PART THREE

17

Olivia was lying in bed, her hands pressed to her bulging belly, feeling the baby kick and turn and enjoying a moment of communion she chose not to share with Francis, although he was lying beside her.

‘It is amazing here,’ she said instead, as the electric blinds purred up, unveiling the view from their bedroom. On one side, far below, a redwood forest ran down to the edge of the Pacific; on the other, an undulation of autumnal hills flowed south from Hunter’s house. In the distance, she could see the sharper creases of the Santa Lucia Mountains, a compressed accordion of chaparral ridgelines. At least a dozen butterflies were resting on the plate-glass window, some with pulsing wings, as if catching their breath before their next flight.

‘Those Monarch butterflies have flown down from northern Canada to spend the winter here,’ said Francis. ‘It takes four generations to make the three-thousand-mile round trip.’

‘Each generation must be born knowing the way,’ said Olivia.

‘Yes, when it comes to navigation, they have bigger minds than any one of us – just more distributed through the generations and the kaleidoscope.’

‘Kaleidoscope?’ said Olivia.

‘It’s a collective noun for a group of butterflies.’

‘I thought it was swarm.’

‘I went with kaleidoscope.’

‘Such an aesthete,’ said Olivia.

‘It’s true,’ said Francis, staring out of the window, smiling.

The redwoods down in the coastal canyons belonged to a state park that protected Apocalypse Now from below. Its flanks were protected by two other large private properties. Altogether the three ranches formed a block of roughly five thousand acres, slightly larger than Howorth but more complicated to integrate. The further thousand acres of the state park had its own policy and its own management, and a bureaucracy that Hunter was better off not provoking, but yesterday he had invited his two other neighbours over to lunch, hoping to persuade them to participate in the wilding project that Francis was devising for him.

Jim Burroughs, the owner of Titan Ranch, was a self-mocking Republican with a white moustache, who joked that the only gun-control he could imagine supporting would be a law that made it mandatory for anyone over the age of five to carry a concealed weapon.

‘How else are they going to protect themselves in the modern school environment?’ he chuckled.

Jim’s great-grandfather had bought Titan Ranch in 1924 to raise the finest grass-fed cattle in California. Jim claimed that he was planning to celebrate a century of Burroughs ownership by releasing a thousand doves from a patch of woodland on his property, while a hundred friends of his stood nearby, heavily armed. The guests would be protected from each other by flak jackets and pellet-proof visors, since you couldn’t rule out a ‘Dick Cheney moment’ at a circular shoot in the middle of a cocktail party.

‘The dove that gets away from that wood alive is certainly going to justify its reputation as the poster bird for universal peace,’ said Jim.