He couldn't tell her. He just stamped his feet till the plastic sagged and the stakes came up and she reached down and took him in her arms while Sunshine looked on with her hands on her hips and rehearsed her own version of events. Naked, browned, pocked with the angry red eruptions of a hundred bug bites, she was the original wild child, suckled by wolves, fed on honey-dew and the milk of paradise. Her hair was kinked, tangled, sun-bleached. Her eyes were watchful. “I did not,” she insisted as her brother whined his accusations into their mother's crotch. “He did. He was the one.”
There was a shout in the distance. Star ignored it. They were busy here, couldn't people see that? There was work to be done and she had no patience for screaming children or the catastrophe of the hour-and they were regular as clockwork, one per hour, on the hour-and couldn't somebody find the time to sit down and read these kids a _book?__ Was that too much to ask?
But the shouts were furious now, mounting-“Star!” they were calling, “Star!”-and she jerked her head round to see a knot of people running toward the goat pen with the two yellow dogs out front in a surge of kneading yellow muscle. Reba threw down her cigarette. Che's sobs died in his throat, an ache, a quiver, then nothing. Star rose to her feet at the same time Merry did, the black plastic rippling like a dark sea beneath them.
The goats were in a rudimentary pen made of eight-foot lengths of birch and cottonwood lashed to posts five feet high, a pen they planned to roof and convert to a barn for winter-and there'd been a whole storm of debate about that, because nobody really featured the goats stinking and bleating and dropping their pellets _inside__ the cabins, yet they didn't really want to put the work in when there were infinitely more important things to do, like erect cabins, install stoves and split a hundred cords of wood so they wouldn't _freeze their fucking asses off__ come winter. Star understood what the priorities were, but she didn't care. She'd gone ahead and built the pen herself, with a hatchet and a coil of old clothesline, and the tent she and Marco shared was pitched up against it so she could keep track of her charges in the gray wash of night.
The dogs were barking now, panting breathless gasps of assertion and rage that rang out over the river and rebounded again, and one of them-it was Frodo-was trying to clamber up into the pen. She dropped the hammer at her feet and took off running.
Everybody was shouting, crowding in against the rail as if they were at a rodeo, Frodo's hind end perched there statue-like for an instant and then disappearing even as Freak scrabbled at the crossbars and fell back. What it was, she couldn't see, the goats bleating-screaming, screaming in a key she'd never before heard or imagined-and a blur of motion visible through the gaps, now here, now there, torn from one side of the pen to the other. And when she was there, everything in an uproar, Jiminy bolting for Pan's tent to get a gun and Marco and Alfredo straddling the rail with clubs in their hands, she still couldn't apprehend what she was seeing, as if there were some essential gap between her eyes and the part of her brain that processed visual information. “It's a bear!” somebody shouted.
The white of the goats, the yellow of the dog, the wild shifting raging _brownness__ of this thing that didn't belong there in the pen, that didn't compute, that was no bear at all but something else entirely, claws, teeth and fur in a fury of grinding perpetual motion and a keening sharpedged growl that never faltered, and by the time Marco and Alfredo waded in on it with their clubs the goats were dead and gutted and Frodo was lying there in the dirt with his throat torn out and this thing, this emanation of the deepest hole in the blackest part of the last and wildest stronghold of the hills that bristled round her like breastworks, faced them down and in one leap was gone, a dark rumor in the high weed out beyond the silent pen. And later, even when she knew what it was-_Gulo luscus,__ the glutton, the wolverine, the big buffed-up weasel that was so blood-crazed it had been known to drive grizzlies off their kills, she still didn't understand. All she knew was that Ronnie had the guns downriver-all three of them-and that there would be no goats to tend, not anymore, and no milk, no yogurt, no cheese. There was a party, led by Weird George, Mendocino Bill and Norm himself, that wanted to butcher the goats and make use of the meat-the whole business regrettable, sure, a real bummer, but why let the meat go to waste, that was their thinking-but she came at them like that thing itself, raging, absolutely raging, and “Why not skin Frodo, then,” she said. “Why not eat him?”
She dug the holes herself. Marco stood off at a distance with a solemn face and two empty dangling hands, but she wouldn't let him help. The ground was like rock. The mosquitoes drained her. Sweating till her eyes stung and the ends of her hair clung like tentacles at her throat, she dragged the carcasses of the goats-of Amanda and Dewlap, and yes, she could tell them apart now, even at this late hour when it no longer mattered and their eyes were closed on the world-dragged them across the yard and buried them.
In the morning, when she went out there in the tall weed amidst the stumps to lay a few flowers on the raw earth and gather her strength and maybe think some consoling thoughts and tell herself it was all for the best, all part of the plan, the _flow,__ there was nothing to see but two empty holes and the naked long gashes that claws make in the dug-up dirt.
Ronnie and Verbie didn't come back on Thursday night as planned, and they didn't show up on Friday either. People began to wonder, and then they began to worry. This was a slippery place, wild, unbridled, full of surprises-and if they hadn't fully appreciated that because they were so wrapped up in themselves, so focused on their hands and feet and the planing of logs and scooping salmon from the river and berries from the hills, then that thing out of the woods had served them notice. This wasn't California. This wasn't Indiana or Texas or New Jersey. They were here in this country and they were going to stick it out, no question about it, and it was beautiful here, paradise almost, but it was a whole lot _dicier__ than any of them could have dreamed in their infancy back in California when there was nothing more to fret over than is there gas in the car and do they have cassava and artichokes down at the supermarket yet? They'd been lulled by the sun, by the breath of the river and the scent of the trees and the syrupy warm days that went on forever. But now there was an edge. Now they knew.
Star went out on Friday night and stared down the length of the river till her eyes felt the strain. She was worried for him, of course she was. Ronnie was the closest person in the world to her besides Marco, and she didn't know what she'd do if anything happened to him. He was her link-her only link-to all that past history, to Mr. Boscovich and the yearbook and her parents even, and though she'd never go back to that, though she'd hated it all then and hated it now, the farther she got from it the more important it became-it was as much a part of who she was as the atoms that composed her cells and the _blood material__ that flowed through her veins and she needed that. Everybody did. She talked about it with Marco all the time, and with Merry and Maya. To come here, to be part of this, to do what they were trying to do at Drop City, you had to sever the ties no matter how painful that might be-but that didn't mean you had to give up the past, erase it as if it had never existed. She'd been Paulette once. She'd gone to Catholic school. She'd baked cookies with her mother, piloted her bike through the blazing blacktop streets of the development and listened to the tires peel back the tar anew with each whirring revolution, developed crushes on boys and wrote in her diary and stayed up all night talking on the phone to Nancy Trowbridge and Linda Sloniker about the most important things in the world. That mattered. It did. And Ronnie was part of it.