Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [27]
She breathed out now, resigned. One day she’d lay eyes on wily Canis latrans in the wild, right here in her own home range, on an animal path cross-stitched by other trails to the paths she’d walked in her childhood. It would happen. But it wouldn’t be this day.
On her way back up the mountain she consciously slowed her step. She heard another magnolia warbler—a sign and a wonder, it seemed to her, like something risen from the dead. So many others never would rise again: Bachman’s warbler, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, Flint’s stonefly, Apamea moth—so many extinct creatures moved through the leaves just outside her peripheral vision, for Deanna knew enough to realize that she lived among ghosts. She deferred to the extinct as she would to the spirits of deceased relatives, paying her quiet respects in the places where they might once have been. Little red wolves stood as silent shadows at the edges of clearings, while the Carolina parakeets would have chattered loudly, moving along the riverbanks in huge flocks of dazzling green and orange. The early human settlers migrating into this region had loved them and promptly killed them. Now most people would call you crazy if you told them that something as exotic as a parrot had once been at home in these homely southern counties.
She stopped and stared at her feet. Here were tracks, fresh, and she paused to study them out: front and hind foot alternating single-file in a long, sinuous line, the front foot a little bigger than the hind; this was a canid, all right. The claw marks were there, too, clear as could be. Where the tracks crossed a broad patch of clear mud she knelt down to take a close look, measuring a cleanly outlined print with the knuckle of her index finger. Two and three quarters inches front to back. You learn what he is by knowing what he isn’t, her dad used to say. This was not a gray fox, and not a red fox. Coyote. A big one, probably male. Alpha’s mate.
A little farther on, where the trail crossed a clearing and, most likely, other animal trails, she found his scat. One single turd with an up-curled point on its end like one of Ali Baba’s shoes—this was coyote for certain, and who but a big male would make such a show out of his excrement? She squatted down and poked it apart with a twig. A coyote could eat nearly anything: mice, voles, grasshoppers, frogs. Human garbage, a house cat. The farmers down below were right to believe a coyote could take a lamb; working together, a pack might even bring down a full-grown cow. But that would take a huge pack, two dozen animals maybe, more adult coyotes than existed in this county and probably this end of the state. And why on earth would they go to the trouble when there was so much else on the slopes of this mountain for a coyote to eat, with greater safety and ease? Hardly a creature on earth could thrive more capably on junk that was useless to humans. During her thesis research she’d found the notes of a biologist named Murie who’d spent the early decades of his century dissecting coyote scat and recording its splendidly varied contents. He’d cataloged hundreds of different items in his journal. Her favorites were “shreds of woolen clothing” and “watermelon, poached.”
From the crumbling consistency of this scat Deanna expected pine nuts and berry seeds, a predictable diet for the locale. She was surprised by the hard, dark glint of an apple seed. Then several more. Apple seeds at this time of year, late May? Apples were just barely past blossom-drop stage down in the valley. Wild apples still hanging on to the trees down there in the wilding fields would be a long shot. More likely this fellow had crept into an orchard where someone