She’s come to a terrible part in the story, where Fiver and the others learn what became of the home warren after they left. Escape holes plugged, gas spreading through the tunnels like poison in a body’s veins, rabbits piling up in the runs. Terrible. And yet, somehow, a source of wretched comfort. Fiver was right, and the others were right to believe him. They had no choice but to leave the old place behind.
She’s reaching for the dragon book when a twig cracks. Only one, but it shakes her like the report of a gun. Billy wakes, stiff with listening at her side. She does her best to listen too, but hears nothing over the sickening rush of her pulse.
Nothing
.
Maybe it was nothing.
A rat or a raccoon, but nothing with any motive beyond feeding itself and its young. Just in case, Lily recites her levels of protection in her head.
Camouflage, dog, bear spray, knife. Camouflage, dog, bear spray, knife
.
Camouflage does the job nine times out of ten—but not when you’re stupid enough to leave a light burning. She should turn out the flame, but that would mean stirring, which could mean missing the crack of a second twig. Billy has relaxed a little beside her, but he has yet to lay down his head.
Dog, bear spray, knife
.
Three times since she came to the valley, her tent has been found. The first creep only came close enough to get Billy
barking before he took off. The second, made bold by the drink he reeked of, had to be chased. Lily was up and breaking camp by the time Billy returned with a scrap of black leather in his mouth.
The true test came with the third intruder. Whatever he was on, it made him worse than bold. He swung at Billy with a length of pipe, kicked through the tent flaps until Lily, still trapped in the mummy bag, shot a blast of bear spray up into his featureless face. Even then he kept on. Blind and gasping, he dropped to his knees, one hand flailing out behind him with the pipe, the other grabbing for Lily where she squirmed. Billy circled round and flew at him from his unprotected side. The pair of shadows became one, Lily heard a tearing sound, and then a new note came into the choking—the first high note of fear.
The tent was toxic, more pepper than air. Wrestling free of the bag, she thrust her head out into the night and saw through her tears how one half of the doubled shadow was attempting to drag itself away. The sound it made now was almost pitiable—harsh, coughing sobs threaded along a keening wail. Billy showed no mercy; he held on tight, snarling through fabric and flesh.
“Get off me!” the shadow screamed. Then the sound of crashing in the waist-high brambles. “Get off!”
Lily struggled to her feet in time to hear the fall. It was like a young tree coming down, the forest disturbed but left standing. Except a tree lay still once it had fallen, instead of thrashing and howling aloud.
By the time Lily got the mummy bag and tent stuffed away, the struggle in the bushes had slowed, each sorry cry
more muted than the last. She couldn’t let Billy kill the guy, could she?
Could she?
She brought a thumb and finger to her mouth. Whistled over and over, until he separated from his victim and came lumbering back.
Later that same night, far from their first unlucky camp, she clung to him in the dark. His body felt new to her, his muzzle wet against her cheek. At first light she stashed their gear and led him down to the Don. While he waded and drank, she dipped a pair of clean panties and wiped at her face and neck. Wherever Billy had nuzzled, the underwear came away red.
He sighs out his nose, as though remembering that bleak morning with her. Lays his chin down on his paws. A soft surrender comes over his body, nose to rump. His dark eyes flutter and close.
It really was nothing. No one here but a girl and her dog, the pair of them blissfully alone. Her heart is slowing now; she might even get lucky and drift off. She should turn out the lantern. Only she left off reading partway down the page. She’ll read to the bottom—to the end of the chapter, maybe, but no more.
T
he claw-foot tub was an eyesore—cracked enamel, years of rust and crud. The kitchen window gave onto the weedy patch where it stood. Whether Edal was bent over long division at the table or scouring the carbonized mess of Letty’s most recent attempt at a meal, all she had to do was look up and there it was, wallowing in the yard like a shabby old sow.
There was no family member—or even family friend—to haul the thing away, and the idea of Letty Jones paying to have such a thing done was a joke. Besides, that kind of wishful thinking often gave rise to a depressing mental inventory: clogged eavestroughs, leaky roof, black mould messages scrawled on the basement walls.
The best Edal could allow herself was to imagine the tub transformed. Another kind of mother might bring loads of soil in a bright wheelbarrow and turn it into a planter, might even get her daughter to help. The two of them would pore over catalogues, agreeing on what they would
plant—something pink and bushy mixed with something purple and tall.
There was nothing to stop Edal from taking the project on by herself. It was true that they had no wheelbarrow, but she could use a bucket, dig soil out of the rift of exposed earth where the yard was subsiding down back. No way she’d get Letty to buy plants, but she might be able to talk her into a few packets of seeds.
It was a Saturday morning when Edal looked out the kitchen window and saw something moving in the old tub. She couldn’t make out what it was—the angle was wrong—but it was black and it was definitely alive. Probably a crow, come to pick a meal of bugs from the dead-leaf sludge that gathered about the drain.
She took pains to work the front door quietly, not for her mother’s sake—Letty rarely kept her bed later than six—but for the sake of whatever it was that was grubbing around in the tub.
She got a fair idea the moment she stepped out onto the porch. It wasn’t the full eye-watering cloud, just the cabbagey musk that threatened worse to come. She stood up on the porch chair to see. The skunk was pacing the length of the tub, now nosing about the drain’s dirty mouth, now turning to take a run at the slick enamel slope. Edal thought she could hear a low muttering issuing from its muzzle. She broke from her fretful trance when it scrambled halfway to the lip and toppled back, releasing a wretched squeal.
As always, she tried first to solve the problem by herself. No sense attempting to tip the tub—she’d never been able to budge it an inch. In any case, if she came too near, the skunk
would spray. Even if she could somehow keep on through the fumes, it would surely bite her if she tried to pick it up. Edal ran through half a dozen possible approaches in her mind, every one of which ended with her reeking and dripping blood.
The skunk squealed again, a sound like a baby snatched up by someone or something cruel. Edal panicked and ran looking for her mother. She found her where she often did, down in the basement, bent over a musty box.
“Oh, Edal, good.” Letty straightened and plucked up the cigarette she’d balanced on the edge of the utility sink. “Give me a hand with these, will you?”
“There’s a skunk in the tub.”
“What?”
“Outside. There’s a skunk in the old tub.”
“Oh.” Letty took a drag. “I thought you meant it was in the bathroom.”
“It can’t get out.” Edal swallowed the beginning of a sob. “It’s trapped.”
“What do you mean, it’s trapped? It got in there, right? How did it get in there?”
“How do I know how it got in? Jesus, Mother!”
That other mother—the one with the wheelbarrow—might’ve gotten angry then, flashed her eyes and said,
Just who do you think you’re talking to?
But Letty clamped her smoke between her lips, looked down into the box and began lifting out the top layer of books. “It’ll get out the same way it got in, Edal.”
If she had any other great advice, Edal didn’t stick around to hear it. In the kitchen she cried properly, hunched at the table with her face buried in her hands. For two whole minutes,
maybe three, she let the hot tears slide down her wrists. Then, in the quiet that followed, she had an idea.
Years of phone books were stacked up beneath the wall-mounted phone. He answered after half a ring. The sound of his voice—familiar, though she’d heard it only once—worked on her like a soothing hand.
She’d thought about what to say. “Mr. Dale, this is Edal Jones. You came to my class.” She heard herself chirping like a six-year-old and tried to slow down.
“Uh-huh. What can I do for you, Edal?”
“I’ve got a problem.” She took a breath. “There’s a skunk in the old bathtub in our yard.” Bathtub. In our yard. There was no other way to say it.
“Stuck in there, is he?” Jim Dale said.
Edal felt a swell of gratitude, almost enough to restart the tears. “Yes.”
“Where do you live?”
Edal worried her mother would show herself at the sound of the truck—her hair dragged back into a greasy ponytail, track pants and Wasaga Beach T-shirt patterned with dust—but the boxes and their contents held sway.
Jim Dale unfolded his long body from the cab of his mushroom-coloured truck, held a hand up in greeting, then put his finger to his lips. Edal nodded, and that made them partners. She knew for certain she’d done the right thing.
He cast his gaze about the yard, spied a pile of scrap wood no good for bookshelves and made for it on silent feet. Fishing a length of one-by-four from the tangle, he headed for the tub.
For a long, horrible moment, Edal thought he was going to kill the skunk. Bash its skull in from a safe distance and lift it up by the tail—or, worse, leave the little striped body for Edal to dispose of herself. Then she remembered how he’d stood at the front of the class, drawing the outlines of leaves on the blackboard in yellow chalk. Just because he was a hunter didn’t mean he’d brain an innocent skunk.
Jim Dale moved like the high grass he passed through, the same wave and hush. When he came within range, he reached the one-by-four out like a feeler and touched it to the tub, just where the back of a bather’s head would rest. When no whiff of alarm rose on the breeze, he began sliding the plank forward and down. The skunk huddled by the drain. Edal was keeping a safe distance, but she could make out the twitching tip of its tail.
When the plank met the far end and angled up out of the tub like a ramp, Jim Dale let go of it and backed away. Edal tiptoed over to meet him at his truck.
“He ought to be able to figure it out,” he said, swinging up into his seat. “You be sure and call me again, though, if he’s not out of there by nightfall.”
He was leaving. Edal had a sudden urge to tell him something—anything—but she only nodded and stepped back.
After he drove off, she settled into the porch chair to keep watch. She didn’t have long to wait. Not ten minutes passed before the skunk realized its good fortune and came grappling up the plank. Edal sat forward in her seat. The skunk hesitated at the tub’s rounded lip. A shiver animated the dark stripe along its spine. It held its breath—or so Edal imagined—and it jumped.
T
here were two Grandmothers: the wordless one for when Grandfather was home, and the talking one for the two slim hours between the school bus drop-off and the tires-on-gravel grind that signalled Grandfather’s return. She always came to meet Darius where the bus slowed to a stop on the shoulder, and this was their secret. Grandfather had an idea that Darius should walk the long track down to the cabin on his own.
Never too young to get comfortable in the woods
.
Most days, Grandmother started talking the second the bus doors hissed shut. It might be about a bird she’d seen through the kitchen window that morning, or even an elk; or it might be about the meat loaf she planned to make for supper. Too bad it wouldn’t be her own mother’s recipe, with whole boiled eggs inside like hidden treasure. Grandfather didn’t like it that way.
If the day was fine, they might drop Darius’s backpack by the door and carry on down to the river, though they never lingered there long. Either way, once they were inside, there
was no TV to listen to, so it made sense for Grandmother to keep on talking while she scraped the carrots or beat the steaks so they wouldn’t be tough.
“Can I try?” Darius asked one afternoon when he’d been living there long enough for the ground outside to be dusted with snow. She drew up a chair for him to stand on beside her, and handed him her little kitchen mallet, its silver face covered in pointy teeth. “It chews the meat,” he said.
“Well, yes, I suppose it does.” She smiled at him, her brief, dissolving smile, and he felt a flash of pride. “You can hit it harder than that,” she added.
“I can?”
She nodded, her mouth twitching up at one end. “Give it hell.”
Sometimes she said more about her own mother than just meat loaf.
“Thirteen children she had. Can you imagine that, Darius? And those were just the ones that lived. Little wonder I wanted out of that house.” She fell quiet for a time, down on her hands and knees, rubbing her rag over the floorboards.
The kitchen chairs were turned legs-up on the table, so Darius was sitting high up on the counter, dangling his feet. He pointed his toes in their wool socks as she shuffled closer, came within centimetres of grazing her back.
“Funny thing, I ended up wanting a whole big brood of my own.” She sat back on her heels to drag the bucket after her. “I suppose you get used to what you know.”
Darius nodded. He’d been used to the apartment, now he was getting used to this.
“I only had the one, though.” She dipped her rag, swishing it through the greying suds. After several passes, she lifted it and let it drip. She didn’t drop back down onto her reddened hands, though. Just knelt there, as though she were gauging the cloth’s sodden weight.
Darius held his tongue for as long as he could bear it. Until it was like holding a toad behind his teeth. “Faye?” he said finally, letting it escape.
She looked up in surprise, as though she’d forgotten he was there. As though the stewpot or the coffee can had spoken her daughter’s name.