Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [29]
Or maybe coyotes would turn out to be pests, as newly introduced species nearly always are. Maybe the farmers were right to shoot them—she had to concede it was possible. But she didn’t think so. She believed coyotes were succeeding here for a single reason: they were sliding quietly into the niche vacated two hundred years ago by the red wolf. The two predators were hardly distinct: the red wolf may have been a genetic cross between the gray wolf and the coyote. Like the coyote, it was a scent hunter that could track in the dead of night, unlike the big cats that hunt by sight. It was like a coyote in its reproductive rate, and close in size. In fact, judging from the tracks she’d seen, the coyotes here were nearly red wolf–sized, and probably getting larger with each generation—insinuating themselves into the ragged hole in this land that needed them to fill it. The ghost of a creature long extinct was coming in on silent footprints, returning to the place it had once held in the complex anatomy of this forest like a beating heart returned to its body. This was what she believed she would see, if she watched, at this magical juncture: a restoration. If she was not too lazy or careless. And if she did not lead a killer to their lair.
She fring the red and white millet and wondering how else she might be influencing the experiment. She bit her pen, trying to concentrate. The longer she worked, the more surely her body’s cravings grew from a nudge to a frank distraction. She wanted something to eat, warm and particular. She would not let herself name this craving what it was, so she named it food, a thing that normally didn’t merit a second thought in her life here—she ate when she was hungry, and anything would do. But for this whole day her body had been speaking to her of its presence: an ache in the thigh, a need in the gut.
Maybe navy bean soup would do it, she decided, jumping up and going inside. Navy beans steaming in an enamel bowl, smothering the rest of the leftover cornbread. He’d made a bright yellow pone of it in her Dutch oven yesterday morning before he left—to take with him, she’d assumed, but instead he’d left most of it for her. She would bring it back out here to the porch chair and sit facing west, with her back carefully turned on Clinch Peak. Watch the sky turn to flame behind the trees.
She went inside, lit the kerosene lamp, and first went without thinking to the big metal canister where she stored her ten-pound bags of beans, but then paused there, feeling foolish. It was too late to soak them and cook them from scratch as she normally did, making enough at one time for half a week’s distracted consumption. But she was pretty sure she had a can of precooked white beans in the back of the cupboard. She flung back doors and raked aside jars of spaghetti sauce, Campbell’s soup, ravioli, things she’d forgotten were here—she rarely bothered with much beyond beans and rice. She shoved aside the Dutch oven to look behind it and was dismayed to see the heavy iron lid sitting ajar. Darn it! She must have left it that way this morning in her rush to get out the door, and the army of mice in this cabin didn’t need an invitation. She looked inside knowing exactly what she’d see: the crisp round edge nibbled ragged, the scattering of black droppings over the golden surface. Tears sprang to her eyes as she stared into the heavy pot.
“Too much of a fool-headed hurry, Deanna,” she said out loud.
It was only food, and she had plenty more, but what she’d wanted was this. She slammed down the lid, swung the heavy pot down from the shelf, and headed outside. She had left the lid ajar, no “must have” about it. Living alone leaves you