Fauna (37 page)

It turned out his place wasn’t all that far, only an hour’s walk from home. Dogleg Road was more of a track, two dirt ruts scattered with gravel, a healthy strip of growth between. Edal crouched to identify quack grass, black medick, common plantain. She had plenty of time.

It really was a dogleg, and not long past the jog she came to a gravel drive marked with a wood-slab sign. He’d painted it dark brown with yellow words:
Jim Dale Outfitters
. She rested a hand on it before advancing up the drive.

Set back in the woods, the little log house looked more like a home than somebody’s place of work. He probably did live on site; it only made sense for a man with no family, and Edal would have noticed if he’d mentioned a wife or kids.

The light was scattered, moving in lazy concert with the leaves and needles that allowed it through. A cone-strewn parking patch stood empty, sprouting weeds. With no truck out front, the place could almost pass for a dwelling from another time, the kind people built when they had to clear the land themselves—the man and his horse grubbing out stumps, the woman stooping to push seeds into the dirt.

The picture windows belonged to the here and now. The one to the right of the split-log steps was curtained, leaving Edal free to make up what lay inside. She kept it simple: a wood stove and a couple of old armchairs, a clean corner kitchen, a door leading through to the pioneer couple’s bed. She didn’t mean to imagine them in there—the man and his small, strong woman moving together under the crazy quilt.

The left-hand window stood clear. With nobody home, it had the watery look of the aquarium at school.

Edal took the steps slowly and knocked. Nothing but the thousand small sounds of the forest. She looked round to make sure she was alone, then bent over the rail to get her face close to the glass.

It was a tidy office—desk and file cabinet, plus a couple of tall metal cupboards, probably for storing guns. Maps in washed-out colours papered the walls. The only homey part was a half-sized fridge with a plug-in kettle on top. The kettle was crowded onto a metal tray with two jars—coffee and Coffee-mate—plus a sugar bag and three brown, hourglass-shaped mugs.

What would Edal say if he offered her a cup? She’d never tried it, though she knew the smell well enough—fresh and pleasant when the jar lid twisted off, sour on Letty’s breath for hours after she’d drunk it down.
Yes, thanks
, is what she would say. Or better yet,
Sure, I’d love a cup
. Stir in the creamy powder and sip and smile.

When she’d touched everything in the room with her eyes—wastepaper basket, ashtray, heavy black phone—Edal drew back to stand again before the door. Her fingers found the knob. She clutched it and turned. Locked.

Something like relief made her knees go spongy. After a moment they hardened up again, and she spun to take the rough-hewn steps in one. Jim Dale probably saw the leap, or at least the landing. He pulled up onto the gravel patch and cut the engine, his rolled-up sleeve at the rolled-down window. “Hey there.”

Edal wondered if he’d forgotten her name. “Hi, Mr.—”

“Jim.” He swung open his door. “How goes it, Edal? How’s that big-foot kitten of yours?”

She stood rigid a moment, as though she’d been slapped or stung. Then she began to cry.

“Whoa, whoa. Hey, now.”

She hid her face in her hands. Heard him shut the truck door and come to stand beside her. Then felt his palm on her back. He chose the rounded stretch of spine between her shoulder blades, held still there a moment, then started patting. He kept up a steady rhythm until she was done.

“Want a pop?” he said as she wiped at her eyes. “There’s root beer in the fridge, maybe even an Orange Crush.”

Edal nodded. No coffee, then. At least not yet.

——

She downed her root beer in silence, then squeezed the can so it dimpled and made hiccuping sounds. Meanwhile Jim stirred up a coffee—black with two sugars—and sat down behind his desk. Finally she looked up and told him about Daisy—the moonlit wakening, the window hoisted high.

“When was this?” he asked.

She considered lying, making up a week or two of the kitten living happily in her room. “The day you brought him.” She hung her head. “That same night.”

He nodded. “So that’s, what, four, five weeks now?”

“I guess.”

“Well, you’re probably right, an owl or a coyote got him.” It helped that he didn’t sugar-coat the thing. It made it something they could share. “What’d you say you called him?”

Edal hesitated. “Daisy.”

He laughed. “No wonder he ran away.”

A week or so later, she walked up his drive to find him unloading sheets of plywood from the bed of the truck. “Hey there,” he said.

“Hi, Jim.”

“What’s the good word?”

“I was just passing,” she heard herself answer. It sounded exactly right. “Building something?”

“Storage shed.” He hoisted a sheet in both hands.

“Need any help?”

He looked her up and down, as though assessing how much use she might be. “Sure,” he said finally, “I wouldn’t say no.”

N
ot long after Grandmother read the last chapter of Faye’s favourite book aloud, the old man took Darius with him into the woods. They tramped down country until the light off the river glinted through the trees, then Grandfather forked left onto a one-man path. Darius followed, catching snap-back switches in the cheek. For a time they carried on within sight of the water, then the path peeled off into a thin cover of yellowing trees.

The pond was long and narrow, choked with cattails at either end. Grandfather’s duck blind was a simple brush lean-to. Water seeped up through the floor of trampled reeds, brown like the third-round tea Grandmother coaxed from every bag. Soon they were kneeling in a shallow pool. Looking down, Darius counted beetles, a water-skimmer, even a tiny darting fish. He began to fidget, and Grandfather hissed at him to keep still.

Darius had eaten duck several times, aping his grandparents, picking shot from the slippery meat and piling it up on
his plate with the bones. He’d encountered the living article too, tails-up in a back eddy, or fat and quacking on the bank—even creaking their watertight wings overhead. Never shot out of the sky, though. The jerk and the wheel and the splash.

He was almost thankful when Grandfather tasked him with wading in after the first floating corpse—his itchy, aching legs were that desperate to move. The weak-tea water rose to his waist, the bottom sucking every step. The duck was a male. Head like a green gemstone, blue medals on its wings. There were five more bodies before they were done, five soaked and miserable vigils while the survivors forgot the fallen and came flapping to land again.

The path home felt different. It held to higher ground, and it seemed longer, too, though that might have been down to the ducks bumping against Darius’s back. He wondered if you could wash a winter jacket—Grandmother wrestling the puffy grey mass into the sink and scrubbing—or if the blood would mark his shoulders for good.

They were halfway home when Grandfather stopped in his tracks. He didn’t look back, only held up a finger that said
Freeze
. The ducks doubled their lifeless weight. Darius’s wet, goose-pimpled legs ached anew.

The old man raised his hand again, beckoning Darius on. He pointed to where the brush showed signs of a struggle, then directed Darius’s gaze farther—perhaps ten paces in from the path—to a mound of fallen needles and dirt. A mound with a hoof. A patch of grey-brown hide.

Grandfather used the shotgun’s muzzle to part the under-storey, taking slow, plunging steps toward the covered kill. Darius longed to keep to the path, but with the old man gone,
the beaten earth felt like a seam beneath him, a fault along which the forest might crack. He stooped and followed, boughs grabbing at his feathered load.

Standing over the carcass, Grandfather reached out to tear a branch from its tree. Slowly, almost tenderly, he swept the dirt layer away. The neck was clearly broken, but the head it had carried was whole. No antlers. Only big, stiff ears, a sleeping eye.

“See the neck, boy? Spinal cord snapped clean through.” Grandfather flapped his branch at the deer’s belly—the pit where its belly had been. “Cougar. Wolves or coyotes go in under the tail. They wouldn’t cover it like this, either.”

Cougar
. Darius shaped the word but couldn’t sound it. He’d forgotten the real-life woods held lions too.

“Come here, boy.” Grandfather laid a hand on Darius’s shoulder, bending him low so he could smell the musk of the deer’s death, the upsetting fetor of meat on the turn. “Teeth like razors.” The branch flapped again. “See how he shaved the hair away before going in?”

Darius saw—the skin naked where it rose away from the cut. What kind of a tooth could be used for shaving? He closed his eyes and saw the massive, neat-eared head, the golden gaze and cotton-ball whisker-puffs. Rubbing with one cheek then the other, the way cats do. Only curling a lip back first, unsheathing a single fang.

The lion in the book had teeth—Darius was certain of that—but there’d been no mention of him using them to razor a hide clean. The only one shorn in that story was the king of beasts himself.

Grandfather turned the branch around, gathering the
greens up in his fist. The broken end made a fine pointer. He poked it into the open deer. “Looks as though he’s had the liver. Got up under the ribs too. Heart and lungs are gone.”

Darius heard a buzzing sound in his head. The combined weight of the ducks and the old man’s hand felt like something sitting hunched on his back. He feared he would tip forward, bury his face in the deer’s deep wound.

“Can’t be far off.” Grandfather’s hand fell away just in time. “Hell, he’s probably watching us from some tree.”

Darius straightened up slowly. If the cat dropped down on them, Grandfather would shoot it. Only Darius couldn’t remember him reloading after the last duck hit the pond—and what would birdshot do to a cougar anyway, besides make it mad? The old man could use the butt end of the gun like a club, but Darius had nothing to defend himself with besides the day’s haul. It wasn’t the most hopeful of pictures, the big cat spitting and lashing its tail, him swinging his clump of ducks.

“Best be going,” Grandfather said, letting his branch fall. “Don’t want him shaving your belly too.”

I
t’s weird how they’ve never come here before. From the beginning—before Lily had even heard of Howell Auto Wreckers or the Precious Pearl—she and Billy made a habit of heading east along the footbridge once they’d climbed the stairs from the valley floor. She had an idea there was something called Riverdale Farm over this way, she just never imagined it would be an actual
farm
. Of course, they can’t go in—or Billy can’t, which amounts to the same thing. They can stand at the fence, though. There’s still plenty to see.

“Horses, Billy. You remember those. And that funny-looking one’s a donkey. See there, standing all on his own?”

Billy makes a sound in his throat.

“Yeah.” She pats his flank. “I know.”

Behind them, the happy noise of a neighbourhood park. Now and then the shriek of an indignant toddler, a burst of yapping from somebody’s poorly trained dog. Lily was here before any of them, having broken camp at the first grey hint
of day. Despite what she told Guy and Stephen, it’s hard to sleep knowing the coyote creep’s down there. Harder still to lie staring, counting the hours until dawn.

She and Billy could have swung by the wrecking yard, picked up the bike and gone gleaning for birds, but there didn’t seem to be any point. She found nothing yesterday morning, and only a single white-throated sparrow the day before. Besides, sometimes it pays to break a habit and try something new. In addition to the farm and the busy little park, they’ve discovered a graveyard.

The place was flooded with early light when they first arrived, trees and tombstones laying long shadows on the grass. The gates were still locked, so Lily sat with her back to the wrought iron rails and read about Bigwig and the other rabbits busting out of Woundwort’s evil warren. She had to wait until they were all drifting downstream on the punt before she could trust the story enough to crack the dragon book and take out her pen.

When the caretaker came to open up, it turned out the graveyard was yet another place where Billy wasn’t allowed. They made do with walking the perimeter, staring through the pointed bars.

“‘Toronto Necropolis,’” she said, reading the sign. “‘Cemetery and Crematorium.’ You know what that means, don’t you?” She laid a hand on Billy’s head. “Any preference?”

He gave a whistling sigh.

“Me too. Cremation every time. Dump us in the Don with the other sludge.”

In truth, though, she liked the look of the old graveyard. She could picture ending up there, if only Billy could come too.

At least it makes sense keeping dogs out of the farm. Billy’s as well trained as they come, but even he could lose it if a stray chicken came clucking across his path—and God help him if there were rabbits in one of those barns. As it happens, the fence is as good a place as any for getting close to the cow and her calf. Lily’s proud of her dog, the way he keeps his cool when the pair of them come lumbering from their little shed.

The mother’s lovely, caramel and cream, with dark, lash-laden eyes. Her calf is almost entirely golden, save for the white splash across its brow. The cow pays close attention to this spot, passing her tongue over it again and again—but Lily feels certain she’d do as much for any calf she’d given birth to, no matter how its hide was marked. And it wouldn’t end there. Whatever peril, whatever predatory force the world thought fit to provide, the cow would put herself between it and her child. She’d lower her hornless head and ram the fucker. She’d kick the vicious prick to death.