{4}
Predators
She sat cross-legged on the floor of the porch, brushing out her hair and listening to the opening chorus of this day. A black-and-white warbler had started it long before dawn, breaking into her sleep with his high-pitched "Sweet sweet!" Deanna could picture him out there, circling the trunk of a poplar, tilting his tiny little zebra-striped head toward the first hints of light, tearing yesterday off the calendar and opening the summer of love with his outsized voice. She'd rushed out to the porch in her nightgown and bare feet, the hairbrush mostly an afterthought lying on her lap. She needed to listen to this: prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.
The other warblers woke up soon after the black-and-white: first she heard the syncopated phrase of the hooded warbler with its upbeat ending like a good joke, then the Kentucky with his more solemn, rolling trill. By now a faint gray light was seeping up the edge of the sky, or what she could see of the sky through the black-armed trees. This hollow was a mean divide, with mountains rising steeply on both sides and the trees towering higher still. The cabin was no place to be if you craved long days and sunlight, but there was no better dawn chorus anywhere on earth. In the high season of courtship and mating, this music was like the earth itself opening its mouth to sing. Its crescendo crept forward slowly as the daylight roused one bird and then another: the black-capped and Carolina chickadees came next, first cousins who whistled their notes on separate pitches, close together, distinguishable to any chickadee but to very few humans, especially among this choir of other voices. Deanna smiled to hear the first veery, whose song sounded like a thumb run down the tines of a comb. It had been the first birdcall to capture her fascination in childhood--not the calls of the meadowlarks and sparrows that sang outside her windows on the farm every morning, but the song of the veery, a high-elevation migrant that she encountered only up here, on fishing expeditions with her dad. Maybe she'd just never really listened before those trips, which yielded few trout and less conversation but so much silent waiting in the woods. "Now, 'at's a comb bird," her dad had improvised, smiling, when she asked, and she'd dutifully pictured the bird as a comb-shaped creature, bright pink. She was disappointed, years later, when she discovered its brown, ordinary birdness in the Peterson field guide.
The dawn chorus was a whistling roar by now, the sound of a thousand males calling out love to a thousand silent females ready to choose and make the world new. It was nothing but heady cacophony unless you paid attention to the individual entries: a rose-breasted grosbeak with his sweet, complicated little sonnet; a vireo with his repetitious bursts of eighth notes and triplets. And then came the wood thrush, with his tone poem of a birdsong. The wood thrush defined these woods for Deanna, providing background music for her thoughts and naming her place in the forest. The dawn chorus would subside in another hour, but the wood thrush would persist for a long time into the morning, then pick up again in early evening or even at midday if it was cloudy. Nannie had asked her once in a letter how she could live up here alone with all the quiet, and that was Deanna's answer: when human conversation stopped, the world was anything but quiet. She lived with wood thrushes for company.
Deanna smiled a little to think of Nannie down there in the valley. Nannie lived for neighborly chat, staking out her independent old-lady life but still snatching conversation wherever possible, the way a dieter will keep after the cookies tucked in a cupboard. No wonder she worried for Deanna.
The sky had a solid white cast by now, mottled like an old porcelain plate, and the voices began to back off or drop out one by one. Soon she'd be left with only the thrush song and the rest of her day. A few titmice and chickadees were congregating at the spot underneath a chokecherry, a dozen yards from her cabin, where she always scattered birdseed on top of a flat boulder. She'd chosen a spot she could watch from her window and had put out seed there all winter--ordered birdseed by the fifty-pound bag, in fact, along with her monthly grocery requisition. The Forest Service never questioned it. It wasn't exactly policy to feed chickadees and cardinals, but apparently the government was willing to do whatever it took to keep a wildlife monitor sane through the winter, and in Deanna's case it was birdseed. Sitting at the table beside the window with her coffee on snowy February mornings, she could lose hours watching the colorful crowd that gathered outside, envying the birds their freedom in the intense cold. Envying, even, their self-important fuss and bustle. A bird never doubts its place at the center of the universe.
Now that it was the third week of May, buds were emerging and leaf-eating insects of every kind would soon be hanging thick on the trees, and these little Napoleons could find plenty to eat elsewhere, but they'd probably gotten addicted to her handouts. She was addicted to their presence, too. Lately she'd been thinking about dusting off her Smokey the Bear hat (she'd been issued both Park Service and Forest Service uniforms, as a glitch of this hybrid job) and putting it out there on the boulder every morning with seed on the brim so the birds would get used to landing on it. Eventually she'd be able to put it on and walk around with a gaggle of chickadees on her head, for no purpose other than her own foolish amusement.
She'd finished brushing out her hair. It cascaded down her back and shoulders and folded onto the porch floor where she sat, rippling all around her like a dark, tea-colored waterfall glittering with silver reflections. More silver each year, and less tea. She'd told her husband (ex- already by then), when he asked her why, that she was moving up onto the mountain so she wouldn't have to cut her hair. Apparently it was a rule for women in their forties: the short, perky haircut. He probably hadn't understood the joke, thinking it was some embryonic vanity on Deanna's part, but it wasn't. She rarely noticed her hair except to let it out of its braid for a run once a week or so, like a neglected hound. She just hadn't liked the rule, hadn't wanted to look her age, or any age. And who could be bothered with haircuts, weekly or monthly or whatever they had to be? Deanna actually didn't know. She'd managed to live her life apart from this and most other mysteries owned by women. Eyeliner, for instance: what was the instrument of its application, did it hurt, and what on earth was the point? She'd never quite had a real haircut. Her dad had known better than to take a girl child to his barber, and if he'd meant to think of some other option, he didn't get around to it before her wild mane grew down to the backs of her knees. The most she'd done in the way of coiffure was to untangle it from tree branches and trim the ends with the scissors on her Swiss Army knife. That was the only kind of woman she had ever known how to be, in Zebulon County and later on as a schoolteacher and attempted wife in Knoxville. Up here in the woods, finally, she could be the only kind of woman there was.
The kind without a man. Eddie Bondo was gone, and that had to be for the best.
He'd said he'd be back, but she did not believe it. He'd taken everything with him when he went--"everything" being his pack, which admittedly wasn't much. If what he said was true, that he intended only to hike over to Clinch Peak for a day or two and then come back to see her again, he would need his pack. So she couldn't judge his leaving by what he'd taken or left. It wasn't that.
He'd called her hair a miracle. He'd said it was like rolling himself up in a silkworm's cocoon.
She turned her face to the sky and listened to the blessed woods--that was what he'd left behind. A chance to listen to the dawn chorus and brush her hair without being watched. Eddie Bondo had left her this hard, fine gem of her very own, this diamond solitaire of a life.
She stretched her legs straight in front of her while she re-braided her hair into its familiar rope, an exercise her hands could do without mirror or attention. When she'd snapped the rubber band back onto it from her wrist, she bent her forehead to her knees, giving her hamstrings a good, painful stretch. Then she lay stra
ight back, flat on her back like a girl, mouth and eyes open wide to the tree branches overhead. She gasped, dizzy, falling up, straight up into the treetops. Thought about the first time he'd laid her down on this porch. She wondered how she would look to him now, lying here like this.
She cursed aloud and sat up. Damned thing, self-consciousness, like a pitiful stray dog tagging you down the road--so hard to shake off. So easy to get back.
No man had ever spoken to her so freely of her body, or compared it to such strange and natural things. Not only a silkworm. Also ivory, for instance, which he claimed was unnaturally smooth. He'd lived in Canada last summer into fall, he said--had gone up there to make money on the salmon run and stayed on hunting caribou around the Hudson Bay, and somewhere in the process had learned to work walrus ivory into knife handles. She listened to his stories, imagining the possibility of touching nature's other faces. She'd known no other but this one. She asked him what birds were there, and he seemed to know but couldn't name any except the game birds people shot for food. She had been listening too hard, she realized now, for the things he left out--what he meant or believed. To have her bare stomach compared to walrus ivory, was this strange compliment hers alone? She had no idea how to take him but had taken him nearly as hard as possible. It still ran a shock of physical weakness all the way through her to think of certain things: his body against hers, the scent of his skin. The look of awestruck joy on his face when he entered her.
She jumped up, shuddered from the cold and nonsense, and went inside to get dressed and find her day. She walked a circle around the room, stepping into jeans and boots without slowing down much. While she buttoned her shirt with one hand, she banged open the cupboard with the other and reached into the Dutch oven to grab some of yesterday's cornbread. She took a bite and stuffed the rest into her jacket pocket to eat on the trail, or later on, while she waited in the blind she was going to build. She'd wasted too much of this morning already. She'd stayed away from the den for such a long time, the first two weeks on purpose and the last ten days of necessity. She hadn't dared to go. Even if she'd gone out alone, or lied, he could have followed her.
She took the Bitter Creek trail down the mountain as fast as she could without breaking into a run, which would be pointless. If they were there, they would still be there in ten minutes. Or they might not be there at all. They were wary creatures, almost beyond a human's conception of wariness--and the day she'd discovered them, they surely had seen her first. It wasn't reasonable to think she could have outwitted or outsensed them. They could only assume she was an enemy, like every other human whose stink they'd ever caught wind of. If this was the same family that had lost half its members in one day over in the Zebulon Valley, the survivors would be cautious.
She was sure it was that family, or else some other refugees of human damage. Why else would they have ventured so high up the mountain into this forest, so far from the fencerows and field margins that are a coyote's usual domain? When they came over here to whelp their pups, they'd have dug themselves multiple dens. Backup plans were their trademark, the famous coyote wiles. Everything that was possible to know about them, though, Deanna knew. That only the alpha female would bear young, for instance; the other adults in the pack would forgo reproduction. They'd support the alpha instead, gathering food, guarding the den, playing with the pups, training them to forage and hunt after they emerged with their eyes open. If their parents got killed, the pups would hardly suffer for their absence--that was the nature of a coyote family. That was the point of it. And if Deanna's discovery of this burrow had disturbed the pack, its members would have moved those pups already to another place, in the middle of the night. Any predator that needs to sleep at night has already lost the game, with a coyote.
She slowed to a walk and then stopped a quarter mile from where she recalled the den as being, to consider building her blind. She'd have to be near enough to see, but downwind, of course, and the wind direction would change between morning and afternoon. She could build only one blind, since she wanted to create as little disturbance as possible and leave few clues in case anyone else should be poking around here. Mornings, then, it would be. She'd build the blind uphill and come to it only in the mornings, when the sun had warmed the fields down below and the air was still rising up the hollows toward the mountaintop.
She'd forgotten how far down the mountain she'd come that first time, to find this den by accident. Now as she searched it out she couldn't even be sure whether she was still on National Forest land or on the farm below that bordered it--there wasn't a fence here. But it was in deep woods, and higher than you'd expect. There wasn't enough known about coyotes in Appalachia to say what was really normal. They surely couldn't like the mountaintops; they'd prefer lowland fields because of field mice, among other things. But this family had its own history. It'd been shoved to the wall. So it had come up high, to stage its raids from safe hiding, like Geronimo.
She began to move forward again slowly, breaking and collecting low branches from sourwood trees. She left the path, protecting her eyes as she pushed her way through a thick clump of rhododendrons. Her intention was to circle wide around the den to where she could look at it from across the creek. The rhododendrons were almost impossibly dense, but that was fine: no one would find her trail. She wondered briefly about whoever farmed the land below here, and whether he liked to hunt. Probably he wouldn't come here. Most local farmers never set foot in the woods except in deer season, and then only with their friend Jack Daniel's for company. The real trouble, the bear poachers and that ilk, generally came from other places. Those men specialized and so had to range widely.
She sidestepped slowly downhill until she could see across the creek to the tangle of roots at the base of the giant fallen tree. She raised her binoculars to the slice of darkness beneath the roots, held her breath, and focused. Nothing. She sat down on a damp mattress of last autumn's leaves and prepared to wait. No point building a blind until she knew they were still here.
Deanna knew exactly when the morning ended. She never wore a watch, and for this she didn't need one. She knew when the air grew still enough that she could hear caterpillars overhead, newly hatched, eating through thousands of leaves on their way to becoming Io and luna moths. In the next hour the breeze would shift. No sense taking a chance; it was time to leave, and she'd still seen nothing--no movement, no sign. No little dogs, foxlike and wolflike and cousin to both, so familiar from her studies that they sometimes ran through her dreams. Awake, she'd had good long looks at only one single animal, a pathetic captive that she'd rather forget, in the Tinker's Mountain Zoo outside of Knoxville. She'd pleaded with the curator to change the exhibit, explaining that coyotes were social, and that displaying a single animal was therefore not just cruel but also inaccurate. She had offered him her services: a graduate student in wildlife biology, finishing up a thesis on the coyote range extension in the twentieth century. The curator had politely suggested that if she wanted to see coyotes in groups she should take a trip out west, where the animals were so common that people got acquainted with them as roadkill. The conversation had given her a stomachache. So she'd written a grant proposal instead, invented this job, and put herself in it as soon as she'd completed and defended her thesis. She'd had to fight some skeptics, wrangling a rare agreement between the Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, so that there were almost more words on her paycheck than dollars. But it was working out fine, they all seemed to think now. Two years after her arrival, one of the most heavily poached ranges of southern Appalachia was becoming an intact ecosystem again. All of that was the point, but to her mind only partly so.
She breathed out now, resigned. One day she'd lay eyes on wily Canis latrans in the wild, right here in her own home range, on an animal path cross-stitched by other trails to the paths she'd walked in her childhood. It would happen. But it wouldn't be this day.
On her way back up t
he mountain she consciously slowed her step. She heard another magnolia warbler--a sign and a wonder, it seemed to her, like something risen from the dead. So many others never would rise again: Bachman's warbler, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, Flint's stonefly, Apamea moth--so many extinct creatures moved through the leaves just outside her peripheral vision, for Deanna knew enough to realize that she lived among ghosts. She deferred to the extinct as she would to the spirits of deceased relatives, paying her quiet respects in the places where they might once have been. Little red wolves stood as silent shadows at the edges of clearings, while the Carolina parakeets would have chattered loudly, moving along the riverbanks in huge flocks of dazzling green and orange. The early human settlers migrating into this region had loved them and promptly killed them. Now most people would call you crazy if you told them that something as exotic as a parrot had once been at home in these homely southern counties.
She stopped and stared at her feet. Here were tracks, fresh, and she paused to study them out: front and hind foot alternating single-file in a long, sinuous line, the front foot a little bigger than the hind; this was a canid, all right. The claw marks were there, too, clear as could be. Where the tracks crossed a broad patch of clear mud she knelt down to take a close look, measuring a cleanly outlined print with the knuckle of her index finger. Two and three quarters inches front to back. You learn what he is by knowing what he isn't, her dad used to say. This was not a gray fox, and not a red fox. Coyote. A big one, probably male. Alpha's mate.
A little farther on, where the trail crossed a clearing and, most likely, other animal trails, she found his scat. One single turd with an up-curled point on its end like one of Ali Baba's shoes--this was coyote for certain, and who but a big male would make such a show out of his excrement? She squatted down and poked it apart with a twig. A coyote could eat nearly anything: mice, voles, grasshoppers, frogs. Human garbage, a house cat. The farmers down below were right to believe a coyote could take a lamb; working together, a pack might even bring down a full-grown cow. But that would take a huge pack, two dozen animals maybe, more adult coyotes than existed in this county and probably this end of the state. And why on earth would they go to the trouble when there was so much else on the slopes of this mountain for a coyote to eat, with greater safety and ease? Hardly a creature on earth could thrive more capably on junk that was useless to humans. During her thesis research she'd found the notes of a biologist named Murie who'd spent the early decades of his century dissecting coyote scat and recording its splendidly varied contents. He'd cataloged hundreds of different items in his journal. Her favorites were "shreds of woolen clothing" and "watermelon, poached."