Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [83]
2) Or are we to think of ourselves as keepers and guardians of the earth, as God instructed us to do in Genesis 1:27–30, “So God created man in his own image;…and God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it!…Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth’”—such as salamanders, Miss Rawley—“‘wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat’; and it was so.” If the Holy Bible is to be believed, we must view God’s creatures as gifts to his favored children and use them for our own purposes, even if this occasionally causes this one or that one to go extinct after a while.
3) If one species or another of those muddly little salamanders went extinct, who would care anyway?
Just wondering,
GW III
That was it exactly, he thought. That was telling her. Garnett licked the envelope and pressed it shut, feeling more pleased with himself than he had in many years. As he walked out his front door and down the drive to his mailbox he whistled “Pretty Saro,” casting it up to the mockingbird on the grain shed so he might catch up a few of Garnett’s notes and weave them into his merry hymn to the day.
{13}
Predators
Why would you use the word windfall to describe something lucky?” Eddie Bondo asked, revealing a peevish edge to his personality that she’d not yet seen.
It was a fair question. She paused to scratch the back of her neck as they fought their way through the impossible maze of sideways trees: now the mosquitoes were finding them. Deanna had made an unlucky choice in an otherwise perfect morning, and they’d ended up here, climbing tediously through the horizontal labyrinth of an enormous windfall. As nearly as she could figure it out, one huge pine struck by lightning on the hilltop had taken down a whole hillside of its brethren by means of their intertwined limbs. Since she’d chosen the route, she was still trying to pretend this was fun.
“A windfall would be lucky,” she ventured, “if you’d been meaning to spend six weeks sawing down all these trees for lumber.”
“Well, I wasn’t,” he stated.
They’d come out this morning in search of molly-moochers, as people here called them. He’d laughed at this funny pair of words (as he laughed at her “oncet” and “twiced” and “I might could”) but got interested when she explained what they were. Morels were hardly more than a legend out on the arid pine slopes of the West, but here they were real, and he wanted to taste them. She was happy to take him looking. Officially she wasn’t supposed to harvest anything out of these woods, but mushroom populations were in no danger in the National Forest, and now was the wrong time to find them anyhow. Her dad had taught her to hunt them in mid-May when oak leaves were the size of squirrels’ ears. Even the ravenous will of Eddie Bondo couldn’t make one appear in the third week of June. But they’d come looking because that was how it was with him. Some days he packed up and was gone, temporarily or for good she never quite knew, but when he was here he was here; if they began a day by waking up delighted together in her bed, it was going to be a new adventure, another reason to ignore her notebooks and the trails she was supposed to maintain. Most days they neglected the trails altogether to clamber into the mountain’s wildest places, straight up or down slopes so steep they had to ascend on all fours and descend on the seats of their jeans, sliding like bobsledders on the slick