Invasive Species Read Online Free PDF

to be released.
    Its encounter with Trey was the third strike. The National Park Service brought in a marksman with a high-powered rifle, and the curious bear was shot no more than a mile from the picnic ground.
    Reading about the bear’s death, alone in his quiet house, Trey felt his eyes prickle. And at that moment, at age eleven, he made himself a promise.
    Not to avoid the presence of the wild creatures on earth, but to seek them out.
    And to keep them safe by going alone.
    *   *   *
    TREY WALKED THROUGH the dim forest for nearly two hours. Then, when and where he’d known he would, he saw it: a brightening in the forest ahead, as subtle as the first wash of light in the eastern sky an hour before dawn.
    But nothing as natural as that.
    Trey stopped for a moment, looked, listened, and went on.

FOUR
    HE DREW CLOSE to the dying forest. The green, stained-glass light that glowed through the unbroken canopy behind him gave way to something brighter, harsher. The wind changed direction for a moment, blowing into his face, and with it came the now-familiar bitter odor.
    Only then did Trey realize that the forest around him was silent. Even healthy rain forests can be surprisingly quiet, but this was different. He heard no birdsong, no frogs calling, not the midday shrill of cicadas or whisper of crickets. It wasn’t the quiet of a vast natural engine concealing its secrets, but a stillness more like death.
    Perhaps a hundred yards ahead he could see a tangle of underbrush. Inside a healthy forest, very few plants grow in the understory; not enough sunlight reaches the ground. Only where a great tree falls, creating a light gap, do vines and thorn bushes and saplings sprout.
    Only where a great tree falls, or all the trees are stricken.
    What the hell was going on here?
    *   *   *
    HE STOOD IN the angled afternoon sunlight beside peeling trunks, beneath bare, twisted branches. Every step he took, he was forced to kick through piles of leaves, sodden and rotting.
    Something was out of whack, and Trey couldn’t figure out what. This pissed him off.
    He knew that people tended to think of natural landscapes as immutable, never-changing, but of course it wasn’t true. Through time—eye blinks, really—glaciers had carved pathways across the world, forests had sprouted and withered, oceans had turned to desert. Nothing stayed the same forever.
    And the balance was fragile, especially in the rain forest. Clearing for farmland or industry, the arrival of an invasive pest from elsewhere, humans hunting out keystone species—any one, or a hundred others, could doom an entire ecosystem.
    So what was messing with this one?
    Only one plant seemed to be thriving in the gap created by the blight: a kind of sprawling, woody vine that Trey had never seen before. Its leaves were a dark glossy green, and here and there he could see its tiny, fleshy fruit, red like a cranberry but smaller and more oval.
    The vines spread from tree to tree, sometimes climbing five or ten feet up a trunk before reaching out toward the next. Examining the tree nearest him, Trey saw that the vine didn’t appear to be the cause of its blight, at least not in any way he could see.
    It gave off a spicy odor that reminded him of ginger.
    A hundred feet ahead, directly in his path, lay a thick wall of half-dead brambles, yellow-green leaves and spiky branches interwoven like a cage. Again, this was something Trey had never seen in the healthy forests he’d explored.
    Another unfamiliar plant taking advantage of light gaps in this forest. Though, unlike the glossy vine, the brambles didn’t seem immune from whatever was killing the trees.
    Something jumped near Trey, right at the periphery of his vision. His pulse quickened, but he did not flinch. With careful, slow movements, he turned his head. A pair of bright black eyes regarded him from the depths of a tangle of the vines. A squirrel, it