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.

‘Are the doves going to be armed?’ asked Lucy. ‘Otherwise, I don’t see what they have to justify.’

‘Yes,’ said Olivia, ‘what about their Second Amendment rights?’

‘We’re flying them in from Colombia,’ said Jim. ‘They don’t have any Second Amendment rights.’

‘They’re just bad palomas,’ said Hunter, ‘rapists and drug doves.’

‘That’s right,’ said Jim, the glass in his hand recoiling several times from his laughing mouth. ‘Kidding aside, tree-huggers and hunters need to work together on this one: with no trees to hug, there won’t be any animals to hunt. If you and Francis are going to come up with a way to make the land more fertile and the wildlife more abundant, count me in. Science is mostly common sense with a lot of uncommon words snapping at its heels, but as long as you can explain it to me in plain English, I’ll sign on the dotted line.’

‘Great,’ said Francis, ‘plain English and common sense coming right up.’

‘He’s my guy,’ said Jim, nodding approvingly at Hunter.

‘Golly, Jim, you must have the most awesome mind on the planet if you think that quantum mechanics or genome sequencing or event horizons are “common sense”,’ said Hope Schwartz, the owner of the other big property bordering on Apocalypse Now.