The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (the false prince TXT) 📕

leave at least one good breeding couple alone. Because if sheep ranchers stopped spotting coyotes, we would all be out of a job.”

Maggie looked at the rancher curiously. “You used to make a living killing coyotes?”

“Yes ma’am. And bobcats, and hawks, and eagles, and little kit foxes no bigger than a pussycat. American sheepmen pay a bounty for those things rather than hire shepherds to look after their stock like they goddamn ought to, ’scuse my French. Shoot, there’s people who’ll kill the critters in one state and drive them over to the next where fool ranchers pay good bounty money.”

“And now you’re doing wildlife rehabilitation? That’s quite a transition, John. Seems to me there must be an interesting story there.”

John stood and gave her a terse little smile. “Well maybe I’ll tell you that story someday. But I warn you, it’s not a pretty one. Or one that I’m very proud of.”

The old man turned back to the house. Cody trailed him as far as she could on her side of the wire fence. Maggie looked thoughtfully at the mutilated coyote, dragging one lame leg in the dust. Then she followed after the rancher, Fox walking silent behind.

“They’re an interesting couple,” she said to Fox later, as he maneuvered his truck down the Alders’ drive. On the seat between were several books about the desert and coyotes that she’d borrowed from John.

He shot her a look. “Do you always think like a journalist, then? Is everyone a potential story?”

She looked at him closely, trying to determine if this was criticism or no. “I’ve always been interested in people,” she said a bit defensively. “In who they are and how they got that way. It didn’t come from being a journalist, but it’s a trait that helped when I was.”

“You say that in the past tense.”

“Well, it’s been some years since I’ve worked for magazines. The books I’ve published since are nonfiction, but they’re personal essays rather than journalism. Mind you, I’m not sure where exactly you draw the line between the two. Davis never did. As long as it wasn’t poetry, it didn’t count.”

“Dora said you wrote poetry.” Fox shot her another unreadable look.

“Wrote. Past tense. She’s quite correct.” Maggie said the words lightly, but felt tension in her shoulders nonetheless.

This time the look he gave her was thoughtful. “Do you prefer writing prose, then?”

“I’d prefer to be writing poetry, or both,” Maggie answered him frankly. “But it’s been twenty years since I was a ‘rising young poet’—and that’s an awful long time. I turned to magazines to make a living, and then I stopped thinking like a poet, I guess. As you said, I think like a journalist now. I’m still trying to determine if the condition is reversible.”

Fox frowned. “Then do you share Cooper’s view that being a poet is the only valid thing to be?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “I’m proud of my books, no matter what he thought.” She looked across at Fox, eyes narrowed. “What’s your opinion? For someone who’s not a journalist, you’re good at asking personal questions.”

“Me? I’m continuing an old argument,” he told her with a self-mocking smile. “I’m still arguing with Cooper’s ghost. But it’s as stubborn as he always was. Nothing mattered but poetry to Cooper. Maybe painting, because that was Anna’s art. Not people. He lived in his poems, not in the world, for the last forty years of his life.”

Fox shifted gears, lurching over the ruts. His eyes were shadowed, his face serious.

“You know all those poems and quotes he wrote all over his office walls?” he asked her. “The day I left the mountain the last time, I came in when Cooper wasn’t there and wrote another quote on his door. From Katherine Paterson. You’ve heard of her? She said: ‘If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don’t even know it, who wouldn’t believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.’ ”

Maggie said, “I saw that written on the door. I noticed it was a different handwriting.”

“And did you notice what he’d written beneath it? No? Just one small word: Touché. The last word I ever had from Cooper. When I came back he was dead.”

Maggie turned to look at him again and Fox gave her an unconvincing smile. He pulled the truck beside Maggie’s car, parking in the shade of the cottonwood. He turned off the engine, and climbed from the truck, slamming the door behind him.

• • •

Fox took out his tools and began to remove the lock from the door of the back room. As he did so, Maggie and Dora set to work scrubbing the mud from the kitchen floor. Lillian turned up just a few minutes later, announcing she was there to help.

Fox paused for a moment in his work to listen to the women at theirs, laughter ringing through the dusty old house. He enjoyed the sound of women’s voices, the effortless talk that bound them together. He’d grown up silent on the mountain; talk was a thing that had come hard to him. Words in his world had been scarce and precious, reserved for the poetry page.

His mother had been a reserved little woman, and his two sisters equally quiet and shy. He searched his memory and couldn’t remember them gossiping together or laughing out loud. Theirs had been a hushed household. His sisters were like wild deer, like poems in motion on the mountainside. Fox was the one who had clattered and clumped and broke things and made all the noise.

The Alders had lived down in Tucson then, but they came up every weekend, filling the Big House with seven loud children and the tumult of normal family life. The six Alder daughters had frightened Fox; he’d hide from them, as shy as his sisters. Now he