The End of the Wild: Chapters 5–11

“I just stopped over to see if I could salvage some of the kids’ things and get some comfort items to them.”

The silence is eerie, as though everything is hiding and holding its breath.

He smashes aside rubbish with his two front paws.

The bear takes swipes at Ranger. Ranger gnashes his teeth at the bear.

The bear turns back once more and roars at Ranger, and then he saunters off into the woods.

Out of nowhere, a Doberman dashed out from the woods and made a beeline for me.

She smacks the book shut and cleaves it to her chest. “The next chapter is so exciting,” she says.

Margot’s often got a snake tongue, but lately she’s been extra venomous.

Margot raises her hand and flails it around.

“Well,” she says, “my mom says that Mark-Richard sat his cat on the couch and put a candle flame to a wood tick on its ear. But Mark-Richard didn’t know that his mom had doused the couch in kerosene to kill bedbugs. The cat leaped off the couch, knocked the candle out of Mark-Richard’s hands, and up went the flames. Mark-Richard got Gary and the cat out, and they all got picked up by the county lady.”

He asks a few other kids and writes some topic ideas on the whiteboard and nearly loses his mind with excitement when one boy says he’s going to take apart a carburetor and explain how it works.

I muster a tight smile.

I don’t know what a naturalist is exactly, but it sounds like someone who loves the outdoors.

There was always something new to discover. Baby ducks following their mom at the pond. Nettles after the first thaw.

The weight of the plump bird has already pulled so tight on the twine leash that Ranger’s skin is chafing, and in one place an open wound, cut by the rope, is bleeding.

Ranger sits back and scratches at the duck and the leash, but to no avail. The leash is attached securely to the mallard and to him.

The rotting-duck scent hits my nose. My stomach turns, sending bile up into my mouth.

I reach out gingerly. Ranger growls softly, but I don’t think he’s really mad, only scared.

“He’s going to bite you and give you scabies!”
“Not scabies, you dumb diarrhea-head,” says Mikko. “Arthritis!”
“Yeah, arthritis.”
“Rabies, you mean,” I say to them.

He leaps, biting at bees and butterflies. He snags a stick and carries it like a flag.

Toivo’s at the computer, a relic hand-me-down.

He did a stint as a laborer at a hog farm, until the operator started hiring immigrants because he could pay them practically nothing.

In the petition, Mr. Marcus Flores claims that Kloche’s fracking company has a history of environmental violations across the state and destroys natural resources, pollutes groundwater, and causes irreparable damage to the environment.

The fracking industry provides hundreds of high-paying jobs and rejuvenates communities.

“Rarrr!” Toivo growls, and swipes at my legs, so I decide to jump on top of all of them and grapple, too.

Toivo feels around on the floor for his hearing aid, which fell out in the skirmish, and pops it back in his ear.

“The birds.” I articulate each word slowly. “Where would they go?”

“Fern, I’m not saying I’m for fracking, but maybe we all have to think about how we live our lives,” he says in a staccato delivery I’m not used to.

Sometimes the despair is so crushing that I wish that Toivo, Alexi, Mikko, and me had all been in the car when sleeping Millner in his pickup truck crossed the dotted yellow line on an early-morning two-laner in the middle of nowhere just as my mom happened to be on the road with my sleeping baby brother tucked tight in his car seat.

Mom had a way with birds. The chickens followed her around. And she could call in cardinals and blue jays by imitating their calls.

Cold air wafts in through a crack, created when Mikko threw Alexi’s hockey skate at his head and missed.

Papers and bills make an unwieldy pile on the table.

In July, collect an ice-cream pail of red currants. They grow wild on short bushes with the maple-shaped leaves about 50 paces into the woods from the gravel road.

We mosey on toward Colter.

I never felt safe around them. Every morning my stomach roiled.

I never felt safe around them. Every morning my stomach roiled. My forehead singed.

Once we get outside, Mikko kicks snow on Alexi and Abdisalom. They get mad and yell and carry on like a bunch of hooligans.

They hurl snowballs at one another and swing at them with sticks. The little white bombs explode. Snowy shrapnel lands in my hair.

His face contorts in pain.

“Sissy’s going to fix it,” she croons.