Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [6]
“So you do watch birds,” he accused. “Not just the predators.”
“You think that little guy’s not a predator? Consider the world from a caterpillar’s point of view.”
“I’ll try to do that.”
“But no, he’s not the top of the food chain. Not the big bad wolf.”
“I thought the big bad wolf was your game, ranger lady.”
“Now there’d be a real boring game, in this day and age.”
“I guess so. Who shot the last wolf out of these parts, Daniel Boone?”
“Probably. The last gray wolf, that’s right, just around then.”
“There’s another kind?”
“Yep. The gray everybody knows about, the storybook wolf. But there used to be another one here. A little one called the red wolf. They shot all those even before they got rid of the big guys.”
“A little wolf? I never heard of that.”
“You wouldn’t. It’s gone from the planet, is why.”
“Extinct?”
She hesitated. “Well. Depends on how you call it. There’s one place way back in a Louisiana swamp where people claim to see one now and again. But the ones they’ve caught out of there are all interbred with coyotes.”
They kept their voices low. She spoke quietly to his back, happy to keep him ahead of her on the trail. He was a surprisingly silent walker, which she appreciated. And surprisingly fast. In her lifetime she’d met very few men who could keep up with her natural gait. Like you’re always leaving the scene of a crime, that was how her husband had put it. Can’t you just stroll like other women do? But no, she couldn’t, and it was one more thing he could use against her in the end. “Feminine” was a test like some witch trial she was preordained to fail.
“But you did say you’ve seen coyotes up here,” Eddie Bondo charged softly.
Coyotes: small golden ghosts of the vanished red wolf, returning. She wished for a look at his face. “Did I say that?”
“Almost but not quite.”
“I said I look for them,” she said. The skill of equivocation seemed to be coming to her now. Talking too much, saying not enough. “If they were here, I’d be real curious to see how they affected the other populations up here. Because they’re something new.”
“New to you, maybe. Not to me. I’ve seen more of them than a dog has ticks.”
“Really?” From the back of his shoulders she couldn’t tell how he felt about that, or whether it was even true. “New to this place, is what I meant. They weren’t even here back in Daniel Boone’s day, or in Indian times.”
“No?”
“Nope. There’s no real record of their ever living here. And then they just up and decided to extend their range into southern Appalachia a few years ago. Nobody knows why.”
“But I’ll bet a smart lady like you could make an educated guess.”
Could, she thought. Won’t. She suspected he already knew much of what she was telling him. Which was nothing; she was keeping her real secret to herself.
“It’s not just here, either,” she added, hating the gabby sound of herself evading the issue. Not most girls you know, but just watch me now. “Coyotes have turned up in every one of the continental United States in the last few years. In New York City, even. Somebody got a picture of one running between two taxicabs.”
“What was it doing, trying to catch the subway?”
“Trying to catch a rat, more likely.”
She would be quiet now, she decided, and she felt the familiar satisfaction of that choice, its small internal tug like the strings pulled tight on a cloth purse. She’d keep her secret in the bag, keep her eyes on the trail, try to listen. Try, also, to keep her eyes away from the glossy animal movement of his dark hair and the shape of the muscles in the seat of his jeans. But the man was just one long muscle, anywhere you looked on him.
She set her eyes into the trees, where a fresh hatch of lacewings seemed to be filling up the air between branches. Probably they’d molted out after the rain. They were everywhere suddenly, dancing on sunbeams in the