Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [2]
“Well, then. I’m not most girls you know.”
She wondered if she was antagonizing him. She didn’t have a gun, and he did, though he’d promised not to shoot. Or bite, for that matter. They stood without speaking. She measured the silence by the cloud that crossed the sun, and by the two full wood-thrush songs that rang suddenly through the leaves and hung in the air between herself and this man, her—prey? No, her trespasser. Predator was a strong presumption.
“All right if I just follow you for a while?” he asked politely.
“No,” she snapped. “That wouldn’t suit me.”
Man or boy, what was he? His grin dissolved, and he seemed suddenly wounded by her curtness, like a scolded son. She wondered about the proper tone, how to do that. She knew how to run off a hunter who’d forgotten when deer season ended—that was her job. But usually by this point in the conversation, it was over. And manners had not been her long suit to begin with, even a lifetime ago when she lived in a brick house, neatly pressed between a husband and neighbors. She pushed four fingers into her hair, the long brown bolt of it threaded with silver, and ran them backward from her hairline to tuck the unraveled threads back into the braid at her nape.
“I’m tracking,” she said quietly. “Two people make more than double the noise of one. If you’re a hunter I expect you’d know that already.”
“I don’t see your gun.”
“I don’t believe I’m carrying one. I believe we’re on National Forest land, inside of a game-protection area where there’s no hunting.”
“Well, then,” said Eddie Bondo. “That would explain it.”
“Yes, it would.”
He stood his ground, looking her up and down for the longest while. Long enough for her to understand suddenly that Eddie Bondo—man, not child—had taken off all her layers and put them back on again in the right order. The dark-green nylon and Gore-Tex were regulation Forest Service, the cotton flannel was hers, likewise the silk thermal long johns, and what a man might find of interest underneath all that she had no idea. No one had been there in quite a while.
Then he was gone. Birdsong clattered in the space between trees, hollow air that seemed vast now and suddenly empty. He had ducked headfirst into the rhododendrons, leaving behind no reason to think he’d ever been there at all.
A hot blush was what he left her, burning on the skin of her neck.
She went to bed with Eddie Bondo all over her mind and got up with a government-issue pistol tucked in her belt. The pistol was something she was supposed to carry for bear, for self-defense, and she told herself that was half right.
For two days she saw him everywhere—ahead of her on the path at dusk; in her cabin with the moonlit window behind him. In dreams. On the first evening she tried to distract or deceive her mind with books, and on the second she carefully bathed with her teakettle and cloth and the soap she normally eschewed because it assaulted the noses of deer and other animals with the only human smell they knew, that of hunters—the scent of a predator. Both nights she awoke in a sweat, disturbed by the fierce, muffled sounds of bats mating in the shadows under her porch eaves, aggressive copulations that seemed to be collisions of strangers.
And now, here, in the flesh in broad daylight beside this chestnut stump. For when he showed up again, it was in the same spot. This time he carried his pack but no rifle. Her pistol was inside her jacket, loaded, with the safety on.
Once again she’d been squatting by the stump looking for sign, very sure this time that she was on the trail of what she wanted. No question, these tracks were canine: the female, probably, whose den she’d located fourteen days ago. Male or female, it had paused by this stump to notice the bobcat’s mark, which might have intrigued or offended or maybe meant nothing at all to it. Hard for a human ever to know that mind.
And once again—as if her rising up from that stump had conjured Eddie Bondo, as if he had derived from