by Sue Henry
“Hi, trooper. O-o-oh, it’s getting cold out there.”
“Yup. Going to freeze tonight for sure. ‘O, it sets my heart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock, when the frost is on the punkin and the…ah…something’s…in the shock.’” He fanny-bumped the hand-hewn door shut, sealing out the invasive wind, and quickly set about divesting himself of boots and coat.
Jessie smiled, familiar with his periodic inclination to quote scraps of poetry, often in imprecise fragments.
“What’s that? Kipling?”
“Nope. James Whitcomb Riley…I think.”
Crossing the room in long strides, he leaned to kiss her welcoming mouth and cast a curious glance over her shoulder at the paperwork. “Whatcha working on?”
“Rest of the stuff for the last junior mushers training this week.”
“Glad to be almost done with it?”
“Yes, but all four of the kids I’ve been working with are doing really well. Two of the older ones want to come out to work in the lot this fall, and I can use the help with the young dogs. You hungry?”
“Starved…and something smells good in here.”
“Moose stew seemed like a good idea in this weather. Toss that pan of biscuits at the oven and we’ll eat as soon as they’re done. I’ll be through here in a minute.”
“Hey, making the biscuits is my job.”
“Yeah, well…I had an extra couple of minutes after I fed the guys, and I figured you’d be ravenous when you hit the porch.”
“Just buttering me up ’cause your birthday’s tomorrow,” he accused her, clattering the pan of biscuits into the oven. “Won’t work, you know. I’m wilier than that. Smell a bribe a mile away.”
Content in his presence, she watched him moving purposely in the compact kitchen, a grin on his face like that of a mischievous small boy with a secret, as he closed the oven, lifted the lid to peer at the stew, and fished a long-neck of Killian’s Irish Red Lager from the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. He held up a second bottle. “Want one?”
“No, thanks. When I finish this, I’m planning to dip into my sacred stash of Jameson.”
“I’ll get it. Ice water?”
“Yes, please. Now who’s buttering who up?”
“A little spoiling, maybe. Not buttering. I save buttering till I have a real reason for it. Then you’re in trouble, because no one butters better than I do.”
He stuck his head out of the kitchen space and twisted his face into a comic leer, waggling the wide handlebar mustache on his upper lip suggestively. “I could, however, be persuaded to do some kind of buttering later tonight, if you’re absolutely set on it.”
Jessie laughed and, realizing there was no chance of gathering her scattered concentration long enough to finish her work, abandoned it and began to collect and organize the papers she had spread out.
“Hey. Whatever. Dirty old men need love, too.”
Along with the clink of ice and glass, she could hear him at the sink, muttering a tongue-twister she had never been able to master—butter, obviously, still on his mind.
“Betty bought a bit of bitter butter, put it in her batter, made her batter bitter. Betty bought a bit of better butter, put it in her bitter batter, made her bitter batter better.”
Where had all this silliness come from? What could have put him into such an exuberant mood?
He brought her shot of Irish whiskey in a small snifter and set it, with a separate glass of ice water, in the space she had just cleared on the desk.
“What, no butter?”
“No butter,” he told her. “This is just a well-deserved ‘Happy Birthday.’”
Beside the drink, he laid a small package wrapped in gold paper and tied with a matching ribbon.
“Alex!” She swung around to look up at him over the back of her chair. “It’s not till tomorrow.”
“So? Tomorrow’s tomorrow. This is tonight’s birthday present. And, if you are really a good girl…”
She reached up, took hold of his shirtfront, and pulled his face down to give him a kiss.
“You…are too much.”
“Open it,” Alex directed, and laid a gently encouraging hand on the nape of her neck.
Jessie picked up the present and held it for a moment in the palm of her hand, considering. She hoped he couldn’t feel her heart beating wildly, for at first sight of the gift it had all but leaped from her chest. The package was tantalizingly close to the size and shape of a ring box. Was it? Did she want it to be? Slowly, she untied the ribbon and carefully loosened the tape, holding the paper to avoid tearing it.
Time. If this was what she suspected, she needed time to decide how to respond. Whenever the question of marriage had entered her mind, she had, with purpose and determination, resolutely shoved it aside. Now she found herself confused, both wanting and resisting the idea. Glad he was behind her, could not see her face, she held her breath and cautiously lifted the hinged lid of the jeweler’s box she had freed of its wrappings.
“Oh, Alex! O-o-oh!”
Against black velvet a pair of diamond studs for her ears caught fire in the light of the desk lamp.
Exhaling a sigh that could have meant anything, Jessie brushed them with the tip of one slightly trembling finger, then glanced up to see the delight in his eyes.
“They’re beautiful,” she started to say, but, halfway through the words, her throat closed without warning and his face swam in unshed tears that blurred her vision. How could one be both relieved and disappointed all at once? she wondered fleetingly.
Astonished, Alex dropped his arm to encircle her shoulders.
“Jess. Don’t you like them? What’s wrong?”
Then, without waiting for a response, he swept her up and carried her to the sofa, where he sat down, cradling her on his lap like a child, and tipped up her chin, so he could see her face.
“No…no.” She smiled, as the tears disappeared. “Nothing’s wrong. Really. I love them. They’re gorgeous. You just caught me off guard, that’s all. Surprised me. What a present!”
He reached to the arm of the sofa for a kitchen towel she had forgotten there and handed it to her.
“Oh. Well, of course I never gave anyone diamond earrings before, so how could I have known this was the traditional response? Here, love…wipe your face and put them on. I want to see.”
She hugged him hard for a moment and complied.
Much later, when they had eaten, washed the dishes, returned a reluctant Tank to the dog lot, and were half asleep in the big brass bed, under the quilt that glowed with northern lights as bright as those that pulsed across the autumn sky high over the cabin, Alex heard her whisper.
“Some kind of buttering, trooper. But we’d better be going somewhere tomorrow night where I can wear these!”
2
In the very early hours of morning, Jessie found herself suddenly wide awake and staring into the dark, filled with a strange tension.
A breath of wind whispered through the slightly open bedroom window, inspiring a small susurrus in the folds of the curtain. Then there was the soft, dry rustle of flying birch leaves against the glass, like spirit fingers scrabbling ineffectively to come in.
She lay without moving, listening hard. Instinctively knowing that no usual sound had raised her consciousness, she searched past those she could identify for something else. The sound was not repeated, though she held her breath till her chest ached with the strain of alert concentration, her body rigid. She could half-remember a sharp noise of some kind, then another—different. All her intuition insisted something was not right.
The wind eased as if drawing its breath, and deep beneath the lowering of it came a distant resonance, a moan…no, the pitch was too high…a whimper…of hurt, or distress? Tank barked, suddenly, twice, and was answered by a yelp or two from other locations in the yard. One of the huskies produced a single howl that faded into yips of disturbance.
Tossing back the covers, Jessie was quic
kly on her feet, switching on a small bedside lamp, throwing on the clothes she had shed when going to bed.
“Wha-at?” Alex asked, sleepily raising his face from the pillow to see her yanking a turtleneck sweater over her head. “What is it?”
Hurriedly, she yanked on socks and jeans.
“I don’t know. Something’s wrong in the lot. Maybe a moose has them going, but they don’t bark without a reason.”
He sat up and swung his feet over the side of the bed.
“Doesn’t sound like a moose. They get crazy for that.”
“I know. I’ll go see.” She slipped beyond the light into the front room, wending surefooted past dark furniture to her coat and boots by the door.
“Hold on. Let me get some clothes on and grab the shotgun.”
By the time he had snatched the gun from its hooks on the wall and, shirttail hanging, arrived at the front door, she was anxiously peering out the window, unable to see anything in the dark but the square shapes of the closest dog boxes, which were a little paler than their surroundings. He shrugged on his coat, crammed his bare feet into boots, plucked one large flashlight from a hook beside the door, and handed her another.
“Opening this door will automatically turn on the new lights,” he reminded her, tucking the rifle in the crook of his arm. “We could slide out through the kitchen.”
“No, it’s okay. We’ll need the light. Can’t see much otherwise, and I want to see, fast.”
As they stepped onto the porch, the motion-activated halogen floodlights on their tall pole blinked into instant brightness, casting a wide, white circle of light that illuminated both their trucks in the drive and extended far out into the lot. At a glance, there was nothing unfamiliar within the area it revealed.
Tank, closer to the cabin than the other dogs, strained toward Jessie as they came down the steps, pacing back and forth at the end of the tether that connected him to the iron stake near his box. He did not bark again, but whined and, when they reached him, turned and trotted ahead, as far as the tether would allow, toward the rest of the lot. There he stopped, and stared intently into the dark beyond the lights.
Several more dogs, inspiring each other, were now barking, making it impossible to hear anything else, though Jessie tried to ignore them, to identify once again the foreign sound that had brought her uneasily searching for its source.
“Let him go,” Alex suggested. “He knows what it is, and where.”
She unfastened her leader, but kept a tight grasp on his collar, knowing that the temptation of a moose would strain his usual disciplined behavior. Free of the line, he did not, however, hurl himself forward against her restriction, as she had half expected, but calmly, steadily drew her past the other dogs, into the dark half of the lot.
Okay, no moose. What, then? Jessie frowned.
“Show me, Tank. Good boy.”
As they moved between individual straw-lined shelters for the dogs, weaving a crooked path through the lot, and left the circumference of the light, her night vision improved, but not enough. She switched on the flashlight she carried and swung its beam ahead of them. Nothing. She could hear Alex walking quietly, close and slightly to one side. In the narrow beam of his light, she caught the glint of an aluminum food pan, the gold of straw spilling out the door of a box.
The husky pulled her forward until they reached the outer edge of the wide lot, the last row of boxes, close to a hundred yards from the cabin. A few feet from one box in particular, he halted, stared at it, and growled deep in his throat. Hackles rose along his neck and back, bristling under her hand. Her light showed nothing but the wooden side of it.
“Alex?”
He stepped up beside her, the shotgun ready for instant use, should he need it.
Then Jessie could hear it again, a muffled whining that came repeatedly, and the familiar wet sound of a dog licking something, but the sharp crack that had broken her sleep did not come a second time. She shone the light over the outside of the dog box. Alex’s light moved over the dirt that surrounded it, stopped, and returned to the ground close to the door.
Jessie caught her breath.
It was soaked with red—blotches of blood that continued into the box.
“God. What the hell?”
They stepped forward and leaned to peer cautiously in through the door. Her light found the dog that had struggled to crawl inside and lay on the straw facing them. The straw under it was also liberally stained with scarlet. The dog raised its head to look blindly into the flashlight beam, quivered, then resumed licking, but it had been enough for them to see the ugly metal trap that was clamped cruelly to the flesh of one foreleg.
“Oh, God! She’s caught, Alex.”
Jessie sprang up to heave the box over, off its base, frantic to get to her dog. The resulting crash startled the next husky into leaping, with a yelp, to the top of its own box.
“It’s Nicky. Oh…dammit. Where did that thing come from?”
She dropped to her knees beside the young female, which whined again and shivered in shock.
“Oh, Nicky. You poor baby.”
Alex held his light, while she raised the dog’s head so they could see the trap on the injured leg.
It was the sort of steel trap that was still sometimes used to capture wolves and other animals of somewhat large size, one that could be spread open, leaving its sharp, wicked metal teeth turned up, silently ready for the unwary to step into it and spring the release. It would then close its steel jaws with a vicious crack, imprisoning the victim, slashing hide and flesh, as it had this dog, probably breaking bone. It was not new, but still strong, though brown here and there with rust and layered with dirt, which made it seem even more loathsome.
“Help me, Alex. We have to get it off her.” Her voice was quiet, but terrible with anxiety and anger. “Can you open it if I hold her?”
“Yes, if you can keep her still.”
She slid forward and gathered the trembling canine body into her arms so that the dog’s front legs remained on the straw, holding Nicky’s head under one arm, the flashlight in the opposite hand so Alex could see what he needed to do.
Gripping the trap, pressing it solidly against the ground, he threw his weight onto it, forcing it open wide enough for her to lift away the injured leg, then quickly letting it go, allowing it to snap shut again with that awful sound—the sound Jessie had heard in her sleep. She flinched. Nicky yelped in sharp pain, and blood once again flowed from the crushed, severed flesh, but she did not snarl or bare her teeth, and the bleeding quickly slowed.
Tank whined, then growled again, staring off into the dark beyond the lot.
“Let’s get her to the porch and the lights,” Alex said, picking up the trap, “so we can see how bad it is. She’s going to need a yet.”
Jessie spoke not a word, but handed him her flashlight and rose, gently supporting the dog in both arms.
Slowly, carefully, they made their way back across the dog lot to the cabin. The floodlights, which had shut themselves off, once again blinked on as Jessie and Alex came within reach of the sensor.
Two hours later, back in the brightness before the cabin, Alex shut off the truck engine and turned to pull Jessie into the circle of his arms. All the way down the long road home from the veterinarian’s she had sat beside him, staring out the window into the passing dark, stiff and silent for the most part, the lines of tears streaking her face, lost in thought and distress. Twice he had attempted to encourage her to talk, failed, and, noting the rigid line of her jaw, let it go, knowing it was better to let her work through her anguish and anger gradually. Now she almost fell, unresisting, to lean against his shoulder.
They had left Nicky with the vet, whom they had roused from sleep with a phone call, and who had been waiting in his small hospital when they arrived in Wasilla. The dog’s trapped leg was broken, but the damage that concerned the vet most was that done to the muscles and tendons, and the possibility of infection.
“That trap may be old and rusty—God knows where it’s been—but it did a very effective job,” he said. “She’ll never be able to run with a team, Jessie. I think I can repair some of this, but only so much, and I won’t know how much till I try. The leg may not be salvageable. I’m sorry. Shall I put her down?”
“No!” Jessie had been adamant. “Oh, dammit anyway. No. She loves to run, but…”
She had been ambitious for this dog and was in the process of grooming her as a possible leader, but she had also grown more than usually fond of Nicky’s sweet nature and patience. Thoughtful for a minute or two, she watched as the vet made a more thorough examination, then frowned.
“She’ll be able to get around, right? In the yard, I mean.”
“Sure. She’d be fine with three legs, if it comes to that. Let me do what I can and we’ll just see how it goes as she heals.
She’s strong and healthy, like all your dogs, and she’s young. Give it a try?”
Jessie had agreed, all her focus on the dog and what was best for her. But on the road home Alex had seen her attention shift back to the idea of the trap and her anger renew itself.
Now, in the truck, he held her, saying nothing, waiting.
In a minute or two, she sighed and sat up.
“Let’s go in.”
“Yes. It’s getting cold in here. Make us a cup of tea, will you? I’ll be there in a minute.”
When she had gone inside and closed the door, he took the flashlight and walked back through the dog lot to Nicky’s box for another, longer look around it and those closest to it. It had crossed his mind that there might be other traps, but he found none.
The tea was welcome, as was the warm fire she had started in the stove. Alex sat cupping his palms around the heat of the mug, but Jessie couldn’t sit still in her chair at the table and was soon pacing between it and the kitchen.
“Where the hell did that…thing come from?” She gestured at the bloody trap he had laid on the table on a double thickness of newspaper. “I’ve never had traps, for this very reason. Too dangerous. With dogs around it’s a disaster.”
