Stag

by Karen Russell

“When I was a kid there were still hundreds of desert tortoises out here. They say we’ll be lucky to have any in fifty years. Ninety-five percent mortality rate for the hatchlings. Trucks

go bowling for tortoises, as you can see. The damn ravens gobble them up.” “Terrible odds,” I agreed. I was not surprised that my species had so efficiently destroyed, in two generations, an animal that had lived under the winged shadows of pteranodons.

Ravens, once unusual in the California desert, now

darken the blue skies, thriving in our shadow, feasting on landfills, and nesting on utility poles, eating the day-old tortoises as they emerge from their burrows. “Tortoise translocation,” undertaken by the Marines, has only pushed them closer to extinction. A lot of life, in my experience, is tortoise translocation.