Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [89]
In the early-morning light, moving fast down the Bitter Creek trail, she stopped for a minute to listen. Nothing, only silence. Or rather, every kind of sound except what she was listening for. Plenty of noise rustling up from the dry leaves around her feet—that would be a lizard making itself sound as big as a bear. She walked on, knowing now what to listen for and knowing she would hear it. All spring she’d been waiting while her imagination filled with voices that made the small hairs stand up on the back of her scalp: those classic howls to the moon, the yips and polyphonic cries she’d studied on cassette tapes till she’d worn them to crinkled, transparent cellophane. She was beginning to fear she’d worn out her mind the same way, waiting in these mountains, leaning into the silent nights, eventually deciding that the one sound she longed for was not going to come. Here it wasn’t necessary for them to speak. Not like out west, where they would have to call to each other from the tops of desert hills for the joy of their numbers because they were so plentiful. They’d have to remind one another of who they were, how many families, and where they stood. Here there was just one single family, and it knew exactly where it stood. Best to keep quiet.
The hardest work of Deanna’s life had been staying away from that den, protecting it with her absence. Sometimes she’d felt sure they were gone, maybe headed south toward the Blue Ridge. She tried to believe that was for the best, but really there would be no safe haven for this family. Wherever these coyotes went, they’d have the hatred of farmers to contend with. Here on this isolated mountain they had the strange combination of one protector and one enemy. She didn’t trust her power to bargain for their safety. In the six weeks of her acquaintance with Eddie Bondo, including both his presence and his absences, she’d hedged and evaded. Now he’d seen them, and she’d spent last night curled miserably in her chair near the wood stove, thinking, while he snored. By morning her bones ached and her mind was raw, but she was ready to lay her cards on the table.
“I’m going down the hill this morning, alone,” she’d said. “If you follow me, you’re off this mountain for the rest of your life or mine. Whichever lasts longer.”
Without a word he’d packed some cold biscuits in his pack, hitched it over his shoulder, and hiked out whistling along the Forest Service road, in the opposite direction from Bitter Creek. Deanna stood for several minutes looking at his hat, which he’d left hanging on the peg by the door, and at his gun propped in the corner. Then she dressed and flew down the trail, free at last to go see. Now she could listen and not be afraid of hearing the voices that could give away their presence. For all those weeks she’d been holding her breath, listening and wanting not to hear. How had she let that happen?
She stopped again, this time hearing only the manic laughter of a woodpecker pair having too much fun, moving sideways through the woods, hopping over each other from one tree trunk to the next. For a minute she watched this pileated woodpecker couple playing checkers with themselves. They were huge, as big as flying black cats, and impossible to ignore with their big, haughty voices and upswept red crests. She received a vision of ghosts, imagined for a moment the ivory bills—dead cousins to these pileated woodpeckers—who had been even bigger, with nearly a three-foot wingspan and a cold,