In the Time of Man: A Novel, Ch. 3

(Author’s note: A lot of friendly emails have prompted me to speed up the editing process on the 19 chapters of “In the Time of Man.”  Although I had planned to publish one chapter a week on this site, I will try to get at least two posted and, if possible, three chapters each week.  Apparently, it’s bad form to make people wait. – JM)

Out on the high plains of Eastern Colorado, Barton Crawford had found the perfect location to set up shop.  Burlington was near the Kansas line and on I-70, which made the community of 5000 not much more than two hours from the new Denver airport.  Geographically, the town was also in the midst of the region where uncounted numbers of cattle mutilations were being reported.  Crawford was gathering data from dozens of incidents and many of them were within comfortable driving distance of his temporary lab in Burlington.  Fortunately for his research, local ranchers had been frequently victimized by the inexplicable killing and cutting of their cattle and they were willing to accommodate a scientist who might be able to solve the mystery.  When Barton found a vacant steel warehouse no longer used by beet growers, he was offered a nice rental rate and discretely moved in with his equipment and three student interns.  Burlington residents did not bother Barton Crawford and left him and his charges to their investigations.

Driving in from the rental house near Bonnie Reservoir, Barton felt his Blackberry buzz and looked down to see a text message from Tina, the Iowa State University junior who seemed to always be in front of her computer.  “Got a good one,” the first line read.  “Actually, got two.  Same ranch.”

Barton punched in her speed dial number with his thumb while driving with his other hand and waited for her answer.

“They’re in Rocky Ford,” she said, dispensing with the formality of a simple hello because she had seen his name on the display of her phone.

“What are the circumstances?” Barton asked.

“The ranch owner found them early,” Tina explained.  “Just before sunrise, about a mile from the house.  The first was a bull.  All the usual cuts and markings.”

“Okay.”

“This one’s a little weird, though, Dr. Crawford.”

“Oh?”

“On the other side of the ranch there was a heifer down and she had been cut up the same way.  It’s like they were going after one of each sex, for some reason.  The sex organs were gone from both animals.”

“Okay, Tina.  I’m going to run down there, quickly.  I’ve got most of the gear in my truck.  I’ll need to stop by and pick up a few things.  Are the guys in yet?”

“No.”

“Whose turn is it to do field work?”

“Mine,” she said cheerily.

“Well, I’ll see you in about 15 minutes.”

“Great.  Okay.”

Barton Crawford, PhD, had begun to think he was trying to do too much.  The innocuously named High Plains Research Project, while not yet scientifically demanding, was beginning to consume a great deal of his time.  He had funded it with money from an inherited share of his father’s fortune but the endeavor was not very expensive and was to be conducted only during a few months of the summer.  The greater challenge for the scientist was being away from the Bleak House in Phoenix.  In the mornings and at the end of the day, he was taking conference calls with the top physicians managing the treatment and pathology research on Luke Air Force Base but Barton was beginning to feel after just a few weeks that he was missing the subtleties of developments in the Bleak House.  Nonetheless, he was unable to put aside his suspicion that there might be a connection between mutilated cattle and the patients arriving at Luke and he was compelled to spend a bit of the summer examining the possibility.

The theory was not an idea Barton Crawford was willing to share; not yet.  He had not even known of the cattle mutilation phenomenon until he had seen an interview with a frustrated rancher, which had been published in the Rocky Mountain News. During a plane change in Denver, Barton had read with fascination about what had been done to the body of an 800 pound Black Angus.  The ranch was near Julesberg and the owner claimed to have lost at least a couple of dozen animals to the mysterious mutilations over the course of a decade.  Even though what had been done to the cow was horrendous, the newspaper had published color photos of the fallen animal and the incisions, which the reporter wrote appeared to have been made with surgical precision.  The pictures and the narrative description by the rancher made Barton think an operating table had secretly been put up on the rangeland and the cow subjected to strange procedures, which, of course, was a ridiculous idea and virtually impossible.

Because of his distinctive appearance and the recognition he had received for his Nobel Laureate research on the transmission of the Ebola virus, Barton Crawford was putting much at risk by chasing after dead cattle.  The only information he had given the staff in Phoenix was that he had made a commitment to assist in a project with a handful of very talented young students who were doing innovative work on Mad Cow Disease.  Barton made it known that he was always readily available on his cell phone, if there were an issue only he might resolve.

His whereabouts did not remain unknown for more than a few weeks, though.  A Burlington high school biology teacher recognized Crawford and mentioned it to a former student who was doing freelance writing for a Denver paper.  Almost six and a half feet tall with the glacially white hair of his English father and his Ethiopian mother’s coffee-colored skin, Barton Crawford was rarely incognito.  An inveterate bachelor fanatically devoted to his work, he still managed to attend a few high profile social functions and was invariably photographed, often with socialite widows who were generally much younger.  When the gossip columnist in Denver wrote that Barton had been spotted out among the beet fields and ranch lands of Eastern Colorado, the scientist suddenly found himself being more cautious.  Maybe his Mad Cow cover story was not working but it was based on a germ of truth.

A few days after the newspaper clipping, he began to get a sense he was being watched.  Barton knew the feeling was baseless and the product of too much self-consciousness but it nagged at him and never relented, even when he was driving the dirt road out to the house at Bonnie Reservoir, and he developed an uncontrollable habit of always looking in his rear view mirror.

Was there some reason to worry?  There was certainly something unsettling about this cattle mutilation business.  Barton was astonished to learn from various ranching associations and rural sheriffs’ departments that cases of mutilation of cows and horses had been consistently recorded for more than forty years.  Snippy the horse was the first victim to be reported to law enforcement.  In September of 1967, the horse disappeared from its owner’s ranch outside Alamosa, Colorado.  Snippy had always returned each evening for water after grazing but had not shown up for two days.  When Harry King, whose parents owned the ranch, discovered Snippy, he saw that the horse’s head and neck had been completely stripped of flesh.  Visible bones were bleached white, as if they had been desiccated by years in the sun, and there was not even the faintest evidence of blood where the animal lay, making it appear Snippy had been meticulously ex-sanguinated.  King described the cuts on his dead horse as having been “very precise.”  Sexual organs had been removed and the anus was cored out.

The explanations for cattle mutilations were numerous and outlandish and they were what prompted Barton Crawford’s scientific restraint.  The most widely-accepted belief was that urban cultists were going out into the country and taking blood and sex organs for pagan rituals.  No evidence had ever been left behind, however, and not a single arrest had been made after tens of thousands of mutilations across the country during a span of four decades.  Most farmers and ranchers, uncomfortable with any explanation other than nature, blamed the deaths on sickness and predators tearing at soft flesh and the work of blowflies on rotting corpses.  They made no effort to understand what caused the total loss of blood or why coyotes, wolves, foxes, dogs, skunks, badgers, and bobcats, or any other type of scavenging wildlife did not come near the carcasses.

As he did with every one of his projects, Barton Crawford approached this mystery with no preconceived ideas.  He was always determined to let data and scientific evidence speak for itself.  The idea of cultists struck him as nonsense, though.  The loss of cattle had been massive and widespread and had spanned the continent from the Mississippi Valley to west of the California Sierras.  Barton did not know what it was but he knew what it was not and cultists were not responsible for what appeared to him as almost an epidemic.

He just had to be careful, though.  The Arizona project at the old Air Force base was under the financial and management purview of the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security.  The Bleak House was not top secret but all staffers, scientists, and physicians, including Nobel Laureate Barton Crawford had been required to sign governmental non-disclosure agreements.  His presence in Phoenix was not, however, closely guarded information and the Arizona Republic had published a feature on Barton and the research on retro-viruses he was conducting in conjunction with Arizona State.  The ASU project was a public relations smoke screen designed to allow Barton Crawford an excuse for being in Arizona while he devoted his disciplined mind to the mystery inside the walls of Bleak House.  And the reason he was living in a two exit town off of Interstate 70 and working out of a rusting steel building in Burlington, Colorado was because he thought the Bleak House mystery disease and the cattle mutilations might somehow be related.

Barton stopped his car in front of the old warehouse, got out and went inside to tell Tina he was ready to leave for Rocky Ford, and then he grabbed a Geiger counter.

*              *              *

The owner of the J-Bar 4 north of Rocky Ford, Clint Peeler, led Barton and Tina to the site of the fallen bull.  The animal was on its side near the edge of a grassless mound not far from a fence line.  Peeler put out his arms to stop them about fifty feet from the carcass.

“You see those footprints leading out to him?” Peeler pointed.  “Those are mine.  I was on my horse, like I told ya, and I left him here.  He was nickering and acting all spooked so I got off and walked over yonder.  You can see how clear my prints are.  We had a light rain just before dark yesterday and there ain’t no damned way anybody could’ve done this without leaving prints or tire tracks or something.  And you can see there ain’t anything like that.”

Tina was writing notes on her clipboard and sketching.  Barton looked down on her scribbling.  She put down her pad and took a flip camera out of her bag and started recording the rancher.  This was only the second time he had worked with her and he wanted to be comfortable she was capturing the information but he had assumed she would quickly get out the video camera.  Tina was diminutive and Barton’s great size made her seem even smaller.  Her voice was assertive, though, and her odd silver eyes conveyed confidence but Barton frequently had to remind himself of her presence.  Every now and then she made him think of Egg, the tiny girl from a John Updike novel he had read.

“Let’s walk the perimeter here a bit before we approach him,” Barton said.

Peeler nodded and Tina followed as Barton led them through the tall pasture grass around the edge of the bare spot.  Even from that distance, Barton saw clearly the large cuts on the bull.  The legs were spread apart and stiffened already in rigor mortis.  A hole of some kind was visible where the penis and testicles had been located.  As they moved around to the other side of the animal, Barton saw that a circular section of the bull had been removed all the way from the sexual organs through to the back.  The thick spinal bones had been neatly excised along with the genitalia.

“Jesus.  How in the hell did they do that?”  Barton knelt and stared through the circular opening that passed all the way through the bull’s carcass.

“I don’t know,” Peeler answered.  “But I can tell you this much, it damn sure weren’t no critters.”

“That much we can be sure of,” Barton said.

“And I’ll tell ya somethin’ else,” Peeler added.  “This ranch has a hell of a lot more than its share of coyote and fox and other critters and every other time I’ve had an animal go down they have been pullin’ at its soft parts in a coupla hours.  You can see there ain’t no critter tracks around him, either.  Not a damned one.  And where in the hell is the blood?  I never saw any, anywhere.”

Barton looked more carefully at the soft, grayish dirt where the bull lay and there was no trace of animal sign or any darkened spots that might be drops of blood.  He did, however, see an oval indentation in the dirt mound and it had a slight ridge running around its perimeter.  Tina and the rancher followed him as he stood and moved toward the concave impression on the soil.

“Any idea what this is, Mr. Peeler,” Barton asked.

“No sir, I can’t tell you what it is.  But I can tell you what it looks like; except what it looks like is impossible.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Well, it looks to me like that damned bull was dropped right there and he bounced and landed in that spot where he is right now.”

Barton looked more closely at the position of the bull and the shallow crater.  He had no guess how high in the air the bull would have been dropped from to have bounced to its present resting place.  In some of the literature on mutilations, he had read of a never explained incident where a Charolais heifer had been discovered twenty feet up in a tree

“Did you hear anything last night, Mr. Peeler?” Barton’s expression revealed that he had no clue what had transpired in the dark on the J-Bar 4.  “I mean, if this animal was dropped, as you suspect, it would have required a helicopter, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose it would have.  But we didn’t hear a thing and the wife and I sleep with the window open this time of year.  There’s no way any kinda chopper could’ve come this close to the house without waking one or both of us up.  All we saw was a little flickering of light, which we figured was heat lightning.”

“Light, huh?  Hear that a lot with these.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, nothing.  Sorry.  Just thinking out loud.”

Barton looked around the grass, which was about a foot tall, searching for any signs of prop wash.  A helicopter’s down draft would have left some of the grasses flattened or bent, the dirt possibly scattered.  He saw nothing.

“Tina, get me a number 10 blade and some sealed plastic specimen bags and let’s harvest some tissue to take back with us.”

“Okay, Dr. Crawford.  Did you want me to get all of that on the flip cam, too?”

“Yes, please, except when I ask for your assistance.”

“Of course.”

Approaching from the front of the bull, Barton immediately saw that something had also been done to the animal’s head and mouth, which was what he had anticipated from previous examinations on other ranches.  He knelt to examine the eye socket and jaw line.  The left eye was completely missing, though the bone of the socket appeared undamaged.  A circle of flesh and hide surrounding the orbital socket had also been taken by what looked to the naked human eye to be clean, surgical incisions.  On the left side of the jaw, an oval-shaped section of tissue had been lifted to expose the bull’s teeth.  While they remained set in the bone, there was no soft tissue and the jaw was bare and clean as if it had been stripped by decades of elements.

“Who the hell can do something like that, anyway?” Clint Peeler said over the shoulder of Barton Crawford.

“I don’t know, Mr. Peeler.  I am as baffled as anyone else by this stuff.”

“My neighbor’s lost about twenty head in the past five years.  I wish to hell I could get my hands on who’s doing this.”  Peeler took off his straw hat and ran his hand through his coarse, dark hair.  Barton thought the man was hiding his fear with a bit of bravura.  Peeler was teenager thin with a droopy, untrimmed mustache and over-sized eyelashes that suggested a softness he probably struggled to conceal. Barton figured Peeler was a man who was better at loving things than he was at carrying around anger.

“Here you go, Dr. Crawford.”

Tina handed Barton the surgical blade and the plastic sandwich bags used for specimen collection.  The scientist reached down and lifted a flap of skin remaining around the orbit of the eye and sliced off a large piece.  He turned and held the tissue sample up to the bright sunlight.

“Look at that,” he said.  “That look’s like an incision made by a laser or some kind of a machine I’ve never heard of.  I’ve never seen a cut that neat.  It’s just like the others we’ve seen this month.  I’ll be interested in seeing this one and the rest of them under a big microscope.”

“Well, I hope you can figure this out, professor,” Peeler said.  “And help us put a damned end to it.”

“I’ll do what I can.”  Barton gazed intently at the bull’s flesh and turned it around in the light.

“What is it, Dr. Crawford?”  Tina moved out from behind the viewfinder of her camera.

“It’s the same thing we’ve seen in others, Tina,” Barton said.  “I just have no idea how this is done.”

“What?”  Peeler was growing impatient and put his hat back on his head.  He had work to do.

“There doesn’t seem to be the slightest indication of blood in this tissue.  It’s almost as if it has been ex-sanguinated down to the cellular level.  I don’t know of any technology that can do that.  We’ll have to make sure when we get this back to the lab but it’s similar to what we’ve been seeing elsewhere.”

Barton dropped the pinkish tissue in one of the plastic bags and pressed the seal.  In the five other mutilations they had studied already that summer, the complete absence of blood was the most mysterious characteristic.  The perfect measurements of the amputations and apparent vivisections were also confounding and the parts of the animals’ bodies that were being removed complicated the puzzle, but nothing was more baffling than the absolute lack of blood in any of the tissue or on the ground around the carcasses.  How could that be possible?  The volume of blood in a thousand pound bull was hundreds of gallons.  You just do not make it all disappear without spilling a drop or two.  Barton hoped to learn more when he returned to Phoenix with some of the tissue and put it under electron microscopes.

Tina kept her camera focused as Barton moved to the rear of the bull’s body.  He removed a small tape measure from his pocket and stretched it across the hole where the male sex organs had been located.

“That’s exactly eighteen inches,” he said for the camera.  He walked to the back of the animal and measured where the opening left a similar gaping hole on the other side of the bull.  “Also eighteen inches.  Someone or something has cut a perfect circle of flesh and bone out of the middle of this massive animal.”

“How do they do such a thing?  Damn it.” Peeler was shaking visibly.  “And who in the hell is doing this?  It just makes no damned sense.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have answers to any of those questions,” Barton said.  “Not a clue.”

The scientist was, however, beginning to formulate a few ideas.  He was thinking about them again as he excised snippets of flesh from the edge of the hole in the bull’s back and then reached his arm deep within the cavity to pinch off a few pieces of tissue.  In the animals he had examined, people he had interviewed, and the literature he had read, Barton had seen a consistency in the removal of sex organs, the anus, udders, and tissue around the mouth.  They were all connected to the creation and the transmission of bodily fluids.  Was it possible the federal government was conducting a secret study to determine how Mad Cow or some other disease moved from animals to humans?  And why in the hell would it be kept a secret, though, unless it had something to do with what he was seeing in patients in the Bleak House?  If that was the case and the government was trying to figure out Mad Cow, what did the eyes and the tail and the ear have to do with anything?  Barton had seen dozens of photos where these had been cut from animals with the same calibrated accuracy as the sex organs.  And the tail was missing from the bull he was presently examining.

“What do they want with the tail?  That’s what I want to know.”  Clint Peeler was growing exasperated.  His hat was off again and he was impatiently tapping it against his leg.  “What do they want, period, that’s also what I want to know.  I just don’t want this on my ranch.  I don’t need it.  Makes me damned uncomfortable.  I’m glad my boy’s in school and he ain’t seein’ any of this.  He’s always out ridin’ the herd with me when he’s home.  And I sure don’t want you all telling the police or anybody else about this.  That’s why I called you, professor, when I saw your flier tacked on the wall at the co-op.  It said confidentiality.  I don’t need people worrying about any problems with beef coming off of my place.”

“I understand,” Barton said.

He was finishing measurements and the removal of a specimen from where the anus had been cored out.  “But I can’t tell you any more about the tail than I can any of the rest of this, which is, in sum, nothing.”

Tina took the last of the plastic specimen bags from Barton and went to store them in the insulated pouch on the side of the equipment bag. Barton, meanwhile, unzipped the Geiger counter from his vest pocket and turned it on.  Immediately, the digital display showed a row of bars ascending to the red zone.  The instrument clicked annoyingly.

“What is that?” Peeler asked.

“It’s a Geiger counter.”

“You mean for radioactivity?”

“Yes.”

“So, it’s telling you there’s radiation here?”

“That appears to be the case, yes.  And not an insignificant amount.  Nothing dangerous but not insignificant, either.  Considerably more than background radiation.”

Tina returned to Barton’s side, raised the video camera, and focused it on the readout on the display.  They were all silent as she taped and the device clicked.  She lowered the camera.

“We haven’t measured radiation at any of these before, have we Dr. Crawford?” Tina asked.

“No, I just wanted to see if there was any radiation presence.  I’d read it in some of the literature.”

“Do you think it means anything?”

“I have no more idea about that than I do any of the rest of it, Tina.”

“But maybe that’s why none of the wild animals ever come around to scavenge or pick at the carcass?  You think that’s possible?”

“I do.  Yes.  I just wish I knew what was causing the radiation.”

“And now my ranch is radioactive,” Peeler sighed.  “This ain’t gonna hurt any of my other cattle, is it?”

“No.  I doubt that will happen,” Barton said.

“Okay, then.  Not much I can do about any of this, it seems.  You all still want to see the heifer?”  Peeler was clearly in a hurry to get about his business.

“Yes, please,” Barton answered.  “But if you can just show us where it is, we’ll be fine.”

“It’s only a few hundred yards over this way.  But you’re gonna see the same thing you’ve seen here; except it’s a female and they took the udder and cut a circle clear through like they did on this bull.”

“Well, we’ll need to take a look, if you don’t mind.”

“Come on, then.”

Peeler stepped briskly ahead of Barton and Tina.  The student researcher was almost jogging to keep up with Barton’s loping stride through the tall grass, even though he had picked up the equipment bag and slung it over his shoulders as if it were a delicate women’s purse.

“You think it’s prions, don’t you, Dr. Crawford?”  Tina looked up to see the reaction on his face when she broached the subject.

“I don’t know, Tina.  I truly have no idea what’s going on here.”

“Yes, but you think it’s possible something or someone is studying the spread of prions through animals, and maybe humans, too.”

“I think that’s possible.  Yes.”

The rogue form of proteins known as prions was first discovered by American chemist and neurologist Stanley Prusiner.  According to his hypothesis, this unique protein molecule attaches itself to a healthy protein already present in nerve cells and converts the healthy protein into a prion.  The process repeats itself until plaques form and destroy brain and other nerve tissue, essentially turning gray matter to a kind of mush with the consistency of a wet sponge.  Prusiner’s work, which was also awarded a Nobel, suggests that prions are the infectious agent that made it possible for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or Mad Cow) to spread from animals to humans after lingering for centuries in sheep as a kind of “wasting disease.”

For Barton Crawford and other scientists, the unbelievable attribute of prions was their complete lack of nucleic acid, either DNA or RNA.  Every living thing with the ability to replicate itself contains nucleic acid; except for prions.  If DNA or RNA were present in prions, they could be inactivated like most traditional viruses by radiation bombardment, autoclaving at high temperatures, being blasted with strong dosages of ultra-violet light, or even pickling in concentrations of formalin.  None of those methods worked, however, to stop prions and that made Barton Crawford suspect they were intelligently designed and not a product of nature.  Mad Cow and the illness he was seeing in humans at the Bleak House had both arisen quickly, and unexpectedly, a fact that prompted his scientific curiosity about prions but he had not yet found any during research on patients in Phoenix.  Not a single case of Mad Cow had been recorded in the U.S, either, but if the brain-eating disease could lie dormant in sheep for centuries, prions might already be distributed throughout all types of creatures in America, human and otherwise, just waiting to be activated and prompt mass death.  Maybe, he thought, someone was culling the human race; the herd had gotten too big.

Barton’s Blackberry buzzed and he took it off of his hip.  The caller ID showed that it was his administrative assistant Dorothy Lund calling on her personal phone.

“Hello, Dorothy.  Is something the matter?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, Dr. Crawford.  But we may have something to be concerned about and I wanted to make you aware of it.”

“Yes?  What is it?”

“Well, I’ve been getting phone calls from a reporter wanting to talk to you.”

“On the government line at the Bleak House?”

“Yes.”

“But how would anyone outside of the cleared employees have that number?”

“I don’t know.  But since I didn’t acknowledge that you were even at that number, she’s begun calling other doctors here.  She seems to have their personal phone numbers, too.”

“Has anyone spoken to her or acknowledged their identity; that you know of?”

“No, I don’t.  But they’ve all asked me to contact you and make you aware of what’s going on.  People are worried.”

“I understand, Dorothy.  Please pass the word that I will be there in the morning.  I’ll get the earliest possible flight out of Denver.”

Before she could say “thank you” or “good-bye,” Barton had pressed the red button to end the call and was staring at another mutilated cow.  All of this, he thought, might be getting beyond his ability to manage.

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