Read Online All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner - Free Book Online

the pasture, thirty acres of wild mustard so bright it yellowed the air. A cowslip under the chin of the sky: you like butter. From a hundred feet away I smelled the daphne in the front entry. A meadow lark was going crazy across the fence, and every male house finch had a head and throat as red as a tomato,, the effect of love.
    So here I am contentedly sprinkling cutworm bait along my row of young tomato plants and amusing myself thinking what a quaint idea it is to perfect Eden with poisons, and wondering (let us suppose) what Adam and Eve did without rotenone, melathion, lindane, chlordane, sodium ammate, and the other deterrents. In the days when the lion lay down with the lamb, did the flea lie down with the dog, or the gnat with the itching mortal? Did the aphid make friends with the rose, or the San Jose scale with the peach tree? Did the picnicking dame consort with the poison ivy? And as I am ruminating in this fashion, I see the tomato plant at the end of the row shiver, stagger, and sink two inches into the ground.
    Within ninety seconds I am into the house and out again with the shotgun. “What is it?” Ruth is calling, and “Joe, be carefull” but I pay her no attention, tiptoeing down the garden path. The tomato plant has not moved. Down underground there the trespasser is still chomping and smacking his lips. As I wait, holding my breath, I hear voices, and a strange young couple appears at the top of our drive where it turns onto the hilltop. The woman wears a look of startlement as if she might scream, and for fear she will I make a fierce gesture for silence. We see hardly any people up here. Who the hell are these? Trespassers, shakers of the earth, scarers of the enemy. My eyes are fixed on the half-submerged tomato, my nose tickles with the dense garden odors, I hear the meadow lark splitting his throat, singing beatitude, and the murmur of Ruth’s voice as she greets the strangers.
    The tuft twitches, the plant goes down like the bobber on a fishline, and I pull the trigger. My ears are shattered by the appalling blast, and the two-foot circle of earth on which I have been concentrating splashes like water. I lay the gun aside, and dig, and behold him with a twig of tomato vine in his grooved teeth, a fat old bull gopher with a big head and naked-palmed feet: Thomomys bottae, the Evil One.
    With my toe I scoop him onto the surface, and as he lies there on his back grinning his four-toothed yellow grin I see the fleas scuttling for cover through the thin hairs of his belly. Then I hear, from above me on the drive, this high, rather strained, but musical voice that says, “For heaven’s sake, what have you gone and done?”
    Now for sure I look up, and it is a rather odd moment altogether, because my ears and my eyes don’t agree. I am prepared to reply to the voice in words of some acidity, but the first look corks my eloquence. She looks as if she had bloomed into this spring day, she has a tremble on her like young poplar leaves. It is hard for a sentimental man to say unsentimentally, and besides my heart is sore, but here is this girl—woman, rather, maybe thirty—with her hair a little blown, her face pale and strained but shining, her eyes most alive, and her lips parted in a look that mixes pity for the gopher with pleasure at meeting me even if I am a brute, and delight simply in the way the sun pours down and the browned daffodils lie in a sheaf across Ruth’s arm. She is one of old Willie Yeats’s glimmering girls, with apple blossom in her hair, and I admit to a pang. God knows what it is—maybe envy that someone is lucky enough to have such a daughter. I am old-fashioned. I believe that the human face was made for expression, and I like the way every emotion shows on this girl’s mouth and in her eyes. I wonder how this kind of innocent eagerness got born into the same world with the beatniks and the glumniks; and all the time I am being captivated I am annoyed at her sentimental