Drop City

He was quiet about it, but he wanted to see a new generation in the country, of course he did, and with a boy he could teach him everything he knew about living off the land and respecting it. “He'd want a boy,” she said, and she slipped a cigarette out of the pack now too. “But so did my father.”
    “And he got two girls.”
    “That's right.”
    And then they were laughing again.
    They smoked their cigarettes and thought their private thoughts, drank coffee, played a second game of chess--which Star won--and then the rubber match, which went to Pamela. Together they made lunch, a thick cooked-down broth with egg noodles and put-up vegetables from the Harder larder, and then they settled in to read by the stove. Though they hadn't discussed it, the unspoken arrangement they'd arrived at telepathically at some point the previous night was that Star was going to stay on till their men returned from the trail. Star had washed and dried the dishes--she insisted on it--and let Pamela sit there by the window as she put everything back on the shelves in proper order. She took pride in that--she knew the place as well as she knew her own. And the pans glistened when she was done with them.
    After a while she moved from the chair to the bed, pulled a fur over her legs. She could feel the nicotine and caffeine ricocheting off the walls of her blood vessels, but she wasn't nervous or coffeed-out, just steady and calm and alert. The book she had with her was by Richard Fariña, _Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me,__ the hippest thing going, recommended by everybody and dog-eared and chewed-over so many times it had to be the sorriest volume in the Drop City library. It was all right. Funny, wild. But the scene it described--college, dope, thumbing your nose at the straight world--just seemed alien to her now. Or remote--that was a better word. Before long, she was asleep.
    She woke to lamplight, a smell of baking. Pamela was there at the stove, her hair coiled atop her head and shining with the soft flickering pulse of the lamp's wick. The windows were black. A distant voice, thin and disconnected, carried down out of the hills, and then it was answered by another and another. “What time is it?” she said, pushing herself up from the pillow. She felt as if she'd been asleep forever.
    “It's early yet. Four-fifteen.”
    “I'll never get used to this.”
    Pamela was taking something out of the oven--a cake in a circular pan--and she paused, the hot pan held out before her, the sweet all-embracing scent filling the room even to the farthest corners, to give Star a look over her shoulder. “You'll get used to it,” she said. “Believe me.”
    They were eating cake--angel food, barely cooled, with chocolate fudge icing--when they became aware of a subtle change in the tenor of the night, the faintest chink of the clip on a dog's harness, a sound as of the earth breathing in and out again, and then they were up from the table and standing at the open door of the dogtrot, peering out into the moonlit yard. The men were there--Marco and Sess--and the patient line of the dogs, sitting in their harnesses, waiting to be freed and staked and fed. Pamela turned back into the room to put the kettle on and Star followed her to get her parka, and in a moment the two of them were out in the moonlight, the shock of the supercooled air searing the nicotine from their lungs.
    A quick hug, one man, one woman, and Pamela was down amongst the dogs, unclipping them individually from the gangline and leading them to their separate houses and their separate stakes. Star stood there in the cold, shifting from foot to foot, wanting to help, but she didn't know the dogs or what to do with them and so she drew back and waited. One of the dogs, she saw that much, was injured and riding up atop the sled, the frame of which seemed overburdened, piled up beyond sense or reason, and where were the furs? She'd looked forward to the furs in the way a prospector's wife might have looked forward to the jar of gold flakes brought down to her out of the hidden seams of the hills--absent the killing of the animals and the mechanics of their suffering, that is, because she didn't want to think about that, didn't want to know or even imagine it. The furs, the furs alone were what interested her. The beauty and richness of them, mink, otter, fox, delivered up from nowhere, magically, like the salmon that gorged the streams and the ducks crowding the