Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (2001)
{1} Predators
characters:
Deanna: Deanna is the first character to appear in the novel, and in this chapter we find her tracking what she hopes is a coyote but turns out to be (she knows by sniffing a tree stump it has marked) a bobcat. Deanna studied and wrote her dissertation about the coyote. Her love for coyotes and for the outdoors, along with her fast stride, are among her former husband's complaints that lead to their divorce. Raised by her father in Zebulon County, Deanna returns to the area after her divorce and has now been working for two years as a forest ranger on Zebulon Mountain, where she lives alone in a cabin and has limited contact with other people. Deanna is in her forties and is tall with a long braid. She speaks with a hillbilly accent.
Eddie Bondo: Son of three generations of sheep farmers from Wyoming, Eddie Bondo is a hunter with a suspicion of coyotes, and is presumably in Zebulon County for the first Mountain Empire Bounty Hunt. He is about 5'6 (a head shorter than Deanna), well-built and good looking. He speaks with what Deanna hears as a Yankee accent.
setting:
Zebulon Mountain in May
plot:
Unused to arranging her face for others to see, Deanna is happy but frowning in frustration at a morning spent tracking an animal she can't yet identify. When she finally comes to a tree stump where the animal has marked, she sniffs and declares it a bobcat - not the coyote she had been hoping for, but a nice surprise nonetheless in an area where the animal is scarce. When she stands, Deanna is confronted by a stranger with a thirty-thirty rifle who introduces himself as Eddie Bondo. In the exchange that follows, she notes that he says bite "with the northerner's clipped i" and he her "hill-inflected vowels" (158-72)*. He wants to know why she's sniffing stumps, but she declines to tell him. He asks to follow her as she continues tracking and she declines that too, noting that as a hunter he should know what two people make more than twice the noise that one does. When he observes that she doesn't have a gun, she replies, "I don't believe I'm carrying one. I believe we're on National Forest land, inside of a game-protection area where there's no hunting" (172-85). He stands long enough to make her realize that he has mentally taken off both her regulation Forest Service nylon and Gore-Tex and her own layers beneath it, and then disappears leaving her blushing.
That night and for the next two days Deanna thinks of Eddie Bondo constantly, and begins to carry the pistol she is supposed to carry for protection against bears. On the third day (May 8) she tracks a coyote to the same stump visited by the bobcat, and finds him there. He is without the gun this time and when he asks to follow her as she tracks, she has him go ahead of her and points out the older bobcat instead of the fresh coyote trail. She follows him a while, and then steps down the hill to another trail. She sees the coyote tracks again headed toward a den that she spotted fourteen days earlier but she resists following them because she does not want Eddie Bondo to find her there. When he does catch up to her and asks what she was really tracking she says "coyotes" and then tries to cover her slip with "And bobcats, and bear, and fox" (248-63). She says a little about her interest in carnivores and their importance as an indicator of the entire ecosystem's health. "Keeping tabs on the predators tells you what you need to know about the herbivores, like deer, and the vegetation, the detritovores, the insect populations, small predators like shrews and voles. All of it" (263-76). She notes in him the familiar confusion of people encountering evidence of her education through her hillbilly accent. Her admitted confusion over whether he is trying to make her angry leads to a discussion of her job and its solitude. He flirts playfully and they walk, Deanna pointing out the sound of a Magnolia warbler's mating song. A mention of the extinct wolf population gives him an opening to mention that she said she'd seen coyotes, but she is suspicious of his interest and answers equivocally. She says, "If they were here, I'd be real curious to see how they affected other populations up here. Because they're something new" (331-45). Coyotes have been extending their range and have appeared in each of the continental United States over the past few years. She looks up at some adult lacewings whose adult life consists of one day of mating.
The trail Deanna follows with Eddie Bondo ends at an overlook where, two summers ago, she had approached jogging and almost fallen over. They look down on Zebulon Valley and he guesses that it's her hometown. She sees a red-tail hawk that she guesses from it's call has a mate, and remembers seeing a pair of them coupling in air, separating just before they would have hit the ground. She remains conscious of him as an outsider - wondering whether a city peron could look at her town and not see it as beautiful, and not mentioning the name of the town Egg Fork because she's learned to hide it from outsiders. He sees some sheep farms below and she remembers to herself how a dairy farmer had found and tried to exterminate a coyote den the spring before. "A mother, a father, and six nursing pups, according to local gossip all dead now, thanks to the farmer's marksmanship. She didn't believe it. She knew how Zebulon men liked to talk, and she knew a coyote family to be a nearly immortal creation. 'Mother and father' was a farmer's appraisal of something beyond his ken; a coyote family was mostly females, sisters led by an alpha female, all bent on one member's reproduction" (398-411). Eddie Bondo touches her fingertips and admires the beauty of the sight before him, and Deanna invites him to stay at her cabin. They head toward the cabin and Eddie points out a pink testicle-shaped flower that Deanna identifies as the deceptively named "lady's slipper" (435-48). Eddie describes a similar flower that grows in northern peat bogs and traps the bee until he can find the one door out, causing him to "spread the pollen over the place where the flower wants it" (448-61). They kiss and roll a way down the hill, then get up and walk toward the cabin where they strip outside and have sex on the porch.
Afterward, Eddie Bondo pulls tangles out of Deanna's hair "But he was still looking away; the hand moved by itself, and she wondered if he worked with animals or something" (498-510). He asks Deanna's name and she tells him, omitting the last name that she explains is her ex husband's. "'Still yet,' he mocked, smiling at her, considering her words. 'That's the male animal for you. Scent marking'" (511-25). Deanna laughs at the joke and Eddie Bondo walks to the end of her porch an pees.
Deanna had not been sexually active until college, when she had attracted mostly older men (mainly professors) and then married one. In his twenties, Eddie Bondo is a new experience for her and they are up all night. "Afterward he moved around her cabin with the confidence of an invited guest, whistling, going quiet only when he studied the titles of her books. Theory of Population Genetics and Evolutionary Ecology: that kind of thing seemed to set him back a notch, if only briefly" (537-50). Eddie Bondo tells Deanna that he is the son of three generations of Wyoming sheep ranchers, and in so doing marks himself as an antagonist to her favored coyotes. "A sheep rancher. She knew the hatred of western ranchers toward coyotes; it was famous, maybe the fiercest human-animal vendetta there was. It was bad enough even here on the tamer side of the Mississippi. The farmers she'd grown up among would sooner kill a coyote than learn to pronounce its name" (562-75). Deanna guesses privately that he had come to town for the Mountain Empire Bounty Hunt - "It'd been held recently, she knew, around the first day of May - the time of birthing and nursing, a suitable hunting season for nothing in this world unless the goal was willful extermination. It had drawn hunters from everywhere for the celebrate purpose of killing coyotes" (575-80).
Deanna: Deanna is the first character to appear in the novel, and in this chapter we find her tracking what she hopes is a coyote but turns out to be (she knows by sniffing a tree stump it has marked) a bobcat. Deanna studied and wrote her dissertation about the coyote. Her love for coyotes and for the outdoors, along with her fast stride, are among her former husband's complaints that lead to their divorce. Raised by her father in Zebulon County, Deanna returns to the area after her divorce and has now been working for two years as a forest ranger on Zebulon Mountain, where she lives alone in a cabin and has limited contact with other people. Deanna is in her forties and is tall with a long braid. She speaks with a hillbilly accent.
Eddie Bondo: Son of three generations of sheep farmers from Wyoming, Eddie Bondo is a hunter with a suspicion of coyotes, and is presumably in Zebulon County for the first Mountain Empire Bounty Hunt. He is about 5'6 (a head shorter than Deanna), well-built and good looking. He speaks with what Deanna hears as a Yankee accent.
setting:
Zebulon Mountain in May
plot:
Unused to arranging her face for others to see, Deanna is happy but frowning in frustration at a morning spent tracking an animal she can't yet identify. When she finally comes to a tree stump where the animal has marked, she sniffs and declares it a bobcat - not the coyote she had been hoping for, but a nice surprise nonetheless in an area where the animal is scarce. When she stands, Deanna is confronted by a stranger with a thirty-thirty rifle who introduces himself as Eddie Bondo. In the exchange that follows, she notes that he says bite "with the northerner's clipped i" and he her "hill-inflected vowels" (158-72)*. He wants to know why she's sniffing stumps, but she declines to tell him. He asks to follow her as she continues tracking and she declines that too, noting that as a hunter he should know what two people make more than twice the noise that one does. When he observes that she doesn't have a gun, she replies, "I don't believe I'm carrying one. I believe we're on National Forest land, inside of a game-protection area where there's no hunting" (172-85). He stands long enough to make her realize that he has mentally taken off both her regulation Forest Service nylon and Gore-Tex and her own layers beneath it, and then disappears leaving her blushing.
That night and for the next two days Deanna thinks of Eddie Bondo constantly, and begins to carry the pistol she is supposed to carry for protection against bears. On the third day (May 8) she tracks a coyote to the same stump visited by the bobcat, and finds him there. He is without the gun this time and when he asks to follow her as she tracks, she has him go ahead of her and points out the older bobcat instead of the fresh coyote trail. She follows him a while, and then steps down the hill to another trail. She sees the coyote tracks again headed toward a den that she spotted fourteen days earlier but she resists following them because she does not want Eddie Bondo to find her there. When he does catch up to her and asks what she was really tracking she says "coyotes" and then tries to cover her slip with "And bobcats, and bear, and fox" (248-63). She says a little about her interest in carnivores and their importance as an indicator of the entire ecosystem's health. "Keeping tabs on the predators tells you what you need to know about the herbivores, like deer, and the vegetation, the detritovores, the insect populations, small predators like shrews and voles. All of it" (263-76). She notes in him the familiar confusion of people encountering evidence of her education through her hillbilly accent. Her admitted confusion over whether he is trying to make her angry leads to a discussion of her job and its solitude. He flirts playfully and they walk, Deanna pointing out the sound of a Magnolia warbler's mating song. A mention of the extinct wolf population gives him an opening to mention that she said she'd seen coyotes, but she is suspicious of his interest and answers equivocally. She says, "If they were here, I'd be real curious to see how they affected other populations up here. Because they're something new" (331-45). Coyotes have been extending their range and have appeared in each of the continental United States over the past few years. She looks up at some adult lacewings whose adult life consists of one day of mating.
The trail Deanna follows with Eddie Bondo ends at an overlook where, two summers ago, she had approached jogging and almost fallen over. They look down on Zebulon Valley and he guesses that it's her hometown. She sees a red-tail hawk that she guesses from it's call has a mate, and remembers seeing a pair of them coupling in air, separating just before they would have hit the ground. She remains conscious of him as an outsider - wondering whether a city peron could look at her town and not see it as beautiful, and not mentioning the name of the town Egg Fork because she's learned to hide it from outsiders. He sees some sheep farms below and she remembers to herself how a dairy farmer had found and tried to exterminate a coyote den the spring before. "A mother, a father, and six nursing pups, according to local gossip all dead now, thanks to the farmer's marksmanship. She didn't believe it. She knew how Zebulon men liked to talk, and she knew a coyote family to be a nearly immortal creation. 'Mother and father' was a farmer's appraisal of something beyond his ken; a coyote family was mostly females, sisters led by an alpha female, all bent on one member's reproduction" (398-411). Eddie Bondo touches her fingertips and admires the beauty of the sight before him, and Deanna invites him to stay at her cabin. They head toward the cabin and Eddie points out a pink testicle-shaped flower that Deanna identifies as the deceptively named "lady's slipper" (435-48). Eddie describes a similar flower that grows in northern peat bogs and traps the bee until he can find the one door out, causing him to "spread the pollen over the place where the flower wants it" (448-61). They kiss and roll a way down the hill, then get up and walk toward the cabin where they strip outside and have sex on the porch.
Afterward, Eddie Bondo pulls tangles out of Deanna's hair "But he was still looking away; the hand moved by itself, and she wondered if he worked with animals or something" (498-510). He asks Deanna's name and she tells him, omitting the last name that she explains is her ex husband's. "'Still yet,' he mocked, smiling at her, considering her words. 'That's the male animal for you. Scent marking'" (511-25). Deanna laughs at the joke and Eddie Bondo walks to the end of her porch an pees.
Deanna had not been sexually active until college, when she had attracted mostly older men (mainly professors) and then married one. In his twenties, Eddie Bondo is a new experience for her and they are up all night. "Afterward he moved around her cabin with the confidence of an invited guest, whistling, going quiet only when he studied the titles of her books. Theory of Population Genetics and Evolutionary Ecology: that kind of thing seemed to set him back a notch, if only briefly" (537-50). Eddie Bondo tells Deanna that he is the son of three generations of Wyoming sheep ranchers, and in so doing marks himself as an antagonist to her favored coyotes. "A sheep rancher. She knew the hatred of western ranchers toward coyotes; it was famous, maybe the fiercest human-animal vendetta there was. It was bad enough even here on the tamer side of the Mississippi. The farmers she'd grown up among would sooner kill a coyote than learn to pronounce its name" (562-75). Deanna guesses privately that he had come to town for the Mountain Empire Bounty Hunt - "It'd been held recently, she knew, around the first day of May - the time of birthing and nursing, a suitable hunting season for nothing in this world unless the goal was willful extermination. It had drawn hunters from everywhere for the celebrate purpose of killing coyotes" (575-80).