“Aside from a giant concrete octagon, you mean?”
“Right.” Hawkins turned to a pile of dirt and leaf litter on the side of the room. A splotch of red color next to the debris caught his attention. He knelt down and picked it up. The thick cloth was easily identifiable as a piece of baseball cap. The remnant of a B confirmed Hawkins’s suspicion that it was Kam’s Red Sox cap. That it was ruined was cause for concern—the kid rarely parted from it—but it being here was also the first real evidence that Kam had made it to the island and not drowned in the storm.
“That’s Kam’s hat!” Joliet said, taking the fabric from him.
“Yeah, but why is it—”
A loud squeak made him jump back and Joliet shouted in surprise as a black shape shot across the floor and out the door.
“What … was that?” she asked, catching her breath.
“A rat,” he said. “I think.”
Joliet inched toward the open door, looking for the rodent. “Looks like the Japanese left something else behind, too. Where people go, rats follow.”
“Mmm,” Hawkins said, but he’d only heard half of what she said. He walked back to the window and looked down the hill, scratching his chin.
“What is it?” Joliet asked.
“The rat,” he said.
“You don’t like rats?”
“Rat,” he said. “Singular. Rats tend to live in colonies. Sometimes several hundred in a single colony. And each female in the colony can have sixty young, per year, half of which might be females. Eleven weeks after birth, those females start cranking out young of their own. On an island like this, left to breed for the past seventy years, their population should have expanded until the place was overrun.”
“But it’s not,” Joliet said. “This is the first we’ve seen.”
Hawkins placed his hands on the windowsill, watching the jungle floor below for movement. “And there are plenty of food sources out there. Rats aren’t picky. It’s possible that their population exploded and suffered a massive die-off because of starvation, but that still doesn’t explain the lack of a colony. Rats live just two years. For there to be one rat, there needs to be others, and we run into the colony explosion scenario again, unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless something is keeping them in check.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a reason Yellowstone is never overrun with rats. They’re there—they’re everywhere—but their population is controlled—” He looked her in the eyes. “By predators. Mountain lions, wolves, foxes, lynxes, bobcats, eagles, hawks, owls, and a variety of other predators keep the rodent and rabbit populations in check.”
“So what? The seagulls here have a taste for rat?” Joliet said with a grin.
“No,” he said, “to keep a rat population down to where they’re not scurrying everywhere requires a healthy population of a number of different predators.”
“How do you know there are different predators?”
“If there were only one species of predator, they would face the same overpopulation issue as the rat. They’d be everywhere. Predators are kept in check by competition. Other hunters.”
Joliet’s smile faded. “How come we’re not seeing them then?”
“Because they’re predators,” Hawkins said, eyes still on the hillside below. “They don’t want to be seen.”
12.
Hawkins let the moment drag out for a moment and then smiled. “Don’t worry, any predators on the island would have come with the Japanese, too. Feral cats. Maybe wild dogs. And some bird species, like the seagulls, which seem aggressive enough to handle a rat.”
Joliet’s let out a breath. “Bastard.”
Hawkins chuckled, but it was only partly sincere. The combination of a dead woman, a WWII fortification, and the presence of an active ecosystem that included predatory animals had him on edge. The island appeared to be as close as you could get to a tropical paradise, but the history of the place trumped the environment. And he had no doubt the lush jungle hid more secrets.
But he wasn’t a historian. Nor was he here to speculate on wildlife. He came to the island to find Kam and take him back to the ship. He stepped out of the pillbox and scanned the clearing outside. He’d lost Kam’s trail before they’d reached the switchbacks, but he couldn’t think of a reason the kid would have gone trailblazing. If anything, Kam had cut straight up the hillside, ignoring the switchbacks altogether. He’d hoped to pick up a trail atop the hill, but saw nothing.
Nothing at all. No rocks. No trees. No overgrowth. The clearing around the pillbox entrance looked almost manicured. Grass covered the ground, but it was neatly trimmed.