Bad Dirt by Annie Proulx

Author:Annie Proulx
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2004-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

Mitchell was glad to be back in Wyoming, far from Maine, and in a way Eugenie was not displeased though the place seemed as alien as ever. The air was clear and the sunlight so fierce that the subtle colors of lichen and rock, of dusty sage leaf burned with an intensity the clouded east could never know. A few days after their return the first storm flailed a few yellow leaves from the aspen and beat down the summer grasses. Weeds collapsed under the hard frost that followed. Then came ten days of flawless clarity, radiantly golden days in the shimmering aspen groves. From the lodgepole pine on the slopes above twisted ribbons of resinous scent.

“Itis beautiful,” Eugenie agreed. She walked out on the forest trail near the house several times where the odor was of dry duff, of earth scratched about by bears raiding squirrel hoards. Her walks stopped abruptly when she met a hunter. He looked wretched and tough, bowlegged, his face smeared with blacking, a trickle of blood in front of his ear where a branch had pierced the skin. He carried a powerful-looking bow, and the razor points of his arrows glittered. He glared at her with his wolfish eyes. She could smell a sharp odor.

“You ought a be wearin orange. Get yourself shot in that getup.”

She was wearing her brown suede jacket and suddenly realized that from a distance, to someone peering through the trees, she might briefly resemble a deer. Perhaps this man had even trained an arrow on her. She could not speak. She turned and began walking rapidly toward the trailhead. At a bend in the trail she turned around and was frightened to see him following. She ran then for the parking lot, expecting to feel an arrow in her back or a hand clamped over her mouth. She said nothing to Mitchell because he had remarked several times that it was hunting season and they ought to get orange vests.

In late October the first snowstorms arrived and steady cold began building the drifts. A few deer came to Eugenie’s bird feeders and she put out pie pans of sunflower seed for them. In less than a week there was a herd of fifty mule deer in their yard at dusk and Eugenie thought of the bow hunter and was glad the deer were safe from him. The wind blew the pie pans away, and she got Mitchell to pour the contents of the twenty-pound bags directly on the ground near a clump of rabbitbrush. The deer ate all of the seed each night, and soon they were spending seventy dollars a week on sunflower seed. Foxes also came for the seed, and magpies, Steller’s jays, even a northern flicker, which seemed the wrong kind of bird to patronize a feeder. Mitchell said he should buy a rifle as one deer would be a good investment on their birdseed expenses.

“God,” said Eugenie disgustedly.

“You will never see anything like this back east,” she wrote to Honor.

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