Night of the Ferrets by Trevor Ritland

      

Pick Up Your Pen Contest
Northern Arizona book Festival
Trevor Ritland

       It was sometime after 3am, and we were going in circles; then again, that was the plan. The

radio died sometime after midnight, and for the last few hours we’d been bouncing down the

dusty pasture road outside Seligman in the dead quiet of an early spring night, windows down,

swinging white spotlights out into the dark. We were looking for the glimmering green eye-shine

of a black-footed ferret. 

A few days earlier, my friend Adam had called me from Phoenix and invited me out on this wild goose chase; had I known that saying “yes” would lead me up and down the same dirt road for seven-hour shifts two nights in a row, I would have let the call ring through to voicemail. But I had foolishly agreed, and we’d reported in the early evening to a trailer parked on the shoulder of route 66, where Jennifer Cordova with the AZ Game & Fish was coordinating volunteers for a survey of northern Arizona’s endangered black-footed ferret population. Her assistant Heather loaded us up with gear and Jennifer drew us out a sketchy map, and they sent us out to drive a transect from 9pm til dawn, leaning out the windows on the dusty roads in the cool night waiting for our spotlights to reflect the ethereal eye-shine of a black-footed ferret near its run.

At the end of the 1970s, even the most optimistic scientists believed the black-footed ferret to be extinct; though thousands had once been known to many western states, disease and habitat destruction nearly wiped them off the face of the continent. But in 1981, a Wyoming ranch dog carried an unexpected carcass to its owners, and it was soon confirmed to be a remnant individual of a species that was long-feared gone. From one ranch in northwestern Wyoming, the last black-footed ferrets on the planet reemerged; captive breeding programs and reintroduction efforts gave the species a foothold in the west. 

By the time Adam and I joined the local efforts to survey the Northern Arizona populations, the future of the black-footed ferret was once again uncertain. A deadly plague and threats to the ferrets’ food source continue to endanger the survival of the resurrected species. As wild populations decline, scientists begin to fear again that the species may be drifting toward extinction. 

When Adam and I drove our endless transect in the inky darkness, the Arizona populations were plague-free, but still declining. We never saw a ferret for ourselves that night, though we heard stories from the other volunteers of their own encounters; those familiar with the species’ history likened the experience to discovering a ghost. 

When the sun came up, painting the open pastures in warm light, we drove out into the pastureland to find a shady place to sleep. We were going out the next night to do it all again; and this time, by god, we were going to find a ferret.