Humane Capture

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I had been dreaming about enormous butterflies, big as ponies, and I had been riding them. One had just bucked me off when I woke with a start. Things seemed quiet – my wife was sleeping next to me; the lights were off; the dogs weren’t barking their heads off. I took a swig of water and was about to settle back down to sleep when I heard it – the same noise that must have woken me up in the first place. It was the sound of the lid of my trash can scraping and bumping on the ground.

I got out of bed, pulled on pants and a shirt, and grabbed the baseball bat. "What is it?" asked my wife groggily. "Some critter's in the trash again," I said, stepping into my sandals. For three nights running something had been rummaging the trash, leaving a mess all over my driveway. "Well, don't get bit," my wife said helpfully before rolling over.

I grabbed a flashlight and went out through the front door. I stole around the corner of the house, hoping to catch the culprit unawares. I toggled the flashlight on and jumped around the trash enclosure, bathing the narrow alley with the blinding light of the beam.

There were two of them – Neanderthals, if I had to guess; they had blockier skulls than the Homo Ergasters we got during the freeze last winter, and they were as tall as a regular person. They had shaggy hair all over their bodies, jutting jaws, and wore tattered hides that looked to have been taken from possums. They grunted with fear, caught in the act of rummaging through my big black plastic trash bin for leftovers, frozen in the beam of my flashlight.

"Go on! Shoo!" I shouted, slamming the bat on the slats of the fence. The light plus the noise was enough to scare the Neanderthals off. Screeching and howling, they ran out the other side of the trash enclosure and took off across my yard. I followed them as far as the curb, shining the flashlight down the road, watching their hunched shaggy forms disappear into the night.

"Goddamn hominids," I grunted, and went back to bed.


The next morning I went out to get the paper. Jackson was already shaved and combed and was watering his shrubs. He waved, and I crossed the street to say hello.

"What's new?" asked Jackson. He was one of those people who can wake up at four in the morning, even on weekends, and not need coffee. It was already nine and I still needed mine. I took a sip and swished it around in my mouth.

"Trash got raided again last night," I said.

"Oh no." Jackson craned his neck to look at my driveway. "Bad mess again?"

"Nope, not too bad," I said. "I caught 'em. Red handed."

Jackson grinned. "Raccoons, right? Clever little bastards; they can use those little paws just like hands, I swear."

"Not raccoons," I said. "Neanderthals."

"Shit," said Jackson, his eyes wide. "Really? In the middle of the city?"

"I know, but that's what I saw," I said. "They were as close to me as you are now, digging for chicken bones."

Jackson snapped his fingers. "Know what?" he said. "The constable's deputy, that Grainger kid, told me he had seen some hominids coming out of the drainage ditch along the back of the subdivision. I guess the drought is bringing them into town."

I finished my coffee. "Now I'm curious," I said. "Feel like taking a walk to go and see? I just need two minutes to get some shoes on."

We walked down to the end of the cul-de-sac. A warning fence kept cars from driving directly into the ditch, but there was a gap to walk down into the grassy, weed-strewn area. Local teens liked to go down into the ditch to make out and smoke weed, or so the rumor mill had it. I assumed that didn't apply when it was wet, because even horny teens will be repelled by swarms of mosquitoes, but it had been dry for months and the bloodsuckers had nowhere to breed.

We carefully crept down the slope of the ditch. A hundred yards further down it ceased to be an open ditch and became a big concrete box culvert, easily ten feet high and across, covered over with dirt and grass and poison ivy.

"I'm not going in there," Jackson said.

"Yeah, well, nobody asked you to," I replied. "But I bet that's where they're living. Damned Neanderthals."

We picked our way cautiously back up and out of the ditch. "How come they had to pick my house?" I complained. "There's got to be fifty lots that are closer. Why not your house?"

Jackson laughed. "Your wife makes the best chicken, I'm guessing," he said. "Besides, I don't keep my trashcan outside; it's in my garage. You should think about doing the same."

"Shit, I paid Jose five hundred dollars to build that enclosure so you can't see the trash from the street," I groused. "I don't want to just throw that money away."

"Well, you can't just put clips on your trashcan," said Jackson. "Those Neanderthals are clever. Big brain-pans, you know; maybe bigger than ours."

"I could put out poison," I said. "Some kind of bait. Maybe a whole chicken, laced with something like cyanide."

"Oh, Jesus," said Jackson. "I can already picture how that goes. I mean, you realize that if you've seen a couple of Neanderthals, there's probably a whole tribe of them, right? Imagine a whole tribe of Neanderthals dying in the ditch back there and stinking up the entire neighborhood. Who's going to go into that pipe and get them out, huh? Not that Grainger kid, that's for sure."

I kicked a rock as we walked back towards our houses. "I'm not sticking my trashcan in my garage; your whole house smells like a hair-clog. And anyway, this isn't just about a mess on my driveway. Those Neanderthals aren't civilized, Jackson. What if they mess with the kids? What if they spread disease, or hunt our pets? We have to do something."

"Okay, I get that," said Jackson. "C'mon, let's go for a drive. I think I've got an idea."

**

Jackson drove us to the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Hominids. A nice hippie-type lady named Cheryl led us past rows of holding cages. Orangutans regarded us solemnly as we walked by; an elderly Australopithecus lay face-down in the straw snoring away.

"I think it's great that you guys are thinking about humane capture," said Cheryl. "It seems like every time we hear about people having troubles with hominids in the city, the first thing they think of is poison, or spike traps, or guns." Jackson and I exchanged glances.

"Yeah, well, it's not like we want to hurt 'em," said Jackson. "We just want 'em gone from our neighborhood."

"Of course," said Cheryl. "A lot of people forget that urban non-domesticated hominids may seem cute and almost human, but deep down they're still basically wild. They don't understand our civilized world, and they don't know how to coexist with us. And when there's a conflict between them and us, the hominids always lose."

I wasn't really interested in lectures. "Okay, so explain how this works again?" I asked.

Cheryl dragged a plastic box out of a corner of a storeroom. "Well, this is our latest catch-and-release hominid trap," she said. It was the size and shape of a port-a-potty. "You're going to set this up on your property, bait it, and wait. Usually the hominids forage at night. You'll catch one, bring the whole thing back here, and we'll figure out how to release it in a location far from humans."

"How will we know when we've caught one?" asked Jackson.

"Oh, trust me; you'll know," said Cheryl. "They'll make a lot of noise. But there's a tiny little window up here with mesh across it where you can look inside."

"What's the best bait?" I asked.

"I've found that baloney works pretty well," said Cheryl. "Something savory that smells good. Once you lure them in, the trap is basically self-baiting. Now, make sure you have a dolly, because once this sucker has a Neanderthal in it, it's going to be hard to load it into your truck."

It was hard enough to manage getting it into my bed even without a hominid inside, but Jackson and I got it sorted out. We drove it back to my house and pulled it off the truck. Straining, we shuffled the big green box into the trash enclosure alongside my trashcan and recycling bin.

"Okay," said Jackson, reading the instructions printed on the side of the box, "first we open the spring-loaded door until it makes a snapping noise. There. Okay, next we set the bait. Got any baloney?"

"No, but I got some hot dogs," I said.

"Fine, get 'em," said Jackson. I got an eight-pack of hot dogs, stripped them out of the package, and dumped them into the bin inside the trap.

"Let's test it," said Jackson. I nodded and walked inside. There was a mirror on my left, a chalkboard on my right, and the food bin straight ahead. I grabbed the hot dogs. A spring let go in the door assembly and it snapped shut. There was no door handle inside the box, and no mechanism to jigger. Jackson let me out again.

"All right," I said, "looks like it works. I guess we'll just go to bed like normal tonight, and we'll know if we've caught something in the morning."

**

I didn't have to wait until morning.

The clock read a little before three in the morning when the racket woke me up. There was a yowling and a pounding and loud thumping noises. "Oh God, not again," moaned my wife, putting the pillow over her head.

"I think we got a nibble," I said. I had gone to bed dressed; I sprang up and grabbed the bat and flashlight, and then opened the garage door. The noise that the motor made scared away any other Neanderthals that might have been loitering around – exactly as I had hoped – but the trap clearly had caught somebody or something. The box was rocking back and forth, and there was a roaring and incomprehensible shouting coming from the slots in the enclosure. I grinned and shone the light through the mesh grid. A huge hand slapped at the window, and a hairy bone-ridged face smashed up alongside it. I jumped and almost dropped the flashlight.

"All right, hominid," I growled, "you're my prisoner. You've won an all-expenses vacation to Someplace Else, and your ride leaves tomorrow morning. So sit tight."

He didn't sit tight. My guest growled and muttered for most of the rest of the night, only starting to calm down when the sun started to come up. I didn't sleep at all; I sat in a lawn chair inside the garage door, waiting to see if the other Neanderthals would return to help try to spring their friend. They didn't.

Before the sun had risen all the way, Jackson came up my driveway. "How'd it go?" he asked.

"See for yourself," I said.

Jackson and I took turns peeking through the window. Our hairy guest was looking at his face in the mirror. Then he was turning and using a piece of chalk to draw his own image on the blackboard. He was engrossed in this task. There were other pictograms on the chalkboard too – images of Neanderthals hunting deer, dancing around a fire, and running away from something that looked suspiciously like a bus.

"All right," I said, "we need to get him to Cheryl. I'm going to back the truck right up to the box, and maybe we can haul it up into the bed."

Easier said than done, especially since our guest got all excited again once he realized the box was being moved, but somehow we managed to get the trap lifted up and into the truckbed. I tied it down securely, imagining the Neanderthal rocking the whole thing out of the bed while we were going down the Interstate. Jackson and I went back to the ASPCH and went to see Cheryl with our prize in tow.

She peeked through the window. Cheryl's eyes grew wide and she smiled. "Oh!" she said. "He's just a *baby*!"

I frowned and looked through the mesh myself. That didn't look like no goddamn baby. It was a hairy, muscular Neanderthal, and I told Cheryl so.

"Oh, no," she said. "This is a juvenile. See how he doesn't have any more hair on his face than he does on the rest of his body? And see how he's not quite full grown? You've caught a child."

"Great," I said. "Let me guess: you can't release a child out into the wild without the parents."

Cheryl frowned. "Well, we can," she said. "We can place him with other Neanderthal groupings. But they have family bonds just the same as humans do. He's going to miss his parents terribly, and they're going to miss him. What would be best if you could take the trap back and try to get one or more of the adults in his group."

Me and Jackson loaded the big green box back into my truck bed. "Poison," I said, thin-lipped. "Cyanide, or antifreeze. Could have done it. Would have been easy." I put the truck in gear. "But NOooo."

"Just drive, Jane Goodall," said Jackson, clearly no happier than I.