Prodigal Summer

“A sheep rancher. She knew the hatred of western ranchers toward coyotes; it was famous, maybe the fiercest human-animal vendetta there was. It was bad enough even here on the tamer side of the Mississippi. The farmers she’d grown up among would sooner kill a coyote than learn to pronounce its name. It was a dread built into humans via centuries of fairy tales: give man the run of a place, and he will clear it of wolves and bears. Europeans had killed theirs centuries ago in all but the wildest mountains, and maybe even those holdouts were just legend by now. Since the third grade, when Deanna Wolfe learned to recite the Pledge and to look up “wolf” in the World Book Encyclopedia, she’d loved America because it was still young enough that its people hadn’t wiped out all its large predators. But they were working on that, for all they were worth.” 

Here, the author sets up both the individual conflict between Deanna Wolfe and Eddie Bondo, and the larger question of man’s role in the natural world throughout the novel. On an individual level, Deanna, who works to protect predators, finds herself attracted to a man whose mission in life is to kill these creatures, particularly her beloved coyotes. On a larger scale, this quote introduces the dilemma of humans upsetting the natural balance of ecosystems by destroying some of their species, particularly predators. Deanna, unlike most people who “dread” predators, loves these creatures, and her respect and passion for these forces of nature will continue to develop throughout the novel.

“It was only four hours later, in the eleventh hour of the ninth of May, as the dryer clicked and droned downstairs and she sat beside her bedroom window reading, that Lusa’s life turned over on this one simple thing: a potent rise of scent as her young husband reached out his muscled arm for a branch of flowers. Here was what she’d forgotten about, the full, straight truth of their attachment. Her heart emptied of words, for once, and filled with a new species of feeling. Even if he never reached the house, if his trip across the field was disastrously interrupted by the kind of tractor accident that felled farmers in this steep county, she would still have had a burst of fragrance reaching across a distance to explain Cole’s position in the simplest terms conceivable.” 

In this quote, Cole is reaching for a branch of honeysuckle—the same plant he argued with Lusa about—to bring back to his wife. From this one simple action, honeysuckles, and particularly the scent of honeysuckles, will become a symbolic reminder of Cole’s presence even after his death. Cole and Lusa are communicating through scent, “a burst of fragrance reaching across a distance,” just as the moths Lusa studies call to each other through pheromones.