“We just came to see the animals. It’s a nice cougar.” Clearly Thomas had learned the value of a little conversation at the right moment.
The man put his head back and laughed, a rusty barking sound. “Nice, you think? Yeah? I bet he’d like to eat one of you. That’s if his teeth were still good.” His laughter turned into deep coughs. He turned around and spat on the ground.
Thomas was slowly stepping backward and bumped into Nika and Randall.
“What about that wolf you had, the tan one?” Thomas asked.
The whites of the man’s eyes showed as his stare drilled into Thomas. He snapped a glance at Nika. A question flicked across his face.
“Too much trouble. I thought she’d make pups. With him.” He pointed to a large black dog lying alone in a cage beyond the foxes.
Nika noticed one cage with its gate open.
“Good money for pups like that. But that tan bitch, she dug out, the worthless bag of bones.” He swore a long string of words. When he finished, he had a confused, faraway look on his face. Then he seemed to get angry again, his eyes on the empty cage.
“You kids deaf? Now get!” His eyes darted around almost as though he were seeing something. Then he turned and walked to the windowless shed, going in and slamming the door behind him.
They turned and ran, hearing the cough-scream one more time, just before they hit the road at edge of his property.
Only when they were back on Roosevelt Street did they talk again. Thomas tried to laugh, but his voice sounded wobbly “What a nutcase!” he said, breathing hard.
Nika slowed to catch her breath. But she was still scared. Was this the man who stole Khan’s brothers and sisters? Why was he keeping animals like that? It didn’t make sense.
Walking beside her, Randall’s eyes were so big and his skin so white that she put her arm around him. With a shift of his thin shoulders, he slipped from her arm and moved closer to Thomas, where he matched his steps to the longer steps of the bigger boy. Was he mad at her? She really didn’t understand Randall lately.
For a minute she stopped on the sidewalk and let them get ahead of her. Then she turned around and glared back toward Bristo’s. She wanted to shout at him. He had no right to cage wild animals. It certainly seemed like the authorities weren’t doing much. But maybe there was something she could do. She looked at Thomas striding ahead, remembering that he could drive a boat.
The silvery-tan wolf pulled herself up on the rocks of the small island. Standing on the shore, she shook, water spraying first from her head, then from her body, finally from her tail. She stood to listen. There were no frightening sounds. She heard the sound of wings. The wolf slipped into a shaded area on a rise where she could rest and see. As she lay down, the dry lichen crunched beneath her. She tasted wildness in the air.
Chapter Nine
When Nika saw Lorna sitting on a chair with Khan nowhere in sight, she narrowed her eyes in frozen anger. She cleaned her shoes, then stood beside the doorway to wait for Ian.
“Oh, you’re back!” Lorna closed her magazine. Her smile abandoned one side of her mouth.
Ian appeared beside Nika, cleaned his shoes, and walked into the porch. “Where’s the pup?” he asked, glancing around. He leaned over to look into the kennel.
“He isn’t very tame, is he?” Lorna threw her hands up in an exasperated gesture.
Nika rolled her eyes.
“Anyway, what happened was, well, first I tried to get him to snuggle, or eat. I tried to play with him, but he kept creeping away. I tried to hold him to make him eat, but he snarled and ran into the kennel. When I pulled him out, he snapped.”
A flame of told you so burned in Nika’s eyes as she glared at Ian.
“Anything else?” Ian asked. His foot was tapping the floor.
“Later I accidentally knocked over my empty pop can, and I guess it clattered. Anyway, that’s when he squeezed behind there.” Lorna pointed to the den box, a crestfallen look taking the place her smile. She stood with her arms wrapped around herself.
“Thanks, Lorna, but maybe you should go into the kitchen for now, until we get him out.” Lorna stepped over the baby gate into the house, shrugging. Ian got down on his knees and carefully eased the wooden den box out a few inches.
“I see him,” said Ian. “Hey, Mr. Khan. Hey, pup.”
Nika walked quietly across the porch to her sleeping bag and sat down cross-legged, pulling the floppy bear next to her. “Hey, Khan, hey, little one, here, puppy, pup. Come here, Khan-boy.” She waited. She wondered if the next time Lorna came, Khan would be afraid of her, if he would remember her smell.
“Here, puppy pup, here, Khan-boy, here, pup-pup,” repeated Ian, making lip-squeak noises.
A sleepy pup slowly crawled from behind the kennel, step by step. Ian moved to give him room. Khan stretched and looked around, then skittered over to Nika’s bag, where he tried to squeeze between her back and the knee wall. She reached behind and stroked the soft folds of his ears and kept talking gently, “Good boy, Khan, good pup.” After a few minutes he backed out, crawled over her leg, and fell into her lap, where he settled, lowering his head on her knee. She wanted to pick him up and hug him, but she didn’t. Better to let him choose his moves. She reached over and placed the red lobster toy in front of him. He grabbed one of its legs and gave it a ferocious headshake. Ian said headshaking was a predatory skill wolves needed as adults, that a shake could snap the necks of small prey. After working over the lobster, Khan showed more confidence and jumped from her lap. He ran back and forth, relieved himself, then came back and climbed on top of the stuffed bear, kneading it with his paws.
“Hungry boy, huh, pup?” Nika got up, cleaned up his puddle, noted it on the chart, then climbed over the baby gate. She set some water on the stove to heat, keeping an eye on Lorna, who was busily explaining to Ian something about her uncle’s dog and how it bit people. The girl was a ditz, Nika decided. She wondered if Ian would admit he’d made a mistake in trusting her.
After dinner that night, Ian bugged Nika to get to work on the pup report she was supposed to write for school credit. He told her he’d watch the pup. So she spread out on Pearl’s big table, with note cards and the giant stack of Ian’s well-worn books and articles. She wrote that the “transition period” was over now and that Khan was starting the “socialization period”—the time, at about three weeks of age, when wild wolf pups first stick their noses out of the den. He weighed 5.2 pounds, and his hearing was beginning to develop. His ears were beginning to stand up. If he growled or snapped at someone, Ian and Nika quickly distracted him with a piece of food or a toy. He liked to hide under his stuffed bear with just his back legs sticking out.
A few days later Nika shared her idea with Thomas, and they made a plan. He got permission to take the fishing boat and they agreed to meet at the Camerons’ in the morning. Randall was mad at Nika for not including him, but she said something lame about how she missed Olivia and Zack and that she needed time with someone her own age. (Both true, really.) Randall had fired off a glare, marched back into the boys’ cabin, and slammed the door. Nika knew that he must be especially furious with her for horning in on his fishing time with Thomas. But she was really protecting Randall. It was enough that she and Thomas were going to cross a line.
It was a perfect glassy-water morning when Thomas came puttering around the point in his small fishing boat powered by a 9½ horsepower motor. They loaded nets and poles to make it look like they were going to fish and headed toward Red Pine. The boat steadily worked its way across the calm surface of the lake, cutting through the shreds and layers of mist that peeled off the water like curtains lifting on a stage. As the motor hummed along, she could tell it was going to take longer to get to town than it had in Ian’s fast boat.
Before they tiptoed up to the skunks’ cage, Thomas told her, “Bristo drinks a lot, so he probably wouldn’t wake up this early even if a land mine went off in the yard.”
The wi
re cutters they’d borrowed from the Camerons’ toolshed were dull, and cutting turned out to be much harder than they’d expected. When they’d finally cut a jagged hole just big enough for the skunks to escape, Thomas whispered, “Don’t worry, they’re fixed, so they won’t squirt us.” They knelt to watch. It wasn’t long before skunks slipped out, shimmying silently into the brush behind the cages, holding their tall tails high like flags, their butts swaying back and forth.
Next they went to work on the fox pen. The foxes stopped their pacing and slouched in surprise. They jerked back whenever Nika or Thomas moved. This time Thomas cut a flap in the wire and tied it open. When they stood back to watch, two very thin, splotchy red foxes crept up to examine the hole. One squeezed out, then another, followed by the blackish one. Soon they were quick shadows flicking through the trees.
The raccoons seemed very tame, coming up close to the fence while Nika snipped the wire. Their coats were matted and dull. When they finished, four raccoons jammed through the hole in close single file and hunched away into the trees. The dog barked hoarsely when they got close to his cage, so they threw him a handful of dog biscuits that Thomas had thought to bring and hurried to the enclosure holding the cougar. The dog stopped barking long enough to eat the biscuits but continued to growl and follow them with his eyes.
Nika’s hand cramped as she clamped the wire cutters on the chain link of the cougar’s cage. She wasn’t sure she could cut it. She laid the clippers down to rest her hand. Hesitating, she looked at the animal and listened to its gravelly breathing. It was so big. They hadn’t thought much about how it might hurt them. Nika watched the cat’s twitching tail tip and motionless eyes.
Thomas said, “It doesn’t really look like it wants to leave, does it?”
Tail twitch. “Either that, or it’s getting ready to attack,” answered Nika. “Besides, it’s old, isn’t it? Look how its ribs stick out.” Just then the cougar showed them that it might be old, but it could still lunge and make a nasty snarl. They both jumped and ran.
When they stopped, Nika’s hands were shaking. “Scary, huh?” she managed to say.
Thomas nodded, wiping sweat from his face. “Can you believe we were dumb enough to think that cougar might just stroll off into the forest?” He thumped his head with one hand.
“At least not so dumb as to actually cut the wire,” Nika said weakly. Soon both of them were laughing and making cougar snarls at each other.
When they looked back, the cougar was on the roof of the lean-to again. As they walked through the alleys of town, they heard it cough-roar several times. The sound kept them moving quickly toward the dock.
As Thomas’s boat chugged out into the lake, he steered it around Eagle Island, heading for the nesting tree. They looked at each other, but neither spoke. When they could see the nest, Thomas cut the engine and they drifted, lying back on the seats, staring silently at the flat blue sky and the smooth reflecting lake.
Letting out a breath that was half laugh and half gasp, Thomas said, “Those foxes really moved! And those raccoons waddled like old ladies. I hope the skunks do okay without their sprayers . . .”
“They’re all free!” said Nika.
They both sat up, reached over, and high-fived.
“Oh, look, one of the eagle parents is coming with food,” she said, pointing. “See the chicks’ heads poking up?” They sat in the gently rocking boat watching as one eagle landed and proceeded to rip the fish apart and stuff bits into reaching beaks.
Thomas leaned forward and tapped Nika’s arm. “Look, did you see that?” He pointed into the woods beneath the nest. “I saw something move. Right under the eagle’s nest. Funny, nobody comes out here except to dump fish remains.”
Nika turned her head and looked at the rock slabs and dense shrubs and their mirrored reflections in the lake. “I don’t see anything. Maybe it was a squirrel.”
“Big squirrel.” Thomas laughed. He looked for a while longer, then pulled the starter on the outboard, aiming the boat back toward home.
Nika felt the breeze on her face. She felt pleased with what they’d done. Those animals didn’t deserve to live like that. Now they were free. And they’d gotten back at Bristo for snatching pups and imprisoning animals. It served him right.
“Hey, Nika, let’s remember to put the wire cutters back, okay?” shouted Thomas over the motor noise.
“Yeah, okay.” She remembered dropping them by the cougar’s cage. She must have picked them up. “Just a sec, I’ll check my backpack.” She dumped all of the contents of the bag onto the bottom of the boat. “I don’t see them. Are you sure you don’t have them?”
“No. You had them last.”
“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter, does it? No one will ever go behind that cage. I guess they’re lost.”
“Are you sure?” Thomas asked loudly. His forehead wrinkled. She put up her hands.
As the boat gained speed, they looked at each other and shrugged. It was too late to go back. They could pool their money and buy another pair for Thomas’s dad.
Releasing the animals felt good. In a way, it was like setting herself free. Nika loved that the foxes could now run and run through the damp earthy smells of the forest.
But by the next week, the secret about Bristo’s animals became heavier to carry. It wasn’t that they told a lie. No one even asked them if they’d caught fish on their supposed fishing trip. But it felt like a lie. When they planned it, she had been sure they were doing the right thing, but now the secret stuck in her throat. She found it hard to look at Ian when he talked to her, so she avoided conversation, except about pup care and dinner and the loon calls at night. She wasn’t sorry about what they’d done, but she couldn’t figure out why she felt so alone. Thomas seemed to be busy all the time helping his dad build a deck. Added to that, Randall was still mad at her.
For Nika the best part of every one of the following days continued to be Khan. One thing was certain—he liked her best. With everyone he met, except Lorna, the pup was friendly and relaxed, but when a sound scared him, he ran to Nika. When others were in the porch, he eased onto her lap to look at them. And when she was with him, touching his springy undercoat, rubbing his oversize feet, she felt whole in a way that she hadn’t felt since her mom died.
Nika settled into her pup care schedule, and the days ran together. She couldn’t believe how big and agile Kahn was becoming. His legs got longer. His ears got taller, though the tips still flopped over now and then. Ian showed her how to make gruel for Khan, mixing formula, vitamins, and ground meat together to the consistency of lumpy oatmeal. Khan ate it from their open hands rather than a bowl and loved it. Ian said they would be weaning him off the bottle soon. He brought him deer feet and pieces of hide to drag about and use for teething. One nice thing about all of the quiet time with Khan is that she finished all of her homework, except science. And they had given her until fall to finish the pup project.
One day Zeus came racing up the path, his sharp barks announcing Pearl’s return. Nika let the dog into the house and watched while he made the rounds of the rooms, then plastered himself against the gate to the porch. Nika was amazed that he didn’t seem upset. Instead he stared through the barrier, his tail moving in little interested twitches.
“Well, I guess it’s dangerous for me to go away for very long.” Pearl came through the front door with a smile and dropped her travel bags on the living room couch. “Things happen.” She reached to hug Nika. Ian followed, carrying more of Pearl’s things.
“So let’s see this little fellow.”
Nika led Pearl to the screen porch and put her hand down to open the baby gate.
“What about Zeus?” Nika asked Ian.
“I think it’s about time to introduce Khan to another canine. We’ll just watch carefully. The little wolf could use some dog-style bossing around.”
Nika swung back the gate, and Zeus trotted straight to the wooden box and sat down. Ian, Pearl, and Nika all tiptoed i
nto the porch and waited. When Khan staggered out, unsteady from sleep, he crab-stepped sideways up to Zeus and started licking the older dog’s chin, then curled down on his back in front of him. Zeus straightened his tail and stood tall, as tall as a small dog can stand. The pup rolled and licked at his chin again. Zeus made little darting lunges at the pup, pushing him down. Every time the pup came back wiggling and whining and low-wagging his tail. It was a long time before Khan even noticed the humans in the porch.
Nika smiled at Pearl. Communication between these canine cousins was not going to be a problem.
As they were watching the pup and the small dog, Ian said, “When I was in town picking you up, Pearl, I heard some news about Bristo. Remember I mentioned he might have stolen three-three-two’s pups?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
Nika’s eyes froze on the dog playing with the pup in the straw. Her breath caught. She waited.
“He’s been rampaging around town, drinking too much, shouting and carrying on about how the government had really done it this time. They locked him up a couple of days ago, just to get him sober. Fencing was cut, most of his animals escaped, and he was going on about it.”
“Poor man,” Pearl said.
“Right after we found number three-three-two, I made a call to Erv Dunn, the new sheriff, and he made a trip to check for pups at Bristo’s place. He didn’t find anything. At that time all the other animals were still there. Erv went back yesterday, and all the cages were empty, except for the one holding the ancient cougar.”
“What did Bristo do with the wolf pups?” asked Pearl.
Summer of the Wolves Page 8
