Drop City

him, but for all that, a deer. He unslung the .30-06, with its two rounds, and eased through the unforgiving willow as stealthily as he could manage. There were their tracks, another pile of droppings, and up ahead, a V-shaped swath any fool could follow cut right through the center of the thicket. He went on, intent on the hunt, and hardly noticed when it began to snow.
    If he'd thought about what he was doing, he might have been concerned. He was on unfamiliar ground, the light was leaching out of the sky and the snow had begun to quicken. Worse, he had no shelter, no food, not even a day pack with paper, matches, a ground cloth--he'd been out for a stroll, an hour-and-twenty-minute walk on the open ice to Woodchopper Creek in clear weather, and he hadn't felt the need to bring anything with him. He shouldn't have been hunting, not dressed the way he was and without even the most rudimentary equipment, but he had the guns, a real novelty, and he saw the tracks, and he just didn't think. In fact, as he worked his way deeper into the trees, he was thinking about Pan's itch, how funny it was, how telling, how pathetic.
    Lydia had come back with crabs--lice, genital lice, hard little creeping things like ticks that were easy enough to get rid of if you went directly to the drugstore, slathered on the proper ointment and burned your underwear on the funeral pyre of intimate relations. But Drop City didn't have a drugstore, and it was a long cold walk to Boynton, and there was no guarantee you'd find what you needed there either. The crabs spread through Drop City like dye in water, and then the camps formed and the accusations flew, and the crabs--clinging, persistent, enamored of blood and secret places--became the markers in the war between Free Love and commitment. Star didn't have them, nor did Marco. But Jiminy had given them to Merry, and he wasn't saying where he'd contracted them, and Reba had infected Alfredo, fooling no one, because she'd been making it with Deuce and Deuce had--speculation now--jumped on Lydia, as had half the other _cats,__ because she was back and she was available and she was new all over again. And so Lydia was the pariah, though she hadn't known what she was doing, because it took a week or so for the crabs to mate and lay their eggs and emerge to bite and suck and excrete their waste until the skin erupted and everybody _itched.__
    Marco thought it was funny, _La Ronde__ staged in the hinterlands. Long-standing resentments flared up. Hypocrites assailed hypocrites. People wouldn't speak to one another. They passed in the yard without looking up, dug into the communal pot for rice pilaf and meatless marinara and the person standing next to them might as well have been dead. As a result, the population of the three cabins and the meeting hall was in constant flux, Deuce at the foot of the bed one night, Angela, Erika or Geoffrey the next. Reba, as medical advisor, shrieked out over the clamor of one very contentious meeting and insisted that everybody, whether they were infected yet or not, had to shave their pudenda bald and soak their underwear in Clorox to kill the nearly invisible eggs of the things, and Mendocino Bill, himself itching, said people should forget coming to him for Dr. Scholl's because it had about as much effect as cornstarch. Norm was itching. Premstar was itching. “I know it's going to sting, people,” Norm boomed out over the tidal roar of the community in extremis, “but I say a little kerosene, maybe a shot glass full, rubbed in each night for a week.”
    Crabs. Crab _lice.__ They were one form of life on this planet, evolved to fill a niche, as the evolutionists would say. And what was the ideal form of life, one that exists independently, preying on nothing, creating its own food source through photosynthesis? The plant, the tree. Yes, but given that life form, given the tree and the leaf, evolution presupposes the insect to feed on it and the fungus to break it down, and the bird to feed on the insect and the cat on the bird. And here he was, with a gun in his hand and the snow driving bristles in his face, doing his level best to prey on another and grander form of life. And why not? If the crabs could gnaw at his brothers' and sisters' groins, then why couldn't he--why couldn't they--gnaw at the leg of the moose?
    It was nearly full dark now. The trees were shadows, the tracks growing faint. Marco knelt to study them, all his senses alive, listening,