Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [13]
So she looked past his lure, through the window to the woods outside and the bright golden Io moth hanging torpid on the window screen. The creature had finished its night of moth foraging or moth love and now, moved by the first warmth of morning, would look for a place to fold its wings and wait out the useless daylight hours. She watched it crawl slowly up the screen on furry yellow legs. It suddenly twitched, opening its wings to reveal the dark eyes on its underwings meant to startle predators, and then it flew off to some safer hideout. Deanna felt the same impulse to bolt—to flee this risky mate gleaned from her forest.
A sheep rancher. She knew the hatred of western ranchers toward coyotes; it was famous, maybe the fiercest human-animal vendetta there was. It was bad enough even here on the tamer side of the Mississippi. The farmers she’d grown up among would sooner kill a coyote than learn to pronounce its name. It was a dread built into humans via centuries of fairy tales: give man the run of a place, and he will clear it of wolves and bears. Europeans had killed theirs centuries ago in all but the wildest mountains, and maybe even those holdouts were just legend by now. Since the third grade, when Deanna Wolfe learned to recite the Pledge and to look up “wolf” in the World Book Encyclopedia, she’d loved America because it was still young enough that its people hadn’t wiped out all its large predators. But they were working on that, for all they were worth.
“You had a rifle,” she said. “The other day. A thirty-thirty, it looked like. Where is it now?”
“I stashed it,” he said, simple as that. He was clean-shaven, bare-chested, and cheerful, ready to eat up powdered eggs and whatever else she offered. His gun was hiding somewhere nearby while his beautiful, high-arched feet moved around her cabin floor with pure naked grace. It occurred to Deanna that she was in deep.
What might bring a Wyoming sheep rancher to the southern Appalachians at this time of year was the Mountain Empire Bounty Hunt, organized for the first time this year. It’d been held recently, she knew, around the first day of May—the time of birthing and nursing, a suitable hunting season for nothing in this world unless the goal was willful extermination. It had drawn hunters from everywhere for the celebrated purpose of killing coyotes.
{2}
Moth Love
Lusa was alone, curled in an armchair and reading furtively—the only way a farmer’s wife may read, it turns out—when the power of a fragrance stopped all her thoughts. In the eleventh hour of the ninth day of May, for one single indelible instant that would change everything, she was lifted out of her life.
She closed her eyes, turning her face to the open window and breathing deeply. Honeysuckle. Lusa shut the book on her index finger. Charles Darwin on moths, that was what she’d been lost in: a description of a virgin Saturnia carpini whose scent males flocked to till they covered her cage, with several dozen even crawling down Mr. Darwin’s chimney to find her. Piles of Lusa’s books on the floor were shoved halfway out of sight behind this old overstuffed chair, the only spot in the house she had claimed as her own. When she first moved in she’d dragged this chair, a strange thing upholstered in antique green brocade, across the big bedroom to the tall, south-facing window, for the light. Now she leaned forward in her seat and moved her head a little to see out through the dusty screen. Far away at the opposite edge of the hayfield her eye caught on Cole’s white T-shirt and then made out the rest of him there, the forward-arching line of his body. He was leaning out from the tractor seat, breaking off a branch of honeysuckle that had climbed into the cedary fencerow high enough to