Effigy (38 page)

“The den overlooked a river. Sandy slopes, you know, good digging. I was letting my horse graze on the far bank. They’d spotted me, all right, but the water was good and deep there, so they weren’t too worried.” He leaves a small pause, which, to his delight, she fills.

“What were they doing?”

He grins. “Not a whole lot. The pups were play-fighting. The mother looked beat. She was off on her own a ways, laying down. The daddy was keeping an eye on the pups, joining in every now and then. For a while they were crawling all over him.”

“How many?”

“Huh?”

“How many pups?”

He thinks for a moment, bringing the tumbling mass clear. “Three.”

“Playing.” She says it to herself more than him.

“Uh-huh. Roughhousing, like.”

Her face and neck flush suddenly, the thin tissue there awash with blood. She fixes him with a look, then turns her eyes, and his with them, to a spot on the floor halfway between her workbench and the first straw tier. Her meaning couldn’t be clearer. He moves into her sightline, into an area the size of a modest stage.

Down on his belly in the near pasture, Lal imagines himself a rattler, all length and scale. He tilts his eyes up in their sockets to find the half moon bulging at its seams. He’d stretch his arms
out long, try his hand at a slither, if it weren’t so crucial he keep still.

Dead ahead, no more than a yard from the point of his chin, the grass shivers. His heart pounds, and he worries its rhythm will speak through the ground to the sensitive feet of his prey.

If it has feet.

A stab of fear now, as though a stone, sharp as a tooth, has cut up through the turf beneath him to catch him between two ribs. What if the disturbance in the grass was born of a diamond-back—a real one? It’s possible. He’s made no sound, no movement, to warn one off for what must be at least a quarter of an hour.

The rustle comes again, and even through his fear Lal can tell warm-blooded scurry from reptilian flow. The tooth-stone sinks away. Moments later he becomes aware of a second small presence—this one closer still, somewhere off the crest of his left ear.

His jaw aches with waiting. He holds off until the grass blades before his eyes give a twitch and the rustling seems to emanate from inside his own skull. Then springs. Thrashes and flails, lets out a yelp as not one but both of his hands close around wriggling spurts of fur.

He rolls onto his broad back, clutching two fistfuls of mouse to his chest. Careful, don’t smother them. Hold them hard, though, otherwise they’ll bite.

Who’s the hunter now?

Lal crosses the deep shadow at the horse barn’s back, carrying the mice by their tails, two in one grip. They’ve left off squeaking. He holds them up before his face, sees both are alive and well, scrabbling in the air with their snowflake paws.

There would’ve been no need to go to such trouble if Drown wasn’t so damn clean and tidy. A thorough kick through the corners of every stall hadn’t produced so much as a skittering. The stable was Lal’s place once. The horses still lift their heads when he has cause to pass among them, but there’s a new flavour to their alarm, as though he were some foreign threat come slinking in, rather than the master in their midst.

He lifts his free hand, comforting himself with a bulge of knuckle against his mouth.

Never mind
, the thumb murmurs.
We’ve got bigger fish to fry
.

The cow barn and chicken house stand quiet as he moves through the weeds behind them. A burst of speed across the open, mice swinging, and then he’s into the mulberries, the black form of the silkhouse in his sights.

He creeps close, hunter quiet, hunter calm. The cottage is lightless within, but to be on the safe side he lays an ear to the perfectly fitted door. Nothing but the noise of their feeding. The mice twist and buck, swiping hairline claw marks across the jamb. Lal’s thumb searches out the latch.

As the door eases inward, a rush of sound escapes, jangling his nerves. He’d pictured dropping the mice directly onto a worm bed—saving them the time and trouble of the climb—but now, inhaling the leaf-sweet, fleshy closeness, he finds himself unwilling to enter Ruth’s little house. Coward that he is, he lobs the mice like a pair of tiny torches, yanks shut the door and runs.

Thus far, Dorrie’s managed to cut the centreboard from a sheet of one-inch stock, shape and sand it to the depth of the runt’s trunk, and nail four wooden blocks in the place of shoulders and hips.
These work to balance the board now, as she flips and rests it on the curve of its spine. Next she must affix the leg rods.

“Can you do the runt’s legs for me?” she asks.

Bendy’s been waiting patiently, lying on the old barn floor, staring up into the feathered forms that haunt the rafters. Now he folds his hands into paws, cycling his arms and legs as though in the grip of a fleet-footed dream. “How’s this?” He flops his head her way.

She drops her gaze to the rough beginnings of the runt, sees nothing but lifeless wood. “I need you to keep still. Make the legs and hold them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He curls to take hold of himself by the shins. With a dual, muted pop his legs become hind legs, the crook of high canine ankles translated into unhinged knees. Reclining on the planks, he flips his elbows back on themselves, completing the pose.

“Thank you.” Closing her eyes, she runs his description of the wolf family through her mind again. The runt lies in full submission, her brother standing over her. The third pup, another male, urges them on, teeth bared, hindquarters high. At a little distance, the father wolf sits watching. Beside him, the milk-white female rests.

He’s been slung back in the yipping brother’s pose for some time now—just how long Dorrie can’t be sure. She yawns, laying her hammer aside. “You can stretch if you like.”

She watches him draw back into a squat and bounce gently on his heels—three, four times—before rolling himself up tall. He takes a long stride toward the collection. Before she can speak, he touches his finger to the spot between a red squirrel’s ears and rubs noseward, against the grain.

“Don’t!” Lamp in hand, she slips out from behind the workbench and draws up beside him.

“What’d I do?”

She doesn’t reply, busy restoring the nap of the small red brow. The squirrel perches alone on a sapling stump, an acorn held like a fat apple to its lips.

“Hungry little fella.” His voice is over-cheerful, making up.

She straightens, satisfied.

“I saw one eat a water beetle, you know, the kind with scissors for jaws.”

She treats him to a narrow look. “Squirrels eat acorns. Nuts.”

“Not only. I swear, he started in on the beetle’s hind end to keep it from pinching his nose.”

She shakes her head.

“Don’t believe me?” He turns his attention to a weasel drawn up on its stubby hind legs. “How about this one. Back when I was riding the ponies, one of the station keepers told me how he saw a hawk swoop down on a weasel and snatch it up. Wasn’t long before he could see the bird was in trouble. Sure enough, after a minute or so it quit climbing and dropped clean out of the sky.” He swirls a splayed hand. “The hawk broke its neck, but would you believe that weasel up and scuttled off? Turns out he tore a hole in the hawk’s sweet spot.” He points to his own armpit, the place where a bird’s skin stretches off into wing. “I’m telling you, the keeper swore blind.”

“Hm.”

He wanders to the far corner and gazes up at the bighorn ram. Dorrie follows at a polite distance. The great sheep has no mate, no young. Hammer and the Tracker heaved it up onto her workbench two autumns ago.
It was work enough to bag one of the buggers. Tracked him for miles. Damn near dropped to our deaths
.
Hammer grinned to tell it. Beside him the Paiute bent his gaze to the rock-coloured sheep, its neck twisted, skull atilt on its headdress of horn.

Bendy turns to face her. “You ought to hear the crash it makes when two of those boys come head to head.”

She nods. This, at least, she’s heard of.

“I watched a couple of them go at it high up over a pass. Came at each other from twenty, thirty feet, full speed. Crack!” He brings his hands together, hard. “Can’t see how they come through it.”

“Their skulls.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Their skulls. The bone is extra thick.”

He grins. “Trust you to know.”

Her face flushes warmly.

Bendy gestures to the scene by his knee. Spanning the length of two bales, a large female beaver trails a pair of kits. “You ever seen a dam?”

“No.”

“Don’t get outdoors much, do you?”

“My work—I work inside.”

“You ought to get out there on horseback, see a thing or two.” He drops into a squat, looking the mother beaver full in the face. “You can sure see why the trappers are so mad for them. That fur.”

“You can touch her.”

He looks round, his neck seemingly boneless. “I thought—”

“It’s all right. Just move your hand from head to tail.”

“Head to tail.” He turns his attention back to the dark, still animal and delivers a thoughtful stroke. “Lord.”

When he stands, his narrow chest comes level with Dorrie’s face. His shirt lies open at the collar, faded to the softest blue. At
his throat a puff of tow. For a second she contemplates reaching for it, brushing it away. Instead, she takes a jerking step back, turns and reaches for a grey squirrel mounted on a chunk of bark. “This is the first one I did for him. He brought it to me on my third night here.”

“All in one piece?”

She nods.

“He must’ve barked it.”

“Barked it?”

“Shot the bark out from under it. Stuns them. He must be some shot.”

“Most everything he brings me has just the one hole.” She clucks her tongue. “See here.” She nudges her finger into a hollow at the squirrel’s hip joint. “He could use a bit of tow there, fill that out. The ears, too. I didn’t pinch them enough while he was drying. They look frostbit.”

Bendy peers in close. “Look all right to me.”

Later, after he’s gone, Dorrie takes up the grey squirrel again. Fingering its tail, she recalls how readily the bone whip slid from its fuzzy sheath. How, after she’d replaced it with a length of number fourteen wire—anchored in the false torso, skeleton strong—and sewn the little fellow up, she shaped the tail anew, easing it first along the round of the spine, then back in an answering curve. Now, making a ring of finger and thumb, she runs it down the resultant S, tip to base, fluffing the fur. Springy. Three years stuffed and still the creature responds.

It was getting on for dark when Hammer delivered the squirrel, but Dorrie was wide awake, busy setting up her workshop. True to his word, Hammer had purchased everything on her list, driving straight from the Endowment House to the market. Tri-cornered
needles in cardboard, scalpels in burlap, plaster in powdery sacks. Countless bottles and jars. Crates overflowing with excelsior. Bales of tow, fat spools of thread. She was in her glory arranging it all, until her husband dragged open the door.

She was certain he’d come to escort her back to the house for a repeat performance of the previous night. What a gift when he grinned and produced a small grey body from behind his back.

“Brought you a little something.” He laid it on her workbench.

“I’ll get started now,” she blurted. “If that’s all right.”

“Suits me.” He was gone without a backward glance.

At home she’d been continually interrupted by chores or meals or bedtime, or by Papa taking exception to all those wasted hours. That night, Dorrie worked as she’d always dreamt of doing—without cease. She kept on until the squirrel came full circle, sat up and looked her in the eye. She was exhausted, exhilarated. It seemed a terrible comedown to return to the ranch house, pass chamber after chamber of slowed pulses, regular breath. And what if Hammer lay waiting for her in the dark?

She decided not to chance it. Kicking straw into a rough pallet, she dragged an empty feed sack over her body and slept.