Creature Discomforts

Kimi were loose in the back. Twisting around to remind them to stay there, I missed seeing the approach of another vehicle until Gabrielle had pulled to the side of the dirt road and yoo-hooed through the open window to Quint and Effie, who’d been heading toward her house. Effie was at the wheel of an adorable green pickup so small and so cute that it looked like a magnified toy truck.
    “Were you coming to see me?” Gabrielle asked. Without waiting for a reply, she went on to report excitedly that her hero was off to fight a misguided duel in her honor and that she and I were rushing off to intercept him. “We can’t talk now!”
    Her eyes gleaming, Effie said, “There! f told you so, Quint! We saw Buck Winter tearing out of here, and I told Quint, but he didn’t want to believe me. Someone ”—Effie glared at me—“must have told him about how Wally and Opal are trying to get their hands on that land of Norman Axelrod’s that abuts the reservation! Is he really going to shoot a developer?” Her face and voice exuded horrified delight.
    “Effie, don’t be foolish!” Gabrielle replied. “We’ll discuss it later.” With a little wave of her hand, she drove off.
    “Shoot a developer!” I exclaimed. “Honestly!”
    “Well,” remarked Gabrielle, without taking her eyes off the narrow road, “he does have a gun. But Effie couldn’t possibly know that, could she? She’s just worked herself into a fit of excitement about that bumper sticker. Effie takes everything to heart, you know.”
    “He has a rifle in his van.”
    “Oh, not that one,” Gabrielle said brightly. “It’s some kind of little gun.”
    “A handgun?”
    “It’s in a holster.” Gabrielle said it reassuringly, as if the holster somehow rendered the sidearm inoperable.
    “What for?”
    “Buck always carries a gun in the woods. The first time we went for a walk together, I asked him about it, and he said you never know what you’re going to run into. I assumed he was thinking of snakes.”
    “There are no poisonous snakes in Maine,” I pointed out. “Certainly not this far north, anyway. And in Acadia? What is there to shoot in Acadia National Park?”
    “Tourists!” Gabrielle joked.
    Her lightheartedness was grating on my nerves. I wished I could think of some way to impress the seriousness of the situation on her. “Carrying a handgun in a national park? I’m sure it’s illegal. I hope he doesn’t get arrested.”
    “Anita will get him out if he does. Besides, his jacket covers it. At worst, he’ll just pull it out and show it to Malcolm,” Gabrielle insisted. “But I don’t think he’ll even do that. What I’m afraid of is that they’ll end up in a fistfight and that one of them will get hurt. Your father is really very angry, you know.”
    “I believe you,” I said, still with no precise idea of what Buck was so angry about. By now, we were speeding along Route 3 past The Tarn, almost at the turn for the Sieur de Monts Spring area. Glancing back to check on Rowdy and Kimi, I caught sight of the cute little pickup, which was no distance behind us. “Oh, damn it!”
    Gabrielle flicked her eyes to the rearview mirror. “You didn’t know?”
    “No, I didn’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. I suppose Effie just couldn’t stand to miss seeing Buck take potshots at a developer.”
    As Gabrielle cruised around looking for an empty space in the big parking lot by the spring, the Nature Center, and the Wild Gardens of Acadia, I noticed Buck’s van, bumper sticker and all. Steve Delaney’s van, its window lowered to provide air for his dogs, was still parked where I’d seen it earlier.
    “Oh,” Gabrielle said cheerfully, “Opal and Wally are here! That’s their Land Rover!”
    You’d have thought we were arriving at a cocktail party. With no hint of frivolousness, however, Gabrielle hopped out of the Volvo and set off toward the abandoned Homans Path. Even on the flat terrain, I had a hard time keeping up. My injuries were beginning to reassert themselves; my shoulder hurt, and my head was swimming. At the ends of their leashes, Rowdy and Kimi trotted behind Gabrielle on the sidewalk by the Wild Gardens and then along a broad dirt road. I let the dogs drag me.
    “We mm left somewhere around here,” Gabrielle said. “There it is! And now we have to keep our eyes open. To your right, up there on the hill, you’ll see where the Park Service cut down a lot of trees. That’s what they do when