I smelled martyrdom. I smelled punishment. I had bit the apple.
"I'll get a guide for myself" she continued. " You go off and fish for yourself!"
Within the context of the day, the trip, our still limited budget, and our marriage, she had performed a piscatorial castration. I had been dismissed. It was an insult and would hurt me and anger me and she knew it. And I knew she wanted credit for making THE SACRIFICE. And I knew that, for a thousand
reasons which I was correct about, even with a guide it would be a lousy day for her on the river.
"Fine."
Silence all the way down I-84 to Mountain Home where US 20 splits from the freeway and turns north to climb into Magic Valley, the clouds hanging with us. No lightning, no thunder, just cold shadow. Everywhere else the sun was shining. She was seething. Except that there had been no question, it had been a trick one. Any response was wrong. She had thrown down the gauntlet and I refused to fight or protest. Never had we actually gone past The Abyss before.
"I'm being a bitch, aren't I?"
I listened oh so carefully to every harmonic and inflection in her voice, but nothing told me it was safe to answer.
Climbing into pine forest again, a ground squirrel skittered off the road in front of us, triggering an incident, a magic memory for both of us from the year in Montana.
We had been driving on a weekend trip to Big Springs, crossing one of so many pastural valleys framed between drop dead beautiful mountains, the horizontal twilight texturing every hillock and gully in gold-sided shadow. At full Montana traveling speed we crested a hill on a turn and came upon a
splattering of ground squirrel carcasses hit by previous, infrequent cars. The blood and gore of one attracts more squirrels to feed, some of which are subsequently splatted, and so on.
Three diners skittered off to the shoulder but the fourth hesitated, fatally. He feinted right, then left, then, without time, crouched. I mercifully centered him between my wheels figuring to roll him safely with the air blast. Both my wife and I crouched forward to be sure he stayed motionless, safe.
Just as he disappeared under the hood of the Vega, an impossible black streak shot from the left and down under the fender and the hood and, frozen in a millisecond in our eyes and caught breaths, a Golden Eagle emerged, cartwheeling upside down in a full roll, its back and tail caressing the right fender and hood, ground squirrel extended upward and outward in it's talons, past the edge of the right
