Routine poisons normally controlled the noxious creatures everyone knew and tacitly accepted as living in the dump. Wafarins held the inevitable rat population in check, and the cockroach broods were standardly contained by pyrethrum and sodium fluoride. Since the prevailing southwest winds carried the stench conveniently out to sea, it was easy for the dump—out of the sight and smell of Yarkie’s homes—to remain out of mind.

Thus, no one marked, suspected, or theorized about the slithering mass of preternatural life seething through the stinking intercises. No one considered or remarked that conditions were ideal for breeding in geometric multiplication. For cockroaches, particularly, the ever-enlarging dump was a great progenitive womb—warm, fetid, moist, with food so cornucopianly plentiful that everything crawling, creeping, and scurrying through the foulness could gorge to satiation.

Until the change in Yarkie’s poison controls by unwitting health officials upset the balance Nature had contrived, and unleashed a new appetite that bloodless garbage could not satisfy.

Aside from the dump’s ugly acre at the northeast tip of Yarkie, the island was travelogue-picturesque. It sat “like a bowler hat” in the sea off the Cape some ten miles eastward of Chatham. It was about two miles wide, and four miles long, running south-north; with a central, forested dome—the “bowler”—bordered with beaches broken sharply by steep cliffs and ridges.

The village of Yarkie rose on the west side, facing toward the Cape, above a deep-water harbor crowded with working fishing boats. The small town made a tidy New England grid of prim lawns and white spires amid tree-lined, red-bricked sidewalks. The old homes of long ago whaling captains stood doughtily behind boxwood hedges and whitewashed fences “making good neighbors.” Outside the town, the Yarkie houses were scattered on a lace of lanes, once cart and wagon roads and a challenge to the few cars that used them. Bikes and shank’s mare were more common on the island.

Most of the buildings were crisp white or gray shingles on hewn oak, what Thoreau had described as “sober-­looking, and reflecting the (Cape Cod) virtues of thrift, neatness and independence.” Almost all were topped with widow walks from which Yarkie wives and children had, as long ago as the late 1600s, scanned the surrounding waters for the first sign of sail of husband, son, brother, lover.

The four hundred-odd inhabitants of Yarkie were no-nonsense. They pretty much held with what one long-faded Cape newspaper had noted for posterity: A person would be “warned out of town” if he were not “twenty-one years old, of sober peaceable conversation, orthodox in religion, and possessed of saleable estate to the value of twenty pounds.” In modern Yarkie, this proscription took the form of discouraging tourists and all publicity about the island’s very existence. One ferry a day served more than adequately between Chatham and Yarkie even in midsummer.