Chapter One
Predators
Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude
is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life
underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are
witnessed.
If someone in this forest had been watching her'a man with a gun, for instance,
hiding inside a copse of leafy beech trees'he would have noticed how quickly she
moved up the path and how direly she scowled at the ground ahead of her feet. He
would have judged her an angry woman on the trail of something hateful.
He would have been wrong. She was frustrated, it's true, to be following tracks
in the mud she couldn't identify. She was used to being sure. But if she'd
troubled to inspect her own mind on this humid, sunlit morning, she would have
declared herself happy.
She loved the air after a hard rain, and the way a forest of dripping leaves
fills itself with a sibilant percussion that empties your head of words. Her
body was free to follow its own rules: a long-legged gait too fast for
companionship, unself-conscious squats in the path where she needed to touch
broken foliage, a braid of hair nearly as thick as her forearm falling over her
shoulder to sweep the ground whenever she bent down. Her limbs rejoiced to be
outdoors again, out of her tiny cabin whose log walls had grown furry and
overbearing during the long spring rains. The frown was pure concentration,
nothing more. Two years alone had given her a blind person's indifference to the
look on her own face.
All morning the animal trail had led her uphill, ascending the mountain,
skirting a rhododendron slick, and now climbing into an old-growth forest whose
steepness had spared it from ever being logged. But even here, where a good
oak-hickory canopy sheltered the ridge top, last night's rain had pounded
through hard enough to obscure the tracks. She knew the animal's size from the
path it had left through the glossy undergrowth of mayapples, and that was
enough to speed up her heart. It could be what she'd been looking for these two
years and more. This lifetime. But to know for sure she needed details,
especially the faint claw mark beyond the toe pad that distinguishes canid from
feline. That would be the first thing to vanish in a hard rain, so it wasn't
going to appear to her now, however hard she looked. Now it would take more than
tracks, and on this sweet, damp morning at the beginning of the world, that was
fine with her. She could be a patient tracker. Eventually the animal would give
itself away with a mound of scat (which might have dissolved in the rain, too)
or something else, some sign particular to its species. A bear will leave claw
marks on trees and even bite the bark sometimes, though this was no bear. It was
the size of a German shepherd, but no house pet, either. The dog that had laid
this trail, if dog it was, would have to be a wild and hungry one to be out in
such a rain.
She found a spot where it had circled a chestnut stump, probably for scent
marking. She studied the stump: an old giant, raggedly rotting its way backward
into the ground since its death by ax or blight. Toadstools dotted the humus at
its base, tiny ones, brilliant orange, with delicately ridged caps like open
parasols. The downpour would have obliterated such fragile things; these must
have popped up in the few hours since the rain stopped'after the animal was
here, then. Inspired by its ammonia. She studied the ground for a long time,
unconscious of the elegant length of her nose and chin in profile, unaware of
her left hand moving near her face to disperse a cloud of gnats and push stray
hair out of her eyes. She squatted, steadied herself by placing her fingertips
in the moss at the foot of the stump, and pressed her face to the musky old
wood. Inhaled.
Cat, she said softly, to nobody. Not what she'd hoped for, but a good surprise
to find evidence of a territorial bobcat on this ridge. The mix of forests and
wetlands in these mountains could be excellent core habitat for cats, but she
knew they mostly kept to the limestone river cliffs along the Virginia-Kentucky
border. And yet here one was. It explained the cries she'd heard two nights ago,
icy shrieks in the rain, like a woman's screaming. She'd been sure it was a
bobcat but still lost sleep over it. No human could fail to be moved by such
human-sounding anguish. Remembering it now gave her a shiver as she balanced her
weight on her toes and pushed herself back upright to her feet.
And there he stood, looking straight at her. He was dressed in boots and
camouflage and carried a pack larger than hers. His rifle was no jokea
thirty-thirty, it looked like. Surprise must have stormed all over her face
before she thought to arrange it for human inspection. It happened, that she ran
into hunters up here. But she always saw them first. This one had stolen her
advantagehe'd seen inside her. Eddie Bondo, is what he'd said, touching his
hat brim, though it took her a moment to work this out.
What?
That's my name.
Good Lord, she said, able to breathe out finally. I didn't ask your name.
You needed to know it, though.
Cocky, she thought. Or cocked, rather. Like a rifle, ready to go off. What
would I need your name for? You fixing to give me a story I'll want to tell
later? she asked quietly. It was a tactic learned from her father, and the way
of mountain people in generalto be quiet when most agitated.
That I can't say. But I won't bite. He grinnedapologetically, it seemed. He
was very much younger than she. His left hand reached up to his shoulder,
fingertips just brushing the barrel of the rifle strapped to his shoulder. And
I don't shoot girls.
Well. Wonderful news.
Bite, he'd said, with the northerner's clipped i. An outsider, intruding on this
place like kudzu vines. He was not very tall but deeply muscular in the way that
shows up through a man's clothing, in his wrists and neck and posture: a build
so accustomed to work that it seems tensed even when at ease. He said, You
sniff stumps, I see.
I do.
You got a good reason for that?
Yep.
You going to tell me what it is?
Nope.
Another pause. She watched his hands, but what pulled on her was the dark green
glint of his eyes. He observed her acutely, seeming to evaluate her
hill-inflected vowels for the secrets behind her yep and nope. His grin
turned down on the corners instead of up, asking a curved parenthetical question
above his right-angled chin. She could not remember a more compelling
combination of features on any man she'd ever seen. You're not much of a
talker, he said. Most girls I know, they'll yap half the day about something
they haven't done yet and might not get around to.
Well, then. I'm not most girls you know...
Excerpted from Prodigal Summer
by Barbara Kingsolver.
Copyright © 2000 by Barbara Kingsolver.
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 2000 Barbara Kingsolver.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-06-019965-2