Fauna (21 page)

Darius is about to shut down when a new comment appears. First time the two of them have been at their keyboards together. He feels a prickling in his spine.

soldierboy wrote …

One more thing about that study. Like I said, the coyotes were eating plenty of mice and the like, but they were also eating raccoons and muskrats, opossums and rabbits, plants and even bugs. There’s a word I came across while I was looking (not making) things up. Generalist. See, it’s the creatures who only eat one or two things that are in trouble when change comes. The generalist, on the other hand, is a survivor. And speaking of that, here’s something else I came across in my wanderings. There’s a Native American saying that when the rest of the world’s creatures are gone, the coyote will be the only one left. Pretty scary if you look at it one way, but change the angle a little and you might just see something you can admire.

POSTED AT 8:01 AM, May 29, 2008

Admire?
Darius can’t let that one go, and he won’t. He’ll set the poor sucker straight—just as soon as he’s had some sleep.

It usually kicks in around now, once she’s descended the footbridge stairs and started northward along the valley path. Kate knows all about endorphins, but there’s more to what she’s feeling than a simple chemical rush. Running is something the body longs for, like light or water. Like love.

Funny that it brings her so much pleasure, given that she was initially drawn to it through pain. Those early mornings when her mind still insisted Lou-Lou was alive, and woke her to the feel of no one beside her in bed. She began by walking, but Lou-Lou’s absence walked alongside her, so, on the second or third morning, she began to run. Amazing the strides a body can make in a year. Ten kilometres a day is what her heart demands of her now; anything less and she risks growing antsy, uncomfortable in her own skin.

She crosses the old plank-and-girder span to the eastern bank, each step feeding the next. The parkway hums in one ear, Bayview Avenue in the other—neither of them equal to the internal music of the run.

After the straightaway where the Don cuts a wide bow away from the path, she enters the viaduct’s swath of shade. Overhead, a subway train judders and squeals. She emerges into the morning again.

To her right, a buffer of scrub between her and the embankment; to her left, a clearing studded with trees. She’s always been fond of this stretch, but it’s only over the past couple of days that she’s begun to make note of a particular spot.
Here
, she tells herself as she passes a certain spiky stump,
right here
.

It was the dog that caught her eye that morning. Normally she kept to the path, maintaining a steady stride, but there was something about that dark, four-legged form appearing and disappearing between the trees that slowed her to a halt. Even at a distance she recognized the swivel-hipped hustle of a Newfoundland retriever, and yet something about the profile didn’t fit. Another breed in the mix—Rottweiler, or even mastiff, given the dog’s size—something bull-headed, with a substantial jaw. No sign of an owner, but surely a dog that big and beautiful couldn’t be a stray. A runaway, then, on the lam from some poorly fenced yard.

When it slipped away down the riverbank, she felt the tug just as surely as if she were holding its leash. Less than a minute of cooling muscles, and she decided it couldn’t hurt to get a better look.

The grass was dewy, wet against her calves, laced with some coarse, tangled weed that threatened to trip her up. As she neared the river, she caught sight of the creature again, motionless in the greenish flow. More bear than dog in that moment. She half expected it to draw back a paw and swipe a writhing salmon from the murk.

The girl stood unmoving as well, camouflaged among the scrappy saplings that fringed the bank. The dog heard Kate coming, or else caught a whiff of stranger on the wind. It lifted its head and only then, when the girl turned to follow her dog’s gaze, did Kate see her. The grey toque, the shapeless, dun-coloured vest, the skinny legs. She might have passed for an underfed boy if it hadn’t been for the delicate features, the fine white throat.

Something told Kate to advance slowly, being careful to
make no false moves. That was no ordinary dog eyeing her from the shallows. And this was definitely no ordinary girl.

The grass is deep here. Lily lies with her head on Billy’s flank, enjoying the warmest morning in the valley so far. Cash from yesterday’s shift in her breast pocket,
Watership Down
in her hand. Life may not suck so hard after all.

It doesn’t take long before a passage stops her cold. She closes her eyes, breathing carefully, feeling for her dragon book and pen.

It’s important to get it down perfectly, remaining faithful to Fiver’s tale of life in the warren of snares—the fat, sleek rabbits with their redolent fur, the man and his shining wires.

A flash of movement lifts her gaze—there, where the path comes winding out of the wood. The runner emerges at a good clip. Only her top half shows above the sea of grass, so that she seems to hover, propelled by her pumping arms alone. Lily could sit up and see more, but she’d rather not give herself away. Weird, given that the woman’s known to her.
Even before the face comes clear, Lily recognizes the dark, swinging ponytail, the shapely arms.

Billy knows who it is too.
“Hrrrr,”
he says.

“Quiet.” She reaches back to clamp his mouth closed.

It’s fucked, she knows, lying low in the grass while her new friend passes her by.

The morning before last, she watched Kate’s entire body running off down the valley path—not just the top half, like today. And now even that partial view is gone. Billy knows she’s not far, though; Lily can feel him wriggling in his skin, a trembling so violent it moves through her body too. It’s only natural that he’d want to go after Kate, catch up and see her turn and smile. But natural isn’t always smart.

“Stay, Billy,” she tells him firmly. “You stay.”

Edal holds her eyes shut against the late morning light, listening for the mouse. Nothing. Three long, bewildering days without a single scritch.

She should get up. Just for an hour or two, then she can go back to bed.

Hauling herself up from the futon, she shuffles into the kitchen and turns the kettle on. Sits in her tank top and plain white panties to wait. Downstairs, a swell of music, the slow, throaty pump of a tango drifting up through the floor. Who the hell tangos at eleven in the morning? The mouse could be down there, swaying along to the accordion’s draw, overshadowed by James and Annie’s fused form. Or it could be
lying broken-backed in one of the old-fashioned snap traps the bearded boy recommends.

Maybe she should get a pet. A python or a sleek black panther. A hawk. Crazy. Even a dog or cat would be unrealistic; she has time on her hands now, but she mustn’t forget what her real life—her working life—looks like.

A dog would be nice. Nothing too big, maybe a terrier of some kind. She could take it for walks in the park, stoop with her hand gloved in a bag when it did its business, stand with the other owners at the edge of the off-leash zone. The conversation would be dog-centred, easy. She could call out to the terrier when it got overly feisty—she can see him more clearly now, black-eyed and bouncing, with grizzled fur. She could name him after one of the neighbourhood streets, Chester or Logan or Wolfrey. Then some other human being standing there might smile at her and say, “That’s my street.” It’s the kind of thing people do—people who belong to the place they live in, and don’t just adhere to it like some tide-washed, clinging thing.

Why doesn’t she have a pet? Why has she never, in all her thirty years, had a pet?

It’s tempting to blame her mother. Letty said animals make a house stink; plus, dogs chew the place to pieces and cats shred anything they can get their claws on. It was the part about the smell that got to Edal the most. All those blocked-up windows, the trapped air heavy with smoke and mould.

Pets cost money, too. “There’s the food,” Letty told her, “and the vet bills. Do you have any idea how much a vet costs?”

No, Edal thought, and neither do you.

“Animals are always getting sick, Edal, or cutting themselves on old tin cans.”

“Maybe you should buy a book about it.” Edal’s not sure if she spoke the line clearly or mumbled it, or just thought it with force.

In the end, she contented herself with the animals she came to know in stories: the otters at Camusfeàrna; Black Beauty and White Fang; the ever-expanding collection of a boy named Gerald, whom she envied to the point of pain.

Still, she hasn’t lived under Letty’s roof for over a decade. Maybe a petless childhood has the power to shape a person for life. Except—
oh God
—she did have a pet. Not for long, but she did.

The memory stands her up like a leg cramp. She moves into the living room, passing the navy blue loveseat, the blind grey eye of the TV. Standing at the front window, she stares out into the whispering heights of the elm. The thinnest of breezes enters the room. It brushes against her and is gone.

Guy’s a rare breed. Most bosses would let the junior man strip and sort while they sat up high in the cab of the Link-Belt, but there he is, bent over the Lumina’s open hood, severing engine bolts with his blue-tongued torch so Stephen can reach in and pluck out the block.

Working the pedals to track into position, Stephen keeps the boom in tight, letting the grapple hang. Just like Guy said, it really does get so you can work the controls without a single conscious thought. It’s practically his own long arm now, his own massive, grasping hand. Imagine having a magnet for a palm; four steely, contracting claws. You could
right a flipped vehicle and set it back on the road where it belongs—back before that road exploded in a geyser of shrapnel and dust. You could feel down over a courtyard wall and gather up rifles like a fistful of twigs. Turn sentries, even snipers, into ordinary men.