The End of the End of the Earth Read online

  Most Egyptian coastal towns have bird markets where a quail can be bought for two dollars, a turtledove for five, an oriole for three, and small birds for pennies. Outside one of these towns, El Daba, I toured the farm of a white-bearded man with a bird-trapping operation so large that, even after the families of his six sons had eaten their fill, he had a surplus to bring to market. Enormous nets were draped over eight tall tamarisk trees and many smaller bushes, encircling a grove of figs and olives; the nets were an inexpensive modern product, available in El Daba for only the past seven years. The sun was very hot, and migrant songbirds were arriving from the nearby coastline, seeking shelter. Repelled by the net on one tree, they simply flew to the next tree, until they found themselves caught. The farmer’s grandsons ran inside the nets and grabbed them, and one of his sons tore off their flight feathers and dropped them in a plastic grain sack. In twenty minutes, I saw a Red-backed Shrike, a Collared Flycatcher, a Spotted Flycatcher, a male Golden Oriole, a Chiffchaff, a Blackcap, two Wood Warblers, two Zitting Cisticolas, and many unidentified birds disappear into the sack. By the time we paused in the shade, amid the discarded heads and feathers of cuckoos and hoopoes and a sparrow hawk, the sack was bulging, the oriole crying out inside it.

  Based on the farmer’s estimates of his daily take, I calculated that, every year between August 25 and September 25, his operation removes six hundred orioles, two hundred and fifty turtledoves, two hundred hoopoes, and forty-five hundred smaller birds from the air. The supplemental income is surely welcome, but the farm would clearly have thrived without it; the furnishings in the family’s spacious guest parlor, where I was treated with great Bedouin hospitality, were brand-new and of high quality.

  Everywhere I went along the coast, from Marsa Matruh to Ras el Barr, I saw nets like the farmer’s. Even more impressive were the mist nets used for catching quail: ultrafine nylon netting, all but invisible to birds, that is strung on poles and reaches from ground level to eleven or more feet off the ground. The mist nets, too, are a recent innovation, having been introduced in Sinai about fifteen years ago and spread westward until they now cover the entire Egyptian Mediterranean coast. Along the coastal highway west of Sinai, the nets run to the horizon and pass straight through tourist towns, in front of hotels and condominiums.

  Much of Egypt’s coast is, on paper, protected. But the coastal preserves protect birds only to the extent of requiring permits to erect nets for catching them. These permits are cheap and freely granted; official restrictions on the height and spacing of the nets are honored mainly in the breach. The owners of the nets go out before dawn and wait for quail, arriving from across the sea, to come zinging over the beach and enmesh themselves. On a good day, a third of a mile of nets can yield fifty quail or more. My very low-end estimate, based on figures from a bad year, is that one hundred thousand quail are taken annually in Egypt’s coastal mist nets alone.

  Even as quail are becoming very difficult to find in much of Europe, the take in Egypt is increasing, due to the burgeoning use of playback technology. The best system, Bird Sound, whose digital chip holds high-quality recordings of a hundred different bird sounds, is illegal to use for hunting purposes in the EU but is nevertheless sold in stores with no questions asked. In Alexandria, I spoke with a sport hunter, Wael Karawia, who claimed to have introduced Bird Sound to Egypt in 2009. Not surprisingly, he’d learned about it from an Italian who hunted in Albania. Karawia said he now feels “very bad, very regretful” about introducing it. Normally, perhaps three-quarters of incoming quail fly over the mist nets, but hunters using Bird Sound can attract the higher-flying ones as well; already all the mist netters in north Sinai are doing it, some of them in spring as well as fall. Hunters on Egypt’s large lakes have also begun to use Bird Sound to capture entire flocks of ducks at night.

  “It will start to affect the birds, it has to,” Karawia told me. “The problem is the mentality—people want to fish anything and hunt anything, with no rules. We already had a lot of guns before the revolution, and since then there’s been a forty percent increase. The people who don’t have money make their own guns, which is very dangerous—it could get them three years in jail—but they don’t care. Even the kids are doing it. School starts in September, but the kids don’t start until the hunting season ends.”

  On the beach in the tourist town of Baltim, I had an encounter with some of these kids. Quail are the only permissible target of mist netters, but there is always a bycatch of small birds and the falcons that prey on them. At sundown in Baltim, walking with a guide from Nature Conservation Egypt and an official from the local protected area, I noticed a beautiful and tiny shorebird, a Little Ringed Plover, caught in a net in the shadow of condominiums. My guide, Wael Shohdi, began to extricate it delicately but stopped when a young man came running up, carrying a mesh bag and trailed by two teenage friends. “Don’t touch the bird,” he shouted angrily. “Those are our nets!”

  “It’s okay,” Shohdi assured him. “We handle birds all the time.”

  A tussle ensued as the young hunter tried to show Shohdi how to yank the bird out without damaging the net. Shohdi, whose priority was the safety of the bird, somehow managed to free the plover in one piece. But the hunter then demanded that Shohdi hand it over.

  The government official, Hani Mansour Bishara, pointed out that, along with two live quail, the hunter had a live songbird in his bag.

  “No, that’s a quail,” the hunter said.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Okay, it’s a wheatear. But I’m twenty years old and we’re living from this net.”

  Not being an Arab speaker, I learned only afterward what they were saying. What I could see in the moment was Shohdi continuing to hold the plover in his hand while the hunter reached for it angrily, trying to grab it away. We were in a country where millions of birds were being killed, but I couldn’t help worrying about this individual plover’s fate. I urged Shohdi to remind the hunter that it was illegal to keep anything but quail from the nets.

  Shohdi did this, but the law was apparently not a good argument to use on an angry twenty-year-old. Instead, with a view to changing hearts and minds, Shohdi and Bishara made the case that the Little Ringed Plover is an important species, found only on mudflats, and that, moreover, it might be carrying a dangerous disease. (“We were lying a little bit,” Shohdi told me later.)

  “So which is it?” the hunter demanded. “A diseased bird or an important species?”

  “Both!” Shohdi and Bishara said.

  “If it’s true about the disease,” one of the teenagers said, “we all would have been dead years ago. We eat everything from the nets—we never let anything go.”

  “You can still get the disease from cooked birds,” Bishara improvised.

  My concern about the plover deepened when Shohdi handed it over to the hunter, who (as I learned only subsequently) had sworn by Allah that he would release both it and the wheatear, just not while we were watching.

  “But the National Geographic needs to see that they really are released,” Shohdi said.

  Becoming even angrier, the hunter took out the wheatear and flung it in the air, and then did the same with the plover. Both flew straight to some of their fellows, farther down the beach, without looking back. “I only did it,” the hunter said defiantly, “because I’m a man of my word.” There wasn’t much more than one large bite of meat on the two birds put together, but I could see, in the hunter’s bitter expression, how much it cost him to let them go. He wanted to keep them even more than I wanted to see them freed.

  * * *

  Before leaving Egypt, I spent some days with Bedouin falcon trappers in the desert. Even by Bedouin standards, falcon trapping is a pursuit for men with a lot of time on their hands. Some have been doing it for twenty years without catching either of the species, Saker Falcon and Peregrine Falcon, that are prized by middlemen catering to ultrawealthy Arab falconers. The Saker is so rare that not more than a dozen
or two are captured in any given year, but the size of the jackpot (a good Saker can fetch more than $35,000, a Peregrine more than $15,000) entices hundreds of hunters into the desert for weeks at a time.

  Falcon trapping requires the cruel use of many smaller birds. Pigeons are tied to stakes in the sand and left in the sun to attract raptors; doves and quail are outfitted with harnesses bristling with small nylon slipknots in which Sakers and Peregrines can get their feet stuck; and smaller falcons, such as kestrels, have their eyelids sewn shut and a weighted, slipknot-laden decoy attached to one leg. Hunters drive around the desert in their Toyota pickups, visiting the staked pigeons and stopping to hurl the disabled kestrels into the air like footballs, in the hope of attracting a Saker or a Peregrine—a blinded, weighted kestrel can’t fly far. The hunters also often tether an unblinded falcon to the hood of their trucks and keep an eye on it while they speed through the sand. When the falcon looks up, it means that a larger raptor is overhead, and the hunters leap out to deploy their various decoys. The same routine is followed every afternoon, week after week.

  One of the two most heartening things I witnessed in Egypt was the rapt attention that falcon hunters gave to my paperback field guide, Birds of Europe. They invariably clustered around it and turned its pages slowly, back to front, studying the illustrations of birds they’d seen and birds they hadn’t. One afternoon, while watching some of them do this, in a tent where I was offered strong tea and a very late lunch, I was stabbed with the crazy hope that the Bedouin were all, without yet realizing it, passionate birdwatchers.

  Before we humans could be served lunch, one of the hunters tried to feed headless warblers to the blinded kestrel and the blinded sparrow hawk that were in the tent with us. The kestrel ate readily, but no amount of pushing the meat into the sparrow hawk’s face would induce it to eat. Instead, it busied itself with pecking at the twine that bound its leg—futilely, it seemed to me. But after lunch, when I was outside the tent, letting the hunters try out my binoculars, a sudden shout went up. I turned and saw the sparrow hawk winging purposefully away from the tent and into the desert.

  The hunters immediately gave chase in their trucks, in part because the bird was valuable to them but also in part—and this was the other heartening thing I witnessed—because a blinded bird couldn’t survive on its own, and they felt bad for it. (At the end of the falcon season, hunters unsuture the eyelids of their decoy falcons and release them, if only because it’s a bother to feed the birds year-round.) The hunters drove farther and farther into the desert, worrying about the sparrow hawk, hoping to spot it, but I personally had mixed feelings. I knew that if it got away, and if no other group of hunters happened upon it, it would soon be dead; but in its yearning to escape captivity, even blinded, even at the cost of certain death, it seemed to embody the essence of wild birds and why they matter. Twenty minutes later, when the last of the hunters returned to the tent empty-handed, my thought was: At least this bird had a chance to die free.

  A FRIENDSHIP

  One afternoon in late summer in 1989, Bill Vollmann called me up and said, “Hey, Jon. Do you like caribou meat? I just came back from the Arctic with some caribou meat that’s about to go bad, and Janice is going to make it into a stew.” Bill has a speaking voice like no one else’s—flat, factual, and hard to read the tone of. Was the implication that I’d eaten enough caribou meat to know if I liked it a subtle joke? What exactly did “about to go bad” mean? With Bill, you never knew.

  I was living in Queens at the time, struggling with my second book, and Bill was the first friend I’d made as a published novelist. A year earlier, in Manhattan, my parents and my wife and I had ridden in a hotel elevator with a rumpled middle-aged couple who smiled at me kindly and introduced themselves as Bill’s parents. They were in New York for the same literary award ceremony that we were going to. Their son, when I met him at the ceremony, looked more like the winner of a high-school science fair; he had the thick-lensed wireframes, the ill-fitting sport coat, the adolescent complexion, the rough haircut. We’d been talking for no more than two minutes when he proposed, out of nowhere, that we write letters to each other. Neither of us had read the other’s work or knew anything about the other, but Bill seemed to have already decided to like me, or was maybe just following one of the bighearted and experience-seeking impulses that are native to him. He caught me off guard with that voice of his.

  Only later did I realize that Bill is a dangerous person to try to do anything reciprocal with. When he and I started recommending books to each other, I learned that he not only can read five hundred pages in an afternoon but retains a near-photographic memory of them. After we made a pact to trade our future manuscripts, I got a thick mailer every nine months, while my own next book was so long in coming that I forgot I was supposed to send it to him. In the year after the award ceremony, while I was in Europe, spending my award money, it took me a month to get around to writing him a letter to which he replied the day he got it. He also sent me an advance copy of his new book, The Rainbow Stories, and I tore through it—not in an afternoon, but in less than a week—with admiration and amazement. The person I’d met in New York, the nerdy young man with the sweet Midwestern parents, turned out to be a literary genius with intimate firsthand knowledge of the streetwalkers and the skinheads and the winos of mid-eighties San Francisco. The book was the opposite of the cheerful thing its title seemed to promise. Its epigraph was a line of Poe’s comparing the varieties of human wretchedness to the hues of the rainbow (“distinct” yet “intimately blended”), and its voice was like Bill’s speaking voice, ambiguously poised between limpid sincerity and radical irony. I loved that voice and was now properly flattered that he wanted to be my friend. My wife and I were trying to decide where to go after Europe, and one of the reasons I pushed for New York was that Bill had recently moved there himself.

  He and his fiancée, Janice Ryu, had a one-bedroom apartment in a modern high-rise near Sloan Kettering, where Janice was doing her residency in radiation oncology. Her Korean-style preparation of the soon-to-spoil caribou meat, gamey and garlicky, was the first of many dinners I had there. In the summer, I played on my publisher’s softball team in Central Park, but in the colder months my only regular exit from married life in Queens was the trips I took on the E or the F train to see Bill. I remember watching The 400 Blows on the TV in his bedroom and feeling as if what had been missing from my life was a male writer friend to watch foreign movies with. I’m not sure what I might have imparted to him, besides book recommendations and strongly held opinions, but I learned a lot from him. He showed me the ink drawings that he was making for his books, and I decided to take drawing lessons. He showed me the Mac on which he did all his writing, and I went out and bought my first computer. (But when he complained that he’d developed carpal tunnel syndrome from typing twelve hours every day, all I could do was envy him for his work ethic.) He told me that Janice cut his toenails for him, which was certainly not a service that my own wife was performing. I was pretty sure I didn’t want anybody cutting my toenails, but Bill got me thinking that there were all kinds of marriage, not just my own kind. He told me that he liked my wife but that she and I both seemed to be suffocating in the hermetic life we shared. He himself led the least hermetic life imaginable, traveling the world, watching people die, narrowly escaping death himself, and consorting with prostitutes of every nationality. He kept proposing, in his flat-voiced way, that I do journalism or take a trip to some dangerous place.

  There, too, I tried to follow his example. I accepted a sexy-sounding assignment in Cincinnati, where the local authorities had recently shut down a show of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs. Esquire wanted me to write about the porn outlets and strip clubs of Covington, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati, in order to prove some dubious point about hypocrisy. What would Bill have done? He wouldn’t have rested until he’d befriended some strippers, recorded their take on the Mapplethorpe affair, and maybe tried
to have sex with one of them. The sex part was beyond my capabilities, but I dutifully went to the strip clubs. They were seedy and depressing and not full of hypocritical Ohioans, and I could sooner have swum back across the river than befriend a stripper. I wrote a flimsy piece of urban sociology and was more relieved than disappointed when Esquire killed it, although I could have used the money. It was four years before I tried journalism again.

  Bill was born only a few weeks ahead of me, in July 1959, but for a long time I felt far behind him. It’s possible that he didn’t fully see me for who I am, or that he saw me mainly as a literary project, a younger brother to be encouraged to do the kinds of things he was good at, because those things had worked for him and they might work for me, too. But he was wise, and generous with his wisdom. He could see my situation in my marriage with a clarity that I wouldn’t achieve for many years. By the time I caught up with him, and separated from my wife, and became a less timid journalist, he and Janice were living in California again. In the spring of 1996, a week after I’d published a declaration of literary independence in Harper’s, he came back to Manhattan and invited me to a party at the home of his book editor. After publishing eight books (I’d published two), he was thinking he could use an agent, and he wanted to meet mine. I introduced the two of them at the party, and then, inflated by Harper’s, I did a Bill-like thing I’d never done before. I went up to a young woman who caught my attention and struck up a conversation with her; I got her number. She and I ended up together for two years, one of them very happy. It was as if Bill had started me down a new road and seen me through to the first station on it. That party was the last time I saw him.

  * * *