Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [25]
She cursed aloud and sat up. Damned thing, self-consciousness, like a pitiful stray dog tagging you down the road—so hard to shake off. So easy to get back.
No man had ever spoken to her so freely of her body, or compared it to such strange and natural things. Not only a silkworm. Also ivory, for instance, which he claimed was unnaturally smooth. He’d lived in Canada last summer into fall, he said—had gone up there to make money on the salmon run and stayed on hunting caribou around the Hudson Bay, and somewhere in the process had learned to work walrus ivory into knife handles. She listened to his stories, imagining the possibility of touching nature’s other faces. She’d known no other but this one. She asked him what birds were there, and he seemed to know but couldn’t name any except the game birds people shot for food. She had been listening too hard, she realized now, for the things he left out—what he meant or believed. To have her bare stomach compared to walrus ivory, was this strange compliment hers alone? She had no idea how to take him but had taken him nearly as hard as possible. It still ran a shock of physical weakness all the way through her to think of certain things: his body against hers, the scent of his skin. The look of awestruck joy on his face when he entered her.
She jumped up, shuddered from the cold and nonsense, and went inside to get dressed and find her day. She walked a circle around the room, stepping into jeans and boots without slowing down much. While she buttoned her shirt with one hand, she banged open the cupboard with the other and reached into the Dutch oven to grab some of yesterday’s cornbread. She took a bite and stuffed the rest into her jacket pocket to eat on the trail, or later on, while she waited in the blind she was going to build. She’d wasted too much of this morning already. She’d stayed away from the den for such a long time, the first two weeks on purpose and the last ten days of necessity. She hadn’t dared to go. Even if she’d gone out alone, or lied, he could have followed her.
She took the Bitter Creek trail down the mountain as fast as she could without breaking into a run, which would be pointless. If they were there, they would still be there in ten minutes. Or they might not be there at all. They were wary creatures, almost beyond a human’s conception of wariness—and the day she’d discovered them, they surely had seen her first. It wasn’t reasonable to think she could have outwitted or outsensed them. They could only assume she was an enemy, like every other human whose stink they’d ever caught wind of. If this was the same family that had lost half its members in one day over in the Zebulon Valley, the survivors would be cautious.
She was sure it was that family, or else some other refugees of human damage. Why else would they have ventured so high up the mountain into this forest, so far from the fencerows and field margins that are a coyote’s usual domain? When they came over here to whelp their pups, they’d have dug themselves multiple dens. Backup plans were their trademark, the famous coyote wiles. Everything that was possible to know about them, though, Deanna knew. That only the alpha female would bear young, for instance; the other adults in the pack would forgo reproduction. They’d support the alpha instead, gathering food, guarding the den, playing with the pups, training them to forage and hunt after they emerged with their eyes open. If their parents got killed, the pups would hardly suffer for their absence—that was the nature of a coyote family. That was the point of it. And if Deanna’s discovery of this burrow had disturbed the pack, its members would have moved those pups already to