only general biology at Ilium High School, but a course in human s.e.xuality, too. This necessitated her describing various birth-control devices which she herself had never used, since her husband was the only lover she had ever had, and she and Roy had wanted to have babies from the very first.

She, who had failed to get pregnant despite years of profound s.e.xual intimacies with Roy, had to admonish her students about how easy it was for a human female to get pregnant from the most fleeting, insensate, seemingly inconsequential contact with a male. And after she had been teaching a few years, most of her cautionary tales involved students she had known personally-right there at Ilium High.

Scarcely a semester pa.s.sed at the high school without at least one unwanted pregnancy, and during the memorable spring semester of 1981 there were six. And, true enough, about half of these babies having babies spoke of true love for those with whom they had mated. But the other half swore, in the face of contradictory evidence which could only be described as overwhelming, that they had never, to the best of their recollection, engaged in any activity which could result in the birth of a child.

And Mary would say to a female colleague at the end of the memorable spring semester of 1981, "For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold." And there certainly was an a.n.a.logy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.

After ten years on Santa Rosalia Island, Mary Hepburn would discover firsthand exactly how easily a teenage virgin could be made pregnant by the seed of a male who was seeking s.e.xual release and nothing else, who did not even like her.

23.

SO, WITHOUT ANY IDEA that he was going to become the sire of all humankind, I got into the head of Captain Adolf von Kleist as he rode in a taxicab from Guayaquil International Airport to the that he was going to become the sire of all humankind, I got into the head of Captain Adolf von Kleist as he rode in a taxicab from Guayaquil International Airport to the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin. I did not know that humanity was about to be diminished to a tiny point, by luck, and then, again by luck, to be permitted to expand again. I believed that the chaos involving billions of big-brained people thrashing around every which way, and reproducing and reproducing, would go on and on. It did not seem likely that an individual could be significant in such an unplanned uproar.

My choosing the Captain's head for a vehicle, then, was the equivalent of putting a coin in a slot machine in an enormous gambling casino, and hitting a jackpot right away.

It was his uniform which attracted me as much as anything. He was wearing the white-and-gold uniform of a Reserve admiral. I myself had been a private, and so was curious to know what the world looked like to a person of very high military rank and social standing.

And I was mystified to find his big brain thinking about meteorites. That was often my experience back then: I would get into the head of somebody in what to me was a particularly interesting situation, and discover that the person's big brain was thinking about things which had nothing to do with the problem right at hand.

Here was the thing about the Captain and meteorites: He had paid little attention to most of his instructors at the United States Naval Academy, and had graduated at the very bottom of his cla.s.s. He in fact would have been expelled for cheating in an examination on celestial navigation, if his parents hadn't interceded through diplomatic channels. But he had been impressed by one lecture on the subject of meteorites. The instructor said that showers of great boulders from outer s.p.a.ce had been quite common over the eons, and their impacts had been so terrific, possibly, as to have caused the extinction of many life forms, including the dinosaurs. He said that human beings had every reason to expect more such planet smashers at any time, and should devise apparatus for distinguishing between enemy missiles and meteorites.

Otherwise, utterly meaningless wrath from outer s.p.a.ce could trigger World War Three.

And this apocalyptic warning so suited the wiring of the Captain's brain, even before his father came down with Huntington's ch.o.r.ea, that he would ever after believe that that was indeed the most likely way in which humanity would be exterminated: by meteorites.

To the Captain, it was such a much more honorable and poetical and even beautiful way for humanity to die than World War Three would be.

When I got to know his big brain better, I understood that there was a certain logic to his thinking about meteorites while he was looking out at Guayaquil with its hungry crowds under martial law. Even without the glamor of a meteorite shower, the world appeared to be ending for the people of Guayaquil.

In a sense, too, this man had already been hit by a meteorite: by the murder of his mother by his father. And his feeling that life was a meaningless nightmare, with n.o.body watching or caring what was going on, was actually quite familiar to me.

That was how I felt after I shot a grandmother in Vietnam. She was as toothless and bent over as Mary Hepburn would be at the end of her life. I shot her because she had just killed my best friend and my worst enemy in my platoon with a single hand-grenade.

This episode made me sorry to be alive, made me envy stones. I would rather have been a stone at the service of the Natural Order.

The Captain went straight from the airport to his ship, without stopping off at the hotel to see his brother. He had been drinking champagne during the long flight from New York City, and so had a splitting headache.

And when we got aboard the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin, it was obvious to me that his functions as captain, like his functions as a Reserve admiral, were purely ceremonial. Others would be doing the navigating and engineering and maintaining crew discipline and so on while he socialized with the distinguished pa.s.sengers. He knew very little about the operation of the ship, nor did he feel he needed to know much about it. His familiarity with the Galapagos Islands was likewise sketchy. He had made ceremonial visits as an admiral to the naval base on the island of Baltra and the Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz-again as essentially a pa.s.senger on board a ship of which he was nominally the commander. But all the rest of the islands were terra incognita to him. He would have been a more instructive guide on the ski slopes of Switzerland, say, or on the carpets of the casino at Monte Carlo, or to the stables serving at Palm Beach polo fields.

But again-what did that matter? On "the Nature Cruise of the Century," there would be guides and lecturers trained at the Darwin Research Station and holding graduate degrees in the natural sciences. The Captain intended to listen to them carefully, and learn about the islands right along with the rest of the pa.s.sengers.

Riding in the Captain's skull, I had hoped to find out what it was like to be a supreme commander. I found out, instead, what it was like to be a social b.u.t.terfly. We were received with all possible signs of military respect when we came up the gangplank. But, once aboard, no officers or crewmen asked us for instructions about anything as they made the final preparations for the arrival of Mrs. Ona.s.sis and the rest of them.

So far as the Captain knew, the ship was still going to sail the next day. He had not been told otherwise. Since he had been back in Ecuador for only an hour, and still had a bellyful of good New York food and a champagne headache, it had yet to dawn on him what awful trouble he and his ship were in.

There is another human defect which the Law of Natural Selection has yet to remedy: When people of today have full bellies, they are exactly like their ancestors of a million years ago: very slow to acknowledge any awful troubles they may be in. Then is when they forget to keep a sharp lookout for sharks and whales.

This was a particularly tragic flaw a million years ago, since the people who were best informed about the state of the planet, like *Andrew MacIntosh, for example, and rich and powerful enough to slow down all the waste and destruction going on, were by definition well fed.

So everything was always just fine as far as they were concerned.

For all the computers and measuring instruments and news gatherers and evaluators and memory banks and libraries and experts on this and that at their disposal, their deaf and blind bellies remained the final judges of how urgent this or that problem, such as the destruction of North America's and Europe's forests by acid rain, say, might really be.

And here was the sort of advice a full belly gave and still gives, and which the Captain's full belly gave him when the first mate of the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin, Hernando Cruz, told him that none of the guides had shown up or been heard from, and that a third of the crewmen had deserted so far, feeling that they had better look after their families: "Be patient. Smile. Be confident. Everything will turn out for the best somehow."

24.

MARY H HEPBURN had seen and appreciated the Captain's comical performance on had seen and appreciated the Captain's comical performance on The Tonight Show The Tonight Show, and then another one on Good Morning America Good Morning America. To that extent, she felt she already knew him some before her big brain made her come to Guayaquil.

He was on The Tonight Show The Tonight Show two weeks after Roy died, and he was the first person to make her laugh out loud after that sad event. There she was in the living room of her little house, with the houses on all sides of hers empty and for sale, and heard herself laugh out loud about the ridiculous Ecuadorian submarine fleet, whose tradition was to go underwater and never come up again. two weeks after Roy died, and he was the first person to make her laugh out loud after that sad event. There she was in the living room of her little house, with the houses on all sides of hers empty and for sale, and heard herself laugh out loud about the ridiculous Ecuadorian submarine fleet, whose tradition was to go underwater and never come up again.

She supposed then that von Kleist was a lot like Roy in loving nature and machinery. Otherwise, why would he have been chosen to be the Captain of the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin?

Now her big brain had her say out loud to the Captain's image on the cathode-ray tube, to the considerable embarra.s.sment of her soul, although there was no one to hear her: "Would you by any chance like to marry me?"

It would turn out that she knew at least a little bit more about machinery than he did, just from living with Roy. After Roy died, and the lawn mower wouldn't start, for example, she was able to change the spark plug and get it going-something the Captain could never have done.

And she knew a whole lot more about the islands. It was Mary who correctly identified the island on which they would be marooned. The Captain, grasping for shreds of self-respect and authority after his big brain had made such a mess of things, declared the island to be Rabida, which it surely wasn't and which, in any case, he had never seen.

And what allowed Mary to recognize Santa Rosalia were the dominant sorts of finches there. These drab little birds, incidentally, so uninteresting to most tourists and to Mary's students, had been as exciting to young Charles Darwin as the great land tortoises or the b.o.o.bies or marine iguanas, or any other creatures there. The thing was: The finches looked very much alike, but they were in fact divided into thirteen species, each species with its own peculiar diet and method for getting food.

None had close relatives on the mainland of South America or anywhere. Their ancestors might, too, have arrived on Noah's ark or a natural raft, since it was wholly out of character for a finch to set out on a flight of a thousand kilometers over open ocean.

There were no woodp.e.c.k.e.rs on the islands, but there was a finch which ate what woodp.e.c.k.e.rs would have eaten. It couldn't peck wood, and so it took a twig or a spine from a cactus in its blunt little beak, and used that to dig insects out of their hiding places.

Another sort of finch was a bloodsucker, surviving by pecking at the long neck of an unheeding b.o.o.by until it had raised little beads of blood. Then it sipped that perfect diet to its heart's content. This bird was called by human beings: Geospiza difficilis Geospiza difficilis.

The princ.i.p.al nesting place of these queer finches, their Garden of Eden, was the Island of Santa Rosalia. She would probably never have heard of that island, so removed from the rest of the archipelago, and so rarely visited by anyone, if it weren't for its swarms of Geospiza difficilis Geospiza difficilis. And she surely wouldn't have lectured so much about it if the bloodsuckers hadn't been the only finches she could make her students give much of a d.a.m.n about.

Great teacher that she was, she would go along with her students by describing the birds as "... ideal pets for Count Dracula." This entirely fict.i.tious count, she knew, was a far more significant person to most of her students than George Washington, for instance, who was merely the founder of their country.

They were better informed about Dracula, too, so that Mary could expand her joke admitting that he might not enjoy Geospiza difficilis Geospiza difficilis as a pet after all, since he, whom she then called as a pet after all, since he, whom she then called "h.o.m.o transylvaniensis," "h.o.m.o transylvaniensis," slept all through the daytime, whereas slept all through the daytime, whereas Geospiza difficilis Geospiza difficilis slept all through the night. "So perhaps," she would decide with mock sadness, "the best pet for Count Dracula remains a member of the family Desmodontidae-which is a scientific way of saying: 'vampire bat.'" slept all through the night. "So perhaps," she would decide with mock sadness, "the best pet for Count Dracula remains a member of the family Desmodontidae-which is a scientific way of saying: 'vampire bat.'"

And then she would top that joke by saying, "If you should find yourself on Santa Rosalia, and you have killed a specimen of Geospiza difficilis Geospiza difficilis, what must you do to make sure that it stays dead forever?" Her answer was this: "You must bury it at a crossroads, of course, with a little stake driven through its heart."

What was so thought provoking about all sorts of Galapagos finches to young Charles Darwin, though, was that they were behaving as best they could like a wide variety of much more specialized birds on the continents. He was still prepared to believe, if it turned out to make sense, that G.o.d Almighty had created all the creatures just as Darwin found them on his trip around the world. But his big brain had to wonder why the Creator in the case of the Galapagos Islands would have given every conceivable job for a small land bird to an often ill-adapted finch? What would have prevented the Creator, if he thought the islands should have a woodp.e.c.k.e.r-type bird, from creating a real woodp.e.c.k.e.r? If he thought a vampire was a good idea, why didn't he give the job to a vampire bat instead of a finch, for heaven's sakes? A vampire finch?

And Mary used to state the same intellectual problem to her students, concluding: "Your comments, please."

When she went ash.o.r.e for the first time on the black peak where the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin had been run aground, Mary stumbled. She broke her fall in such a way as to abrade the knuckles on her right hand. It wasn't a painful event. She made the most cursory examination of her injuries. There were these scratches from which beads of blood arose. had been run aground, Mary stumbled. She broke her fall in such a way as to abrade the knuckles on her right hand. It wasn't a painful event. She made the most cursory examination of her injuries. There were these scratches from which beads of blood arose.

But then a finch, utterly fearless, lit on her finger. She was unsurprised, since she had heard many stories of finches landing on people's heads and hands and drinking cups or whatever. So she resolved to enjoy this welcome to the islands, and held her hand still, and spoke sweetly to the bird. "And which of the thirteen sorts of finch are you?" she said.

As though it understood her question, the bird now showed her what sort it was by sipping up the red beads on her knuckles.

So she took another look around at the island, never imagining that she was going to spend the rest of her life there, providing thousands of meals for vampire finches. She said to the Captain, for whom she had lost all respect, "You say this is Rabida Island?"

"Yes," he said. "I'm quite sure of it."

"Well, I hate to tell you this after all you've been through, but you're wrong again," she said. "This has to be Santa Rosalia."

"How can you be so sure?" he said.

And she said, "This little bird just told me so."