Wild Spirits

by Rosa Jordan

  Wild Spirits

  Wild

  Spirits

  Rosa Jordan

  Copyright © Rosa Jordan, 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by and means, electronic photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Editor: Shannon Whibbs

  Design: Courtney Horner

  Printer: Webcom

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Jordan, Rosa

  Wild spirits / Rosa Jordan.

  ISBN 978-1-55488-729-3

  I. Title.

  PS8619.O74W56 2010 jC813'.6 C2009-907478-8

  1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright materials used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Published by The Dundurn Group

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  www.dundurn.com

  Dundurn Press

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  Dedicated to the real-life animals featured in this story and to the real Tracy Wilson who spends her time and money caring for them and to animal lovers everywhere who are working to create safe places for wild things.

  1

  THE BANK

  It was an old bank, the kind where the teller windows had bars so deposits and withdrawals had to be passed back and forth through a space below the bars. Maybe, Wendy thought, the bars were there so, if a Jesse James–type bank robber stuck a gun in your face, you could duck behind the counter and the robber couldn’t lean over to shoot at you. Not that banks were robbed in the Jesse James style anymore, with a bandana over the nose and a horse waiting at the hitching post outside.

  Wendy felt lucky to be working at the bank. There were few jobs in the small town for girls with only a high school diploma. She had already tried working as a sales clerk and a doctor’s receptionist, but found the bank job more interesting. Some people said that with her honey-blonde hair, clear skin, and eyes so blue they were almost turquoise, she could be a model or in the movies. But you don’t find those jobs in small towns, either. Besides, she did not like being stared at. She had read that models and actresses spend 90 percent of their time standing around waiting for somebody to tell them what to do the rest of the time. That was not how she wanted to spend her life.

  She did not want to spend her life as a bank teller either, but for now — she was only nineteen — it was okay. She found math easy, and had never made a mistake counting money. The only thing she did that sometimes got her reprimanded was what she was doing right now: staring out through the bars, her thoughts far away.

  Her boss called it daydreaming. Ellen, the teller at the next window, jokingly called it “going into a trance.” But Wendy was not daydreaming or in a trance. She was just remembering. Like most people, she remembered a lot of things. But when she stared into space as she was doing now, she was remembering the wild things.

  • • •

  Wendy’s parents said she couldn’t possibly remember something that happened when she was so little, but she did. She remembered her dad spreading a blanket in the middle of the forest and she, a toddler, being placed on the blanket and told, as if she were a puppy in training, “Stay right here, Wendy. Take your nap. If you wake up, don’t go off this blanket. You understand?”

  What Wendy understood was that if she left the blanket she would be spanked. She would lie down with her thumb in her mouth, and listen as her father clumped off through the woods.

  Wendy’s mother, who worked during the day, believed she was being babysat by her father. Her mother knew, when she came home, that they had been in the woods, and knew Wendy’s father had gone there to hunt, because often he brought back fresh game for supper.

  “How can you hunt and look after the baby at the same time?” her mother asked.

  Her father shrugged. “No problem. I just put her down for a nap on her blanket. I stick close enough to hear her if she cries.”

  That was not true. Wendy could tell, just by listening, exactly when he had gone so far away that if she called out, he would not hear her. So, after a few experimental calls, she didn’t call out, or cry. She took her nap, as her dad had told her to do.

  She was alone when she fell asleep, but when she awoke there might be a bushy-tailed squirrel sitting on the corner of her blanket. It would stare at her with its bright black eyes — as hard as she stared back at it with her bright blue eyes. One day it was a smell that awakened her, and she saw, just a few feet away, a mother skunk parading across the clearing, trailed by four little ones. Wendy kept completely still. Luckily, the skunk family kept going. She often saw rabbits, and learned that they came in all sizes, from ones almost as small as a mouse to ones as large as her family’s big tomcat. As long as she remained still and did not make any noise, they would play around her in the grass, and even hop close to her on the blanket.

  Perhaps when she was very small she had tried to touch the animals, but she did not remember that. What she knew, and it seemed she had always known, was that if you tried to touch a wild animal, it ran away. If she wanted the wild things to stay nearby, to keep her company until her father returned, she had to be quiet. She didn’t have to stay completely still, or completely quiet, for that matter. The animals made small noises themselves, and didn’t seem to mind if she did. Small movements, like brushing away an ant, were okay, too. Wild creatures just didn’t like loud noises and sudden movements. But then, neither did Wendy.

  The only loud noise she liked to hear was her father who, two or three hours after he had left, would come clumping back along the trail. The wild things scattered when they heard him coming, so by the time he reached the clearing where he had left Wendy, she would be alone again.

  Her father, carrying his gun in one hand and a sack in the other, would be in either a good mood or grumpy, depending on how the hunting had gone. He would shake Wendy’s blanket, roll it up so she could carry it, and they’d set off for home. Sometimes, if he was in a hurry and she wasn’t keeping up, he would yell at her. Other times he would pick her up and carry her.

  When they got home he would open his sack and take out the furry things he had shot. They looked like the animals that had kept her company, but not as real. Her father would quickly remove their skins and cut them into pieces. Then they didn’t look like animals at all. They looked like pieces of meat, which her mother, when she got home from work, would cook for supper.

  Deer often wandered into the clearing
when her father was not around, when she was there alone and quiet on her blanket. Once she opened her eyes from a nap to see a big deer stepping right over her. Behind the big deer came a very small one, probably a brand new fawn. It did not step over her, but stumbled, and stepped on her. Its hooves were so tiny that getting stepped on didn’t hurt, but it did surprise her. Neither the fawn nor its mother paid Wendy any mind. The doe stopped close by to browse on some bushes. The fawn stuck its nose under her belly to suck milk. Wendy, lying on her blanket, remembered clearly how she looked up at underside of the mother deer’s belly and saw the small teats where the fawn was getting its milk.

  That was the only time a deer ever came so close as to actually touch her, but many times deer crossed the clearing where Wendy waited, or stopped to nibble on nearby bushes. That was why, when her father took his gun and went on weekend hunts with his friends, and came home with a dead deer, Wendy eventually realized what “hunting” meant.

  She was five years old when, walking into the woods one day with her father, they startled a deer. The big antlered buck threw up his head and stared at them. Her father quickly raised his rifle. Wendy dashed forward, screaming at the deer, “Run! Run for your life!”

  That was the last time her father ever took her with him when he went hunting.

  • • •

  “Hey, Wendy, wake up!” Ellen hissed. “If Mr. Smart catches you off in a trance again, he’s going to hit you upside the head with a computer print-out.”

  Wendy grinned sheepishly and turned her attention to the computer screen, to input data as she was supposed to when there were no customers. But just then a customer came in. The moment Wendy saw Danny Ryan, she knew he would come to her window. He always did.

  Danny was a serious eleven-year-old with shaggy brown hair. His dark eyes were bright and watchful. They reminded her of the eyes of a wild animal, not sure whether to stay put or run, because it doesn’t know whether to expect kindness or cruelty.

  Danny’s dad, a soldier, had been killed about five years earlier, and his mother had remarried. Wendy had never met Danny’s mother or his stepfather, but she knew that they had been in trouble a few times for drunk driving and fighting. Maybe because of how things were at home, Danny spent a lot of time wandering around downtown. If he saw other kids coming along the sidewalk, he’d cross to the other side of the street. If he didn’t — and this Wendy knew because she had seen it happen — they’d taunt him. Instead of trying to defend himself, Danny would hunch his shoulders and hurry away, as if he had important business elsewhere.

  In fact, he did have a kind of business. He collected aluminum cans that he sold to the recycling centre. When not in school, he worked at this project almost continuously, and earned a surprising amount of money for a kid his age. Once, after his stepfather broke into his piggy bank and took all the money, Danny’s grandmother, who lived far away and was just there for a visit, brought the boy to the bank and helped him open an account. After that Danny came to the bank at least once a week, marched straight to Wendy’s window, and made a deposit.

  “Hi, Danny,” Wendy greeted him. “How much are you depositing today?”

  “Nineteen dollars,” he said, shoving the money through the barred window.

  “You’ve got over three hundred dollars in your account now,” she said encouragingly. “What are you saving it for? A bicycle?”

  Danny narrowed his eyes at Wendy in a way that made her think that he was making up his mind whether or not she could be trusted. Apparently deciding that he could count on her not to laugh, he said in a low voice, “Not a bicycle. A llama.”

  “A llama?”

  Wendy did not laugh. When she was Danny’s age, she had often visited farms near where she lived. The cows and horses grew used to her, and allowed her to pet their calves and foals. But her favourite farm animal was an exotic one, a llama. When the mother llama had a baby, Wendy thought it was the cutest thing she had ever seen. She thought, Someday I’ll live on a farm. Instead of cows and horses, I’ll have llamas.

  Wendy looked through the bars of the teller window at the boy. She did not find his desire to own a llama funny at all. He was just different, the same way she as a little girl had been different, caring about things that sometimes caused other kids to tease her.

  “Why a llama, Danny?”

  The boy looked in both directions, as if to make sure no one was near enough to hear what he said. Then, standing on tiptoe and leaning close to bars that separated them, he told her, “Llamas spit.”

  “You want a llama because they spit?”

  Danny smiled the way you do when you’ve just shared your biggest secret with somebody, and whispered, “I’ll train it to spit on people who pick on me.”

  2

  TRIPOD

  “Ready, Wendy?” Ellen held out the bag of money she had just finished counting.

  Wendy glanced at the clock. It was 3:45 p.m., the time when, each day, she and Ellen had to walk across the bank parking lot to the ATM and refill it with cash.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” Wendy sighed, and took the bag of money.

  They stepped out of the air-conditioned bank into blistering heat. The breeze that blasted Wendy in the face felt like a hair dryer on high. But heat wasn’t the worst part. The worst was that they had to cross the lot in full view of cars driving along the street. Wendy felt that all the people in those cars must know that the canvas bag she carried held thousands of dollars. What was there to stop one from zooming into the parking lot and holding them up?

  From the corner of her eye she noticed that one of the passing cars was a police cruiser. She turned her head quickly, in time to catch a big grin from Kyle Collins. In high school Kyle had been a couple of grades ahead of her. Wendy had barely noticed him then, and he hadn’t noticed her at all. It wasn’t until he got back from college and was hired by the local police force that they started dating. For the past nine months they had been more or less going steady. He wasn’t exactly a hottie, but he was a fitness freak. His well-muscled body (which Wendy had seen quite a bit of by now) definitely put him in the “hunk” category. She smiled and waved, glad to know that the police weren’t far away as she and Ellen transferred $50,000 in cash from their bag into the ATM.

  As they re-entered the bank, Wendy paused to hold the door open for an elderly lady climbing the steps with the aid of a cane. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Armstrong,” Wendy said politely. “Awfully hot to be out and about.”

  “Oh, heat’s no problem for us pioneers,” Mrs. Armstrong assured her. “I lived most of my life before air conditioning was even invented.” She shivered as she stepped into the cool, air-conditioned bank. “I imagine I’d freeze to death if I were cooped up in a place like this.”

  Mrs. Armstrong wore a summer dress that was stylish enough — except that over the dress she wore a sleeveless safari vest, the kind with a dozen pockets, inside and out. Wendy was probably the only person in town who knew why she always wore that vest.

  “Tripod doesn’t like the cold, either,” Mrs. Armstrong confided to Wendy. “Want to say hi to him?”

  Mrs. Armstrong held the front of her vest open enough for Wendy to look down and see a small furry face with two bright black eyes looking up at her. “Hi, Tripod,” she whispered. To Mrs. Armstrong, she said, “Better hold on to him. If he gets loose here in the bank, it’ll be total chaos.”

  Mrs. Armstrong chuckled. “This bank could use a little chaos. I don’t know how you can stand being shut up in here all day.”

  Wendy didn’t tell Mrs. Armstrong that being indoors all day was the hardest thing about a job which she otherwise liked. No point in remembering that she had been happiest when she was doing what she had been doing back when she and Mrs. Armstrong first met.

  • • •

  Wendy was only fourteen at the
time, and already had a reputation as someone who liked caring for wild animals that had been orphaned or injured. In fact, that’s what she was doing — sitting on her parents’ front porch, feeding a baby flying squirrel that had fallen out of the nest — when Mrs. Armstrong came running up. Wendy knew her to say hello, but that was about all. Before she could wonder why a senior citizen would be running, Mrs. Armstrong called out breathlessly, “Honey, can you come with me right away? There’s this thing, this animal, in my henhouse. It’s hurt! Bad!”

  Wendy immediately tucked the little squirrel into the box she had fixed up for it. Without even taking time to put on her shoes, she followed the old lady back to her house. As they hurried along, Mrs. Armstrong explained the situation.

  “There’s a varmint that’s been raiding my henhouse. I wanted my son, Crawford, when he came from Montana to visit, to build me a new henhouse. Instead, he brought this trap, and, well, I should’ve gone out to the henhouse with him to see what he was doing, but I just didn’t think … you know, men around here hunt, but they don’t use traps. This one’s just awful. I had no idea a trap could be so nasty!”

  “What has it caught?” Wendy asked.

  Mrs. Armstrong didn’t answer because she was busy opening the gate into her yard and hurrying around back to where the chicken pen was.

  “Just awful!” Mrs. Armstrong muttered. “When I went out to gather eggs this morning, and saw that thing, I just about died.”

  When Mrs. Armstrong opened the door to her henhouse, Wendy saw a leg-hold trap, the kind normally used out West to trap animals for their fur. A small animal, of a type she had never seen, had one front leg clamped in the jaws of the trap. The creature was dark brown, about the size of a squirrel, but definitely not a squirrel. It looked up at her with black eyes so full of pain that it nearly broke her heart. The leg was almost completely severed. It looked like the little animal might have been trying to chew off its own leg to free itself.