T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

Give her dirty legs-scraped, scabbed, mosquito-bittenand hands that could have been cleaner. And smoother. A smudge under her left eye that glistened like a scar. Limp hair. Clothes that smelled of smoke and food and her own rich musk. Give her all that, because they were camping, Glacier Park, special permit, and you could wash all you wanted, but you couldn't escape the dirt, not under those conditions.

He wanted his pancakes semi-black, and he communicated that much from the folds of his sleeping bag, which was laid out next to hers on a neoprene pad in the tent that looked like a big amanita mushroom sprung up out of the earth. It was raining, a soft misting rain that stained the trunks and silvered the needles of the trees. The night before, in the brooding black ringing silence of 11:30 RM., They'd violated the chastity oath they'd taken on entering the park a week earlier: no sex in grizzly territory. No sex. That was common sense, and they'd discussed it dispassionately on the plane into Kalispell, and with real feeling in the motel room the night before they hiked into the back country-she was all skin and heat and hot ratcheting breath and they must have done it ten times against the deprivation to come. But two girls had been killed here-maimed and killed and one of them partially eaten — and they were taking no chances.

This was the wild, or as wild as it got on the planet earth in 1979. Tierwater's heart beat just a little bit faster to know that there were creatures out there that could and would attack a human being and maybe even eat him, big eight- and nine-hundred-pound bears that could outrun a racehorse and outsmell a pack of bloodhounds, real serial killers, the top of the food chain. It thrilled Jane too. This wasn't Westchester County, where the most dangerous thing you'd run into was a black widow in the shower or maybe the quick-moving shadow of a copperhead sucking itself into a crevice in a fieldstone wall. This was raw. This was nature, untamed and unsanitized. "You know what the scientific name for the grizzly is?" He'd asked her as the plane dipped its wings and the landing gear thumped into place. "Ursus arctos Hornbills? Isn't that a gas?"

It was, it was. And he could see it in the sheen of her eyes and the way her face opened up to him. "And those girls? Is it true they were menstruating?"

"You have to realize these things make their living by smell — they have to sniff out spring beauties, whitebarkpine nuts, carrion that's hardly even dead yet. Because they can never have too much to eat, and their whole life is a trip to the salad bar with a nice piece of meat on the side. So yes. The girls were menstruating, and maybe wearing perfume too. A grizzly could smell it — the blood-from miles away. It's like ringing a dinner bell-"

"Come on."

"It is. And that's why there's no sex. They can smell the secretions."

"Come on."

"No, I mean it. Just last summer, right here in Glacier, a couple was killed in their tent. At night. They were-at least this is what the investigators say — they were doing it."

So the pancakes. The pan was black, inside and out, soot like paint running right up the handle. Tierwater slapped mosquitoes and choked down the Jane-fried flapjacks that tasted like incinerated wood pulp and watched his wife eat her portion. There was no syrup. Syrup was too potent an attractant for bears. The beverage of choice? Pond water, fresh from the tin cup.

Of course, what was a potent attractant and what was not really hadn't come into play the night before. They'd been out there a week now-one week down, one to go-collecting the scat of the yellow-bellied marmot in Glad sandwich bags. Jane was working toward her Ph. D. In wildlife management, and one of her professors was studying the dietary predilections of the marmot in Glacier National Park for some reason fathomable only to herself. But, for two weeks, Dr. Rosenthal had to be at a Sciuridae/Rodentia/Mustela conference in Toronto, and Tierwater and Jane jumped at the opportunity to spell her, though it meant leaving Sierra with her grandmother in Watertown. That hurt. And yet there was never any real debate about it-this was a chance for Jane to do fieldwork and to score some bonus points with her friend and mentor, Dr. Sandee Rosenthal, the foremost marmot-person in the world, and it was a chance for Tierwater and his wife to be alone together, romantically alone, in a romantic setting. A second honeymoon, nothing less.

No sex, though-that would have been crazy.

Still, when Jane lit up a joint and slid bare-legged into his sleeping bag, he couldn't seem to keep his hands from making a mute appeal to her — and she seemed to be having the same problem he was. She pulled him to her. They kissed, long and hard, and then, panting and hot, they forced themselves apart. They lay there under the canopy of the tent, fighting for self-control- "We can fool around, can't we? Maybe just a little?" — Listening to the condensation drip from the trees as the fire outside settled into its embers, and what with the stillness and the pot and the electricity of their bodies, things got out of hand. They hadn't seen a grizzly, hadn't heard one, hadn't seen tracks or scat or stumps gutted for ants. They took a chance. They couldn't help themselves. And it was all the more intense for the danger of it-for the fractured resolve, for the tease — and when it was over they made themselves get up out of the sleeping bag and follow the beam of the flashlight down to the pond, where they slipped into the icy envelope of the water to scrub themselves with scentless soap till their teeth chattered and their lips turned blue.

Tierwater chewed the cud of his pancakes, the atomized rain collecting in his hair, and stared up into the canopy of the trees, opening up to everything there was. He was feeling rich, feeling blessed, and — he was only twenty-nine then, so you'll have to forgive him-feeling all but invulnerable. When Jane cried out he almost laughed, it was so comical. "Oh!" She said, and that was all-just "Oh" — as if she'd been surprised in the dark or fallen out of bed. It wasn't "Oh, shit!" Or "Oh, fuck!" — Just "Oh." Jane didn't curse, couldn't bring herself to it, and though they'd played at being street-smart and tough when that was the thing to do and smoked countless bowls with countless stoners and shouted their lungs out in dark overheated clubs and reeling outdoor arenas, Jane clung to her core of small-town propriety. Tierwater always thought that if it weren't for him she would have grown up to be the kind of woman who sat on the PTA board and went to church in a veiled hat and white gloves. And he loved that, he loved that about her. The world was full of obscenity, full of hard cases, antichrists and nutballs-he didn't need that. Not at home. Not in a wife.

"Oh!" She cried, and she jumped up from the dish of pancakes as if she'd been stung. As if, he says — but that was exactly what had happened. A bee had stung her. Or not a bee — a yellow jacket, Yespula maculifrons, the gold — andblack-banded wasp the locals called a meat bee because of its love for burgers, steaks and chops fresh off the grill. Not to mention carrion.

It was almost funny. A bee sting. But the incredible thing was that Jane had gone through an entire life, all twenty-five years of it, without ever having been stung before — or not that her mother could remember anyway. So this wasn't funny, wasn't the casual mishap it might have been for 99 percent of the species, the lucky ones, the nonallergic and resistant. It was death, that's what it was. Though Tierwater, fully engaged in the bliss of natural being and chewing his cud of semi-blackened buckwheat meal, didn't yet realize it. He got up, of course, set down the tin plate and went to her, the fire smoking, the trees dripping, the swatted yellow jacket lying on its back in the dirt and kicking its six moribund legs as if it could live to sting another day.