Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [80]
“Yeah?”
“Yep. And I support their right to go on murdering their babies in the wild if that’s how they do it, unpestered by humans. That’s the kind of animal lover I am.”
He raised his eyebrows and nodded slowly.
“It’s not like you thought, is it?”
“Heck, now I’m thinking maybe you’ll go hunting with me.”
She rolled onto her back. “Forget it. I’d never kill just for fun. Maybe to eat, if I was hungry, but never a predator.”
“So a deer but not a fox? Plant eaters matter less than carnivores?”
She thought about this. “They don’t matter less. But herbivores tend to have shorter lives, and they reproduce faster; they’re just geared toward expendability. They can overpopulate at the drop of a hat if nobody’s eating them.”
He lay on his back next to her, at ease with this kind of talk. “Like rabbits do, sure. But it’s complicated. Up north, the lynx go in these cycles. Every ten years, boom, there’re thousands, and then they crash.”
“All the more reason to leave them alone,” she insisted. “There’s something going on there you don’t want to mess with. Maybe there’d be some plague let loose on the Arctic.” She wondered if he’d seen lynx. She’d probably never see one herself.
“I know what you’re saying,” he conceded. “It’s been messed with already.”
“What are they like, lynx?” She tried not to sound like a jealous child.
“Oh, baby, there’s a cat you’d love. They’re just like you.”
“How’s that?”
He grinned, thinking about it. “About three parts pissed off to four parts dignified. They’re gorgeous. If you find one caught in a trap line and let it go, it won’t scramble around and run, nothing like that. It’ll just stand there glaring at you for a minute, and then turn around real slow and just strut away.”
She could picture it. “Don’t you get it? To kill a natural predator is a sin.”
“You’ve got your rules, I’ve got mine.”
She sat up to look at him. “Right. But then there’s the world, which has got these rules nobody can change. That’s what’s wrong with people: they can’t see that.”
“And what rule of the world says it’s a sin to kill a predator?”
“Simple math, Eddie Bondo, you know this stuff. One mosquito can make a bat happy for, what, fifteen seconds before it starts looking for another one? But one bat might eat two hundred mosquitoes in a night. Figure it out, where’s the gold standard here? Who has a bigger influence on other lives?”
“OK already, I get it,” he said. “Chill.”
“Chill yourself,” she said. “I didn’t make up the principles of ecology. If you don’t like them, go live on some other planet.” Doing my best to run this guy off, she thought. But she couldn’t go on biting her tongue. She needed this conversation.
“Fine,” he said. “But if I’m a bug rancher it’s my right to shoot the bats off my ranch.”
She leaned back against the pillow. “What you’re thinking about coyotes doesn’t make a lick of sense. They’re way more important to their natural prey than they are to livestock. I bet there’s not one rancher in the whole American West who’s gone under because of coyote predation.”
“Maybe not gone under,” he said.
“It’s just fear, looks to me like. A bunch of macho ranchers scared of a shadow.”
“You’ve got no idea how tough ranching is.”
“I don’t see you ranching sheep, Eddie. I don’t think I can give you the high ground here.”
“I’ll inherit fifteen hundred acres one day,” he said, sounding unconvinced, and she wondered what divides of kinship were concealed in that flat statement, what dreads and expectations, what it was costing him to hold his place in his family. As the daughter of a farmer who’d lost his land, she felt only measured sympathy.
“Right,” she said. “You’ll settle down with the little wife, raise up sheep till you’re old, that’s the plan? Just this one little thing, you need to run around and shoot every coyote in the world first?”
He shrugged, refusing to absorb her irony. “I’ve still got some time. I like to get around, see a lot of country.”
Shoot every coyote, screw every woman, see the world, she thought: the strategy