Free All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner Page A

examine the roots of poison oak? They’re dead black, with red underbark, and if you cut one with a shovel or an ax it squirts out juice that will put you in bed for a week. Or these wild cucumbers. I dug one up once, just to see where all that vile vitality comes from that can sprout these tentacles twenty feet long. You know what’s down there? A big tumor sort of thing as big as a bucket, an underground cancer. I very much doubt that any of these things are the friends of man.”
    As usual when I get high on my own persuasive powers, I think I am making quite a case, but when I glance at Marian Catlin I don’t see any sign of conviction. She wears a delicate flinching expression as if she were forcing herself to look steadily at something ugly, or as if I am being embarrassing and she wishes for my own sake I would stop. Her husband stretches his legs abruptly. In a moment he will propose going home. And my good wife, who has been doing everything but kick my shins for five minutes, serves up at the conversational bar one of her patented dry murmurs, five-to-one with a twist of lemon peel. “Joe, lamb, you’re being carried away.”
    “On my shield,” I say, and let it go.
    So we must leave the foolish girl in her foolishness, with a smile but not without some residue of combativeness. I turn the conversation by asking Catlin what he does for a living. The answer may not explain the nature worship, but it’s consistent with it. He tells me he is an ethologist, which I understand to be halfway between an experimental psychologist and a veterinary. He came out here from Woods Hole last fall. His specialty is sea mammals—whales and porpoises and seals and such—and he spends a lot of time in the field. In the course of the conversation he tells me that a baby California gray whale grows a ton a month, a fact which, I feel sure, will agitate my mind on many a sleepless night. What in hell is in whale’s milk?
    We discuss other interesting matters, such as the objection that geese have to incest, and the way birds are imprinted, almost immediately after hatching, on the first thing they see that moves or makes a noise. Apparently, you can make an unfortunate baby bird believe that almost anything is its mother—an alarm clock, a mechanical toy, anything. There is a duckling somewhere that yearns for Charles Collingwood, before whom he was hatched on television. Catlin is full of interesting lore, and the ladies are having their own intimate dialogue, and my argumentative bumptious-ness is passed over and forgotten.
    Then a mockingbird swoops past, perches in the top of an oak below us, and sprays the whole hillside with song. He is in total disagreement with Browning’s wise thrush, who sings each song twice over. This one is mortally afraid of repeating himself, and he sings so loud and long, and leaps into the air every now and then with such wild somersaulting glee, that he forces us to stop talking, and with pleased acknowledging looks at one another, to listen.
    For a moment I have an acute awareness of how we look, quiet on the terrace in the bird-riddled afternoon, with the breeze dropped to nothing, the leaves still, the haze beginning to spread amethyst and lavender and violet between the layers of the hills, the sun dappling the bricks like something especially sent down from above to soothe our mortal aches away. Marian Catlin’s face tells me that she has the same perception. This is the way she feels everything in her life—hungrily. Sensibility that skinless is close to being a curse.
    I notice that her neck and face are thin; except when the easy blush comes on, she is pale. Her head is twisted sideward to hear, and against the strained cord of her throat a pulse is beating, a little hidden life. Her smile looks as if it pained her, and I swear her eyes are shiny with tears. I am ashamed of the way I hammered her down; it was like teasing an oversensitive child.
    The mockingbird pours on,