THE FERAL STRUT

Chapter 58

She wished she hadn't reported the damn bear.

The Goose Fairies (their license plates had the letters GF for Game and Fish) had swooped down like a bunch of red-shirted bats. They hauled in a big rattly thing like a culvert on wheels— a bear trap— and backed it out into the trees between the outhouse and the barn, where the bear had been.

"Don't go near the trap," the Head Fairy said. "We don't want your scent mixed up with the smell of the bait."

"Look, there's no indoor toilet," Mary said. "What am I supposed to do. Hold it indefinitely?"

"Maybe you could drive over to the campground or something."

"Couldn't you, like, put the trap somewhere else?"

"We gotta put it where you saw the bear. Besides, we can't get the truck any farther back."

Boneheads, she thought.

The one woman took her aside and said to be extra careful when she was on her period. They both blushed. The woman, Megan was her name, said that grizzlies might be drawn by menstrual fluids. Some of the fatal attacks had been linked to that. "You might want to double-bag your tampons," she said, "or put them in a jar or something."

"Yeah, right. I get it. Thanks."

I enjoy being a girl, Mary thought: blood, water retention, cramps, and fatal bear attacks.

She had a coffee can, with a tight-fitting plastic lid, to pee in. But she didn't like the idea of crapping in a bucket, and then having to carry it out and empty it. Sometimes her digestion worked really fast: one twinge and she had to go. There was no way she could make it out to start the truck and drive— on a really bouldery road— to the campground in time. Sometimes she just barely made it to the outhouse.

After a furious internal debate, she decided that she would go out the front door of the guard cabin, cross to the pole fence, follow it around the back, and then approach the outhouse on the side opposite the trap.

She'd been reading about how the Shoshone used to smudge themselves with sagebrush and other aromatic herbs before going hunting, to cover their human odor. So she collected some sagebrush tips and tried it out. A butane lighter proved to be the best tool. The trick was to get them smoldering, then pass them over her body with one hand while cupping the smoke in her other, as if it were suds and she was washing herself. She liked the scent.

Gris found it disturbing. He didn't like the burnt-pitch smell and would draw back to a far corner and sit there, whining and cocking his ears. When she'd go to the outhouse, he'd tread on her heels and then try to fit in with her. The outhouse being rather snug, he'd get stuck turning around and rake her ankles with his claws. So she decided to leave him inside.

He hated that. When she shut the door, he'd charge into the bunkroom and jump up on her bed, to watch her through the window with agonized eyes, as if she was setting off to China.

Speaking of China, Spider had actually written a letter to Ginger. From New Zealand, which was even farther from Jackson Hole. She'd checked it out in her pocket atlas. Mount Cook showed up on the map of New Zealand, in a patch of white, which meant high mountains. There was a dot, labeled The Hermitage— that sounded cool.

Spider said the ski season was getting underway down there and he really liked the people, who were super low-key (his words) after the obnoxious shitheads in Jackson (not you guys, ha-ha!) They called themselves Kiwis after some bird, the one on the shoe-polish can, that was pretty hard to find these days. But the ski operation was set up for real skiers (dead keen was how they put it) and not a bunch of jet-set dopers and investment slugs. Reading it aloud, Ginger kept flushing.