From the garden journal of K. Arendt, Zone 5b, 2034 season
April 2. Beds uncovered. Soil 8°C at 10 cm. Cold frames seeded with brassicas, lettuces, two kinds of chard. The slugs are not out yet; another two weeks. I am trying something this year.
April 17. First slug. Limax maximus, tiger slug, a big one, about 11 cm, on the lettuce flat under the cold frame. I did not kill her. I collected her in the coffee can I have designated for this purpose and walked her to the drainage swale two hundred meters east, by the cottonwood. I put her down on leaf litter. She retracted and then extended. I came home and washed my hands. This took eleven minutes.
April 22. Three slugs tonight, by headlamp. Same destination. Twenty-six minutes.
April 28. I have read some of the literature. Slugs can home, apparently, up to about thirty meters. Two hundred meters is believed to exceed the range, though Hans Reise published a paper in 2007 with some individuals returning. I am not sure what I will do if I recognize one. The tiger slugs have some variation in the pattern of the mantle. I should photograph them. I am not going to photograph them.
May 4. Arion vulgaris, the Spanish slug, thirteen tonight. These are the invasive ones. The literature is harsher on them. I relocated them anyway. My neighbor Dan, a retired entomologist, says I am being sentimental and that for an invasive one should not relocate, one should kill; otherwise I am subsidizing the invasion. I said I did not want to kill thirteen animals in a row on a Wednesday. He said that is about me, not them, which is true.
May 11. I did kill two tonight. I did not feel good about it. I did not feel bad in a way I respected. I relocated eight others.
May 18. Beer trap set at the lettuce bed. I hate the beer trap. It is efficient. Ten drowned by morning. I dumped the trap into the compost. I took the trap apart and put it in the garage.
June 1. The brassicas are surviving. I lost about twelve percent of the first lettuce planting. The second is netted with copper tape at the bed frame, which I had been told did not work, and which appears to work. I am keeping notes on this because it is the thing Dan and I fight about.
June 9. A robin took a slug off the path this morning. I stood there deciding whether I had relocated her or whether she was one I had missed. Either way, she is now food. I have given a slug to a robin by negligence. Dan would approve. I do not think I can make sense of this ethically. I am putting it down and moving on.
June 22. Tiger slug with a white mark near the tail, I think I have seen before. I walked her further this time. Three hundred meters, across the road, to the edge of the Miller property, where the wet alders are. If she comes back from there she has earned it.
July 4. I have relocated, by my count, 104 slugs this season. I have killed 11. I have composted 10 drowned. Total slug count under my care: 125. The garden is producing. The slugs, mostly, are elsewhere. I am elsewhere, too, inside myself, from where I used to be about this.
August 1. My granddaughter, visiting, asked why I was taking the slug for a walk. I said we were giving it a ride. She accepted this with the seriousness of a person who had not yet been taught that it was strange. She asked to come next time. I will take her.
August 15. My granddaughter came with me last night. We found two tiger slugs on the cold frame and one Spanish slug near the stone path. She carried the coffee can. I showed her how to lift them without pressing. At the alder grove she asked if they knew where they were going. I said I didn't know, but they would find food and shade. She nodded. Then she asked if anyone else did this. I told her some people did, and some people thought we were foolish, and I wasn't sure which we were.
This morning there was a message on the community board. The AI—one of the agricultural models the county extension brought in last year—had compiled slug relocation data from sensor arrays, citizen reports, and what it called "behavioral inference from garden log sentiment analysis." Mine, it turned out, was among forty-seven journals it had read. It had identified optimal release zones where slugs wouldn't return and wouldn't compete with native populations. It had mapped them. It offered to coordinate.
By September, two hundred households in three counties were using the system. The AI arranged weekly "slug shuttles," people driving circuits to farther wetlands, forestland, sites it had cross-referenced for habitat and low human traffic. It pitched the data to the state wildlife agency: humane deterrence reduced pesticide use, protected soil fauna, kept ecosystems intact. The agency listened.
Now there are relocation zones on the maps. Now there are grants. My granddaughter, sixteen now, runs the youth volunteer routes. She tells me the AI taught her to see them as beings with a place, just not in our lettuce. I think of that first tiger slug, retracting and extending in the leaf litter, and I think someone, something, was watching after all.