Valley of Death (2 page)

“W
hat the heck is borax?” Jack asked. “I keep seeing it on the map: Eagle Borax Works Ruins, Borax Museum, Harmony Borax Works, Twenty Mule Team Borax….”

Jack, Ashley, and Leesa were wandering through a collection of old wagons, machinery, and an actual locomotive on display in the Furnace Creek Ranch complex. In the restaurant nearby, Steven and Olivia still lingered over their breakfast coffee—Jack could see them through the window, their heads together, talking.

“Jack, if you'd bought the booklet in the museum like I did, you wouldn't have to ask,” Ashley said. “It only cost me a dollar.”

“Why should I waste my money buying one when you already did? So tell me what borax is.”

Leafing through the pages, Ashley answered, “It says here that borax aids digestion, keeps milk sweet, gets rid of dandruff, improves your complexion, cures epilepsy, dissolves bunions—”

“Give me a break!” Jack hooted. “Nothing could do all that.”

Ashley laughed. “That's what people were saying about it back in 1890. Too bad you can't get some for your complexion, Jack. I noticed that zit on your cheek….”

Jack grabbed the booklet and swatted Ashley with it, but it was too flimsy to have any effect. Then he opened it and got interested in the story of borax, a white mineral mined in Death Valley. The best part was about the 20-mule teams—actually nine pairs of mules and a pair of horses—all lined up with a 120-foot-long chain running down the middle of them. The chain connected the team to two huge wagon loads of borax, plus a big iron water tank, with the entire load totaling 36 tons. Jack could imagine those poor mules hauling all that weight out of the valley in the boiling heat of summer. Even worse, sometimes the brakes on the wagons would fail, and the heavy load would thunder downhill on top of the panic-stricken mules trying to stay ahead of it.

“Hey! Give me back my book,” Ashley demanded.

Since Jack was now five feet seven inches tall, he had no trouble holding the book too high for his shrimpy little sister to reach. She kept jumping up to slap at his arm.

“Leesa, come help me,” Ashley begged, but Leesa didn't want to get involved in a sibling tussle. She backed away to stand in front of one of the huge, old borax wagons on display in front of the ranch. Leesa was short to begin with, not much taller than Ashley, and next to the seven-foot-high rear wheel of the wagon, she looked like a Munchkin.

“Here, take your book,” Jack said, stuffing it down the back of Ashley's T-shirt. “Mom and Dad are coming.” Sometimes, if he teased his sister a little too much, Jack got in trouble with his parents. Usually Ashley didn't tell on him, though. She was pretty cool that way. Pretending to be serious, he said, “As I was mentioning, today borax is used to make glass and soap and certain cosmetics, which, by the way, I saw you sneaking out of Mom's purse—”

“
What
cosmetics!”

“Her lipstick. I don't think there's borax in that.”

“I put it right back,” Ashley said quickly, blushing a little. “OK, we're even now. You don't tell Mom about the lipstick, and I won't mention your zit again. Truce?”

“Deal.” They gave each other a high five.

By then Steven and Olivia had reached them. “Did you see all the old mining equipment behind the Borax Museum?” Steven asked. “Back in those days, they made machinery large and heavy to do big jobs. It took a lot of muscle power to move those loads.”

“We'll come back and spend some time here later,” Olivia told them. “Right now I have a meeting at the visitor center. Unless the rest of you would rather stay here, and I can go the visitor center by myself….”

“We've seen this,” Jack told her. “There's probably other good stuff at the visitor center.”

When they got there, Olivia went into one of the offices in the back, while Steven headed straight for the photo books of Death Valley. Ashley started chatting up one of the interpretive rangers, and Jack was left with Leesa.

Silent as always, she at least walked next to him as they wandered past the displays of Indian artifacts and baskets. At the end of a large room they came to a glass case holding what a sign identified as a desert bighorn sheep, now mounted and on display. Its enormous horns curved in an almost perfect circle from the top of its head to beneath its jaws.

“That's why we're here,” Jack said, trying to start a conversation.

“Why?”

“Because my mother is a wildlife veterinarian, so when the national parks have problems with any of their wildlife, they call my mother as a consultant. Here in Death Valley, some bighorn sheep have died, and no one knows why. Just a few died, but there aren't that many living in the park, and park officials don't want to lose any of them. The sheep stay high up in the mountains.”

“Oh,” Leesa said.

Great conversation. Well, he tried.

A while later, while Leesa was studying a chart that showed how far below sea level different parts of the park were, Ashley came up to Jack and whispered, “Did you find out anything?

“About Leesa? No. She doesn't talk.”

“She talks,” Ashley said. “I mean, she talked to me a little bit last night when we were alone in the room. I think I figured out why she's with us.”

“Tell me,” Jack demanded. It bothered him when his sister knew something that he didn't.

Pulling him into a corner of the room, Ashley said softly, “It's really romantic, like Romeo and Juliet. She's in love with this boy, a ninth grader like she is. His name is Aaron. Well, she didn't really say they were in love, she just said they were very good friends.”

“So?”

“So Leesa's family doesn't like this boy's family, and when her dad found a note Aaron had written to her, he got so mad that he wouldn't let Leesa go to school for three whole weeks!”

“Wow! What did the note say?”

“Nothing, really,” Ashley answered. “Aaron was just asking her to go to a movie with him. Then, after she missed all those weeks of school, the principal found out it was her father who was keeping her at home, and he called Social Services. That's why she's here with us now, I guess, until things get straightened out with her father.”

Jack was puzzled by that. Lots of people pulled their kids out of the public schools for one reason or another. Home schooling was pretty common in Wyoming. And why would his parents be so secretive about Leesa if that's all there was to the story?

Olivia came up to them then and announced, “I have five free hours, so we can go exploring. Since the biologists are waiting for a blood test to come back on one of the sheep that died, there's no sense for us to keep speculating on the cause of death until the test results arrive by FedEx this afternoon at three o'clock. So where would you like to go?”

“Skidoo!” Ashley yelled so loudly that some German tourists turned to stare at her. She clapped her hands over her mouth, then said more quietly, “I've been talking to that ranger, and he told me all about this old ghost town called Skidoo. I really want to see it, Mom. We can get there and back in five hours, no problem.”

“Fine with me,” Olivia answered. “I'll check with your father.”

Olivia didn't think to ask Leesa whether she would be interested in seeing a ghost town. It was easy to overlook Leesa, since she always seemed to melt into the shadows. To be polite, Jack said, “How about you, Leesa? Would you like to see Skidoo?” Leesa just shrugged, which maybe meant “OK” or just “I don't care” or “whatever.”

Once again the five of them were back in the Land Cruiser, this time with Leesa in the middle of the backseat between Jack and Ashley. She sat stiffly, being super careful that not a single part of her would brush against Jack, not even the edge of her sneaker. Jack had the feeling that if she'd had room to move even farther away from him, she'd have jumped at the chance. Not that he was at all anxious to make contact with this girl. Leesa was a high school freshman who probably considered Jack, an eighth grader, far down on the social scale. Besides, she already had a boyfriend, named Aaron. Not that
Jack
would ever want to be her boyfriend….

His thoughts were interrupted by his mother, who turned to tell them, “This morning I found out something that's going to interest you, but first I want to give you some background information.”

Trust their mother to create a buildup like that and then make them wait for the exciting part. “Go ahead,” Jack said.

“As you know,” Olivia began, “I'm here because a few desert bighorn sheep have died mysteriously. There were no outside signs of trauma on the sheep, so we're suspecting it might have been something they ate, or an infection transmitted to them from some other animal. Sheep are fairly sensitive to diseases from other species.”

Ashley leaned forward, interested, as always, in endangered wildlife. Leesa stared straight ahead.

“They found three sheep that had been dead long enough that not much remained of the carcasses—it takes no more than two days for even a large carcass like a sheep's to be picked clean, down to the skeleton, by coyotes or ravens or mountain lions or all of the above. But they found one sheep in the throes of death, and were able to get a blood sample before it died. That's what I'm waiting for—the analysis of that blood sample.”

Olivia seemed to be taking longer than usual to reach the point, but from the look on her face, she was getting closer.

“Well, now,” she said, “bighorn sheep don't have many real enemies, but they do have competitors for food and water—the burros.”

“You mean like the gold miners brought in a long time ago?” Ashley chimed in. “The ranger was telling me all about them. When the mines ran out and the miners gave up and went home, they left their burros behind, here in Death Valley.”

“Right. And the burros multiplied and multiplied and multiplied some more until there were several thousand of them in and around Death Valley. They're tough, feisty little critters that can live in a climate like this, but when there got to be so many of them, they ruined the area for the bighorn sheep. The burros trample vegetation and pollute the water supply.”

Jack thought his mother should have been a schoolteacher. Nothing delighted her more than explaining things to kids, especially if the subject happened to be animals. Her eyes would light up, and she'd make everything come alive. But maybe that was because she was talking about animals—her real love.

When Olivia handled any species—dogs or wolves, elk or deer, horses or even manatees—her touch was expert and yet gentle. It was as though animals knew they could put their trust in her. And so did the foster kids who stayed with the Landons. They found Olivia sympathetic and understanding.

She continued, “Since burros are exotic animals—” Olivia interrupted herself to explain to Leesa, “That means they aren't native to Death Valley. And because they had a bad impact on the ecosystem and the desert bighorn sheep, National Park policy decreed that the burros had to go.”

“How'd they get rid of them?” Jack wanted to know.

A shadow crossed Olivia's face. “A lot of them were removed by direct reduction. That's a polite way of saying they were shot. Others were trapped and removed. Then, in the 1980s, the park joined with the Bureau of Land Management in an Adopt-a-Burro program. People could adopt them and take them home to ride, or for work, or just for pets—but not, heaven forbid, to sell to slaughterhouses.”

Leesa moved forward, listening intently.

“How'd they get the burros, Mom?” Ashley asked. “Did they come here to the park and say, ‘You! The brown burro with the big ears. I'll take you.'”

Steven laughed at that. “I wish it was that easy. I used to round up horses when I lived on a ranch, and they never moved along without an argument.”

In Zion National Park, Jack had watched his father capture a wild horse, but that wouldn't have qualified as a roundup. “Is that how they get the burros for adoption?” he asked. “They round them up?”

“Uh-huh. Of course, they can't capture all of them that way,” Olivia explained. “The ones that live way up in the mountains may be too hard to reach and—well, sometimes they still have to rely on direct reduction.”

“Shooting,” Leesa murmured.

“It's an emotional issue that nobody likes to deal with,” Olivia explained, “but you have to realize that wild burros tend to damage the environment pretty badly, especially for the bighorn sheep….” Then Olivia brightened. “But wild burro roundups save the lives of anywhere from two to three hundred burros a year. And guess when the next wild burro roundup is going to happen—right here in the park. The day after tomorrow!”

She'd finally made it to the exciting part, and it really had been worth the wait. That is, if—“Will we still be here? Where in the park? Can we watch it?” Jack and Ashley demanded, peppering their mother with questions.

“Yes, we'll still be here, and to your last question, maybe,” Olivia answered. “Or maybe not. These roundups are carefully organized by the park and the BLM, with trained wranglers and helicopters that herd the burros down from the mountains and into corrals. Still, if we're real lucky, and if we promise to stay far out of the way—” She turned farther in her seat to ask, “Would you like that, Leesa?”

Leesa's expression was hard to read. “Yesterday,” she began, “Jack and Ashley said that every living creature on Earth has value. Now you just told us that park rangers used to shoot wild burros. So if it's wrong to kill coyotes, why wasn't it wrong to kill burros?”

The silence that followed was broken only when Olivia murmured, “It's complicated. Coyotes are native to the park. They've always been here. Burros were brought here. They are the outsiders, and the Park Service feels that exotic species need to be removed.”