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By Root 752 0

stare. “Wipe that grin off your face.” She turned and headed uphill toward the cabin with the stout scythe balanced over her shoulder. Her legs felt as heavy as water. There was no reason to feel this tired, except maybe the aftermath of an adrenaline rush, but she was ready to quit for the day. Eat a late lunch, curl up with a book. Rain was coming. She’d heard unexpectedly loud thunder several times already this morning (each boom had made her jump, as the snake had): a storm rolling in from Kentucky. She took a shortcut back to the jeep road through a ten-year-old clear cut that was overgrown now but still sunny, and full of cockleburs. She tried to avoid this route in summer so she wouldn’t have to spend an hour afterward picking the burrs off her jeans. But she didn’t want to get caught in the storm. She swiped her weed cutter at the dense stands of bristly seedpods, taking her own perverse satisfaction in their presence, here and everywhere. Parakeets’ revenge, was how she liked to think of them. They’d coevolved with an expert seed eater, the Carolina parakeet, which had gone extinct so soon after Europeans settled that little was known about it but this one thing, its favorite food. John James Audubon painted the birds’ portrait with their mouths full, feasting among cockleburs, and he wrote of how the bright flocks would travel up and down the river valleys searching the burrs out, descending noisily wherever they found the bristly stands and devouring them until hardly any were left. That was hard to imagine, a scarcity of cockleburs. Now they went uneaten and would continue so for the rest of time. Now they grabbed the ankles of travelers and spread into fields and farms, roadside ditches, even woodland clearings, trying to teach a lesson that people had forgotten how to know.

She picked up her step when the first fat raindrops began to spatter through the leaves. An hour ago she’d been sweating, but as the storm moved in she felt the air temperature plummet as if she were swimming deep into a lake. She stopped to untie her windbreaker from around her waist and put it on, pulling the hood forward to her eyebrows before taking off again at a trot. By the time the trail met the Forest Service road that ran up from the valley, she’d picked up her pace to a dead run.

She slowed down on the road because its ruts could turn an ankle, and because the mountain was steep; she needed to catch her wind. Why did people always run in the rain? She still had half a mile to go, so she’d be soaked when she got home, regardless. She smirked at herself, then stopped to listen.

It was a vehicle. She stood waiting for it to round the corner so she could see what manner of human intrusion this was to be. Sad to say, she assumed people meant trouble. She knew the Forest Service wouldn’t approve of her inhospitable outlook, but this mountain would be a superior place if people stayed off it altogether. She waited, feeling her shoulders tense up, and was surprised when the flat green flank of the Forest Service jeep appeared through the damp tree trunks. Today? What was it, July already?

She thought about this. Yes, well into the first week of July. Darn it, they’d sent up her supplies, and she’d missed what’s-his-name again. Jerry Lind was his name, the guy who usually drove up with her mail and groceries. She needed to give him her requisition. Her heart was pounding, and not just from running uphill. Eddie Bondo was up there. This morning she’d left him sitting on the porch in his bare feet reading her Field Guide to the Eastern Birds. Oh, hell.

“Hey, Deanna! You look like the Grim Reaper.” Jerry was driving with his head stuck out the open window.

“Hey, Jerry. You look like Smokey the Bear.”

He touched his hat brim. “Keeps the rain off.” He cut the engine, slowing to a roll next to Deanna and then pulling the brake on hard, causing the whole vehicle to jerk. The road here was deeply cut with ruts that were starting to run like small chocolate rivers. She cocked her left foot up against the jeep to tie her soggy bootlaces.