owls there are history.”
“But what about the differences in numbers? They’re claiming fifty percent more breeding pairs than you.”
Jenny turned up the palms of her hands and shrugged. “To be honest, it beats me where they found all those owls.”
“And you must be what, an ornithologist?”
Any second she’d hit me with it, I knew: Well, Larry or Robert or David says blah blah and et cetera, to which I would be required out of courtesy to ask, stupidly, Larry or Robert or David who?
This was so she could tell me about her chess-champion-philosophy-professor-ex-New York Met boyfriend who had climbed K-2 without oxygen, hiked across the Kalahari Desert, wind-surfed with teenaged athletes off in the gorge, and could get it up four times on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
“Yes, I am,” she said. “A bird woman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. If we had our druthers, we’d list the owl as threatened, but the Forest Service wants to sell timber rights to the land to help reduce the deficit.”
“It’s Ellin’s lawsuit that’s got you on the pike now, I take it.”
Jenny nodded. “He owns the logging rights to several tracts of old-growth Douglas fir in Gifford Pinchot. Unless Gifford Pinchot has a thriving spotted owl population, there’ll be no cutting for the Boz, so he claimed our owl count was low, and then the Resource Council hired their own ornithologists.”
“And they found more owls than you did.”
“My boss and I were listed right up there at the top of Ellin’s lawsuit, because we were in charge of the Fish and Wildlife Service count that had been accepted by the courts and Congress.”
“So now what happens?” I said.
“So now we go back to the disputed Gifford Pinchot tracts and count owls again. We don’t have a hint as to where Ellin’s people found all those owls. But if they signed affidavits saying they found owls, we have to assume they found owls.”
I said, “Your boss received a bunch of threatening letters from pissed-off loggers, as I recall.”
“We received a lot of hate mail, and you’re right, most of it was addressed to Lois Angleton. My boss. But they were aimed at me also. Several of them referred to ‘those women,’ meaning Lois and me.”
I said, “These are heavy stakes to be decided by a study headed by just two people. I don’t think that helps any.”
I could see the lights of Hood River coming up. “The Dalles is another twenty miles down the road. You want to pull in here or keep on trucking?”
“The Dalles is fine,” she said. “You going to Sixkiller on this job?”
“Oh yes, my clients live about halfway between Sixkiller and Calamity.”
“Ahh, maybe we’ll be seeing each other there.”
Chapter Three — The Case of the Murdered Owl
We rode in silence for a few minutes; then Jenny said, “You’re a detective, Mr. Denson. I bet you like puzzles. Let me tell you about a spotted owl we found flattened outside of Sixkiller. Murdered, actually. A real mystery for you. I’d like to know what you think.”
“Go for it,” I said.
“When an animal gets run over on the highway, it’s the state’s job to clean the mess up, and if the animal’s on the list of threatened species, they try to give us a call.”
I said, “I think I read about this in the papers. Do you ordinarily find owls flattened on the highway? I thought they were forest feeders.”
“You probably did read about it. It had its few days of fame. And no, we don’t ordinarily find them on the highway; you’re right on the money, Mr. Detective. First, this was at the edge of Gifford Pinchot, which is the source of all this legal wrangling, and second, we wondered how on earth a spotted had come to be flattened on a highway — that almost never happens with an owl, much less a spotted. We wanted to find out what it had been eating that would bring it down out of the forest and onto the highway.”
“Our Fish and Wildlife Service in action. Just dig into that yummy owl shit. Boy, oh, boy.”
Jenny grinned. “It’s not quite that bad. Raptors swallow their prey whole. They regurgitate the feathers, fur, and bones in the form of a dry ball of fur and bone. They do this a couple of times a day — once before they go out hunting at night, and usually once in their nests, where these balls of fur and crunched bones pile up.”
“A professional