Bat Census

Bat Census


– They are lost, Richard thought. – Either they are completely and dangerously lost or I’m sunstruck and hallucinating.

Richard emerged from the oven-like alcove carved in the flank of conical hill and saw the women and their car two-hundred yards down the slope. The car sat on the edge of the jeep-track mauled into the side of the slope. It was a city-car, sleek and low-slung and unsuited to desert exploration. The hubcaps of vehicle were fogged with dust and the car was dirt-brown and dirt-red to the bottoms of its windows. Both doors on the driver’s side of the car were open and the sun was positioned to draw a long shadow from the vehicle out across the desert rising toward where Richard stood near the abandoned mine. The women were sitting next to the car, crouched in the shadow that it cast, a blanket or table-cloth spread out on the stony, barren ground.

It had been 115 degrees earlier, when the sun was higher in the sky, but, now, Richard estimated the temperature to be about 100. The desert stretched in all directions, featureless, undulating pyramidal hills that the wind had scoured until they were as smooth as the knuckles of your fist with the skin stretched taut over bone. You could look and look and it was all the same until your eyes could see no more.

Richard’s jeep was parked a quarter-mile away in a sandy draw between two knolls. He dreaded the hike and felt the heat on his shoulders and in his chest. The sun fermented acids in the muscles of his hips and thighs and calves and it felt as if his sinew and tendons were floppy, half-melted. The heat made Richard feel as if he had run a long distance, sprinting most of the way, even though, in fact, he had only hiked a couple of miles, moving slowly and taking time to hydrate himself. The walk was the distance between the abandoned mine-shafts carved into the flattened conical hills, two or three drilled down around the crest of each knoll. Bats roosted in the old mines and Richard was making a census of the endangered animals for the State Department of Natural Resources. It seemed unjust to Richard that he couldn’t just amble back to his jeep on the other side of the ridge, but, now, was compelled by common decency to drag himself down the hill to the women, his footfalls on the slope jarring knee and ankle, the sun blazing against his eyes, to see what misadventure had brought them to this place.

Richard stepped into the full blast of the sun, emerging from the entry to the incline shaft, and the heat seemed to roar around him like a lion. He waved his arm and one of the women – there seemed to be three of them raised her hand and dangled it in the air like a limp flag. How much water did he have? Richard stepped backward into the shadow of the mine adit and leaning against the timber portal opened his backpack to check his canteen and water bottles. Then, gritting his teeth, he stepped back into the open and walked carefully, judging his pace and his stride against the slope’s disposition to pitch him forward, picking his way among the seared creosote bushes and the low hedges of cholla.

About halfway down the hill, Richard heard the women’s voices, submerged as if underwater, and the whisper of the car’s airconditioning. The women were huddled in the lea of the car, with the cool air coming from inside gliding over their shoulders. They were dressed identically, in loose black dresses, garments made from some synthetic substance that seemed half-melted and dull like bitumen tar. One of the women seemed to be about 60 years old and she sat with her bare, bony knees exposed in the open door at the car’s front seat. The other women were younger, perhaps in their late thirties, and they had pinched, severe faces, nervously looking up from the table-cloth spread beneath them to the older woman and, then, glancing to see Richard as he approached, measuring the distance between him and where they were crouched in the car’s shadow.

The older woman rose and approached Richard. She put out her hand to shake his as if they were meeting in an office somewhere or at a gathering of friends. Her skin was dry and papery. Richard noticed that the three women had their hair cut identically, tight helmets trimmed to expose their red, pointed ears and flattening out across the nape of their neck to make a kind of blonde fan. The color of the women’s hair was identical and Richard felt a tiny shudder of revulsion at that observation.

A wicker picnic hamper was open on the table-cloth and there were two bottles of champagne, one of them open, and a plate heaped with purplish, dewy-looking grapes, another plate shingled with slices of white and yellow cheese.

“Not a very good place for a picnic,” Richard said.

“How so?” the older woman asked.

“Too hot today,” Richard answered. “Too far from the main road.”

Richard stooped to squat on his haunches in the shade of the car.

“You must be lost,” he said.

“No, not at all,” the older woman said. “We’re okay,” one of the younger women added. The two younger women seemed to be sisters. One of them wore a chain around her neck from which a teardrop-shaped rose-colored crystal dangled. The other woman’s gold chain supported a purplish stone about the size of plum, probably amethyst.

“Are you hunting for rocks?” Richard asked. But as he spoke, he saw that the women were not wearing boots or, even, tennis shoes, but flat leather slippers.

“No, we’ve come for the mines,” the older woman said. He brushed sweat from her pale face. The women had ghost-white skin. Perhaps, they were pale because coated with the sandy dust from the road.

“Is your car okay?” Richard asked.

“Yes,” the older woman said. Richard shrugged: “I don’t think it’s prudent to run the engine and the air-conditioning. You’re using up your fuel.”

“We checked,” Rose-quartz crystal said. “We have enough fuel for the journey.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Rose-quartz said.

“I’ve been in the mines here,” Richard said. “Doing a bat census for the Conservation Administration. I’m a naturalist with the State.”

Amethyst’s eyes were wide and she extruded her upper lip with disgust. “Are there bats in the mines here?”

“Not as many as I had hoped,” Richard said. He pointed up the hill to the incline shaft from which he had come. “Pallid bats, two small colonies with about two dozen individuals each. I didn’t see any pups. Over there –“ He gestured across the swale to a several similarly shaped pyramidal hills. “...over there, I found some Mexican free-tailed bats, a few hundred, and some leaf-nosed bats roosting in the headworks. It’s a little sparse.”

“I don’t like bats,” Amethyst said.

“They are wonderful creatures,” Richard replied. “But some people are afraid of them.”

“I don’t like bats at all,” Amethyst said.

“We have a map of some of the mines,” the older woman said. “Our guide gave us the map.” She pointed at the barren stony knobs rising over the jeep-track. “Are these the Paradise Hills?”

“They are,” Richard said. “It’s a funny name, isn’t it?”

“It’s a good name,” Rose-Quartz said. The women’s eyes were red. Richard wondered if it was the glare of the sun or the biting silica dust or if they had been weeping.

“Would you like a glass of champagne?” Amethyst asked.

“Alcohol’s not a good idea out here,” Richard said. “It dehydrates you.”

The older woman had a map spread out across the front seat of the car, its edges stirring slightly in the cold breeze from the air-conditioner. Richard could see that it was a geographical survey map with a couple of the mine sites circled in red magic-marker.

“So this must be – if I’m reading the map right – ‘Pearly Gates Mine’. Am I right?” the older woman said.

“I think so,” Richard told her. “But I would have to check the map.”

She clutched at the map and pushed it toward Richard. He slid his sunglasses with the bifocal lenses down over his nose and peered at the map. It was annotated. Next to the circle around the pick-axe and hammer emblem marked “Pearly Gates,” someone had written “bottomless vertical shaft, quite wide.”

“You’re right,” Richard said. “And the information here –“ he stabbed his thumb at the emblem and the words. “–that’s right too. These old mines are incredibly dangerous. Up there, you get in past the twilight zone, to where you can’t see an inch in front of your face, and it’s pretty much level and, then, suddenly – no warning at all – the ground drops away, a vertical pit that goes down who knows how far, probably to ground water three or four-hundred feet below. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could fall into that hole and that would be the end. No one would even find your body.”

“Did you see that pit?” Rose-Quartz asked.

“Sure, I almost slid into myself,” Richard told them, wiping the sweat out of his eyes.

“Are there bats by the pit?” Amethyst said, her upper lip twisted a little, just the slightest snarl to her face.

“You go by them to get to the pit. You’ll smell the ammonia. But I don’t think you should go up there. It’s too dangerous,” Richard said. “And it’s illegal for anyone to molest the bats. There endangered species.”

“I don’t like bats,” Amethyst said.

“Their useful animals,” Richard said. “The pallid bats glean insects off the desert pavement. You know that their immune to the sting of a scorpion.”

“So there are scorpions too?” Amethyst asked.

“Lots of them,” Richard said.

The older woman pursed her lips. She lifted a flute of champagne to her mouth and drank deeply. Then, she caressed the throat of bottle, all sweaty in the chill coming from the car. “How wide is the shaft? The vertical shaft up there?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Richard said.

“If we went into that mine hand-in-hand, holding hands, would it be big enough to suck us all down at one time?” she asked. She poured champagne into her empty glass and topped off the glasses of the two women.

“I don’t know, probably,” Richard said. “That’s why you don’t want to be exploring these kinds of place without a guide.”

“We lost our guide,” the older woman said.

“What? He brought you out here and abandoned you.”

“Oh no,” Amethyst said. “Our guide would never abandon us.”

“So where is he?”

“You misunderstand,” the older woman said. Her voice trembled slightly. “We mean ‘guide’ in the sense of ‘teacher’ or ‘leader’.”

“I see,” Richard replied.

“He’s gone now,” the older woman said. “His body became weary and it dissolved around him and his spirit ascended, it went upward.”

“And he told us –“ Amethyst began.

“There’s no point in telling anyone what he told us,” the older woman said, interrupting her. “Outsiders won’t understand. They can’t understand.”

Amethyst pointed to the hill across the hollow empty land. “Is that a mine up there?” she asked. She aimed her hand at a gouge near the top of the hill.

“That’s the old ‘Elysium’ shaft,” Richard said.

“Are there bats in that mine?”

“A few. Mexican free-tailed bats.”

Amethyst said: “I don’t like to think of there being bats. Bats in the mines.”

The older woman said: “I want you to understand, kind stranger, that we are fine. That we are completely okay. We don’t need any help and we are certainly not lost in any way, shape, or form.”

“Your car isn’t exactly suited for this kind of terrain,” Richard said. “It’s not high-clearance. If you go farther down this track, you’ll get hung-up. And, even if you don’t get high-centered, the path goes over slabs of rock, lots of slabs where you have to navigate by cairns of piled-up stones. You can’t go any farther this way. You have to go back to the Highway.”

“Route 66,” the older woman said.

“Get your kicks on Route 66,” Rose-Quartz said.

“How did you get out here?” the older woman asked.

“My jeep is over the hill,” Richard said. “On another road.”

“We’re detaining you,” the older woman said. “We don’t want to detain you.”

“I’m concerned for your safety,” Richard replied. “This is unforgiving territory.”

“People vanish out here,” Amethyst said. “There’s no remnant. Not a trace left behind.”

“I suppose,” Richard said.

“A remnant can be misunderstood,” Rose-Quartz added.

“Completely misunderstood,” the older woman said. “You see we picked this mine because of the kiva. We can make a fire in the kiva and watch the stars.”

“You don’t want to be out here overnight.”

“The kiva makes this place sacred,” the older woman said. She pointed up the slope to a round indentation hacked into the hillside. The sun was low and outlined the round depression with a black elliptical shadow.

“That’s not a kiva,” Richard said. “It’s an ‘arrastre”– that is a place where they drove mules in a circle to haul a sledge that crushed rock to get at the ore.”

“It looks like a kiva,” Amethyst said. “That’s what we thought it was. Maybe, this is all a mistake. Maybe –“

“It’s okay,” the older woman interrupted her. “All will be well.”

“But the bats –“ Amethyst said.,

“All will be well,” the older woman. “Kind stranger, it’s unfair of us to detain you any longer.”

“Listen, all I can do is warn you,” Richard said. “People die out here. Let me come around the hill in my jeep and, then, you can follow me back to Needles.”

“That’s unnecessary,” the older woman said. “We know what we’re doing. We’re following very clear directions.”

Richard looked at the three women, gazing at them from face to face. They seemed without gender, red-eyed and with fox-ears and opalescent skin stretched over their faces that were solemn and exhausted like white masks.

“Your car isn’t right for the road. You could get hung-up.”

“We got here okay,” the older woman said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”

“But you’ll have to turn around to get back to the highway and you might get high-centered making that maneuver. Then, what?”

“We’re okay,” the older woman said. “We really are.

“Suit yourself,” Richard said.

He shouldered his backpack and shook hands with each woman in turn and, then, stumbling a little in the heat, went back up the hill. He passed the round arrastre filled with shattered stones and, then, the mouth of the tunnel. The sun was low enough for the first few bats to emerge and they fluttered out tentatively like falling leaves. From the hilltop, Richard looked back at the women. They were still gathered in the shadow of the car, but, now, the valley was filling up with grey twilight and the bats flew toward the women like smoke dispersing from the mouth of the shaft and they seemed to be embracing in the stony hollow.

It was later than Richard thought. Although it seemed to him that he had spoken with the women for only a few moments, apparently, he had tarried longer than was prudent and, as it happened, his jeep was not parked exactly where he remembered it. The hike to his vehicle was longer and more complex and, as darkness descended, he had to scramble up a steep slope slippery with fine, hot pebbles to reach the jeep. Night falls swiftly on the desert and the air cools rapidly. By the time, Richard jolted his way over the bad road to the highway, it was cold and blue and stars were twinkling above. A few miles outside of Needles, a jackrabbit shot up out of the sage and, when Richard swerved to avoid the animal, he lost control of the jeep and crashed into the ditch. One of the tires was lopsided and Richard had to hitchhike into town to find a place that would tow the vehicle to a service station.

The next morning, Richard had to supervise repairs to his State-issued jeep and, although he thought that he should make some kind of report about the women in the desert, it wasn’t clear to him what he would say or why he was concerned. Ill-prepared people go out on the desert every day and, most of the time, nothing bad happens to them. And, further, he had now waited almost 24 hours and, surely, it was too late to trouble anyone about his worries at this stage.

Richard resolved that he would return to the Paradise Hills and look for the car and the place where the women had been picnicking on cheese and champagne on the desert. But the next year, the State suffered a budgetary crisis and funding was unavailable for the bat census. A lot of people don’t like bats and numbering the creatures was not a high priority and so, ultimately, the census-taking program was discontinued.