Rufus was pulled up short by her use of the word “fun” and so spent a few moments taking stock of things. He’d never before set foot on a university campus. Some of his expectations had been correct. Lots of young and startlingly attractive people with protest signs: check. But her office wasn’t paneled and book-lined like professors’ offices in movies. The walls were reinforced concrete, and it was small, with cables and computers all over the place.
Not a bad fit overall with Dr. Rutledge, who was a reinforced concrete kind of gal, lacking in the far-fetched adornments that Rufus was used to seeing on females of the species Homo sapiens. Photographic evidence pointed to the existence of a husband and at least two children. Medium-length hair held back out of her face by a pair of laboratory safety glasses pushed up on top of her head. Middle American way of talking—either she was a transplant from out of the north, or one of those Texans who somehow grew to adulthood without picking up a Texan accent. A little prickly and short with him until he showed that he respected her. Reminded him in that way of some female army officers.
“Speaking of fun,” he finally said, “the Eurasian wild boar introductions were—”
“For sport.” She nodded. He felt he might have scored a point by his use of the word “introduction.”
“They’re more fun to hunt if they’re harder to kill,” Rufus said.
“I’m not a hunter but that sounds like a logical assumption to me.”
“Wily, fast, vicious.”
She raised her eyebrows and turned her palms up.
“A boar like that, crossed—hybridized—with a domestic variety that was bred up to be just huge—it could . . .”
He trailed off. She broke eye contact and let out a long breath she’d been gathering in as he circled closer and closer to his point.
“You’re talking about the animal that killed your daughter,” she said, in a tone that was quiet and sad but firm.
Of course. She would have googled him, just as he had her. It had been all over the papers.
She waited for him to nod before she went on.
“A hybrid of unusual size is plausible. Common sense really. But I would just caution you that the larger these animals get, the more food they have to consume to stay alive.”
Rufus was taken aback by her use of the word “caution,” which he was most accustomed to seeing on labels attached to crates of ammunition. She seemed to be warning him against falling into some kind of intellectual or ideational risk. Which would make sense, for a professor.
“So if your Hogzilla, your Moby Pig, weighs two hundred kilograms? I’ll buy that,” she continued. “Three hundred? I’m becoming skeptical. Beyond that I think you are in the realm of fantasy. Just going full Ahab. The enormous size that you are attributing to this animal is a reflection of the size of the role that it plays in your psyche. It’s just not a scientific fact. Are you about to throw up?”
“Beg pardon, ma’am?”
“You stuck your tongue out. Like you were gagging.”
“It’s a thing I do. Because of my psyche. I’m fine.”
“I want to help you,” she said. “I mean, if you want to devote your life to hunting down one hog out of several million and killing it, fine. It’s a man-eater. Getting rid of it would be a public
service. But my role, if I have one, is to keep you grounded in scientific reality. So, fact number one is that it probably doesn’t weigh more than two hundred kilograms. Certainly not three hundred. Point being that if you’re confining your search to fantastically enormous animals that you heard tell of from some cholo in a T.R. Mick’s, you’re just chasing folk tales and you’ll never find him.”
That stung a little because it was true. But Rufus was used to being stung. He shook it off and nodded. It made sense. Explained a thing or two.
“Fact number two is that, by your own reckoning, this animal is already three years old. In another three years it’ll be dead of old age. She frowned at him. “You don’t believe me?”
“Huh, of course I believe you. Ma’am.” People were always saying to Rufus variations on this. It was rarely the case. This had led him to understand that his face, in its natural resting state, conveyed a sense of skeptical disbelief. He guessed it was something to do with his forehead, which had developed prominent horizontal creases. “It’s just how I look when I’m thinking.”
She turned her palms up again. “Well, this age limit is a good thing. Prevents you from going full Ahab.”