Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [144]
“So we helped them out by killing the wolves,” he said, unexpectedly. “And what’s your next good guess?”
“It’s not a guess, it’s a fact. Coyotes breed faster when they’re being hunted.”
He stared straight ahead, into the fire. “How?”
“They have bigger litters. Sometimes they’ll even share a den, so where you’d normally see just the alpha female breeding, now one of her sisters breeds, too. They work in family groups, with most of the adults helping to raise one female’s young. It might be that when some adults are killed out of a group, there’s more food for the young. Or maybe there’s a shift in the reproductive effort. Something happens. What we know for sure is, killing adults increases the chances of survival for the young.”
“Wow.”
She turned toward him. “Hey, Eddie Bondo.”
He turned to face her. “What?”
“Boo. Life’s not simple.”
“So I’m told.”
“Hey. Read the book. It’ll keep you on the edge of your seat. My major professor claimed he remained conscious through the whole two hundred pages.”
Eddie looked back at the fire. “I don’t think I’m going to care for the ending.”
The moon was up somewhere, and big, just a little past full. It hadn’t yet climbed above the mountains that shadowed this hollow, but the sky was collecting a brightness Deanna could sense through her closed eyelids. She willed her body to find a flat plane of repose instead of turning and turning like a rolling pin on a piecrust. On these sleepless nights she got the blanket in a tangle that left Eddie exposed to the elements.
They’d dragged the mattress outside before collapsing on it in a turkey-stuffed delirium. But she’d always slept outside in summer, whenever the nights were warm enough; moonlight didn’t usually disturb her sleep. Nothing usually disturbed her sleep. She’d never known insomnia before these last few weeks. She’d never known falling asleep in the daytime, either. Something had gotten her out of whack. Deanna wasn’t sure whether these worries roaming her brain were keeping her awake nights or whether they had just moved into the vacant apartment of an insomniac head.
The urge to roll over consumed her like pain, she couldn’t resist it any longer, so she moved cautiously from her side to her back. Immediately that felt uncomfortable, too. She tried to forget her body, her immensely full stomach, and Eddie beside her—all these troublesome symptoms of being human. She tried, slowly, to inhale and absorb this night instead. It was an extraordinary time to be awake, if you gave in to it: these hours of settled darkness when the insects quieted and the air cooled and scents rose delicately out of the ground. She could smell leaf mold, mushrooms, and the faint trace of a skunk that must have come poking around the turkey bones in the woods right after she and Eddie fell into bed and she fell asleep, hard, briefly, before popping indelibly awake again.
Now her brain settled on phoebe worries: they might have scared the mother off her nest before dark, or a baby might have fallen out, something that had already happened twice. The fledglings were nearly old enough to fly and slightly bigger even than adults now because of their fluffy juvenile feathers—big enough to make it way too crowded in there. Two days in a row, Deanna had picked up a fallen nestling off the ground and tucked it back in on top of its siblings. Eddie claimed a bird wouldn’t return to a nest once a human had touched it; Deanna knew better from experience, but she let the mother bird answer. She swooped back onto her nest just seconds after Deanna stepped away from it.
Please gather your feathered courage and fledge soon, she beseeched these babies, for they were getting to be a handful. She’d been tiptoeing around underneath the phoebe nursery for weeks and forcing Eddie to do the same. This mother had already lost her first brood to their carelessness, and it was too late in the season for her to