Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [88]
In the evening, when she couldn’t stand any more of his proximity, she invented the necessity of walking down to the hemlock grove with a claw hammer. She would work on the trail bridge over the creek that had collapsed back in February. She still had a few hours of sunlight, as it was close to the summer solstice. (She thought about this: had she missed the solstice, in fact?) She would pull the old bridge apart, count the unsalvageable boards, and put in a requisition for the lumber she’d need to repair it, since the Forest Service jeep would be coming up fairly soon to drop off supplies and collect her new list. She would order no more food than usual, nothing extra. She’d left the cabin without a word, unable to imagine his doing anything but cleaning his gun in her absence.
The hemlock grove was on a tributary that fed Bitter Creek, in a strange, narrow hollow where long updrafts carried sound peculiarly well. Sometimes here she’d heard sounds all the way up from the valley: a dog barking, or even the high, distant whine of trucks on the interstate. That was in winter, though, when the trees were bare. Today, as she worked to pry up boards, she heard mostly the heavy quiet that precedes a summer evening, before the katydids start up, when the forest’s sounds are still separated by long silences. A squirrel overhead scolded her halfheartedly, then stopped. A sapsucker worked its way around a pine trunk. Eddie Bondo had spoken of acorn woodpeckers he’d seen in the West, funny creatures that worked together to drill a dead tree full of little holes, cached thousands of acorns in them, and then spent the rest of their days defending their extravagant treasure from marauding neighbors. How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them. She listened to the sapsucker’s methodic rapping, which ceased only when the bird paused to flick off sections of bark that landed on the mossy ground near the creek.
She was tearing the last boards off the log frame of the bridge when she heard something else that caused her to stop her hammer and listen. Voices: men talking, it sounded like. She stood up and listened more carefully. Hunters.
She wiped a strand of hair out of her eyes, feeling put out. This must be the longest day of the year, for she’d had quite enough of it. Talking meant there was more than one, and this late in the day they’d be up to something stupid like sleeping in a tree all night so they could poach wild turkeys at first light. She sighed and walked the log back across the creek to where she’d thrown her jacket. She’d have to head down there and summon the energy to call their bluff.
The sounds were very distant, maybe as much as a mile off. But they were certain, and continuous. She listened for another minute to the low, steady murmurs. It wasn’t words. Growls, they were. Little conversational growls and higher-pitched barks. It wasn’t men talking; this was women, coyote women, not howling at the moon but snarling quietly in the language of mothers speaking to children. Those two females this morning had taken a live mouse, she’d noticed. They hadn’t eaten it or even killed it, just disabled it. Now Deanna knew why. Those pups are alive, she sang to herself in a whisper. Alive in the world with their eyes open, learning to hunt. Learning to speak. Coyote children