Drop City

settled thick on the raw meat of the hide, but they'd be dead soon too, winter-killed any day now, and the mosquitoes that went for blood every minute of every day and night, they'd be gone along with them. Merry rocked back on her heels, reached up to pull down the brim of her hat and remove the oversized pink discs of her sunglasses, the better to focus her blunted brown eyes on Pamela. “You mean it's true? You actually--I mean, people--actually eat _bear?__ Bear as in Winnie-the-Pooh? Yogi Bear? Smokey Bear? Only you can prevent forest fires?” She giggled. “You're goofing on me. Come on, tell me you're goofing.”
    She could feel the wine singing in her veins. She didn't want this, didn't need it--she just wanted to let go. She shrugged. “Listen,” she said, “let me get some cups,” but she didn't move. The two girls stood transfixed, looking at her. “All right, yes,” she sighed. “We eat bear and anything else we can get our hands on up here, moose, rabbit, duck, fish, lynx--better than veal, Sess tells me--even porcupine and muskrat, and I can testify to that, because you wouldn't think it but muskrat can be as sweet and tender as any meat you can name--”
    Merry was giving her a look of undistilled horror. “But to kill another creature, another living soul, a soul progressing through all the karmic stages to nirvana”--she paused to slap a mosquito on the back of her wrist with a neat slash of her hand--“that's something I just couldn't do.”
    “You just did.”
    “What? Oh, that. All right, I agree with you, I shouldn't have, and I wish I didn't have to--I can't wait till it's winter and the earth mother lays them all to rest, really--but a bug is one thing--and I know, I know, the Jains wouldn't think so--and like a _bear__ is something else. They're almost human, aren't they?”
    Pamela had to think about that for a minute, standing there in the yard with the flies thrumming, the meat hanging in the shade and the thick yellow-white fat hardening in the cans on the shelves. She had to think about the traps and the foxes and brush wolves that chewed through their own flesh and bone and tendons to escape the steel teeth and about the cub Sess had orphaned, the cub that was too young to dig a den and destined to die of inanition and cold when the long night came down. “Yes,” she said finally, “yes, they are.”
    And then it was all right. She bundled up the half-flensed hide and flung it over the salmon rack like a beach towel gone stiff with crud, scooted the flies from the table and brought out three cups and a bottle of Sess's rum. “Iron Steve,” she said, setting the bottle down and easing in beside Star. “He was here last night for dinner, and guess who he talked about nonstop?” And _there__ was a topic. The wine sank in the bottle, shots went round, and the hounds of gossip went barking up every tree.
    It was late afternoon by the time Merry and Star stumbled down to the river, bouncing off trees like pinballs caroming from one cushion to another in a pinball game as big as the world, and Pamela said, “It's a good thing you don't have to drive anywhere,” and they all laughed about that, all three of them, until their heads began to ache and they felt they'd laughed enough, at least for one day. She watched them shove off, the canoe uncertain in the current until they balanced out their weight and the paddles caught them and the bow swung upstream. “Be careful!” she called, and she wouldn't let herself think about the canoe overturning and the cold swift rush of that water. She waved, and Star, backpaddling to keep the nose straight, lifted a hurried hand from her grip on the paddle, and then they moved off and got smaller and kept dwindling till the country ate them up.
    Then there was the silence again. She stood there on the bank for a long while, staring at nothing, at the trees that were all alike, at the water that jumped and settled and sought the same channels over and over, and she felt something she'd never felt before. An immanence. A force that took her mind away and drew her down to nothing. She wasn't Pamela Harder standing on the banks of the Thirtymile. She wasn't a newlywed newly deserted. She wasn't anything. The sky rose up out of the hills and shot over her head with a whoosh that was like the closing of an air lock and then the clouds came up and blotted the sun and still she stood there. She'd never used drugs in her life, had believed