A Friend of the Earth

by T. C. Boyle

  It was erotic, the primitive life, Tierwater was thinking – all those naked pot–bellied tribes in the jungles of South America and New Guinea, bare breasts, loincloths, penis sheaths, doing it in the hut, on a log, in the stream as the water sizzled round you – but it only took a day or two to disabuse him of that notion. The fact was that lust consumed calories, and in the final analysis calories were the only thing that mattered. Once their cells had been burned clean of fats, nitrates and cholesterol, once they understood that the odd fish, indifferently charred on a green stick, or a fistful of manzanita berries au naturel was it for the day – hold the butter, please, and no, I think I’ll pass on the napoleons this evening – their erotic life came to a screeching halt. He saw his wife crouched there by the new and improved hut, weaving sticks into a primitive weir, her breasts pendulous, her skin so burned, abraded and chewed over it was like a scrub pad, and he barely glanced up. There’s a naked woman, he thought, in the same way he might have thought, There’s a tree or a rock.

  In the beginning, it had all seemed possible. They were enthusiasts, pumped up with confidence and what they’d distilled from the pages of a book, so simple really, the diagrams still resonating in their heads (attach x to y to z and voilà, there’s meat in the pot). Tierwater spent hours constructing deadfalls to lure the unsuspecting skunk or raccoon, but it proved to be a fruitless endeavor, because nothing, as far as he could see, ever went near the baits he left out – except flies. Andrea sat cross–legged in the sand and fashioned snares from the thin whiplike branches of the willows, yet they snared nothing but air, and both of them spent the better part of a long morning digging mouse bottle pits (two and a half feet deep, with a wide bottom and narrow neck, hidden beneath a flat rock propped up on both ends to provide access), only to discover that no mouse, if mice even existed this far afield, had been generous enough to tumble into one of them. After inspecting the empty traps three days running, they looked each other in the eye beneath the tall trees, amidst the glorious but inedible scenery, searching for signs of the inevitable breakdown. There was frustration in the air. There was anger. And more than that, there was hunger – desperate, gnawing, murderous.

  ‘A mouse,’ Andrea spat, arms akimbo, her skin burned to the color of boiled wiener, ‘we can’t even catch a mouse. And how many calories you think we wasted digging these pits, Ty? Huh? And even if we did catch one, or even ten of them, what good would it do? What are they, the size of a marshmallow, once you skin and gut them?’

  But Tierwater was in the grip of something – a delusion, that’s what it was – and out here, where there were no microphones or high heels or E.F.! contributors to woo, he was in charge. ‘Bears eat them,’ he said lamely, staring down into the dark, mocking aperture of the empty hole at his feet.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘and people eat bears. Why don’t we catch a bear, Ty? You know any good bear recipes?’

  They spent the rest of the day haunting the streambed, darting after the elusive shadows that were the fish, but it was an unlucky day, and finally they were reduced to turning over stones to pluck beetles, salamanders, earthworms and scorpions from their couchettes, the whole mess, two handfuls of pulped and writhing things, singed in the cup of a rock Tierwater set in the middle of the fire. ‘I don’t care, Ty,’ Andrea sang, huddled over her naked knees as the sun clipped off the rock wall above them and the ambrosial smell of whatever it was Chris Mattingly was cooking drifted down the gorge, ‘I’m not eating anything with the legs still attached. I’m not.’ So Tierwater mashed the whole business together with the blunt end of a stick, pounded it and pounded it again, till they had a dark paste sizzling there in the scoop of rock. They ate it before it had cooled – ‘It has a kind of nutty flavor, don’t you think?’ Tierwater said, trying to make the best of it – but fifteen minutes later they were both secreted in the bushes, heaving it back up.

  The next morning, Andrea was up at first light, a cud of twig and leaf working in her mouth. He was tending the fire when she rose up suddenly out of the dirt and took hold of his arm. ‘I want meat,’ she said. ‘Meat. Do you hear me?’ Her eyes were swollen. Her nails dug into his flesh. ‘Can’t we at least hunt? Isn’t that what people do when they’re starving? Isn’t that standard operating procedure?’

  Tierwater didn’t bother to answer, because if he’d answered he would have asked a question of his own, a question that was sure to bring some real rancor to the surface – Whose idea was this, anyway? Instead, he said nothing.

  ‘What about marmots? Aren’t there marmots out here?’

  The fire was snapping. It was early yet, the sun buttering the ridge before them, the canyon still sunk in shadow. Tierwater had always been one to eat breakfast – and a substantial breakfast, at that – as soon as he arose in the morning. It’s the most important meal of the day, his mother used to say, and she was right. He wanted coffee, with heavy cream and lots of sugar, he wanted eggs and thick slices of Canadian bacon, buttered sourdough toasted till it was crisp, but he heaved himself up with the picture of a marmot – a fat yellow–throated thing like a giant squirrel and so stupid it wasn’t much smarter than the rocks it lived among – planted firmly in his head. ‘I used to collect marmot shit,’ he said, the smoke stabbing at his eyes. ‘I guess I ought to know where to find them – up there, I would think,’ he said, gesturing at the ridge behind them.

  They looked at one another a long moment, their bodies smudged and battered and all but sexless, and then they turned as one and started to climb. It was no easy task. Already, after a mere five days, they could feel the effects of starvation, a weakness in the limbs, a gracelessness that took the spring out of their step and made their brains feel as if they were packed with cellulose. They gulped air like pearl divers, left traces of themselves on the rough hide of the rocks. Every bush poked at them. They tasted their own sweat, their own blood. And when they got to the top of the canyon, they discovered more scenery, a whole panorama of scenery, but nothing to eat. ‘We’ve got to look for their burrows,’ Tierwater said, snatching the words between deep ratcheting breaths.

  Andrea just stared at him, her chest heaving, the whole world spread out behind her. Burrows, they were looking for burrows.

  They spread out and combed the ridge, chasing incidentally after lizards that were so quick they couldn’t be sure they’d seen them, chewing bits of twig and the odd unidentifiable berry that might or might not have been poisonous, but they found no scat, no burrows, no sign that marmots or anything else lived there. Tierwater, the tender skin of his back and shoulders baked to indelibility, was making some sort of excuse, flapping his hands, dredging up marmot lore, when the two of them suddenly froze. There was a sound on the air, a high cluttering whistle that seemed to be emanating from the next ridge over. ‘You hear that?’ Tierwater said, and his face must have been something to see – give him a loopy grin, the look of the mad scientist, the cannibal turning a corner and bumping into a sumo wrestler. ‘That’s a marmot. That’s a marmot for sure.’

  Guided by the sound, they moved through the brush and into the cover of the tall pines till they came to a clearing dominated by a tumble of rock; in the center of the tumble, its broad flat rodent’s head jerking spasmodically as it sang or screeched or whatever it was doing, was a marmot. A yellow–bellied marmot, fat and delicious. Tierwater glanced at Andrea. Andrea glanced at Tierwater. He put a finger to his lips and bent for a stout branch.

  For an hour, crouching, creeping through a bristle of yellowed grass and pine cones on their stomachs, Tierwater and Andrea converged on the animal from opposite directions. It was hot. Tierwater was white with dust and itching in every fiber of his torn and abraded flesh. He watched Andrea’s head bob up from behind a fallen log ten feet in back of the marmot, then he swallowed his breath and charged the thing, stick flailing in the air – and she, taking his signal, rose up with a whoop, her own stick clutched tight. It was a careful stalk, a brilliant stalk from a tactical standpoi
nt, but, unfortunately, the marmot was unimpressed. With a single squeak that was like the first faint exhalation of a teapot set on to boil, he – it – disappeared down its hole.

  ‘All right,’ Tierwater said, ‘all right, we’ll dig him out, then.’

  And so they dug, with brittle pine sticks instead of a pick and shovel, in dry, rocky soil, their stomachs creaking and crepitating and closing on nothing. They dug wordlessly, dug mindlessly, earth and stones flying, sticks shattering, the vision of that stupid, dull–eyed, buck–toothed animal constantly before them – meat, meat spitted on the grill – until they gradually became aware of a noise behind them, a high chittering whistle. They turned as one to see the marmot watching them from the neck of a burrow twenty feet away, its head bobbing in complaint. Tierwater picked up a stone; the marmot disappeared. ‘No problem,’ Tierwater said, turning to his wife, and she was a mess, she was, her hands blackened, a fine grit glued to her with her own sweat, ‘you just stay here, at this burrow, and I’ll dig him out over there.’

  And so they dug again, with renewed vigor, watching the distance between them shrink as Tierwater traced the burrow back along a meandering line to where Andrea dug forward to meet him. Half an hour passed. An hour. And then, finally, though they were exhausted – tense, exhausted and angry – the end was in sight: there were no more than five feet separating them. ‘I’ll force him out,’ Andrea whispered, her voice gone husky, ‘and you club him, club the living shit out of him, Ty.’ Yes. And then they heard the whistle behind them, and there was the marmot, the fat, stupid thing, on the lip of yet another burrow.

  Thirty days is a long time to play at nature. An infinity, really. But they learned from their mistakes, until finally, with coordination and the fiercest concentration, they began to eke out a starvation diet, all the while marveling at Great–grandfather Knowles and the sheer grit he must have had. Eventually, they caught things and ate them. They herded fish into shallow pools and scooped them out with a sort of lacrosse stick Tierwater fashioned one afternoon (the protected golden trout, Salmo aguabonita, mostly, but chub and roach too); they gathered crickets, grasshoppers and berries; they extinguished a whole colony of freshwater mussels that tasted of mud and undigested algae. They foraged for bird’s eggs, chewed twigs to fight down the hunger that tormented them day and night, lingered round Chris Mattingly’s camp like refugees choking on their own saliva. At night, wrapped in their leaves and detritus, when the stillness descended and there was no sound but for the trill and gurgle of the river digging itself deeper, they dreamed of food. ‘Reese’s Pieces,’ Andrea would murmur in her sleep. ‘Cheeseburger. Doritos. Make mine medium rare.’

  The days stretched on, each one an eternity unto itself, animal days, days without consciousness or conscious thought. No books. No TV. No sex. Every waking moment consumed with a sort of ceaseless shifting and wandering in search of food, and no set time for meals either, not dawn or high noon or dusk. No, they just fell on whatever they managed to catch or forage – berries, forbs, a brace of lizard smashed to pulp by a perfect strike right down the middle of the plate – and ate greedily, no time for manners or self–abnegation or even civility, no time but primitive time. Andrea had grown up in the outdoors. She’d hiked, fished, camped, ridden horseback for as long as she could remember, and she had the blood of the mad anchorite Joseph Knowles in her veins, but, still, this was too much for her, Tierwater could see that before the first week was out. And it was too much for him too, too much suffering to prove a point, though there were moments when he stared down into the rolling liquefaction of the waters or up into the starving sky and felt washed clean, no thought of Sierra ensconced on Lake Witcheegono, New York, with her Aunt Phyll, no thought of Sheriff Bob Hicks or the awesome weight of the prison door as it slammed shut behind you or the busy wars of accumulation and want that raged through the world with the regularity of the seasons.

  Tierwater lost twenty–five pounds, Andrea nineteen. They were stick people, both of them, as hard and burnished as new leather, and they barely had the strength to drag themselves up and out of the canyon on the last day of their exile. Chris Mattingly led the way with his loping vigorous strides, a man who dwelt deep inside himself, and nobody said a word the whole way back. The path rose gradually out of the gorge and into the higher elevations, and Tierwater had to stop every ten minutes to refocus his energy, Andrea tottering along on the poles of her legs like a furtive drunk, the sky overhead expanding and contracting at will until both of them had headaches so insistent they could barely see. But it was worth it, it was, because when they got there – to the big exfoliated dome of granite where it all began – there was a crowd of five hundred gathered to greet them and they roared like a crowd twice the size.

  Teo was there, newspeople with minicams and flashing cameras, children, dogs, E.F.lers, potters, crystal and totem vendors, and every last resident of Big Timber, turned out in flannel shirts and jeans. Declan Quinn was at the front of the press, nodding the parched bulb of his head like a toy on a string, and two cops in uniform flanked him. ‘That’s the man,’ he rasped, ‘that’s him,’ and the cop to his left – the one with a face like the bottom of a boot – stepped forward.

  It was funny. Though he was making a spectacle of himself in a penis sheath he’d constructed of willow bark and rattlesnake skin, a man of sticks barely able to stand up straight while his wife, the thousand–year–old woman, limped along gamely at his side in a crude skirt and top made of woven grass, though it was over now and they were going to shut him up in a cage, Tierwater felt nothing but relief. He was as calm as Jesus striding out of the Sinai after his thirty days and thirty nights of temptation, and when he felt the cold steel grip of the handcuffs close over his wrists, he could have wept for joy.

  Santa Ynez, April 2026

  And then, one day, the rain stops for good. There it is, the sun, angry and blistered in a sky the color of a bleached robin’s egg, steam rising, catfish wriggling, eighty–seven degrees already and it’s only eight in the morning. I’m outside, squinting in the unaccustomed light, my feet held fast in the muck of the yard, a flotilla of crippled–looking geese sailing by in the current of what we’ve dubbed the Pulchris River. What am I feeling? The faintest, tiniest, incipient stirring of hope. That’s right. Hope for the animals – and they’ve suffered, believe me, cooped up in the house like that, no breath of fresh air or touch of the earth under their hoofs and paws, filthy conditions, irregular diet, lack of exercise – and hope for myself and Andrea too. Mac’s promised to rebuild on higher ground, state–of–the–art pens and cages for the animals, a bunker for me and Andrea, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room. Of course – and this is the sad part – for a good third of our specimens, it’s already too late. The warthogs, all fourteen of them, have slipped into oblivion (a swine flu, we think, passed by the peccaries or maybe Chuy, but then I’m no veterinarian), Lily’s vanished, the spectacled bear poisoned herself after she broke through the wall into the garage and lapped up a gallon of antifreeze, and there’s been a whole host of other calamities I don’t even want to get into.

  Anyway, I was up at six, the astonishing wallop of the meteorological change registering insistently in my back and hip joints, the pillow gummy with sweat, my glasses misted over the minute I clapped them on the bridge of my nose. Global warming. I remember the time when people debated not only the fact of it but the consequence. It didn’t sound so bad, on the face of it, to someone from Winnipeg, Grand Forks or Sakhalin Island. The greenhouse effect, they called it. And what are greenhouses but pleasant, warm, nurturing places, where you can grow sago palms and hydroponic tomatoes during the deep–freeze of the winter? But that’s not how it is at all. No, it’s like leaving your car in the parking lot in the sun all day with the windows rolled up and then climbing in and discovering they’ve been sealed shut – and the doors too. The hotter it is, the more evaporation; the more evaporation, the hotter it gets, because the biggest greenhou
se gas, by far and away, is water vapor. That’s how it is, and that’s why for the next six months it’s going to get so hot the Pulchris River will evaporate and rise back up into the sky like a ghost in a long trailing shroud and all this muck will be baked to the texture of concrete. Global warming. It’s a fact.

  But right now my spirit leaps up: I’m here, I’m alive and the sun is shining. Spring has sprung, and my brain is teeming with plans. I haven’t even had breakfast yet or labored over the toilet and already I’m pacing off the rough outline of the new lion pen on a prime piece of high ground, a good half–acre of ochre muck and devilweed wedged between the garage and the gazebo. It’s the lions that are suffering most – their hair is falling out, they’re too depressed even to cough, let alone roar, and Buttercup seems to have lost most of her carnassial teeth, which makes chewing through all that partially defrosted prime rib a real chore – and I’m determined to get them fixed up first. Besides, they’re the most dangerous things in the house (except maybe for Andrea, but who’s complaining?), and though we’ve barricaded the doors and taken every precaution, I shudder to think what would happen if one of them got loose.