profusion of blood stains was a good sign.
He walked among the sheep. As many as a hundred carcasses littered the hill, most of them ripped open by the activity of coyotes and vultures. The ground was torn up. He lifted a carcass with his boot and uncovered soil discolored by a dark pitch smelling of ammonia. That was better. He moved on in this pastoral setting until he found a ewe less disturbed than the rest. Although she was disemboweled, her intestines strung out on the grass, a fluttering of her nostrils showed she was still clinically alive. Paine squatted next to her. Some vultures landed to pick at farther away sheep. He paid them no attention.
The forward area of the ewe’s chest was striped by shallow gouges seeping blood. Paine held a jar upside down almost flush over the wounds. Between the open lid and the wounds he stroked a paper card. A minuscule activity began developing in the jar. He moved the jar and card over all the wounds and then screwed the top on the jar. He fixed the jeweler’s loupe in his right eye and held the jar up to the sky. Eight, nine fleas hopped against the glass.
There were over two hundred different species of fleas in North America alone. Magnified, the parasites of the Order Siphonaptera shared a basic equipment: wingless bodies, powerful legs, bristles in rows, and the sucking mouths that bestowed their Latin name. There were four species in the jar. Mice that had nibbled on the wounds had left rodent fleas, Xenopsylla Cheopis, eyeless fleas with double rows of bristles. The coyote that had ripped open the ewe had deposited two species: common Dog Fleas, rounded, with a moustache-like mouth comb; and blunt-headed, eyed Carnivore Fleas. There were two specimens of the last species. They had eyeless, helmet-shaped heads. A mouth comb like mimic teeth. Bat Fleas.
For a moment, Paine was stunned by the magnitude of his luck. Overhead, the vultures watched him squat by other sheep and collect more specimens, and when he stowed them in his truck and drove away the birds all descended again through the rising air of the thermal to finish that work nature designed them for.
Controlling his excitement, Paine drove slowly.
Life was unfair. Usually, only the poor and geniuses realized this but Hayden Paine was admitted to the fact with his father’s death. It was Joe Paine who was the really first-rate immunologist, Joe Paine who back in ’44 led the Rockefeller Institute team that identified a mysterious paralytic disease killing hundreds of thousands of cattle annually as vampire-transmitted rabies. All the other authorities claimed the bat was an impossible vector. Under a microscope, the so-called derriengue virus didn’t look exactly like rabies. Besides, rabies invariably killed its host, yet the majority of vampires thrived on the virus that infected them. It took Joe Paine to prove that the rabies virus had mutated under the influence of its bizarre host and that the vampire alone of all species on earth was not vulnerable to rabies.
Joe Paine’s abilities hardly ended there. Chee was terrified of plague? In 1967, the Paines, father and son, were in Saigon to study a disease raging among the refugees of the beleaguered city. Joe Paine overcame American and Vietnamese obstructions to identify the disease as bubonic plague carried by rat-infested rice. A small item among the horrors of war: there were 5,547 cases of plague in Vietnam in 1967.
But always for Hayden Paine it came back to the caves. He suffered from claustrophobia. One step into the dark and his heart doubled its beat. The condition had come on gradually, accreting with experience. In the first year of vampire work with his father, the claustrophobia paraded as nervous energy. The second year, without understanding why—he’d been on spelunking expeditions with his father even as a boy—Paine had trouble breathing. By the end of the second year, adrenaline flowing like nitro through a bloodstream dark with
He walked among the sheep. As many as a hundred carcasses littered the hill, most of them ripped open by the activity of coyotes and vultures. The ground was torn up. He lifted a carcass with his boot and uncovered soil discolored by a dark pitch smelling of ammonia. That was better. He moved on in this pastoral setting until he found a ewe less disturbed than the rest. Although she was disemboweled, her intestines strung out on the grass, a fluttering of her nostrils showed she was still clinically alive. Paine squatted next to her. Some vultures landed to pick at farther away sheep. He paid them no attention.
The forward area of the ewe’s chest was striped by shallow gouges seeping blood. Paine held a jar upside down almost flush over the wounds. Between the open lid and the wounds he stroked a paper card. A minuscule activity began developing in the jar. He moved the jar and card over all the wounds and then screwed the top on the jar. He fixed the jeweler’s loupe in his right eye and held the jar up to the sky. Eight, nine fleas hopped against the glass.
There were over two hundred different species of fleas in North America alone. Magnified, the parasites of the Order Siphonaptera shared a basic equipment: wingless bodies, powerful legs, bristles in rows, and the sucking mouths that bestowed their Latin name. There were four species in the jar. Mice that had nibbled on the wounds had left rodent fleas, Xenopsylla Cheopis, eyeless fleas with double rows of bristles. The coyote that had ripped open the ewe had deposited two species: common Dog Fleas, rounded, with a moustache-like mouth comb; and blunt-headed, eyed Carnivore Fleas. There were two specimens of the last species. They had eyeless, helmet-shaped heads. A mouth comb like mimic teeth. Bat Fleas.
For a moment, Paine was stunned by the magnitude of his luck. Overhead, the vultures watched him squat by other sheep and collect more specimens, and when he stowed them in his truck and drove away the birds all descended again through the rising air of the thermal to finish that work nature designed them for.
Controlling his excitement, Paine drove slowly.
Life was unfair. Usually, only the poor and geniuses realized this but Hayden Paine was admitted to the fact with his father’s death. It was Joe Paine who was the really first-rate immunologist, Joe Paine who back in ’44 led the Rockefeller Institute team that identified a mysterious paralytic disease killing hundreds of thousands of cattle annually as vampire-transmitted rabies. All the other authorities claimed the bat was an impossible vector. Under a microscope, the so-called derriengue virus didn’t look exactly like rabies. Besides, rabies invariably killed its host, yet the majority of vampires thrived on the virus that infected them. It took Joe Paine to prove that the rabies virus had mutated under the influence of its bizarre host and that the vampire alone of all species on earth was not vulnerable to rabies.
Joe Paine’s abilities hardly ended there. Chee was terrified of plague? In 1967, the Paines, father and son, were in Saigon to study a disease raging among the refugees of the beleaguered city. Joe Paine overcame American and Vietnamese obstructions to identify the disease as bubonic plague carried by rat-infested rice. A small item among the horrors of war: there were 5,547 cases of plague in Vietnam in 1967.
But always for Hayden Paine it came back to the caves. He suffered from claustrophobia. One step into the dark and his heart doubled its beat. The condition had come on gradually, accreting with experience. In the first year of vampire work with his father, the claustrophobia paraded as nervous energy. The second year, without understanding why—he’d been on spelunking expeditions with his father even as a boy—Paine had trouble breathing. By the end of the second year, adrenaline flowing like nitro through a bloodstream dark with
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