The issue was not about scent.
Kayla did not want to come with me to this weekend's Women Warriors retreat, starting tomorrow, where one hundred women would gather to trap trespassing trolls, celebrate our strength, hunt our own dinners and leave nature's scavengers to do dishes when they picked the carcasses clean. Instead, my daughter wanted to stay in town with Tiffany and shop for makeup and high heels. Kayla was a pacifist. I was a warrior, an awkward situation for us both.
'You look good,' I said, thinking that if her pleated skirt had been cut from leather instead of polyester and if her tank top had been chain mail instead of spandex, she could have passed. Her arms and long legs were muscled and tan, not from fighting, but from cheering the football team. It stunned me that someone who existed on tofu and fruit could grow the body of an Amazon.
She made a face. 'I can't believe you're going to wear that. This is SO embarrassing.'
'Are you all packed?' I asked. The counselor had recommended changing subjects to diffuse tense situations.
'Let's talk about packing later,' she said, meaning she hadn't started. 'We gotta go.'
I had prearranged for Bear Woman to get the focus group sharpening knives if I ran late, so I wasn't in any hurry. 'Pack,' I said, settling into a power pose on the floor. I crouched on my haunches as if ready to spring, fingers poised an inch above my boar-tusk knife handle. I had killed the boar myself while on safari in Peru.
'Mom!' Kayla screamed.
I forced myself not to smile. 'Go upstairs and pack,' I said. Alpha power surged through me in a premenopausal electrical storm. I unsheathed my knife and lazily carved my initials into the pecan floor.
Kayla stood by, defeated. 'Oh, all right!' she said at last. She turned and ran to her room.
Only then did I notice I wasn't breathing. I gasped, both with surprise and the need for air. I had won the battle. The war wasn't scheduled to start until tomorrow.
Kayla's suitcase was big enough to hold a gray whale, which, incidentally, she tried periodically to save. She had packed a month's worth of clothing, makeup, and reading material-nearly all relating to Ricky Martin, her latest pop star heartthrob. She was bringing her own cooler filled with Rainier cherries, mangos, and a chewy vegan concoction called tempeh that Kayla liked to chop and season with sunflower seeds and roll up in whole wheat tortillas.
My cooler held a case of chocolate truffles, a few bottles of my favorite white zinfandel, barbecue sauce, spices, and pork casings to make sausages, in case there were any leftovers from the kill. Okay, so we were militant, but I was born in the Midwest, and when you were from Iowa, you never threw away anything you could can, freeze, or over-winter in the cellar.
The retreat was near the Washington/Oregon border, a three-hour drive by highway, a little over two hours if you knew how to get there off-road, which I did. I ignored Kayla's whining and refused to take the Jeep out of four-wheel drive until we had crossed a shallow ravine called Starving Woman Creek. The creek was empty year-round, except for an occasional flash flood. Tomorrow, if things went well, we planned to fill it with a river of animal blood when we hosted our full moon Earth Mutha ceremony.
'Mom,' Kayla said, 'you're not really going to trap trolls, are you?'
'It doesn't hurt them,' I said, for the umpteenth time. 'We just trap them in cages to transport back to the Idaho wilds.' I had no sympathy for the hairy beasts. They weren't even native to the area and had been brought to the Northwest by Idaho farmers looking for cheap help to harvest their potato crop.
'Goddess, Mother!' she said, using that I-can't-wait-till-you're-in-the-nursing-home voice. 'I suppose you think it was okay for the government to intern Japanese Americans during World War II.'
'Not a good analogy,' I said. 'This is way different. Trolls aren't even human. They behave like pigs. They steal our supplies, trash our site, and urinate on our bedding. That's why they're called trolls, for Goddess' sake.'
'Now you're going to pretend like I don't know what I'm talking about so you don't have to listen,' Kayla said. 'You and your friends are bigger thugs than the trolls.'
'I'm sorry, dear, but the trolls are too much of a nuisance to ignore. We tried living in peace with them, but this really is an `Us or Them' kind of issue, and I'm sorry you don't understand that.' How quickly our discussions degenerated into variations of Because I Told You So!
'It's people like you who make us have wars,' Kayla proclaimed.
I stared at my difficult daughter. She had shed her sweater to reveal the 'I heart Trolls' shirt she knew I detested.
'I want peace as much as you do,' I said. 'We just disagree on the best way to get it.'
'I'll say.' Kayla liked to have the last word. I decided to let it pass.
She bent to dig around on the floor and came up with a crinkled paper sack. 'Want some teriyaki seaweed jerky?' she asked.
'No, thank you,' I said. 'Could you pass me the dried buffalo strips?'
'Sorry, but I don't touch dead things. Get it yourself.' She arranged her earphones, turned on her CD player, and mouthed the words to Ricky Martin's latest hit.
The counselor had suggested that when I was angry I count to ten before speaking. I counted to fifty. That helped a lot. Despite our differences, all I wanted was a nice mother-daughter weekend together. Outdoors, communing with nature. Getting in touch with the warrior within. While Kayla ate her trendy vegan diet, the rest of us would dig roots, pick berries, hunt animals. We would come together for dessert. We had two diet rules: 1) Unlimited chocolates and 2) Everyone eats what they kill. Rule one built community. Rule two protected our offspring when patience ran thin.
Kayla didn't believe me, but I was trying. As a concession to civilization and my easily grossed-out teen, I'd brought plenty of dental floss so she wouldn't have to see her mother with sinew hanging from her teeth. Still, I had my limits; Kayla would have to learn to accept them.
She flipped down the mirror to apply lipstick. I heard the unmistakable sound of a mister as she sprayed herself with yet more Flower Power. My eyes watered. Then she did her nails. I rolled down the window and tried to focus on nature, which was harder than it should have been, despite our being a hundred miles from the nearest town.
Finally, we arrived at the retreat. A narrow gravel road led up a hill to the grassy meadow in the forest where we would sleep a dozen to a teepee. Twelve teepees were already set up, their tanned hide walls stitched together with gut and painted with the stories of our exploits over the years. There were many images of women spearing animals. One picture story depicted the time Mavis shot a man with her crossbow. He should have known better than to wear brown in the woods the weekend of our retreat.
In the center of the circle of teepees was a fire circle. Gladys Badger Woman was already hauling wood in for the fire we'd need during the drumming we'd be doing later tonight. She had mighty thews and a big axe.
Other SUVs and ATVs were parked beside teepees while women offloaded weaponry, toilet paper, and auxiliary mail. The air was alive with jingling, jangling, clanking, and greetings.
Our meetings would be held in the lodge, a river-rock building just a short hike up the trail. To the left of the lodge, a flagstone deck held a stone altar and overlooked dry Starving Woman Creek. Other communal buildings were tucked further into the forest beyond the lodge.
I parked beside the executive teepee to unload; Kayla scampered out to explore the rock cave in the nearby woods.
Three years ago, she'd been enthusiastic about coming on a Women Warriors retreat with me. She'd had the time of her life here. No whining then about what to save and what not to eat. I had a Polaroid of her in the bottom drawer of my desk at work. In the picture, she held up a half-cooked rabbit on a spit, and her mouth was smeared with animal fat. She wore the biggest smile I'd ever seen on her face.
You'd never catch her smiling at me like that now.
'First workshop starts in three hours,' I called after her.
'Oh goody, arts and crafts. I can hardly wait.'
'Force yourself,' I said.
There were ten girls enrolled in the Teen Warriors program. The applied arts class was held in a lean-to constructed of sharpened bones and animal hides that opened to the front. It was a rustic look that practically screamed Don't Mess With Me! I thought it attractive enough that I had instructed our PR division to make postcards with an inscription reading 'Wish you were here.'
Kayla seemed determined to corrupt the others with her pacifist nonsense. It only took one wrong-headed person to ruin things for everyone else. So why did that one have to be related to me?
'I'll be back to check up on things,' I whispered to Lanyard Lana, our arts group leader, and left to make sure the bow-stringing class was running smoothly. All the materials were in place for the mask-making workshop tomorrow. Another group had already speared a twelve-point buck and were gutting it in preparation for roasting over the coals for dinner. Everything looked well under control. I headed for the galley at the back of the lodge and watched Cookie stir her huge black cauldron. I smelled vegetable broth and frowned. Had Kayla somehow gotten to Cookie? 'Need any help?' I asked, on the lookout for any white cubes that might be tofu.
She grinned. 'One troll,' she said. 'That's all I ask. Enough for a decent broth, and the rest of them can go back to Idaho.'
Trolls were a protected species. 'Sorry,' I said. 'But I'll be glad to skin you a rabbit.'
'Not the same,' Cookie said with a sigh. 'Goddess, I miss the good old days when you could kill anything you wanted.'
I shrugged. 'You gotta change with the times,' I said, and waved good-bye.
I decided to drop by the sign-up desk. There was one problem with a credit check, but otherwise everything was in order. I checked on supplies. We had enough ammo and plastic wrap to last a year. The troll traps were set and my border guards were alert and on patrol.
Back at the lean-to, the girls were constructing chain mail from soda can pop tops, a very clever project, I thought, with proprietary pride. Then I saw Kayla's innovation. Instead of aluminum, her chain mail was made from paper gum wrappers.
She looked up, saw me, and got an impish grin. Before I could protest, she pulled a lighter and her perfume mister from her pocket. She coated her
