Creature Discomforts

he mean you were a Girl Scout?” Effie whispered to me.
    “No,” f whispered back. “Brownie is a dog.”
    “This story of how Holly lost her footing and cracked her head? Holly didn’t trip and fall on a tourist trail on this glorified anthill!” After a brief pause, Buck concluded with one of his favorite expletives. “God’s balls!”
    “What a peculiar expression,” Effie muttered to me. “I didn’t know you’d hurt your head. Are you all right?”
    I shrugged my shoulders. After Buck’s paean, I didn’t know whether to cry or bark. Everyone else was as silent as I was, probably because of universal puzzlement at what, if anything, Buck was driving at. Eventually, Gabrielle spoke. “Buck, are you suggesting that Holly was pushed? Deliberately? Holly, if that’s the case, why didn’t you say something? You could’ve—”
    “Because she doesn’t remember,” Buck said. “Yet. But she will.” Having made an appropriate, supportive, hopeful, and confidence-building remark, he reverted to normal, which for Buck means knocking himself out to win an eccentricity contest without realizing that he’s the only contestant. Glancing up at the clear sky, surveying the trees, and running admiring eyes over the admittedly beautiful landscape, he announced, “Perfect day for a hike in the park! A few steps up, cut to the left, bushwhack no distance at all, and we’ll hit the Emery Path, and then it’ll be no distance at all to the top of the Ladder Trail.”
    Peculiar though the proposal was, it came as a relief to me, mainly because I was starting to suffer from an irrational sense of being trapped on that small stretch of the Homans Path. The sense of entrapment stemmed, I suppose, from the recognition that Buck was leading up to something. I felt increasingly impatient to have him stage his finale and be done with it.
    Malcolm Fairley, however, objected. “We have work left to do here. This is, after all, a trail crew, not a hiking club. But don’t let us stop you.”
    “Stop me? I’m just getting started. You know,” Buck told him, “unlike you, I’m just a regular guy.”
    “We’re all regular guys here,” Malcolm said condescendingly.
    Buck smiled in a way that alarmed only me. “A regular guy’s idea of good return on an investment is like this: You pay a hefty stud fee, and in return, you get a litter of pups that get out there and win for you.”
    “Oh, is that so?” Fairley replied.
    I wanted to kick Fairley. Of course, I wanted to kick Buck, too. And Steve Delaney, who kept his distance so effectively that he might as well not have been there.
    “But if a regular guy’s got some extra cash sitting around even after he’s paid the stud fee,” my father continued, “he knows better than to sink it into something that sounds too good to be true. Sound investment strategy for anyone. Norman Axelrod for example. He subscribed to it.” Like a dog persistently returning to the same halfburied bone, he said, “You invited him to invest in the Pine Tree Foundation. Invited him. And he turned you down.”
    “The more fool he,” Opal muttered.
    Buck went on. “I’d’ve done the same thing. You see? I’m a regular guy.”
    Even Gabrielle was losing patience. “Buck,” she said sternly, “those of us who invest in the Pine Tree Foundation are just like the next person. There is positively nothing irregular about us, as you know perfectly well. What’s special in this situation is that the benefactors are not, uh, regular guys. And that changes everything.”
    “Outside the scope of most people’s experience,” Malcolm Fairley agreed. “Well put, Gabbi. Regular guys is precisely what they are not. Wonderful human beings, of course. Generous almost to a fault.”
    “Anonymity,” I said. “Keep your name out of it.”
    “What was that?” Fairley asked.
    Ignoring Fairley’s question, Buck asked one of his own. “Has anyone ever met these wonderful human beings?” The foundation’s investors were quick to repeat the usual explanation: The benefactors preferred to remain anonymous.
    “People in high places,” Malcolm said. “Let’s leave it at that.”
    “Malcolm, don’t be silly,” Gabrielle said. “It’s not too hard to guess. We all know, after all. Just who’s been generous to the island? Think of the carriage roads! For a start.”
    “Rockefeller,” Buck said. “You know, that’s not the name that keeps ringing in my ears. The name that does is