Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [141]
“Than taking out one of its prey. I know. Numbers.”
“Simple math, Eddie Bondo.”
He seemed thoughtful, squatting by the fire with his hands between his knees. “How many big carnivores on this mountain, you think?”
“What does ‘big’ mean? Mammals, birds?” She looked down the narrow cleft of the hollow, where lightning bugs were beginning to rise in irregular yellow streaks. “Maybe one bobcat per five hundred acres. One mountain lion per mountain, period. Big birds of prey, like great horned owls, one pair needs maybe”—she thought about this—“two hundred acres, I’d guess, to feed itself and raise two or three young in a year.”
“And how many turkeys?”
“Oh, gosh, there’s gaggles of them walking around this hollow. A turkey lays fourteen eggs without half thinking about it. If something gets one of her babies she might not quite notice. If a fox gets the whole nest, she’ll go bat her eyes at tom here and plunk out fourteen more eggs.” She pondered the equation for a minute as she worked. “But still, turkeys are scarce compared to their prey. Grubs and things, there’s millions of them. It’s like a pyramid scheme.”
Eddie was silent, poking at the fire but still listening. He seemed to understand that this was not a casual conversation to her. She shook a handful of salt out of the can into her palm and rubbed the bird’s stippled skin, first with the gritty salt and then with the smooth, cool oil. When she spoke again, she took care to keep the emotion out of her voice.
“The life of a top carnivore is the most expensive item in the pyramid, that’s the thing. In the case of a coyote, or a big cat, the mother spends a whole year raising her young. Not just a few weeks. She has to teach them to stalk and hunt and everything there is to doing that job. She’s lucky if even one of her kids makes it through. If something gets him, there goes that mama’s whole year of work down the drain.”
She looked up, catching his eye directly. “If you shoot him, Eddie, that’s what you’ve taken down. A big chunk of his mother’s whole life chance at replacing herself. And you’ve let loose an extra thousand rodents on the world that he would have eaten. It’s not just one life.”
He was looking away. She waited until she had his eye again. “When you get a coyote in your rifle sight and you’re fixing to pull the trigger, what happens? Do you forget about everything else in the world until there’s just you and your enemy?”
He thought about it. “Something like that. Hunting’s like that. You focus.”
“‘Focus,’” she said. “That’s what you call it? The idea that there’s just the two of you left, alone in the world?”
“I guess.” He shrugged.
“But that’s wrong. There’s no such thing as alone. That animal was going to do something important in its time—eat a lot of things, or be eaten. There’s all these connected things you’re about to blow a hole in. They can’t all be your enemy, because one of those connected things is you.”
He reached into the fire pit with a stout, forked limb, carefully rearranging the burning logs into a square with a space in the center where the pot would go. “I would never shoot a bobcat,” he said without looking at her.
“No? Well, good. You’re not as stupid as some predator hunters, then. Let’s give you a medal.”
He glanced up sharply. “Who stepped on your tail?”
“I know about this stuff, Eddie.” She wiped her hands with the rag and listened to her heart beating in her ears. Two months she’d known this man, and for two months she’d been nursing an outrage without giving it a voice. She spoke quietly now, as her father used to when he was angry. “They have those hunts all over. It’s no secret; they advertise in gun magazines. There’s one going on right now in Arizona, the Predator Hunt Extreme, with a ten-thousand-dollar prize for whoever shoots the most.”
“The most what?”
“It’s a predator kill, period. Just pile up the bodies. Bobcats, coyotes, mountain lions, foxes—that’s their definition of a predator.”
“Not foxes.”
“Yes foxes. Some of your colleagues are even terrified of a little gray fox. An animal