Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [26]
She slowed to a walk and then stopped a quarter mile from where she recalled the den as being, to consider building her blind. She’d have to be near enough to see, but downwind, of course, and the wind direction would change between morning and afternoon. She could build only one blind, since she wanted to create as little disturbance as possible and leave few clues in case anyone else should be poking around here. Mornings, then, it would be. She’d build the blind uphill and come to it only in the mornings, when the sun had warmed the fields down below and the air was still rising up the hollows toward the mountaintop.
She’d forgotten how far down the mountain she’d come that first time, to find this den by accident. Now as she searched it out she couldn’t even be sure whether she was still on National Forest land or on the farm below that bordered it—there wasn’t a fence here. But it was in deep woods, and higher than you’d expect. There wasn’t enough known about coyotes in Appalachia to say what was really normal. They surely couldn’t like the mountaintops; they’d prefer lowland fields because of field mice, among other things. But this family had its own history. It’d been shoved to the wall. So it had come up high, to stage its raids from safe hiding, like Geronimo.
She began to move forward again slowly, breaking and collecting low branches from sourwood trees. She left the path, protecting her eyes as she pushed her way through a thick clump of rhododendrons. Her intention was to circle wide around the den to where she could look at it from across the creek. The rhododendrons were almost impossibly dense, but that was fine: no one would find her trail. She wondered briefly about whoever farmed the land below here, and whether he liked to hunt. Probably he wouldn’t come here. Most local farmers never set foot in the woods except in deer season, and then only with their friend Jack Daniel’s for company. The real trouble, the bear poachers and that ilk, generally came from other places. Those men specialized and so had to range widely.
She sidestepped slowly downhill until she could see across the creek to the tangle of roots at the base of the giant fallen tree. She raised her binoculars to the slice of darkness beneath the roots, held her breath, and focused. Nothing. She sat down on a damp mattress of last autumn’s leaves and prepared to wait. No point building a blind until she knew they were still here.
Deanna knew exactly when the morning ended. She never wore a watch, and for this she didn’t need one. She knew when the air grew still enough that she could hear caterpillars overhead, newly hatched, eating through thousands of leaves on their way to becoming Io and luna moths. In the next hour the breeze would shift. No sense taking a chance; it was time to leave, and she’d still seen nothing—no movement, no sign. No little dogs, foxlike and wolflike and cousin to both, so familiar from her studies that they sometimes ran through her dreams. Awake, she’d had good long looks at only one single animal, a pathetic captive that she’d rather forget, in the Tinker’s Mountain Zoo outside of Knoxville. She’d pleaded with the curator to change the exhibit, explaining that coyotes were social, and that displaying a single animal was therefore not just cruel but also inaccurate. She had offered him her services: a graduate student in wildlife biology, finishing up a thesis on the coyote range extension in the twentieth century. The curator had politely suggested that if she wanted to see coyotes in groups she should take a trip out west, where the animals were so common that people got acquainted with them as roadkill. The conversation had given her a stomachache. So she’d written a grant proposal instead, invented this job, and put herself in it as soon as she’d completed and defended her thesis. She’d had to fight some skeptics, wrangling a rare agreement between the Park Service, the Forest