Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [79]
“Tell me the truth. How many times have you seen sheep killed by coyotes?”
“Enough.”
“A hundred?”
“On my own family’s ranch? No. A hundred would wipe a man out, even if it was spread out over four or five years.”
“On your own family’s ranch, in your lifetime, how many? Fifty? A dozen?”
He was still looking up at the roof beams. “Maybe a dozen,” he conceded. “We’ve got sheepdogs, we’ve got good fences, but even so. Probably that many. You can’t always tell what got them, especially if it was a lamb and whatever got it just hauled it clean away.”
“So in one or all of those cases it could have been anything. A neighbor’s dog. A barn owl. A damn bald eagle.”
Eddie Bondo grimaced, declining to agree or disagree.
“A coyote is just something you can blame. He’s nobody’s pet; he doesn’t belong to anybody but himself. So, great, put a bullet in him.”
He turned to look at her full on, propping himself up on an elbow. “What you don’t understand is that ranching’s not like farming. It’s not a vegetarian proposition.”
She shook her head but said nothing, beginning to feel herself recede in her own way. What was it about the West, that cowboy story everybody loved to believe in? Like those men had the goods on tough. She thought of her soft-spoken father, the grim line of his mouth stretched pale as a knuckle while he worked the docking tool and she held the bawling head end. Working to castrate the bull calves.
The moth on the window grew restless again, fluttering against the sheer curtain and the bright outdoors behind it. He saw her watching it and reached up to tug her hair gently. “Miracle of miracles, I do believe I’m in bed with an animal lover.”
She looked at him, surprised. If he only knew she’d been reminiscing about castration. It bothered her a lot, his being so sure he had her number. She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again, a little startled at what she chose to say. “I’ll tell you something. If a feral cat wandered up here from some farm and started wrecking nests and killing birds and having babies in the woods? I’d trap it and drown it in the creek.”
He made a face of exaggerated dismay. “You wouldn’t.”
“Maybe I would. I’d want to.”
“Why?”
“Because cats like that don’t belong here. They’re fake animals, introduced, like the chestnut blight. And just about that destructive.”
“Not a cat person,” he decided. Once again, sure he knew.
“I had cats as a kid. But people won’t be bothered to fix them, so they breed in the barns and prowl the woods, and they don’t have any sense about what things to take. They’re not natural predators, except maybe in a barn. In the woods they’re like a firebomb. They can wreck a habitat so fast, overrun it in a season, because there’s no natural control. If there were still red wolves here, the place could hold its own against a stray cat. But there aren’t.” Or enough coyotes, she thought.
He studied this new Deanna, potential murderess of tabby cats. She met his gaze for a second, then rolled over and rested on her elbows, twirling the end of her hair into something like a paintbrush and touching its tip to the palm of her other hand.
“I don’t love animals as individuals, I guess that’s the way to put it,” she said. “I love them as whole species. I feel like they should have the right to persist in their own ways. If there’s a house cat put here by human carelessness, I can remedy that by taking one life, or ignore it and let the mistake go on and on.”
“How much damage could a cat really do?”
“You wouldn’t believe how much. I could show you a list of species that have been wiped out because of people’s laziness about cats. Ground-nesting birds, especially.”
“Not the kitty’s fault.”
“No,” she said, amused that her hunter seemed to be pleading the kitty’s case. “And it’s also not a cat’s idea that every life including its own is sacred. That’s a human idea, and I can buy it for humans. But it’s some kind of weird religion to impose it on other animals that have already got their own rules. Most animals are as racist as Hitler, and a lot of them