The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown by Adam Welz

Author:Adam Welz [Welz, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9781635575224
Google: 0DPZEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1635575222
Goodreads: 126524776
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2023-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

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a  Fire is, in a sense, rot sped up. Both processes break down cellulose and the other components of wood to produce carbon dioxide gas, water vapor, and other products; they both reverse the process of photosynthesis but have very different effects on the ecosystem.

6

Fertile Air

A Cheetah lies still and low, eyes forward, in a mass of small, scrubby thorn trees, mostly Sicklebush and Blackthorn, in the Otjozondjupa region of northern Namibia. She’s facing into a lightly-grassed clearing criss-crossed by the habit-worn trails of Gray Duiker and Steenbok, small antelope she’s become accustomed to killing.

Only one cub from her most recent litter survived to adulthood, and he left some months back to find a territory of his own, so she woke alone an hour ago. She indulged in a long, tongue-flexing, canine-baring yawn as the first pulse of real blue began to wash the stars from the eastern sky, and then picked a careful way through the dense, prickly bush to this small arena, two or three open acres of scrappy Wool Grass and Dubi Grass on reddish, sandy soil. A few sniffs and glances at fresh hoofprints told her that it was well enough used, so she settled down in ambush as the day’s hard yellow light hit the branches above her hiding place and the birds rose around her into abundant, rippling morning song.

Twenty yards away, to the Cheetah’s left, a male Gray Duiker stops at the edge of the clearing. With a foreleg frozen in midair, he silently jerks his dark, wet eyes and large ears toward an almost imperceptible rustle—toward her. Flicks and shivers pass along his skin, sending up a couple of early flies.

The Cheetah tenses up, her belly fur tickling across the loose sand, and then explodes forward. With no time or space to turn, the Duiker shoots into the clearing, the Cheetah turning hard right to intercept his headlong sprint across the space. She swipes at his back legs with an outstretched paw to trip him, but misses, then tucks in behind him for another try, her nose just a yard from his rear.

It takes just seconds for them to reach the opposite edge of the clearing, where the Cheetah suddenly breaks off her charge and stumbles to a halt, shaking her head in a thin cloud of dull, slowly rising dust. The Duiker disappears in a waning cascade of hoof thumps, safe again in the thicket. The birds have quit singing. An inch-long Sicklebush thorn, one of many on a long, thin, low branch, has ripped into the Cheetah’s right eye.

In the coming days her eye will swell and its cornea will turn a pale powder blue. She will begin to starve, a loose-skinned Cyclops loping through the bush in search of easy meat—a calf on a nearby cattle ranch, perhaps, or the remains of another predator’s kill—but she won’t find it.

One evening, as she looks for shelter, she’ll be surprised by another spotted cat: a glossy male Leopard with a dark mouth and bright teeth, the new lord of the thicket.

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