T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

And so they dug again, with renewed vigor, watching the distance between them shrink as Tierwater traced the burrow back along a meandering line to where Andrea dug forward to meet him. Half an hour passed. An hour. And then, finally, though they were exhausted-tense, exhausted and angry — the end was in sight: there were no more than five feet separating them. "I'll force him out," Andrea whispered, her voice gone husky, "and you club him, club the living shit out of him, Ty." Yes. And then they heard the whistle behind them, and there was the marmot, the fat, stupid thing, on the lip of yet another burrow.

Thirty days is a long time to play at nature. An infinity, really. But they learned from their mistakes, until finally, with coordination and the fiercest concentration, they began to eke out a starvation diet, all the while marveling at Great-grandfather Knowles and the sheer grit he must have had. Eventually, they caught things and ate them. They herded fish into shallow pools and scooped them out with a sort of lacrosse stick Tierwater fashioned one afternoon (the protected golden trout, Saltno aguabonita, mostly, but chub and roach too); they gathered crickets, grasshoppers and berries; they extinguished a whole colony of freshwater mussels that tasted of mud and undigested algae. They foraged for bird's eggs, chewed twigs to fight down the hunger that tormented them day and night, lingered round Chris Mattingly's camp like refugees choking on their own saliva. At night, wrapped in their leaves and detritus, when the stillness descended and there was no sound but for the trill and gurgle of the river digging itself deeper, they dreamed of food. "Reese's Pieces," Andrea would murmur in her sleep. "Cheeseburger. Doritos. Make mine medium rare."

The days stretched on, each one an eternity unto. Itself, animal days, days without consciousness or conscious thought. No books. No TV. No sex. Every waking moment consumed with a sort of ceaseless shifting and wandering in search of food, and no set time for meals either, not dawn or high noon or dusk. No, they just fell on whatever they managed to catch or forage-berries, forbs, a brace of lizard smashed to pulp by a perfect strike right down the middle of the plate — and ate greedily, no time for manners or self-abnegation or even civility, no time but primitive time. Andrea had grown up in the outdoors. She'd hiked, fished, camped, ridden horseback for as long as she could remember, and she had the blood of the mad anchorite Joseph Knowles in her veins, but, still, this was too much for her, Tierwater could see that before the first week was out. And it was too much for him too, too much suffering to prove a point, though there were moments when he stared down into the rolling liquefaction of the waters or up into the starving sky and felt washed clean, no thought of Sierra ensconced on Lake Witcheegono, New York, with her Aunt Phyll, no thought of Sheriff Bob Hicks or the awesome weight of the prison door as it slammed shut behind you or the busy wars of accumulation and want that raged through the world with the regularity of the seasons.

Tierwater lost twenty-five pounds, Andrea nineteen. They were stick people, both of them, as hard and burnished as new leather, and they barely had the strength to drag themselves up and out of the canyon on the last day of their exile. Chris Mattingly led the way with his loping vigorous strides, a man who dwelt deep inside himself, and nobody said a word the whole way back, The path rose gradually out of the gorge and into the higher elevations, and Tierwater had to stop every ten minutes to refocus his energy, Andrea tottering along on the poles of her legs like a furtive drunk, the sky overhead expanding and contracting at will until both of them had headaches so insistent they could barely see. But it was worth it, it was, because when they got there-to the big exfoliated dome of granite where it all began — there was a crowd of five hundred gathered to greet them and they roared like a crowd twice the size.

Teo was there, newspeople with minicams and flashing cameras, children, dogs, E. F.I Ers, potters, crystal and totem vendors, and every last resident of Big Timber, turned out in flannel shirts and jeans. Declan Quinn was at the front of the press, nodding the parched bulb of his head like a toy on a string, and two cops in uniform flanked him. "That's the man," he rasped, "that's him," and the cop to his left — the one with a face like the bottom of a boot-stepped forward.

It was funny. Though he was making a spectacle of himself in a penis sheath he'd constructed of willow bark and rattlesnake skin, a man of sticks barely able to stand up straight while his wife, the thousand — year-old woman, limped along gamely at his side in a crude skirt and top made of woven grass, though it was over now and they were going to shut him up in a cage, Tierwater felt nothing but relief. He was as calm as Jesus striding out of the Sinai after his forty days and forty nights of temptation, and when he felt the cold steel grip of the handcuffs close over his wrists, he could have wept for joy.

Santa Ynez, April 2026 A ad then, one day, the rain stops for good. There it is, the filsun, angry and blistered in a sky the color of a bleached robin's egg, steam rising, catfish wriggling, eighty-seven degrees already and it's only eight in the morning. I'm outside, squinting in the unaccustomed light, my feet held fast in the muck of the yard, a flotilla of crippled-looking geese sailing by in the current of what we've dubbed the Pulchris River. What am I feeling? The faintest, tiniest, incipient stirring of hope. That's right. Hope for the animals — and they've suffered, believe me, cooped up in the house like that, no breath of fresh air or touch of the earth under their hoofs and paws, filthy conditions, irregular diet, lack of exercise — and hope for myself and Andrea too. Mac's promised to rebuild on higher ground, state-of — the-art pens and cages for the animals, a bunker for me and Andrea, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room. Of course — and this is the sad part-for a good third of our specimens, it's already too late. The warthogs, all fourteen of them, have slipped into oblivion (a swine flu, we think, passed by the peccaries or maybe Chuy, but then I'm no veterinarian), Lily's vanished, the spectacled bear poisoned herself after she broke through the wall into the garage and lapped up a gallon of antifreeze, and there's been a whole host of other calamities I don't even want to get into.

Anyway, I was up at six, the astonishing wallop of the meteorological change registering insistently in my back and hip joints, the pillow gummy with sweat, my glasses misted over the minute I clapped them on the bridge of my nose. Global warming. I remember the time when people debated not only the fact of it but the consequence. It didn't sound so bad, on the face of it, to someone from Winnipeg, Grand Forks or Sakhalin Island. The greenhouse effect, they called it. And what are greenhouses but pleasant, warm, nurturing places, where you can grow sago palms and hydroponic tomatoes during the deep-freeze of the winter? But that's not how it is at all. No, it's like leaving your car in the parking lot in the sun all day with the windows rolled up and then climbing in and discovering they've been sealed shut — and the doors too. The hotter it is, the more evaporation; the more evaporation, the hotter it gets, because the biggest greenhouse gas, by far and away, is water vapor. That's how it is, and that's why for the next six months it's going to get so hot the Pulchris River will evaporate and rise back up into the sky like a ghost in a long trailing shroud and all this muck will be baked to the texture of concrete. Global warming. It's a fact.

But right now my spirit leaps up: I'm here, I'm alive and the sun is shining. Spring has sprung, and my brain is teeming with plans. I haven't even had breakfast yet or labored over the toilet and already I'm pacing off the rough outline of the new lion pen on a prime piece of high ground, a good half-acre of ochre muck and devilweed wedged between the garage and the gazebo. It's the lions that are suffering most — their hair is falling out, they're too depressed even to cough, let alone roar, and Buttercup seems to have lost most of her carnassial teeth, which makes chewing through all that partially defrosted prime rib a real chore — and I'm determined to get them fixed up first. Besides, they're the most dangerous things in the house (except maybe for Andrea, but who's complaining?), And though we've barricaded the doors and taken every precaution, I shudder to think what would happen if one of them got loose.