Previous: Chapter One: A Visitor from the Sky
Dinner was served in the Mess, and then it was time for Frances’ talk. One of the ranch hands, Merl, drew the window shades and darkened the lights. MaryLiz introduced Dr Stapledon, then yielded the floor to Frances.
“I first found the castings while doing wildlife inventory in the estuary of the Rio Grande, a few kilometers south of where we’re sitting. First slide please.”
A nest of dark colored pellets, animal droppings. Frances had removed a glove to indicate scale. “Rio Grande is Spanish for ‘Big River’. It’s shores are grasslands, tending to marshland and mud flats, the closer you get to the river. The overall feature is more than a mile – several kilometers – wide, here at the Gulf of Mexico.”
Though new to Jo, Frances presented the information as if it were news to everyone in the rooom. There was a suppressed sigh among the ranchers who considered themselves as familiar with Frances’ ‘Poop Talk’ as anyone needed to be.
“First, I thought it was hare - the animal - or maybe deer, because of the grassy composition. Then I did moisture analysis, and it’s way too dry to be hare. Then there’s the size distribution – next slide please – here’s frequency versus mass and size. If it were deer, we’d expect to find adult-sized coprolites, but the only ones found are no bigger than those cast by juveniles.
Frances glanced at Jo, who sat stock still, seeming to stare at a point several meters behind the screen.
“Ten days ago, we deployed fifty wildlife cameras with pretty good coverage of a ten hectare plot, smack dead in the center of what some of us are calling Mystery Poop Valley.”
A floorboard creaked as one of the ranchers leaned forwards towards the screen. This part was actually pretty cool.
“We used a wireless repeater to transmit ten of the cameras’ views live. The rest were set to record to local storage. This is what we saw.”
MaryLiz glanced at Jo. The Aussie sat expressionless, but an astronaut could see that the scientist was breathing quite deeply.
The screen lit up with a matrix of ten camera views. Trees of a ghostly pale green were visible in most of the scenes, framing a lush river valley, covered in grass. A clock in one corner of the screen ticked off playback time faster than reality: this was time lapse photography.
“Nothing much happens until about four in the morning. And then…”
The playback slowed to real time as one camera view expanded to fill the entire screen. The room’s audio system crackled to life with the captured audio. Jo could hear a rough scraping against the shell of the camera.
Then, on the screen, blurred inside the near limit of the camera’s depth of field, a finger? And then two, and then, nothing. Something was inspecting the camera.
A low creature hopped into view of the camera. Like a hare, with powerful haunches. Big as a juvenile deer, but stockier. And no hare, nor deer, stood on two legs like that, not just like that.
The animal turned, and looked towards the camera. Jo mouthed the word no. The creature hopped towards the camera. Jo shrunk backwards involuntarily as the near field characteristics of the lens kicked in, grotesquely distorting the scale of the animal’s outstretched hands.
The identification was one any undergrad in Jo’s field would have aced, even given poorer imaging. Unmistakable.
Suddenly, the view showed only the pre-dawn sky, as the camera, and the stake it was mounted on, were yanked from the soil. Blurred flashes of undergrowth. The audio crackled as the camera was dragged along the ground.
Then the video ended, in a blurred freeze frame of a tuft of grass.
“That’s the camera going out… being dragged out… of the range of our repeater.”
The screen now showed nine views, those of the surviving cameras. A few seconds ticked by. Then, one by one, each of the remaining live cameras began to meet the same fate. In the field of view of the first two cameras to be snatched, Jo could again see occasional glimpses of the thief. The agile hands, the facial markings, the attentive ears…..
Two more cameras disappeared, then three. The final pair lasted a good five minutes longer before meeting the same fate, within ten seconds of each other.
Frances nodded to Merl, who raised the room lights. The presentation was over. The question hung in the air.
“So,” said Jo Stapledon. “You’ve got a wallaby.”
“Not a wallaby, several wallabies. The three cameras that were taken at virtually the same time were thirty meters apart. Wallabies are fast, but not that fast. It’s not just one.”
“Three wallabies,” breathed Jo. “What about the cameras that weren’t livestreaming? Did you recover them?”
“As soon as daylight hit, we drove back out to the valley to see what they might have captured, the cameras we didn’t have live radio bandwidth for.”
“OK, hit me.”
“We found nothing. That is to say, there were no cameras. The wallabies took all forty, without exception and without a trace.”
“And that’s when you called me?”
“Who else should we have called?”
Jo was still gobsmacked. “It’s truly unexpected….”
“Yes, it’s truly unexpected.”, exclaimed Frances. “Fifty wildlife cameras ain’t cheap. Some of them were antiques, ex-NASA, and are irreplaceable. If I knew the little buggers were going to take the whole shooting match, I’d have left them a note so they could steal the repeater, too.”
“Where’s the repeater?” Jo asked.
“It’s on a test bench in the shop,” said Frances.
“No,” said Jo, “I mean, where was it deployed on the night in question?”
“Oh. I tied it to a tree branch. Along with a fourteen hour battery. They didn’t take that, either.”
“What kind of tree?”
“I don’t know, a kinda scrubby looking Texas one. Ask me more about Zoology.”
“Was it one that a child could climb?”
“Sure, a motivated one. I climbed it myself a little bit to hang the repeater up there: I needed line of sight back to the Ranch.”
“OK,” said Jo. “I’m trying to rule out tree kangaroo.”
“Why can’t we rule out every kangaroo? In south Texas? Why are they here? What are they doing?”
It was becoming clear to the ranch hands, that, even with the planet’s greatest experts in the room, the group was out of their collective depth.
It was MaryLiz’s meeting to chair. The astronaut took in a gentle breath, stretched, and breathed out without a sigh. Jo could sense that this was a signal for the room to go quiet, which is what happened.
“Let’s focus on what we know. What are our data sources? The poop and the cameras. The cameras are gone. Where did they go? How can we find out?”
Jo turned to Frances.
“I’m gonna wanna see your poop.”
Frances smirked. “I can’t wait to show you. This way, please.”
“Frances, just a second,” said MaryLiz. “Is there some way we could get a fix on where those cameras all went, from examining the repeater?”
“Ask a network engineer. I do animals. I gotta go show Jo my poop.”
“Capiche,” said MaryLiz. “Go do you. I know someone we can call. Someone who thinks outside the box.”
Frances’ face brightened. “You gonna call Rad?”
“Yep,” said MaryLiz, “I’m gonna call Rad.”
Frances laughed, and sighed. “Rad.”