Burdell found a mongoose in the trap and now he had to kill it. He hated this part of the job. The first few times, he did it with a pellet gun point-blank to the brainpan, but that felt too personal, too gangsterish. Lately, he’d been experimenting with carbon monoxide, stuffing the condemned into a Hefty bag and pumping in exhaust with a hose from the Jeep’s tailpipe. This took longer but seemed more humane.    

Burdell had been on Maui for eight months. As caretaker of a pristine tract of hillside overlooking the Pacific on the jungle end of the island, he spent weeks at a stretch undisturbed, minimally attending to the property and working on his novel. His employer, an internet millionaire turned absentee conservationist, insisted only on one thing: that he kill any mongoose he encountered.

Everyone on the island despises these weasel-like, devil-eyed creatures, introduced in the 19^th century to hunt rats on the sugar plantations but quickly ran amok. They’re known to raid henhouses and decapitate a dozen chickens without eating a single one. The wastefulness of this wanton butchery offends the frugal sensibilities of the islanders.

In the cage, the mongoose paced rapidly back and forth, stumbling over the empty bait tin again and again. Burdell knew he wouldn’t kill it. He put the trap in the back of the Jeep and drove the winding two-track to the edge of the property. Before he set it loose, he stared at it, fixing its features in his mind. The mongoose stared back, one non-native species to another, heedless of the momentary inconvenience. Burdell opened the trap and it surged out, vanishing into the tall grass.

Two days later he found eight adolescent chicks dead in their segregated coop. They were shut inside to protect them from the aggressions of the older chickens and thus had been trapped with their assailant, who picked them off one by one, clawing heads from necks. Burdell threw his hat against a tree and kicked over a wheelbarrow.

Since then, he uses the pellet gun. From time to time, unexpectedly, he glimpses the face of that freed mongoose around the island: in the hazel eyes of a cashier at the Kahului Costco or the sun-blond goatee of a hitchhiker along the Hana Highway. It could be anywhere by now.