Much of the west, toward which they strived with such fervor and at such cost, is a desert. Cities are built on sand in drought. Rivers are dammed and debilitated. Every time the child opened her history book, something else like this was popping up at her. Their fevers rose to 105. The girls were covered in flat, rose-colored spots.
THEY RISE UP again now, the girls, as if out of that same place — though over a century and a half has passed. Women and children emerge from the mist on the horizon line still in pioneer dress, still emptying the bit bucket. Look, the child says, calling for the mother. Come quickly! The mother and child stand mesmerized. There before them are the girls in home-sewn, ankle-length dresses, with their hair pinned up in braids, tilling small gardens, pumping water, and doing chores in the shadow of an eighty-foot gleaming limestone temple. Self-sufficiency is paramount, because the Apocalypse is near.
Mothers and daughters work together on the Yearning for Zion Polygamist Ranch. What is the use, the mother wonders, of taking such good care of a girl — making her clothes by hand; feeding her only the freshest and most wholesome of foods: whole grains, fruits, and vegetables; giving her fresh air; keeping her far from the cities and the fumes and the bad influences; making sure she is happy and fit — if you are only going to hand her over to the fifty-year-old Fathers in the end? What is the use if you are just going to offer her up joyfully to become a child-sister-wife?
The women in gingham and bonnets look up curiously; they do not remember this part. What is the use of surviving on the plains if your own mother is going to hand you over before you are grown? The child brides cannot read or write or state the date of their births, the TV is saying. In the outside world avert your eyes, they are instructed. In the outside world avoid the color red, for that color is reserved for Jesus Christ who will return to the earth wearing red robes one day. The mother shuts off the TV. Enough, she says.
In the Great Girl Giveaway, the Indian girl, Little Bird, was taken by an opposing tribe where she was turned into a slave and named Sacajawea, and that tribe, when the time came, was all too happy to sell her to a Canadian fur trader three times her age, as a wife.
Enough, the mother says, but at night the girls follow them into sleep. On the Polygamist Ranch the men take girl children as brides, and so the girls know it is only a matter of time. Where are the mothers when they are needed? One of the girls dreams of introducing mange into the Father Population. When the fathers come near, too sunburned and with patchy fur, they howl in the dirt. There is a resourcefulness to girls in trouble, the child thinks to herself.
The child says that she has seen the girls staring into the soup pots in a daze, dreaming, like all girls, of their futures. Once the soup is evaporated, they will meet their husbands, so it becomes the child’s job to provide a constant source of soup for the girls so that the pot will never be gone. The mother marvels at the miracle of the child: her poise, her good sense, her intelligence, her resourcefulness, her beauty.
WHEN UNCLE INGMAR comes with his giant steps, the sea level will drop. Don’t forget, the mother whispers to the child, to fill the pot.
THE CHILD NUDGES the mother and points. On the horizon a tiny flame. She sees fire in the distance. At last, after the proper time of mourning, the Torch is revived. There it is, she is sure of it, glinting near the Muir Woods, in the City of Forests.
THE THREE SCHOOLGIRLS hold evergreen sprigs. The mother is grateful that all along the children have made themselves visible to her, that they are whole, and that they have not, in all the chaos, lost their backpacks.
THE WHO HAS Hair Where Conversations had begun. Except on her head, as of yet, the child had none. In a few years after all the hair had sprouted, the child would look at her mother strangely. With the hair in private places there would be a need for other privacies, and this would increase over time until finally the child would be gone. At the same time the Boy in the Glen was having the Why, When, and How Deep or High Are Boys’ Voices Conversation at home with his father.
For now the child was attached to the wall because the mother had grown tired of paying the bill for the walk-around phone. Soon the child will be older, and the child will still be attached to the wall and she will feel as if she cannot move around and speak in confidence.
Once, the mother will say, when she was a child and living in a house with the North Pole Grandmother and Ingmar, Lars, Anders, Sven, and baby Inga, everyone was attached to the wall, and if you wanted to talk in confidence, you had to invent a private language. There was a secret yodel she was fond of when she was a growing child on the wall trying to leave her mother. A keening sound had come out of her as she tried to leave. On these days she would stand high up on a mountain yodeling, waving, gasping for breath.
THE SNOW WAS slowly melting, which meant that things that could not be seen before would soon be seen in the Valley again. The mother and child looked out at the Valley they loved, but also hated a little. Out the car window: two goats, free vegetables, a pink toilet, the signs that said Mabbetville and Pulvers Corners.
Sometimes the child wondered what it would be like to live in any other place.
MANY OF THE People of the Valley wanted a white person to live in the White House. There was a simplicity to it that appealed to them. They were not interested in having a person of any other color or stripe sullying things up.
The People of the Valley knew enough to know what they liked, and there was a simplicity to that as well. They also knew what they feared — and all around them was darkness.
About four million years ago, the wolf, the coyote, and the golden jackal diverged from one another. All three have seventy-eight chromosomes. This allows them to hybridize freely and produce fertile offspring. First-crossed wolf/dog hybrids are popular in the US, but the dog retains many wolf-like traits. This the mother remembers from her Wolf Studies long ago.
A coydog is the hybrid offspring of a male coyote and a female dog.
The dogyote is the result of breeding a male domestic dog with a female coyote.
Coyotes also breed with wolves, resulting in coywolves. Other breeds to have hybridized with foxes are huskies and hounds: this animal is known as a dox. The neighbor has a wonderful dox is not an unheard-of thing to hear in parts of the Valley.
Let us not forget that the wolf and the jackal can interbreed and produce fertile hybrid offspring. What is a dingo, the mother does not know, but she knows what a coy-dingo must be. If you cross a coyote with a dog, you get the ferocity of the coyote with the friendliness and fearlessness of a dog — an unfortunate mix. What if you tried to pet it?
It is thought that the Ancient Egyptians crossbred domestic dogs with jackals, producing a jackal-dog that resembled the god Anubis.