Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [3]
“There you are,” he said. “Not most girls I know.”
Her heart beat hard enough to dim her hearing in pulses.
“I’m the only one you know, looks like, if you’d be hanging around the Zebulon National Forest. Which you seem to be.”
He was hatless this time, black-haired and just a little shaggy like a crow in the misty rain. His hair had the thick, glossy texture she envied slightly, for it was perfectly straight and easy and never would tangle. He spread his hands. “Look, ranger lady. No gun. Behold a decent man abiding by the law.”
“So I see.”
“More than I can say for you,” he added. “Sniffing stumps.”
“No, I couldn’t lay any claim on being decent. Or a man.”
His grin grew a shade darker. “That I can see.”
I have a gun. He can’t hurt me, but she knew as she thought these words that some other tables had turned. He’d come back. She had willed him back to this spot. And she would wait him out this time. He didn’t speak for a minute or more. Then gave in. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For pestering you. But I’m determined to follow you up this trail today, for just a little while. If you don’t mind.”
“What is it you’re so determined to find out?”
“What a nice girl like you is sniffing for in this big old woods. It’s been keeping me up nights.”
He’d thought of her, then. At night.
“I’m not Little Red Riding Hood, if that’s what’s worrying you. I’m twice as old as you are.” Twiced as old, she’d said, a long-extinguished hillbilly habit tunneling into her unpracticed talk.
“I doubt that sincerely,” he said.
She waited for more, and he offered this: “I’ll keep a little distance, if you like.”
What she didn’t like was the idea of his being behind her. “My preference would be for you to walk on ahead, and please take care not to step on the trail of this animal I’m tracking. If you can see to keep off of it.” She pointed to the three-day-old cat tracks, not the fresher trail in the leaf mold on the down side of the trail.
“Yes ma’am, I believe I can do that.” He bowed slightly, turned, and walked ahead, his feet keeping an expert’s distance from the tracks and hardly turning the leaf mold, either. He was good. She let him almost disappear into the foliage ahead, then she took up the trail of the two males walking side by side, cat and man. She wanted to watch him walk, to watch his body without his knowing it.
It was late afternoon, already something close to dark on the north side of the mountain, where rhododendrons huddled in the cleft of every hollow. In their dense shade the ground was bare and slick. A month from now the rhododendrons would be covered with their big spheres of pink blossoms like bridesmaids’ bouquets, almost too show-off fancy for a wildwood flower on this lonely mountain. But for now their buds still slept. Now it was only the damp earth that blossomed in fits and throes: trout lilies, spring beauties, all the understory wildflowers that had to hurry through a whole life cycle between May’s first warmth—while sunlight still reached through the bare limbs—and the shaded darkness of a June forest floor. Way down around the foot of this mountain in the valley farmland, springtime would already be winding down by the first week of May, but the tide of wildflowers that swept up the mountainsides had only just arrived up here at four thousand feet. On this path the hopeful flower heads were so thick they got crushed underfoot. In a few more weeks the trees would finish leafing out here, the canopy would close, and this bloom would pass on. Spring would move higher up to awaken the bears and finally go out like a flame, absorbed into the dark spruce forest on the scalp of Zebulon Mountain. But here and now, spring heaved in its randy moment. Everywhere you looked, something was fighting for time, for light, the kiss of pollen, a connection of sperm and egg and another chance.
He paused twice on the trail ahead of her, once beside a flame azalea so covered with flowers it resembled a burning bush, and once for no reason she could see.