And so

My job ends.

When I first saw Turtle Island, I wanted to climb its mountains; to stand on the tip of the head of the turtle and look over the cliff and the crashing waves below.

That night, we caught the last bat to be radio tagged, frequency number 150.985; "985" for short.

Thus began six months of the radio tracking of four bats.  From the beginning, one was never found.  After a month, another disappeared.  Sometime in December the third died, but we weren't able to reach it until February.  In the last week of February, I concluded that 985 could no longer be moving, either.

Yesterday we climbed to get the last bat.  Or radio-transmitter, as it turned out.  Our worst fear, that the radio transmitters were killing the bats, did not turn out to be the case, at least in this instance.  We found the broken collar still attached to the chewed antenna on the slope of a gully that emptied into a sheer cliff.

It was not an easy climb.  A-Hong had to cut the entire way through, until his blisters cut open, while I followed with an antennae, getting it caught on every thorned vine I came across.  The grade was ridiculously and dangerously steep, and we had to clamber and pull ourselves up by tree trunks and plants, too often covered in spines.

So it's done.  The bat tagged on my first day is accounted for (the collar, at least) and I climbed something.  I couldn't really get a good view because of the dense undergrowth, but I saw the sea a couple times through the trees.  And I looked down into several drops at another jungle below.  My hands are covered in little cuts.

Mission accomplished.  Is this it?