beaks opened slightly ajar and serving like the flare of a trumpet. I could only imagine what existed beyond that sign. Compared to the common field mice and frogs I was used to, the cranes were mysterious, critically endangered dog-sized birds from the Great Plains. They were a first taste of the sentimental and at the same time selfless exhilaration of rarity, knowing something so rare was being carefully hand-raised in Patuxent, Maryland—a protected oasis surrounded by freeways, city parks, and subdivisions.
• • •
In the afternoons I would sit with my father in his office, eating my lunch and watching him eat without stopping work. A field biologist turned administrator, he would awkwardly hunt and peck for keys on a computer while slowly eating Fig Newtons and an apple. It was the same small lunch every day, washed down with four or five cups of coffee. Being otherwise surrounded by field biologists, I couldn’t yet understand how he found contentment in a thirteen-hour-a-day indoor work routine that included trips in on weekends to “catch up.”
It was only that summer that I learned that to a former field biologist, “catching up” meant getting away from the computer and phone he was tied to during the workweek. Because of a recent change in leadership at the research center, the historic Merriam Laboratory was being put through a cleaning frenzy. As with any political regime change, the new director wanted to make a gesture of renewal. Out with the old and in with the new by way of dumping an attic full of old note cards and field notes to make room for the current and next generation of biologists who needed room for their old laptop computers and floppy disks. On Saturdays my father would make the one-hour drive to Patuxent from our home to comb through the old file boxes stacked by the Dumpster, beating the Monday morning trash pickup and squirreling away boxes of unpublished, original reports from Aldo Leopold, letters from C. Hart Merriam, and other irreplaceable historical documents from an era before compact discs and hard drives.
“Last weekend I found a box of ferret pictures you might like to see,” he said, knowing I had been pestering him lately about getting a pet ferret, a European polecat from the local pet store just like my neighbor, Brian Peel, had.
“Wild ferrets?”
“Yes, very rare black-footed ferrets from out West. Much neater than the ones at the pet store.”
My only experience with the West as a child was books and movies and the Zuni fetishes my mother had purchased for me on winter trips to Arizona with her sister. On her latest trip she bought a book for me telling of the ceremonial symbolism of the fetishes. It was a form of religion I could wrap my head around, animals at its center, based upon the land.
At night, I would set up the Zuni fetishes in my attic bedroom—small carved rock animals that I kept packed in a woven pine needle bowl with a tight-fitting lid. I wrapped the smooth, polished, brightly colored stone animals in scraps of leather I found in the basement and bits of sage mailed from my uncle’s ranch in Wyoming. I would gently unwrap the fetishes, remembering the species and stories but also creating my own as I lined them up on a table by the window. Hearing the slowly lapping waves on the Chesapeake Bay through the old oak trees outside my window, I would light candles, turn out the lights, and feel the individual fetishes in my hand as the book said, squeezing tight and letting go, closing my eyes and trying to let go, hoping for a vision.
With no luck, I would repeat the ceremony on another night, arranging the figurines in a different order, leaving some in the bowl. I thought it might be my trappings that blocked the spirits. I tried burning some of the sage to clear the air as I had seen in movies. I took my shirt off to clear a pathway to my heart, where I was told my soul resided. Seconds felt like minutes that felt like hours as I waited, hurriedly blowing out candles and putting my shirt on only as I heard my father coming up the stairs.
The visions never came.
After I finished my sandwich I went up to the attic of Nelson Lab. It was the only room without the bustle of scientists typing on keyboards. My father gave me the padlock combination, and fixing the numbers in place, I released the white-painted door that stuck tight from the humidity and lack of use. Inside, the attic was dark, wooden, stuffy with the smell of old paper and dry, rotted leather. A thirty-foot row of wooden file card cabinets filled the middle of the room and contained five hundred thousand index cards with bird observations dating back more than a hundred years. Metal cabinets filled with measuring tapes, binoculars, and metal tree tags lined the outside walls and made small alcoves. Old cardboard boxes were stacked in corners, filled with field notebooks and research reports from projects finished or abandoned—questions were answered, funding ran out, forests were cut down, researchers moved on, species went extinct.
I walked a lap around the island of wooden bird-card file cabinets and found the stack of cardboard boxes he had set to the side, marked “Do Not Discard.” Inside the first box, I found a stack of papers with original large glossy black-and-white photographs of a black-footed ferret. There were also letters, memos, and reports from Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Saskatchewan, Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, Utah, and Kansas. The oldest was a typed letter by a South Dakota trapper, Ralph Block, who reported his first ferret sighting in 1947: “The first observance I ever had of one was in northeast Nebraska, Knox County. I trapped this animal with a steel trap and wondered what this strange looking animal was and thought this was a freak mink. I had not entirely concluded this idea, but sent it in with a shipment of furs to a fur house, Sears Roebuck. In a few days my check for the other furs came along with a notation on the grading chart, noting that there was also a pelt of no value.”
• • •
Each day, after a morning of trapping voles, I would return to the attic and stay late into the afternoon while my father worked in the office below. I read through dozens of letters from farmers, ranchers, housewives, and professors. All of them reported to have seen a ferret on their property or crossing a road at some point during the 1950s and ’60s. Most were obviously inaccurate, and all were nearly impossible to verify or highly questionable, like this letter from John Francis:
About 6 years ago in August or September I took a trip up to near Lemmon S Dakota to drive a tractor. I worked this plow and tractor work 3 seasons. On one trip I visited a coffee buddy’s cousin that had migrated to there from Lewis, KS. He had a real type sheep ranch, very well kept with clean water by well and pump and beautiful fields of alfalfa and grass and wheat. I drove my car to his sheep ranch and visited. I had an auto track for about a mile with thick weeds bumper high. I was watching my trail in, when a possible ferret or weasel of kind jumped about ten feet ahead of me and cleared both trails in a 2-second of time and into the thick high grass. I could only see that he looked like a long stove pipe, and was used to a car or pickup, and was out of sight.
The letters by trapper Ralph Block were consistently the most reputable and interesting. I pictured a short, stocky man who would always be found in plaid shirt and cowboy boots, sporting a mustache and driving an old pickup truck covered with a film of dust from prairie dirt roads. In 1949, Ralph was hired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for predator and rodent control, stationed out of Isabel, South Dakota. He began to spend extended amounts of time on prairie dog colonies as he carried out his job to exterminate them. He submitted typed stories of his interactions with black-footed ferrets, making repeated trips to see them during his trips to “clean up” remaining prairie dogs after a poisoning event and occasionally on his weekends and free time. A cowboy conservation biologist, he was killing the West while also beautifully recording its biota for posterity. After a week of reading, I concluded that Ralph had come up with more sightings than all of the others whose reports were in the file.
In the spring of 1950 my second observation of a black-footed ferret was at a location about 14 miles southwest of Isabel on what is called Corn Creek in a large prairie dog town, on the Forrest Thompson Ranch, Section 24 T. 15 R.21. This was an adult
