Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [87]
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Me and everybody with ears.”
She shook her head. “Amazing. Nothing stays the same down there.”
“Nothing stays the same anywhere.”
She looked at him earnestly. “Well, but see, up here it does. I guess there’s big successes and failures going on, but they’re too slow to notice in a lifetime.” She crossed her arms, hugging herself. “I guess that’s why I like it. Nature’s just safer.”
He leaned forward and kissed her. “Tell me some more about ginseng.”
She concentrated on her drawing of a perfect two-armed, two-legged cocky little man who had no need to dig up ginseng for virility. He laid her down on the ground on top of her artwork and they stayed there awhile in the shifting leafy sunlight, leaving their own impression of human desire. Soon they were headed back toward the cabin with nothing on their minds but their bodies.
That was when they came upon the coyotes, two females hunting in the open. They were a mile or so from the hollow that fed Bitter Creek, not a place where Deanna would have gone looking for them. It was in a clearing where fallen trees had opened the canopy, letting the sun onto a patch of forest floor that now grew thick with a red carpet of new blackberry leaves. At first she thought they were dogs, they were so big: thick-furred behind the ears like huskies, and much stockier than the scrawny specimen she’d seen in the zoo or any western coyotes she’d seen in photographs. These two appeared golden in the sunlight, arching their backs and hopping through the foot-deep foliage, one and then the other, like a pair of dolphins alternately rolling above the waves. They were on the trail of something small and quick beneath the leaves and grass. Probably a vole or a mouse. They paid no attention to the pair of humans who stood with their boots frozen in the shadows. Focused entirely on their pursuit, their ears twitched forward like mechanical things, tracking imperceptible sounds. Like two parts of a single animal they moved to surround and corner their prey against a limestone bank, tunneling after it with their long noses. Deanna watched, spellbound. She could see how efficiently this pair might work a field edge, pursuing the mice and voles they seemed to prefer. No wonder farmers saw them often and feared for their livestock; if only they knew that they had nothing to lose but their mice. It occurred to her as she watched them that this manner of hunting might actually be helpful to ground-nesting birds like the bobwhite, because of the many passages it would open through the tight clumps of fescue.
Then, without any warning that the chase was near an end, the forward guard pounced and then raised her head with a sideways jerk, snapping the mouse just once in the air like a small, damp dust-rag she meant to shake clean, before disappearing into the woods with her catch still writhing in her jaws. Her sister paused at the edge of the woods and turned back on them with a dark, warning glare.
Deanna didn’t speak for the rest of the afternoon. What was there to say, to this man whose thoughts she couldn’t stand to know? She wanted him to have seen how they really were in that sunny clearing, how golden and perfectly attuned to their own necessities. But she knew not to ask. The sight of them had caused him to withdraw far inside himself, carefully avoiding any touch or glance at her as they stood watching the animals. Afterward, he hadn’t offered a word about what they’d witnessed.
They did not go to bed in the afternoon, as it seemed they’d intended. Her body went cold. She put on a kettle for tea, then boiled some rice and reheated yesterday’s black beans. She and Eddie had fallen into the habit of eating their meals on the bed, but on this day she claimed back the single chair and the table, covering it with a pile of books and papers and her neglected field notebook, writing while she ate. Eddie Bondo was restless, pacing out on the porch. The loudest sound on the earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do. Why was he still here?
For the