Until he’d flown to Houston and met Haven, in the summer of 2001, Walter had been unfamiliar with the concept of good Texans, the national news being so dominated by bad ones. Haven owned a large ranch in the Hill Country and an even larger one south of Corpus Christi, both of them lovingly managed to provide habitat for game birds. Haven was the Texan sort of nature lover who happily blasted cinnamon teal out of the sky but also spent hours raptly monitoring, via closed-circuit spycam, the development of baby barn owls in a nest box on his property, and could expertly rhapsodize about the scaling patterns on a winter-plumage Baird’s sandpiper. He was a short, gruff, bullet-headed man, and Walter had liked him from the first minute of his initial interview. “A hundred-million-dollar ante for one passerine species,” Walter had said. “That’s an interesting allocation.”
Haven had tilted his bullet head to one side. “You got a problem with it?”
“Not necessarily. But given that the bird’s not even federally listed yet, I’m curious what your thinking is.”
“My thinking is, it’s my hundred million, I can spend it whatever way I like.”
“Good point.”
“The best science we got on the cerulean warbler shows populations declining at three percent a year for the last forty years. Just because it hasn’t passed the threshold of federally threatened, you can still plot that line straight down toward zero. That’s where it’s going: to zero.”
“Right. And yet—”
“And yet there’s other species even closer to zero. I know that. And I hope to God somebody else is worrying about ’em. I often ask myself, would I slit my own throat if I was guaranteed I could save one species by slitting it? We all know one human life is worth more than one bird’s life. But is my miserable little life worth a whole species?”
“Thankfully not a choice that anybody’s being asked to make.”
“In a sense, that’s right,” Haven said. “But in a bigger sense, it’s a choice that everybody’s making. I got a call from the director of National Audubon back in February, right after the inauguration. The man’s named Martin Jay, if that ain’t the damndest thing. Talk about the right name for the job. Martin Jay is wondering if I might arrange him a little meeting with Karl Rove at the White House. He says one hour is all he needs to persuade Karl Rove that making conservation a priority is a political winner for the new administration. So I say to him, I think I can get you an hour with Rove, but here’s what you got to do for me first. You got to get a reputable independent pollster to do a survey of how important a priority the environment is for swing voters. If you can show Karl Rove some good-looking numbers, he’s gonna be all ears. And Martin Jay falls all over himself saying thank you, thank you, fabuloso, consider it done. And I say to Martin Jay, there’s just one little thing, though: before you commission that survey and let Rove see it, you might want to have a pretty good idea what the results are going to be. That was six months ago. I never heard from him again.”
“You and I see very much eye to eye on the politics of this,” Walter said.
“Kiki and I are working a little bit on Laura, whenever we can,” Haven said. “Might be more promise in that direction.”
“That’s great, that’s incredible.”
“Don’t hold your breath. I sometimes think W.’s more married to Rove than to Laura. Not that you heard that from me.”
“But so why the cerulean warbler?”
“I like the bird. It’s a pretty little bird. Weighs less than the first joint of my thumb and flies all the way to South America and back every year. That’s a beautiful thing right there. One man, one species. Isn’t that enough? If we could just round up six hundred and twenty other men, we’d have every North American breeder covered. If you were lucky enough to get the robin, you wouldn’t even have to spend one penny to preserve it. Me, though, I like a challenge. And Appalachian coal country’s one hell of a challenge. That’s just something you’re going to have to accept if you’re going to run this outfit for me. You got to have an open mind about mountaintop-removal mining.”
In his forty years in the oil-and-gas business, running a company called Pelican Oil, Vin Haven had developed relationships with pretty much everyone worth knowing in Texas, from Ken Lay and Rusty Rose to Ann Richards and Father Tom Pincelli, the “birding priest” of the lower Rio Grande. He was especially tight with the people at LBI, the oilfield-services giant which, like its archrival Halliburton, had expanded into one of the country’s leading defense contractors under the administrations of Reagan and the elder Bush. It was LBI to which Haven turned for a solution to the problem of Coyle Mathis. Unlike Halliburton, whose former CEO was now running the nation, LBI was still scrambling for inside access to the new administration and thus particularly disposed to do a favor for a close personal friend of George and Laura.
