Prodigal Summer
A Novel
Chapter One
Predators
Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude
is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life
underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are
witnessed.
If someone in this forest had been watching her - a man with a gun, for
instance, hiding inside a copse of leafy beech trees - he would have noticed how
quickly she moved up the path and how direly she scowled at the ground ahead of
her feet. He would have judged her an angry woman on the trail of something hateful.
He would have been wrong. She was frustrated, it's true, to be following tracks
in the mud she couldn't identify. She was used to being sure. But if she'd
troubled to inspect her own mind on this humid, sunlit morning, she would have
declared herself happy.
She loved the air after a hard rain, and the way a forest of dripping leaves
fills itself with a sibilant percussion that empties your head of words. Her body was
free to follow its own rules: a long-legged gait too fast for companionship,
unself-conscious squats in the path where she needed to touch broken foliage, a
braid of hair nearly as thick as her forearm ... read full excerpt from: Prodigal Summer ebook
