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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 joke'a 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 advantage'he'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
general'to be quiet when most agitated.
“That I can't say. But I won't bite.” He grinned'apologetically, 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 THE PRODIGAL SUMMER (c) Copyright 2000 by Barbara
Kingsolver. Reprinted with permission from the publisher, HarperCollins. All rights
reserved.
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