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336 LISTEN HERE PRODIGAL SUMMER (2000) from Chapter 1 PREDATORS The trail ended abruptly at the overlook. It never failed to take her breath away: a cliff face where the forest simply opened and the mountain dropped away at your feet, down hundreds of feet of limestone wall that would be a tough scramble even for a squirrel. The first time she'd come this way she was running, not just her usual fast walk but jogging along-what on earth was she thinking? And had nearly gone right over. Moving too fast was how she'd spent her first months in this job, it seemed, as if she and her long, unfeminine stride really were trying to leave the scene of a crime. That was two summers ago, and since that day her mind had returned a thousand times to the awful instant when she'd had to pull up hard, skinning her leg and face in the fall and yanking a sapling sourwood nearly our of the ground. So easily her life could have ended right here, without a blink or a witness. She replayed it too often, terrified by the frailty ofthat link like a weak trailer hitch connecting the front end ofher life to all the rest. To this. Here was one more day she almost hadn't gotten, the feel of this blessed sun on her face and another look at this view of God's green earth laid out below them like a long green rumpled rug, the stitched-together fields and pastures ofZebulon Valley. "That your hometown?" he asked. She nodded, surprised he'd guessed it. They hadn't spoken for an hour or more as they'd climbed through the lacewinged afternoon toward this place, this view she now studied. There was the silver thread of Egg Creek; and there, where it came together like a thumb and four fingers with Bitter, Goose, Walker, and Black, was the town of Egg Fork, a loose arrangement of tiny squares that looked from this distance like a box of mints tossed on the ground. Her heart contained other perspectives on it, though: Oda Black's store, where Eskimo Pies lay under brittle blankets offrost in the cooler box; Little Brothers' Hardware with its jar offree lollipops on the dusty countera whole childhood in the palm of one valley. Right now she could see a livestock truck crawling slowly up Highway 6, halfway between Nannie Rawley's orchard and the farm that used to be hers and her dad's. The house wasn't visible from here, in any light, however she squinted. "It's not your hometown, that's for sure," she said. "How do you know?" BARBARA KINGSOLVER 337 She laughed. "The way you talk, for one. And for two, there's not any Bondos in Zebulon County." "You know every single soul in the county?" "Every soul," she replied, "and his dog." A red-tailed hawk rose high on an air current, calling out shrill, sequential rasps of raptor joy. She scanned the sky for another one. Usually when they spoke like that, they were mating. Once she'd seen a pair of them coupling on the wing, grappling and clutching each other and tumbling curvewinged through the air in hundred-foot death dives that made her gasp, though always they uncoupled and sailed outward and up again just before they were bashed to death in senseless passion. "What's the name of that place?" She shrugged. "Just the valley. Zebulon Valley, after this mountain." He would laugh at Egg Fork if she declared its name, so she didn't. "You never felt like leaving?" he asked. "Do you see me down there?" He put a hand above his eyes like a storybook Indian and pretended to search the valley. "No." "Well, then." "I mean leaving this country. These mountains." "I did leave. And came back. Not all that long ago." "Like the mag-no-lia warblers." "Like them." He nodded. "Boy, I can see why." Why she'd left, or why she'd come back-which could he see? She wondered how this place would seem to his outsider's eye. She knew what it sounded like; she'd learned in the presence of city people never to name her hometown out loud. But how did it look, was it possible that it wasn't beautiful ? At the bottom ofthings, it was only a long row oflittle farms squeezed between this...

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