T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

In the beginning, it had all seemed possible. They were enthusiasts, pumped up with confidence and what they'd distilled from the pages of a book, so simple really, the diagrams still resonating in their heads (attach x to y to z and voila, there's meat in the pot). Tierwater spent hours constructing deadfalls to lure the unsuspecting skunk or raccoon, but it proved to be a fruitless endeavor, because nothing, as far as he could see, ever went near the baits he left out-except flies. Andrea sat cross-legged in the sand and fashioned snares from the thin whiplike branches of the willows, yet they snared nothing but air, and both of them spent the better part of a long morning digging mouse bottle pits (two and a half feet deep, with a wide bottom and narrow neck, hidden beneath a flat rock propped up on both ends to provide access), only to discover that no mouse, if mice even existed this far afield, had been generous enough to tumble into one of them. After inspecting the empty traps three days running, they looked each other in the eye beneath the tan trees, amidst the glorious but inedible scenery, searching for signs of the inevitable breakdown. There was frustration in the air. There was anger. And more than that, there was hunger-desperate, gnawing, murderous.

"A mouse," Andrea spat, arms akimbo, her skin burned to the color of boiled wiener, "we can't even catch a mouse. And how many calories you think we wasted digging these pits, Ty? Huh? And even if we did catch one, or even ten of them, what good would it do? What are they, the size of a marshmallow, once you skin and gut them?"

But Tierwater was in the grip of something — a delusion, that's what it was — and out here, where there were no microphones or high heels or E. F.I Contributors to woo, he was in charge. "Bears eat them," he said lamely, staring down into the dark, mocking aperture of the empty hole at his feet.

"Yeah," she said, "and people eat bears. Why don't we catch a bear, Ty? You know any good bear recipes?"

They spent the rest of the day haunting the streambed, darting after the elusive shadows that were the fish, but it was an unlucky day, and finally they were reduced to turning over stones to pluck beetles, salamanders, earthworms and scorpions from their couchettes, the whole mess, two handfuls of pulped and writhing things, singed in the cup of a rock Tierwater set in the middle of the fire. "I don't care, Ty," Andrea sang, huddled over her naked knees as the sun clipped off the rock wall above them and the ambrosial smell of whatever it was Chris Mattingly was cooking drifted down the gorge, "I'm not eating anything with the legs still attached. I'm not" So Tierwater mashed the whole business together with the blunt end of a stick, pounded it and pounded it again, till they had a dark paste sizzling there in the scoop of rock. They ate it before it had cooled- "It has a kind of nutty flavor, don't you think?" Tierwater said, trying to make the best of it — but fifteen minutes later they were both secreted in the bushes, heaving it back up.

The next morning, Andrea was up at first light, a cud of twig and leaf working in her mouth. He was tending the fire when she rose up suddenly out of the dirt and took hold of his arm. "I want meat," she said. "Meat. Do you hear me?" Her eyes were swollen. Her nails dug into his flesh. "Can't we at least hunt? Isn't that what people do when they're starving? Isn't that standard operating procedure?"

Tierwater didn't bother to answer, because if he'd answered he would have asked a question of his own, a question that was sure to bring some real rancor to the surface-Whose idea was this, anyway? Instead, he said nothing.

"What about marmots? Aren't there marmots out here?"

The fire was snapping. It was early yet, the sun buttering the ridge before them, the canyon still sunk in shadow. Tier-water had always been one to eat breakfast — and a substantial breakfast, at that-as soon as he arose in the morning. It the most important meal of the day, his mother used to say, and she was right. He wanted coffee, with heavy cream and lots of sugar, he wanted eggs and thick slices of Canadian bacon, buttered sourdough toasted till it was crisp, but he heaved himself up with the picture of a marmot — a fat yellow-throated thing like a giant squirrel and so stupid it wasn't much smarter than the rocks it lived among-planted firmly in his head. "I used to collect marmot shit," he said, the smoke stabbing at his eyes. "I guess I ought to know where to find them-up there, I would think," he said, gesturing at the ridge behind them.

They looked at one another a long moment, their bodies smudged and battered and all but sexless, and then they turned as one and started to climb. It was no easy task. Already, after a mere five days, they could feel the effects of starvation, a weakness in the limbs, a gracelessness that took the spring out of their step and made their brains feel as if they were packed with cellulose. They gulped air like pearl divers, left traces of themselves on the rough hide of the rocks. Every bush poked at them. They tasted their own sweat, their own blood. And when they got to the top of the canyon, they discovered more scenery, a whole panorama of scenery, but nothing to eat. "We've got to look for their burrows," Tierwater said, snatching the words between deep ratcheting breaths.

Andrea just stared at him, her chest heaving, the whole world spread out behind her. Burrows, they were looking for burrows.

They spread out and combed the ridge, chasing incidentally after lizards that were so quick they couldn't be sure they'd seen them, chewing bits of twig and the odd unidentifiable berry that might or might not have been poisonous, but they found no scat, no burrows, no sign that marmots or anything else lived there. Tierwater, the tender skin of his back and shoulders baked to indelibility, was making some sort of excuse, flapping his hands, dredging up marmot lore, when the two of them suddenly froze. There was a sound on the air, a high chittering whistle that seemed to be emanating from the next ridge over. "You hear that?" Tierwater said, and his face must have been something to see-give him a loopy grin, the look of the mad scientist, the cannibal turning a corner and bumping into a sumo wrestler. "That's a marmot. That's a marmot for sure."

Guided by the sound, they moved through the brush and 'into the cover of the tall pines till they came to a clearing dominated by a tumble of rock; in the center of the tumble, its broad flat rodent's head jerking spasmodically as it sang or screeched or whatever it was doing, was a marmot. A yellow-bellied marmot, fat and delicious. Tierwater glanced at Andrea. Andrea glanced at Tierwater. He put a finger to his lips and bent for a stout branch.

For an hour, crouching, creeping through a bristle of yellowed grass and pine cones on their stomachs, Tierwater and Andrea converged on the animal from opposite directions. It was hot. Tierwater was white with dust and itching in every fiber of his torn and abraded flesh. He watched Andrea's head bob up from behind a fallen log ten feet in back of the marmot, then he swallowed his breath and charged the thing, stick flailing in the air — and she, taking his signal, rose up with a whoop, her own stick clutched tight. It was a careful stalk, a brilliant stalk from a tactical standpoint, but, unfortunately, the marmot was unimpressed. With a single squeak that was like the first faint exhalation of a teapot set on to boil, he-it-disappeared down its hole.

"All right," Tierwater said, "all right, we'll dig him out, then."

And so they dug, with brittle pine sticks instead of a pick and shovel, in dry, rocky soil, their stomachs creaking and crepitating and closing on nothing. They dug wordlessly, dug mindlessly, earth and stones flying, sticks shattering, the vision of that stupid, dull-eyed, buck-toothed animal constall* before them-meat, meat spitted on the grill-until they gradually became aware of a noise behind them, a high chittering whistle. They turned as one to see the marmot watching them from the neck of a burrow twenty feet away, its head bobbing in complaint. Tierwater picked up a stone; the marmot disappeared. "No problem," Tierwater said, turning to his wife, and she was a mess, she was, her hands blackened, a fine grit glued to her with her own sweat, "you just stay here, at this burrow, and I'll dig him out over there."