Outside, the light was weakening. The sky had compressed and the clouds lay curdled and pale over the tops of the trees. His breath hung frozen on the air and he moved off and left it behind, one puff after another. He'd gone half a mile before he thought to stop and check the chambers of the rifles, because what good were they if there was no ammunition? There were two rounds in the Springfield, one in the Winchester. He felt foolish, but he could hardly retrace his steps, knock on the door all over again and ask Ronnie to cough up the bullets, which he might very well have purchased on his own at the general store in Boynton and which were readily available to Marco or anybody else the next time they felt like making the twenty-four-mile roundtrip stroll into town and back. Two rifles, three bullets. The night he'd gone with Norm to visit the uncle in Seattle (and it was just as he'd envisioned it, déjà vu, the old man in the bed and the snowshoes on the wall, and though he didn't believe in karma or mysticism or any kind of predetermination at all, it was enough to chill him even now), the uncle had rattled on about using only two bullets a year, one for his moose and one for his bear. Well, all right. For the first time all fall, Marco had the means to lay in meat. And when he shouldered the rifles and came up out of his crouch, he listened to the breeze and studied the snow with the ears and eyes of a hunter.
At some point-he couldn't be sure later exactly when, whether it was half an hour up from Woodchopper or less-he saw moose sign along the south bank of the river, the neat parallel indentations of the hooves, the browsed willow, a dark scatter of pellets against the blank page of the snow, and he veered in off the ice to follow the trail. It led him inland, and there was more than one moose here-two, or possibly three, depending on how you read the tracks, and he was no expert, he'd be the first to admit it. Still, he'd hunted deer growing up in Connecticut, and a moose was just another kind of deer, six times as big, maybe, and dangerous, capable of turning on its adversary and goring him, battering him, crushing the life out of 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, watching, not daring even to breathe, and then he lifted his head and there it was, a moose, or the head of a moose, projecting in a dense clot of shadow from behind the nearest spruce in a forest of them. It was canny, this moose, its nostrils flared as it tried to pick up his scent, the bulk of its body secreted behind the trees, in no hurry to commit itself. He waited a long breathless moment for it to step out into the open, gauging where the shoulder would appear so he could aim for it, or just behind it, and do the fatal damage. But the animal barely moved, nothing more than a twitch now and again to lend it animacy, and finally, afraid of missing his chance, he took aim, the blood boiling in his veins-Do not miss, do _not__-and squeezed the trigger. The night tore open in thunder and flame, and yet, incredibly, the moose stood rooted to the spot. It wasn't until he fired the second shot that it dropped in a dark swoon to the ground and he was coming after it, coming to retrieve it with hands that trembled and legs that had gone weak.
The snow sifted through the needles with an admonitory hiss. Marco stumbled forward, one shot left, the slug in the Winchester, praying that the thing was dead, that he wouldn't have to sacrifice it all over again, because this was enough for one day, more than enough. And then he was there, by the tree with its black skirts of tightly woven needles and the bark that smelled of pitch, of air freshener and Pine-Sol, and saw that there was no moose, wounded or otherwise, lying heaped in the snow. He heard a sudden sharp heartrending cry then, the cry of a human baby spitted by some fiend on the point of a bayonet, and looked down at his feet. There _was__ something there, a black weakly thrashing living form, a thing he'd shot while it clung to the bark of the tree eight feet from the ground, impersonating the head of a moose. And what was it? Weak and bristling, the life sucking out of the hole he'd put in it-a porcupine, that's what it was, the humped and hobbling old man of the woods, fit only to feed to the dogs.