Drop City

flecks among the birch and aspen in the yard and she could smell the new-made scent of the Thirtymile where it joined with the Yukon and drew wet sparks from the rocks. Her hair was a travail, especially when she was out in the bush, and she'd meant to leave it braided--but when she woke and saw him there at the stove, laying on wood, fussing with the draft, she thought she'd comb it out and let it hang like a flag of surrender. Or enticement. Because she was on trial too, and she wanted to show him what she had, and not only mentally, not only verbally, but physically as well.
    “That,” she said, giving him a smile, “sounds like just the thing. Because, I mean, anybody could have offered me eggs Benedict, caviar and truffles and the like, but if I'm going to paddle three hours for breakfast, the least I could expect is the super-special flapjacks. With, what did you say, _moose__ sausage?”
    He didn't answer, because he was executing some sort of arcane maneuver with a cast-iron skillet so black it might have been unearthed from a tomb. There was the sound of hot grease snapping in the pan, and suddenly the cabin was dense with the smell of it, and with smoke too. He stabbed the sausages with a long-handled fork, danced round the coffeepot, flipped the leaden dark cakes with a rolling snap of his wrist. “I ought to get you a toque,” she said, and he said, “What's a toque?”
    They ate outside in the sun at a picnic table he'd fashioned from black spruce and varnished till it was the color of old leather, and they made use of his entire complement of dishware in the process: two tin plates and two tin mugs. In the center of the table, set in a can, was a sprig of wildflowers he'd gathered while she slept, and that touched her, the effort he'd put out and the essential sweetness it implied. He poured coffee, spooned up blueberries. “You know what I bet the best thing about living out here must be,” she said, mopping up her plate. “Aside from the beauty, I mean?”
    He shrugged and grinned, tried not to look too pleased with himself. “Tell me,” he said.
    “Safety. You've got to feel safe here, don't you?”
    “Sure, as long as I don't have to perform any emergency appendectomies. On myself, that is. Or you.”
    “The auto-appendectomy,” she said, and they both laughed.
    “Or dental work. Imagine trying to pull your own tooth?”
    They were silent a minute, contemplating the horror of that particular image, and then she said, “I'll pull yours if you pull mine,” and they were laughing again. It was laughter that took a while to subside, and when he got up, still chuckling, to scrape the plates and wash up, she told him to sit down and let her do it, because she'd seen enough--enough, already. What did he think, he had to wait on her hand and foot? “What I meant,” she said, sliding the dishes into the tub of water he'd heated on the stove, “was the kind of safety you could never feel in the city, or at least I couldn't. It got so I didn't want to go out at night, not alone.”
    He'd followed her back inside and was sitting on the edge of the bed now, rolling a cigarette and watching her as she moved amongst his things. “Okay,” he said, “sure, I'll grant you that. As a woman you've got to be especially careful--”
    “As a man too. The whole society's breaking down, assassinations, drugs in the schools, hippies--I know this guy from my office who used to like to walk his dog before he went to bed . . . just that, walk his dog. And you know what happened?”
    Sess lit the cigarette. “Somebody jumped him?”
    “You bet they did. Two guys with a knife, longhairs, and they weren't content to just take his wallet--they stuck the knife right up his nose and slit his nostril, and you should see it, it's like a permanent disfiguration, like a tattoo or something. And the dog. It was this sweet little thing, a cockapoo--Berenice, he called her--and she tried to protect him and they just turned on the dog and kicked her and kicked her till there wasn't hardly anything left of her. That's what I mean. That's what society's coming to.”
    He'd risen from the bed and was standing beside her now, and she was aware of him in a way that made her skin prickle, the breadth of him, the smell of the tobacco, a tentative hand on her shoulder and his voice pitched deep: “You don't have to worry about any of that out here. Bears, maybe. Wolverines. But we know how to discourage them. Believe