Four and a half days at Scotia Lake. They should have been pushing west and north, but instead they’d lingered where the food was easy at the risk of being spotted. He’d known it was a mistake even as they’d done it. The howling had been bad enough the night of the fireworks, but now the little blond girl had gotten a good long look at him and an even better look at the dogs. He’d heard her shout as they were running from the clearing, “Hey, Diane! DIANE! Over here! Oh my God! You’re never going to believe this!”
Whoever Diane was, she’d believe it, all right. She’d believe it, and her parents would believe it, and the county sheriff’s office would believe it, too. There was nothing to do but move as far and as fast as possible and always keep away from the roads-the old plan. The only plan he’d ever had. They’d covered maybe two miles as the light waned. If they pushed hard the next day they could cover another three or four straight through the forest.
There was some good news, at least. The Zebco fishing rig, being a stubby affair, had survived their mad dash. Once they’d crossed the forest road, Edgar had cut off the hook and embedded it in the makeshift cardboard hook-book he kept in his back pocket. Afterward, he’d managed to thread the rod through the underbrush by tucking it under his arm. The other good news was how perfectly the dogs had translated the guarding game. It had been lovely to see them move through the sunlight toward the little girl. Part of Edgar had wanted to stand and watch them. Once they had surrounded her, whenever she moved, whenever she even shifted her weight, one of them pressured her back into place. And when it was time to run, they’d kept close and quiet.
Essay lay with her head beside Edgar’s knee. He listened to her stomach growl and began the arithmetic again: on foot, breaking a trail and having to sidetrack for food and water, they might advance three solid miles a day. Ninety miles in a month. It was early July. He hoped it wasn’t more than one hundred miles to the Canadian border. That put them where he wanted to go by mid-August.
He was going to need a map soon. They were still in the Chequamegon, but if they made steady progress, they wouldn’t be for long.
THE NEXT MORNING A MIST began to fall so fine it coalesced in beads on the dogs’ fur. By noon the mist had turned to rain, and when a high-skirted pine presented itself, they scuttled beneath to wait out the weather. Half an hour later, the pelting rain was deafening. Sheets of water swept across their knee-high vista. Their adopted tree shed water erratically; without warning, a chilly gush would cascade through the core of the tree and onto their backs. When he was willing to take on more water, Edgar poked his head from beneath the tree’s hem to look for a break in the clouds. The dogs alternated between groaned complaints and half-sleep, trotting into the rain to urinate and returning, shaking out at the fringe of the tree, or sometimes-to everyone’s displeasure-beneath it. The air beneath the pine began to reek of wet dog. After a while Edgar could find no position that was both comfortable and dry. His bones began to ache. Only Baboo passed the time with equanimity, head on paws, hypnotized by the sight of falling water, sometimes even rolling on his back to watch the proceedings upside down.
At first Edgar’s thoughts were practical: they needed to keep moving. He measured his own hunger to gauge how the dogs might feel. He’d gained a sense for how long they could go without. Skipping a day, he thought, would leave them distracted but not in danger. They were used to a little hunger now. In fact, except for the discomfort, there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with spending a day sitting under a tree. Hadn’t they done pretty much exactly that for the previous three days?
But something in his mind made him fidget as the day passed, something he didn’t want to think about. For the first time since they’d crossed the creek at the back of their land he felt genuinely homesick, and once that began, the litany of memories quickly overwhelmed him. His bed. The sound of the creaky stairs. The smell of the kennel (which their time beneath the tree was reminding him of ever more powerfully). The truck. The apple trees, surely heavy with green fruit by now. His mother, despite the tumult of emotions surrounding her in his mind. And most ferociously, he missed Almondine. Her image appeared accompanied by a spasm of pure wretchedness. The dogs with him were fine dogs, astonishing dogs, but they weren’t Almondine, who bore his soul. Yet he kept making plans to go farther away from her and he didn’t know when he would ever be back. He couldn’t go back. His last image of her was that despondent posture, lying in the kitchen, tracking him with her eyes as he turned away. Her muzzle had grayed so in the last year. Once upon a time, she had bounded down the stairs ahead of him and waited at the bottom; lately, there had been mornings when she’d tried to stand but failed, and he’d lifted her hindquarters and walked alongside as she navigated the steps.
But what she’d lost in agility she’d gained in perception-in her capacity to peer into him. How had he forgotten that? How had he forgotten that in the months after his father’s death, she alone could console him, nosing him at precisely the instant to break some spiral of despair? How had he forgotten that some days she’d saved him simply by leaning against him? She was the only other being in the world who missed his father as much as he did, and he’d walked away from her.
Why hadn’t he understood that? What had he been thinking?
He needed only to close his eyes to feel all over again the sensation of his father’s hands reaching into him, the certainty that his heart was about to stop. The memory was too dazzling, like the memory of being born-something that, if recalled in full, would destroy a person. He couldn’t separate it from the image of his father lying on the kennel floor, mouth agape, and that final exhalation Edgar had pressed from his body. Then he thought of Claude and the look on his face when Essay had trotted up to him with the syringe in her mouth, and of the white dandelion and the patch of white grass that had surrounded it. And he thought of Doctor Papineau, eyes open and head turned at the bottom of the workshop stairs.
He was stumbling through the rain before he knew what he was doing. He didn’t care what direction he traveled, only that he moved. When he looked down, the dogs were bounding alongside. His wet clothes had warmed to the temperature of his body, but the rain flushed away the heat. He flung himself through the brush, bursting through thickets, stumbling and standing and running again. For the first time since they’d left home, true meadows appeared. Twice they crossed gravel roads-strange, unbroken lines of rusty mud. All of it washed through him, washed the thoughts away. The rain became a senseless tapping on his skin, neither warm nor cold, and he welcomed it. A July rain should never have stopped them. The danger had been in staying still so long. They encountered many fences now, some downed and rusty and more dangerous because they were difficult to see. He stripped blueberries from their stems wherever he found them and held them out to the dogs, who rolled them in their mouths and reluctantly swallowed. The cardboard holding the fishhooks dissolved in his pocket and the hooks began to poke his skin. He spent an hour standing naked from the waist down, extracting the hooks and wrapping them in layers of birch bark, and when he finished, his fingertips were puckered and raw.
Near twilight the clouds fractured and the rain let up. Tracts of deep blue appeared in the sky. They were within sight of a small hayfield of perhaps fifty acres at the far end of which stood a lone old barn. He stripped off his sodden clothes and bedded them down inside the edge of the woods. Before any but the brightest stars shone, the four of them lay overlapped and sleeping at the rim of the Chequamegon.