The Ministry for the Future

86

Back in Zurich, Mary emerged from a couple of weeks of intense work, every waking moment right at the face of the seam, so to speak. She was ready for a break. Frank May was now out of jail, living in co-op housing near the jail; what was he doing? How was he doing? She had lost track of him now that he was out, and was almost afraid to check in.

“I’m doing okay,” he told her when she called. “Hey listen, I’m going to the Alps tomorrow to look for chamois. Rupicapra. It’s some kind of goat-antelope, and the maps show they’re all over up there. Do you want to come?”

“Look at animals?” Mary said dubiously. “Like at the zoo?”

An impatient snick. “Except no zoo.”

One could use tracking apps to see where the creatures were hanging out, then go there and probably see some. He had done it before and liked it. There were some above Flims, it was a nice region.

“I guess so,” Mary said.

So they met at Hauptbahnhof just before the 6 AM departure to Chur, and an hour later, after eating breakfast on the train, sitting silently next to each other, uncomfortably aware perhaps that they had never done anything like this before, they got off and switched to the narrow-gauge train that headed upvalley to the Vorderrhein. This was a much slower train, but they didn’t stay on it long, getting off and taking a waiting bus up to Flims. A cable car from the station there lofted them high up into a big south-facing basin, elevation about 2,000 meters where they got left off. It was 8:30 AM and they were in the Alps. Mary had told her bodyguards in advance to leave them once they got on the trail, and they did; as so often, there was a little restaurant at the cable car’s upper station, and they would wait there.

She and Frank found themselves hiking up into a big indentation in the Alpine range that formed the northern sidewall of the Rhine River’s uppermost headwaters. Near the end of the last ice age, after the ice had melted out of this part of the valley, a massive landslide, one of the biggest ever known to have occurred, had slumped down this south-facing wall. The entire village of Flims rested on the flat top of the remains of this landslide. Above it the green alps filled overlapping stacked bowls of rock, rising more and more steeply to the Tschingelhörner ridge, a wall of steep gray crags with a horizontal crack running through it. This crack was so deep that it had created a gap in the range, a giant window of sorts through which one could see a big patch of sky, well under the gray crags above. Yet another strange Alpine feature resulting from millions of years of ice on rock.

Trails ran up the green alps under the crags. Mary and Frank ascended one that led them westward, away from ski lifts and farms and other human sites, toward wilder territory, what in the Alps passed for wilderness. The wild creatures of the Alps couldn’t afford to be too picky, Frank told her as they hiked, when it came to hanging out near people; if you weren’t on sheer vertical rock, people were going to be passing by pretty often.

Though it looked like a gentle upward slope, this was partly because the gray cliffs ahead and above were so steep. In fact their ascent was quite a slog of a climb. By the time they got up into one of the highest bowl meadows, floored with a rumpled carpet of short grass, studded with rocks and spangled with alpine flowers, they were tired and hungry, and the sun was well overhead. They sat on a low boulder and ate.

The meadow was littered with big fallen chunks of the ridge above, gray boulders that had detached and crashed down and rolled onto the meadow; or perhaps they were erratics, conveyed by the ice of a long-departed glacier and dropped there when the ice melted. As they sat on their low rock, eating their bahnhof sandwiches and drinking from water bottles, they were rewarded for their silence by a first sighting of alpine creatures: in this case, marmots.

These were fat gray things, like groundhogs or maybe badgers; Mary didn’t have much basis for comparison. The color of their fur no doubt made predators take them for rocks, including the hawks soaring overhead. Perhaps because of these overseers, the marmots seemed to have a tendency to stay still; except when moving from one spot to another, they were as motionless as the rocks they were on. They spoke to each other by way of high staccato whistles. As Mary and Frank listened, it became clear that this must be a language much like any other.

“Down in Flims they speak Romantsch,” Frank mentioned.

The marmots did not mind them talking, Mary saw.

Frank saw this too, and went on. They had heard a little Romantsch in the bus on their ride up from the train station to Flims, he said. It was like Italian and German put in a blender, they agreed. They shared their pleasure in the story of how Romantsch had become one of Switzerland’s four national languages, by way of a rebuke to Hitler. Thus the national myth, and they were both inclined to believe it.

The sun beat on the meadow, causing it to shimmer. It was warm in the sun. The marmots got comfortable with them sitting nearby, even though they had apparently occupied a marmot outpost; piles of little dry turds were clustered in the cracks on the top of their boulder. Herbivores, by the looks of it.

Frank and Mary sat there like big marmots. They didn’t say much. Mary thought it a little dull. Then one of the younger marmots, judging by size and fineness of fur, ambled their way, unconcerned by their proximity. It stopped, reached out a forepaw, pulled all the grass stalks within its reach toward its face. This created a small cluster of tiny grass seeds clutched inside its forearm, which it then munched off the top of the stalks. It only took a few bites. When that gathering and eating was done, it let the topless grass blades spring back into position and moved on. Did it again. Then again.

Seeing this, then looking around the meadow at the level of the grasstops, Mary suddenly realized that the little beast’s source of food was almost infinite. At least now, when the grass was seeding. Probably it was the same for all the alpine herbivores.

Frank agreed when she mentioned this. The marmots would eat all day every day, until they were fat enough to get through the coming winter. They hibernated through the winter like little bears, tucked in holes under the snow and living off stored fat, their metabolisms slowed to a crawl. In the spring they would emerge to another summer of eating.

Then a clutch of larger animals appeared over a low ridge. Ah ha! Chamois!

Probably these weren’t the animals Frank had seen online, as none wore a radio collar. If that was in fact how GPS got attached to animals these days; she didn’t know. Frank was watching them closely.

They were odd-looking beasts. Round-bodied, short-necked, short-legged, snub-faced. Short curving horns. They had the rectangularly pupilled eyes of a goat. Devil’s eyes. After Frank had proposed this trip, she had read they were “goat-antelopes,” whatever that meant. Obviously they were their own beast, neither goat nor antelope, and not even much like the other species in their same family. The youngsters were slender and hornless, and stayed near their moms. They nibbled, looked around, walked calmly over rocks from one patch of grass to the next. They regarded Frank and Mary curiously. She was surprised that they seemed so unconcerned to see people; there were Swiss hunters, or so she had heard, and these beasts were among the most commonly hunted. Why were they so unafraid?

She muttered this question to Frank.

“Why should they be afraid?” he replied.

“We might shoot them.”

“We don’t have any guns.”

“Do they know that?”

“They’ve got eyes.”

“But have they seen guns before? Wouldn’t that put them off people entirely?”

“Probably. So maybe they haven’t seen any guns.”

“I find that surprising.”

“The Alps are wild.”

“I thought you said they weren’t.”

He thought about it. “They are and they aren’t. Lots of people up here, yes. But the Alps can kill you quick. They’re savage, really. Didn’t you say you went over one of the high passes?”

“I did.”

“That should have taught you.”

She nodded, thinking it over. “That was definitely wild. Even savage, yeah—if the weather had turned, sure. Nothing but rock up there.”

“And that was a pass. There are lots of places up here where people don’t ever go. They’re really hard to get to, and they don’t lead anywhere. If you look on the maps you see them all over.”

“Not like this, then,” Mary said, gesturing around. On the grass under their boulder lay scattered about twenty varieties of alpine flower, either tucked into the grass or waving over it, flowers at different heights for different plants, so that the air was layered by color: at the top yellow, waving over a white layer; lower still a blue layer; then the grass, spangled with a variety of ground flowers.

“Not like this.” Frank smiled.

Mary saw that with a start; it seemed to her that she had never before seen him smile. Flower-filled meadow, wild beasts grazing all careless of them, the young ones literally gamboling, defining the word as they popped into the air and staggered around on landing, then did it again. Gray wall above, with a window in it to make it Alpine-strange. Blue sky. It was definitely a cheerful sight. Even a little hallucinogenic. Breeze flowing over the flowers like a tide, so that they bobbed in place. The young marmot still there near them continued to draw grass stalks to its mouth. The oily sheen of the bunched seeds it had caught in its paw gleamed in the sun. Quick little fans of food. The demon eyes of the chamois just a bit farther away, placidly chewing their cuds, unafraid of anything.

“I like this,” she said.

“Seeing the animals?”

“Yes.”

The slight smile returned. “Me too.”

They watched for a while.

“Have you seen many?” she asked him. “Animals in the wild, I mean?”

“Not many. I’d like to see more. So far almost all the ones I’ve seen have been up here in this basin, or basins like it. These guys, mainly. Marmots and chamois. Once an ibex, I think it was. Another time something like a marten. I looked it up later and it seemed like it must have been a marten. It was by a creek up here, with some trees on the other bank. It was running around like a crazy person, back and forth. I couldn’t understand what it was doing. Really fast, but erratic. Didn’t seem to be hunting or building a den, or whatever. Just dashing. Slinky thing with dark fur. Very intent on its own business. I wanted to pull my phone out of my pocket and take a picture, but I didn’t want to spook it. I didn’t want it to notice me. So I stayed still.”

“How did that end?”

“I had to leave to make the last chairlift.”

She laughed. “That’s the Swiss for you.”

“So true.” He plucked a grass stem from under him and began using it as a toothpick. “What about you?”

She shook her head. “Galway and Dublin aren’t really places for wildlife. I liked going to the zoo when I was a girl. That wasn’t quite the same.”

“Yes. What you would want is animals around you where you live.”

“Probably so. That’s what they’re working on in California. They’ve got so much land there, and they’ve been rewilding for a long time. My contacts there called it the Serengeti of North America, but they were referring to before Europeans arrived. It’s something they’re trying to get back.”

“Nice for them. But we live in Zurich.”

“Right. I don’t know. I walk the paths on the Zuriberg pretty often, but I’ve not seen any animals up there. I’m a bit surprised, now that I think of it. It’s quite a big forest.”

He shook his head. “Surrounded by city. That doesn’t work.”

“So they need habitat corridors, you mean. Do those work?”

“I think so. If they’re wide enough, and connect up big enough areas.”

“That’s what they’re doing in California.”

“In lots of places, I gather. I think it might work in Switzerland too. Although these beasties might not like it if wolves come back.”

“Is that who used to eat them?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t imagine the Swiss getting on with wolves either.”

“You never know. I read that with their glaciers going away, they’re thinking of reforesting some lower alps, and helping start plants on the exposed glacial basins. That would make more wolf zone, I think. Wolves need forests, but they’re good in open country too, and there’s going to be more rocky empty areas exposed higher up, with marmots and moles and squirrels. And those areas will be pretty high, and as far from people as they can get in this country.”

She shook her head. “Hard to believe wolves could come back.”

“No more so than these guys. At this point, every wild creature is unlikely. It’s going to be tough to come back.”

“Not if the Half Earthers have their way.”

He nodded. “I like that plan.”

They sat there. No reason to leave. Nowhere else they could get to that afternoon would be better. So they sat. Frank chewed a grass stalk. Mary watched the animals, glanced at him. His body was relaxed. He sat there like a cat. Even the marmots and chamois were not as relaxed as he was at that moment. They were busy eating. And indeed that was what would get Mary and Frank off their rock; hunger, and the need to pee.

And darkness. The sun hit the ridge to the west and immediately the air felt cooler. Shadows fell across the meadow.

Frank glanced up at the ridge, at her.

“What say?”

“We should get back down I guess. There’s a last cable car here too.”

“True.”

They stood, stretched. The chamois looked up at them, wandered off. Without appearing to hurry, they were soon across the meadow; and when they had gotten among the rocks bordering the meadow, they disappeared. It was like a magic trick. Even trying, even knowing they were there, Mary couldn’t see them.

The marmots didn’t seem to care that they were moving. Then one whistled, and the young one who had been feeding near them galumped away and ducked under a boulder. Frank looked up, pointed. A bird far overhead, soaring. Hawk, maybe.

They started toward the trail that led down to the cable car. Then Frank lurched forward and fell on his face.

Mary cried out, rushed to him, crouched by his side. He grunted something, looking stunned. Put his hands to the ground and pushed himself up, rolled into a sitting position, sat there with his head in his hands. Felt his face, his jaw.

“Are you all right?” Mary exclaimed.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What happened!”

“I don’t know. I fell.”