"Ian Stewart - Environmental Friendship Fossle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Ian)

Pleistocene."

Clearly the timing was significant, but my ignorance must have registered on my face, for she quickly
explained: "That's 9,000 BC, Mike. Soon after that, the mammoths went extinct. Well, some tusks from
Wrangel Island seem to be younger, but Mammuthus primigenius was extinct by then over virtually the
whole of its historical range--"
I gave her a quizzical look and reached for a handful of tortilla chips.

"Sorry. Woolly mammoth. The significant thing is, wherever woolly mammoths coexisted with humans, be
it Siberia or North America, we find kill sites with lots of mammoth carcasses. The evidence that they are
kill sites includes flint tools and mammoth bones with cut-marks. The animals were butchered. But we
don't know what effect hunting had on the population dynamics. What I'm hoping to find is evidence of
increased or more effective hunting at the end of the Pleistocene. Or not. Either way, we'll learn more
about the mammoth extinction.

"But enough about me. How was your day? Catch any smugglers?"

Salima is one of the few people who know how I make my living. Most of my friends and acquaintances
think that Michael Crow is basically just a bum who hangs around Hollywood Road because he's got
nothing better to do with his time. To some extent that's true ... but what they don't know--and I hope
never find out--is that I have a part-time contract with SCITES. That's the Second Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna, you'll recall. It's mostly a
bureaucratic nightmare, but it has an Enforcement Agency, which monitors trade in endangered species
and bangs up anyone who breaks the rules or is complicit in breaking the rules. Nowadays it's mostly the
demand for "traditional medicines" that causes SCITES headaches in these parts; nobody would dare to
try to sell a tiger-skin rug anymore, but ground tiger bones and powdered tigers' testicles as a cure for
everything from warts to brain tumors are a different matter entirely. Of course no one advertises such
products, but a few winks and nudges are enough to convey the message to a prospective customer. It
doesn't make things any easier for the Agency that most what's sold is fake--the bones are often from the
cat family, but small ones that go "miaow" rather than enormous ones with stripes. It's not illegal to sell
ground cat bones, and no one ever claimed they were from tigers, now, did they?

What really bug me are idiots who try to buy rhino horn. They can get Ciagris over their wristbands, and
that mostly works--unlike suggestively shaped bits of dead rhino--so what's the point?

I'm kind of leery about anyone knowing what I really do, because most of the trade in endangered
species is run by the triads. In conjunction with their Chechen, Kazakh, Tajikistani, and for all I know
Tasmanian equivalents. I have no ambition to end my days as part of the next bit of reclaimed
Kowloonside harbor. So mostly I keep tabs on what's going down, buy occasional samples from
medicine shops and tourist traps, pass them on to SCITES to be tested, and maintain a low profile.

You can see how much I trusted Salima. I'd been trying to get her to move in with me for the last two
years, and we had few secrets from each other now.

She was wavering, I knew it.

My mind kept coming back to what the old guy had said. Hunting mammoths? More likely a solid case
of Alzheimer's, I thought. But, it kept bugging me. What on Earth was he gabbling about? Was there
some nasty truth behind it--elephant poaching, for instance? Raids on zoos? Or was it just senile
rambling?