Primal Tears - Excerpt

Back at Tree Nation camp, Sage and Carver visited Virgo Jane and Tanika on their platform high in the treetops. The four of them lounged in a nest of sleeping bags, wool blankets and foam pads spread out on two sheets of plywood suspended from ropes hitched around the bole of a two hundred-foot tall Douglas fir. The platform shimmied and the ropes creaked whenever any of them moved, but they were used to it. Besides, they were tied in themselves. They all wore climbing harnesses clipped into safety lines, day and night. They were a hundred feet up, and from that height, the big campfire circle below was no bigger than a dime.

They shared a meal of garbanzo beans, nutritional yeast, and day old bread. The bread was an excellent whole wheat sourdough scrounged from a dumpster in the nearby college town of Ashland. Sage had a handful of ant larvae on her plate that she was mixing with the garbanzos. She offered some to the others, but only Virgo Jane would try them.

“Mmm, not bad,” Virgo Jane chewed slowly.

Tanika giggled. “Eeew gross! I mean, it’s cool you can do that, but how can you stand the fact that those things are alive and so wiggly?”

Virgo Jane did look queasy. But she was a serious young woman and chewed the ant larvae slowly and deliberately. “No, actually they taste good. Kind of like sushi.”

Sage gazed at Virgo Jane. She was a long-limbed, hard muscled climber, next to Sage, the best climber in their camp. Sage thought she looked fantastic sitting cross-legged on the platform in her halter top, her short red hair in tight ringlets.

Tanika giggled again. “Just don’t try to kiss me with those crawly things in your mouth.” But Virgo Jane loved a challenge. She grabbed Tanika and tried to kiss her.

Sage had been fascinated to discover that Tanika and Virgo Jane were lesbians. She had met some old ladies -- friends of Fern’s from the library -- who were lesbians, but she had never thought about girls her own age being gay.

“Hey, hey,” Carver shouted, “don’t rock the boat.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to lose my dinner,” Sage said.

Virgo Jane and Tanika settled down, the platform stopped rocking and the conversation turned back to the usual topic, animal rights.

Tanika said, “Sage, you are so cool because you are more like a real animal than the rest of us. Look how easy it is for you to eat those grubs. Most of us humans are too out of touch with nature to be able to do that. Except V.J., but she just does it because she always tries to be so macho.”

Virgo Jane elbowed Tanika in the ribs.

Sage looked up from her meal and slowly shook her head. “It’s not because I’m half bonobo. I was grossed out at first too, but I was hungry. Now I’m used to it.”

“Well I don’t eat meat anyway,” Tanika said. “I don’t think humans should eat any animals, even worms. It makes us too violent.”

Carver got a glint in his eye. “But Tanika, what about your nutritional yeast? Yeast is an animal, one-celled, but still an animal.”

“Oh god, Carver, leave me alone.”

“Hey you guys, we’ve got more important things to talk about,” Virgo Jane was serious again. “Like what are we going to do about Operation Debutante?”

Want to read more? Here is Chapter 1 for you to read right now.

Primal Tears is available from North Atlantic Books. Ask your local bookstore to carry Primal Tears, or order direct from www.northatlanticbooks.com or from amazon.com