Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [4]
They reached the point where the old bobcat trail went straight up the slope, and she let him go. She waited until he was out of sight, and then turned downhill instead, stepping sideways down the steep slope until her feet found familiar purchase on one of the Forest Service trails. She maintained miles of these trails, a hundred or more over the course of months, but this one never got overgrown because it ran between her cabin and an overlook she loved. The fresher tracks had diverged from the bobcat trail and here they were again, leading exactly where she thought they’d go: downhill, in the direction of her recent discovery. Today she would bypass that trail. She’d already forced herself to stay away for two weeks—fourteen long days, counted like seasons or years. This was the eighth of May, the day she’d meant to allow herself to go back there, sneaking up on her secret to convince herself it was real. But now, no; of course not now. She would let Eddie Bondo catch up to her somewhere else, if he was looking.
She’d dropped down from the ridge into a limestone-banked hollow where maidenhair ferns cascaded from outcroppings of stone. The weeping limestone was streaked dark with wet-weather springs, which were bursting out everywhere now from a mountain too long beset with an excess of rains. She was near the head of the creek, coming into the oldest hemlock grove on the whole of this range. Patches of pale, dry needles, perfectly circular, lay like Christmas-tree skirts beneath the huge conifers. She paused there with her feet in the dry duff, listened. “Nyaa nyaa nyaa,” spat the chickadees, her familiars. Then, a crackle. He’d doubled back, was tracking her now. She waited until he emerged at the edge of the dark grove.
“Lose the bobcat?” she asked him.
“No, lost you. For a while.”
“Not for long, I see.”
He was wearing his hat again, with the brim pulled low. She found it harder to read his eyes. “You weren’t after that cat today,” he accused. “That trail’s a few days old.”
“That’s right.”
“I’d like to know what it is you’re tracking.”
“You’re a man that can’t hold his horses, aren’t you?”
He smiled. Tantalizing. “What’s your game, lady?”
“Coyotes.”
His eyes widened, for only a second and a half. She could swear his pupils dilated. She bit her lower lip, having meant to give away nothing. She’d forgotten how to talk with people, it seemed—how to sidestep a question and hide what was necessary.
“And bobcats, and bear, and fox,” she piled on quickly, to bury the coyotes. “Everything that’s here. But especially the carnivores.”
She shifted, waiting, feeling her toes inside her boots. Wasn’t he supposed to say something after she finished? When he didn’t, she suggested, “I guess you were looking for deer the other day?”
He gave a small shrug. Deer season was many months over and gone. He wasn’t going to be trapped by a lady wildlife ranger with a badge. “Why the carnivores, especially?” he asked.
“No reason.”
“I see. You’re just partial. There’s birdwatchers, and butterfly collectors, and there’s gals like you that like to watch meat eaters.”
He might have known this one thing could draw her talk to the surface: an outsider’s condescension. “They’re the top of the food chain, that’s the reason,” she said coldly. “If they’re good, then their prey is good, and its food is good. If not, then something’s missing from the chain.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Keeping tabs on the predators tells you what you need to know about the herbivores, like deer, and the vegetation, the detritovores, the insect populations, small predators like shrews and voles. All of it.”
He studied her with a confusion she recognized. She was well accustomed to watching Yankee brains grind their gears, attempting to reconcile a hillbilly accent with signs of a serious education. He asked, finally, “And what you need to know about the shrews and voles would be what, exactly?”
“Voles matter more than you think. Beetles,