from Prospérité.
Barely a week after her return to Senegal, she typed her pseudonym, “Caroline Yi,” into a news-search engine and found over sixty links to English-language sites alone. The activist websites were already humming with talk of resurrecting the boycott that Sanderson Tropical Timber had narrowly avoided eighteen months earlier. Some green groups, the ones that had praised Sanderson’s voluntary reforms, had balked at first, but others were coming around. Amy knew she had made this happen, and that made it easier to think of her lacerations as battle scars.
Caroline Yi’s story about a strange animal carcass on the logging truck had met with less enthusiasm. She’d posted a description of the creature on a site called PrimateWeb, which was a forum for primatologists, tropical forest ecologists, physical anthropologists, and any other professionals whose research involved primates.
After a week of checking responses to her request for help identifying the animal, Amy was glad she hadn’t used her real name.
The more polite comments on PrimateWeb were gentle suggestions that she’d seen a deformed monkey, or some other kind of carcass that had been so battered as to become unrecognizable. One person said she was probably sick with a tropical fever and had hallucinated it. Another recommended that she quit sneaking handfuls of the medicine man’s magic bark.
So screw th em all if they couldn’t see that she was handing them what might be the find of a lifetime. Let someone else rediscover the creatures in the future and take the credit, instead of these skeptics. She had other things to think about.
Now that she’d done some damage to Sanderson Tropical Timber, and her wetlands work here in Senegal was done, she could forget about Sanderson and Equateur and put her time to different use. For starters, there was a group of Mexican and U.S. activists working hard to slow down commercial overfishing in the Sea of Cortez. Amy had helped them out before, and it looked like they were hurting for cash to keep up the fight. She planned to meet with their organizers once she got back to California, and she would head back there as soon as her battered face looked a little less shocking.
CHAPTER THREE
In a less than affluent patch of Oakland, Stephen Stokes’s cats woke him up and complained that breakfast was late.
He couldn’t remember what he’d just been dreaming, but knew it had something to do with his friend Mario Torres, so it probably involved little devil-monkeys creeping out of basements in the desert. Some nights he dreamed of seeing them appear in corners of the rented storage space that his nieces called the “orange garage,” because of the color of its roll-down door. The orange garage was where he kept the hardly-explored and partially-ruined bundle of drawings, letters, and documents from Baja.
According to Mario, the Mexican authorities were satisfied that the discovery in the old mission consisted of nothing more than what he’d shown them during their visit, but Stephen had remained cautious. If anyone still doubted Mario’s story, it would be easy enough to find out that Stephen and the clergyman had been phoning and emailing each other, and that Stephen had bought Mexican car insurance just a few days before Mario was questioned. If the right authorities on both sides of the border were ever persuaded that this might be a case of trafficking in stolen artifacts, someone might well show up at Stephen’s door with a search warrant.
So the goods had gone into hiding. The storage space contained keepsakes common to Stephen’s extended family, and had been rented in the name of his cousin, who had a different surname. Although Stephen contributed to the cost of the storage space, no bills for the rental came to his house, and nothing in any records showed a connection to the orange garage.
And the inquiries had come, starting with a couple of voicemail
Barely a week after her return to Senegal, she typed her pseudonym, “Caroline Yi,” into a news-search engine and found over sixty links to English-language sites alone. The activist websites were already humming with talk of resurrecting the boycott that Sanderson Tropical Timber had narrowly avoided eighteen months earlier. Some green groups, the ones that had praised Sanderson’s voluntary reforms, had balked at first, but others were coming around. Amy knew she had made this happen, and that made it easier to think of her lacerations as battle scars.
Caroline Yi’s story about a strange animal carcass on the logging truck had met with less enthusiasm. She’d posted a description of the creature on a site called PrimateWeb, which was a forum for primatologists, tropical forest ecologists, physical anthropologists, and any other professionals whose research involved primates.
After a week of checking responses to her request for help identifying the animal, Amy was glad she hadn’t used her real name.
The more polite comments on PrimateWeb were gentle suggestions that she’d seen a deformed monkey, or some other kind of carcass that had been so battered as to become unrecognizable. One person said she was probably sick with a tropical fever and had hallucinated it. Another recommended that she quit sneaking handfuls of the medicine man’s magic bark.
So screw th em all if they couldn’t see that she was handing them what might be the find of a lifetime. Let someone else rediscover the creatures in the future and take the credit, instead of these skeptics. She had other things to think about.
Now that she’d done some damage to Sanderson Tropical Timber, and her wetlands work here in Senegal was done, she could forget about Sanderson and Equateur and put her time to different use. For starters, there was a group of Mexican and U.S. activists working hard to slow down commercial overfishing in the Sea of Cortez. Amy had helped them out before, and it looked like they were hurting for cash to keep up the fight. She planned to meet with their organizers once she got back to California, and she would head back there as soon as her battered face looked a little less shocking.
CHAPTER THREE
In a less than affluent patch of Oakland, Stephen Stokes’s cats woke him up and complained that breakfast was late.
He couldn’t remember what he’d just been dreaming, but knew it had something to do with his friend Mario Torres, so it probably involved little devil-monkeys creeping out of basements in the desert. Some nights he dreamed of seeing them appear in corners of the rented storage space that his nieces called the “orange garage,” because of the color of its roll-down door. The orange garage was where he kept the hardly-explored and partially-ruined bundle of drawings, letters, and documents from Baja.
According to Mario, the Mexican authorities were satisfied that the discovery in the old mission consisted of nothing more than what he’d shown them during their visit, but Stephen had remained cautious. If anyone still doubted Mario’s story, it would be easy enough to find out that Stephen and the clergyman had been phoning and emailing each other, and that Stephen had bought Mexican car insurance just a few days before Mario was questioned. If the right authorities on both sides of the border were ever persuaded that this might be a case of trafficking in stolen artifacts, someone might well show up at Stephen’s door with a search warrant.
So the goods had gone into hiding. The storage space contained keepsakes common to Stephen’s extended family, and had been rented in the name of his cousin, who had a different surname. Although Stephen contributed to the cost of the storage space, no bills for the rental came to his house, and nothing in any records showed a connection to the orange garage.
And the inquiries had come, starting with a couple of voicemail
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