A Friend of the Earth (31 page)

It got better, and then it got worse. In the morning, with a pain in his gut that twisted like the blunted stone head of a Bushman's arrow, Tierwater managed to get a fire going. He squatted beside it, his testicles dangling in the cool sand, and nurtured the weak dancing flame till it danced higher, into the nest of twigs and bark he'd prepared, and there it was: fire. It was a hungry little fire, and it chewed contentedly at everything he fed it, till finally he was dragging branches the size of coat racks out of the piles of river–run debris scattered along the spit and slamming them hard against the standing trees till they yielded the fuel he wanted, in convenient three–foot sections. He didn't know what time it was – only that it was light and that the chill had begun to lift – and he did a naked capering dance of triumph round the fire, kicking up his heels in the sand. They had fire. Fire!

While Andrea slept on, oblivious, her slack limbs encrusted with leaf mold and all the small but ferocious things that lived within it, Tierwater gathered firewood. He combed both sides of the river, keeping an eye out for fish or bird's nests or even snakes – and, yes, he'd be pleased and honored to indulge in a little roast ratdesnake for breakfast – and by the time the sun had climbed up over the eastern ridge of the gorge, he had enough fuel for a hundred fires stacked up round the shelter. But he wasn't done yet – no, this shelter would never do; it wasn't much more imposing than a suburban mulch pile, and all night, as insects crawled over him and fragments of leaves worked their way into his private parts and maddened him with itching, he envisioned a larger, airier shelter, a model of cleanliness and efficiency. Something you could stand in, with pine boughs spread inside over the soft, clean sand. The thought of it made his spirits lift and soar, as if a fierce–eyed bird of prey had emerged
from his body – climbed right up out of his throat – and shot into the sky. He'd never felt anything like it. Never. And then he was crouching in the hut, leaning over his wife to kiss her awake, the smell of her like some fermenting thing, like vinegar or curdled milk spilled on a patch of damp ground, bits of leaf mold stuck to her lips and forced up her nostrils, a scurry of insects frantically hopping and burrowing out of his calamitous way. ‘Wake up, baby,' he said, pressing his lips to hers, the leaves rustling and fragmenting beneath them, and she woke to the smell of him, to the smell of smoke on him, and they made love in the twisted thrashing way of animals in the bush – for the third time since the hut had gone up the night before. ‘I made fire,' he told her, over and over, and she clutched at him with her big hands and powerful arms, pulling him into her with a furious urgency the hut couldn't withstand. It rattled, it swayed, it fell, and they hardly noticed.

It was erotic, the primitive life, Tierwater was thinking – all those naked pot–bellied tribes in the jungles of South America and New Guinea, bare breasts, loincloths, penis sheaths, doing it in the hut, on a log, in the stream as the water sizzled round you – but it only took a day or two to disabuse him of that notion. The fact was that lust consumed calories, and in the final analysis calories were the only thing that mattered. Once their cells had been burned clean of fats, nitrates and cholesterol, once they understood that the odd fish, indifferently charred on a green stick, or a fistful of manzanita berries
au naturel
was it for the day – hold the butter, please, and no, I think I'll pass on the napoleons this evening – their erotic life came to a screeching halt. He saw his wife crouched there by the new and improved hut, weaving sticks into a primitive weir, her breasts pendulous, her skin so burned, abraded and chewed over it was like a scrub pad, and he barely glanced up. There's a naked woman, he thought, in the same way he might have thought, There's a tree or a rock.

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
voilà
, 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 tall 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.! 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. Tierwater had always been one to eat breakfast – and a substantial breakfast, at that – as soon as he arose in the morning.
It's 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 cluttering 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 constantly 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.'

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,
Salmo 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.'