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4. Los Angeles, California

42 Los Angeles, California GPS Coordinates: –118.2436849, 34.0522342 March 12, 2010 By the time Claire Matthews had finished writing her doctoral dissertation she was regarded by many of her colleagues to be one of the world’s most promising young contributors to the emerging field of cryptozoology. For this, she had an unusual potbellied herbivore to thank. Although no bigger than a common goat, the Ha Tinh pygmy rhinoceros, as it was now known the world over, had promised to get Claire in the door of an elitist community of male scientists that every now and then tolerated a Madame Curie in their ranks. Claire had been a lead member of the research team who had confirmed the existence of the pygmy rhinoceros, a taciturn creature whose most prominent features were a pair of vestigial horns on its snout and zebra stripes about its rump. However, the discovery that should have rocketed her to relative stardom fizzled mightily, and her career had more or less blown up on the launch pad nearly five years ago. Admittedly, tracking down species thought to be extinct or merely rumored to exist was not going to make a celebrity out of her, but there was something inherently noble and gratifying about opening the eyes of the world to the mystery and diversity of fauna that had populated the planet long before there were humans to level forests for toilet paper. She also liked proving the skeptics wrong. They were men mostly, burnt-out practitioners of hard data and established facts, who regarded her passion for the unknown with the same scorn many of Copernicus’s contemporaries had regarded the renegade astronomer’s heretical model of earth’s solar system. For decades, people in the remote mountain villages of Laos and Vietnam had reported sightings of a reclusive mammal unclassified in modern taxonomy, but no one had paid any serious attention. That is until Claire had produced credible evidence of the Ha Tinh’s existence in the form of badly decomposed remains. She had received the parcel via overnight mail by secret arrangement with an anonymous zoo acquisitionist operating without a permit in the balmy highlands of Ha Tinh prov- Josh Pryor ~ 43 ince. In actuality, there was no zoo acquisitionist and the decomposed remains had belonged to a stillborn hippopotamus, but the ruse had been enough to convince the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History where she had been interning to fund a modest expedition. It was a big gamble. Claire knew that failure would’ve meant exposure as a fraud and the end of a career in its infancy; however, she was absolutely certain that something, if not the rumored pygmy rhinoceros, was out there waiting to be discovered. Once upon a time she had been an incurable optimist. Besides, she was not going to make it in a man’s world playing by the rules. She had to take chances, make her own way. She had learned early on that her survival depended on her ability to adapt, eke out a niche in a field saturated with testosterone. Her hunch had paid off and after only three leech-infested weeks in the jungle she and the other members of the team had documented two adult and one juvenile Ha Tinh pygmy rhinoceros. It was the most significant addition to the Class Mammalia since biologists had confirmed the existence of the Vu Quang ox in 1992. Despite her early notoriety she now lived with the distinct possibility that she was never going to be able to match the success of her first expedition, a triumph eclipsed by an over-inflated controversy that haunted her to this day. Already there were those who described her, in addition to less flattering appellations, as a “one hit wonder.” Mostly, these were the same aging armchair scientists who had doubted her from the beginning, envious hemorrhoid sufferers who ruled university Natural Science departments and the professional journals with an arrogant dedication to rehashing what was already known. But the label bothered her anyway. Claire had known all along that her chosen field was with few exceptions little more than a bastion of male ego. Still, she had done nothing to deserve this. Teaching general biology at Los Caminos Community College, an under funded, overcrowded haven for anyone who could afford the twenty-five dollars per unit enrollment fee was nothing short of a slap in the face. The gloomy little college was equidistant from every...