Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [194]
She was growing a little uneasy, though, this far down the mountain. She had never been able to reconcile herself to the cacophony of sensations that hung in the air around these farms: the restless bickering of hounds penned behind the houses, howling across one valley to another, and the whine of the perilous freeway in the distance, and above all the sharp, outlandish scents of human enterprise. Now, here, where this row of fields turned back up into the next long hollow, there was gasoline wafting up from the road, and something else, a crop dust of some kind that burned her nose, drowning out even the memorable pungency of pregnant livestock in the field below.
She had reached the place where the trail descended into a field of wild apple trees, and she hesitated there. She wouldn’t have minded nosing through the hummocks of tall grass and briars for a few sweet, sun-softened apples. That whole field and the orchard below it had a welcoming scent, a noticeable absence of chemical burn in the air, that always made it attractive to birds and field mice, just as surely as it was drawing her right now. But she felt restless and distracted to be this far from her sister and the children. She turned uphill, back toward safer ground where she could disappear inside slicks and shadows if she needed to. The rest of them would be coming up onto the ridge from the next valley over. The easiest way to find them from here would be to follow the crest of this ridge straight up and call for them when she got closer.
She skirted a steep, rocky bank that was fetid with damp moss and hoarded little muddy pools along its base—a good place to let the little ones nose around for crayfish in the daylight, but not now—and then she climbed into the older, more familiar woods. Here was a nutty-scented clearing where years of acorns and hickory nuts had been left buried under the soil by the squirrels that particularly favored this place, for reasons she couldn’t fathom. She’d had meals of squirrel here before, many times, but now it was dark, and they were nervous things, reluctant to leave shelter after a storm like that one. Still, she could hear the much bolder, needly nocturnal banter of flying squirrels high up in the hickory. She crossed back into the woods and then stopped again to put her nose against a giant, ragged old stump that had a garden of acid-scented fungus sprouting permanently from its base. Usually this stump smelled of cat. But she found he had not been here lately.
She paused several more times as she climbed the ridge, once picking up the scent she’d followed for a while earlier tonight but then had lost again, because a rain like that erased nearly everything. It was a male, and particularly interesting because he wasn’t part of her clan; he was no one they knew. Another family had been coming down from the north, they knew that; they’d heard them sing at night and known them to be nearby, though never right here before. She paused again, sniffing, but that trail wasn’t going to reveal itself to her now, no matter how hard