Fauna (19 page)

“You won’t tell them, will you?” she wailed.

“Tell who?”

“My parents. My father. About the test.”

“You’re not being graded here, Kate. This is supposed to help.”

“Oh.”

“Here.” He pinched the test by its corners and tore it in two. “Forget about the test. Forget about your parents for a minute if you can. What about you?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What do you want to be?”

“I …” She’d never felt so stupid. “I don’t know.”

“Okay, let’s put it this way. What makes you happy?”

She didn’t need to think to answer that one. She’d scarcely been able to believe her luck when Mr. and Mrs. Dove from down the block had asked her to look after their pets over Christmas break. Besides the two cats, Karl and Kitten, there was the Lassie-dog, Sally, and a cockatoo named Roger, who screamed whenever she set foot inside their door.

Daddy didn’t like it one bit. More often than not, when she scooped the Doves’ house key from the bowl in the front hall, he called out from the kitchen, or the armchair where he sat watching the flickering news,
The zookeeper is off again
. And when she came back,
Ah, the zookeeper returns
. His commentary grew more colourful as the days wore on.
Did you wash your hands, zookeeper? Who knows what nastiness you’re touching over there
. Or,
I hope you’re not sitting down on their sofa. I don’t want any fleas in this house
.

She couldn’t help but answer back from time to time.

“They don’t have fleas.”

“Oh, no? And how would you know, miss? If you know so much, tell me this: why don’t these people have any children, the way nature intended? Why so many animals and not one single child?”

Kate spent as much time as she could on the job. She took her time walking Sally, adding another block to the snowy circuit whenever they went out. She washed the food and water dishes every morning before filling them, even though Mrs. Dove had said every few days would be fine. She even fashioned cat toys at home—barrettes like silver butterflies
clipped to lengths of dental floss. Roger stopped screaming at her and began to talk. He mostly said
cocky
, but once there was something that sounded a lot like
Kate
.

“Kate?” Mr. Talbot was watching her, waiting for her reply.

“Animals,” she said. “Animals make me happy.”

He smiled. “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.”

Daddy said nothing when she told him about the veterinary technician program at Seneca College. Not one word. He kept it up for three months, by which time her classes had already begun.
Tell your daughter she should eat a better breakfast. Ask your daughter where she put the remote
.

She thought that was as mad as he could get, but now he won’t even speak to her through Mummy, and it’s already been more than a year. Little wonder it took her so long to work up the guts. There were moments when she came close to spilling the beans—her head a tightly packed jar, a dip of the chin all it would take to release the clattering stream. Somehow she maintained the seal. Month after month she promised herself she would tell them—would tell Mummy, at least—when the time was right. Even after Lou-Lou died, she managed to keep it all in. When Mummy offered to go with her to the funeral, Kate spoke evenly into the receiver, assuring her there was no need.

The shock made it almost easy. From the moment she’d let herself in the front door to find Lou-Lou dead of a massive brain aneurysm, Kate had entered an underwater world. She was walking, sitting, lying on the ocean floor.

Then came the second shock. In her grief, Kate hadn’t given a thought to the house. Lou-Lou had. She’d changed her will seven months after Kate moved in. She’d been that
certain, even then. Even though Kate had gone to the clinic’s annual picnic without her, saying it was a staff-only event. Even though they’d spent every Sunday dinner and all of their first Christmas apart.

There was only one way to be worthy of that kind of love. The following Sunday, when Daddy asked her, “Why so glum?” and Mummy said quietly, “Vic, you know her friend passed away,” Kate felt herself coming up for air.

“Not friend, Mummy.” She turned to look her father in the eye. “I’m sad because I loved her, Daddy. I’m sad because my lover died.”

It’s not the only time Brother’s come to Guy in his sleep, though it is the first time in years. In life he made more sound, butting the bedroom door open when it was cold enough for him to be kept in at night, scrambling up the clapboard outside Guy’s window during the other three quarters of the year. Either way, he invariably announced his arrival with an emphatic
mrrrph
, the sound of a living engine turning over, the first, vibrating hiccup of his home-safe purr.

Ghost-Brother, by contrast, comes in silence, swimming through the darkened room to find Guy lying on his side. The living Brother would wait for a groggy Guy to pat the mattress—that springy-soft, welcoming sound—but the phantom cat needs no such invitation. He knows that the space between Guy’s body and the edge of the bed belongs to him.

He rises with a flick of his tail, not a hop but a hover.
His four white feet touch down where the sheet hammocks against Guy’s belly, his silvery weight drawing it taut. Guy stirs—not into wakefulness, but into the reality of the dream. Brother has come to sleep alongside him. His beloved pet has returned.

Both of their bodies remember. Brother makes a brief knot of his length, then unties it and lays it out long. The back of his skull rests against Guy’s collarbone; the pads of his hind feet touch Guy’s knee. His front paws cross like a pale prisoner’s hands, extending beyond the mattress into air.

Guy’s right arm is tucked away beneath his pillow. His left curls down as Brother settles, his hand landing where the belly fur lies thickest, where the skin can be gathered up gently and held. The purr is soundless, but Guy can feel it humming in his fingers. The warmth of a long-dead body. For a time the sleep they share is sound.

J
im Dale was tall—the tallest man Edal had ever seen. His hair and beard were black, but in the cold classroom light they showed purple like the slash on a duck’s wing. His age was hard to pin down; he acted like a dad while he told them about skinning a moose, but grinned like a kid during his joke about two squirrels and a bear. Her mother was thirty—Edal’s twelve years plus the eighteen Letty’d had under her belt when she’d given birth—but it was difficult to compare women and men. One thing was certain: Jim Dale was old enough to know everything worth knowing about the natural world.

When Grandpa Adam was still alive, Edal would sometimes join him on his daily walk through the woods, the pair of them passing hand in hand through the gateway formed by the twin red pines. He spoke rarely once they’d left the yard. When something took flight overhead, or slithered across their path, he would give her fingers a squeeze, pointing out the flash of feathers, the disappearing slip of tail.

Once he was gone, she went alone. Short forays at first—she was only six—but Nana was too sick to mind, and Letty was too busy looking after her to notice, so Edal ventured deeper by the day. She remembered which trees stood where, even if she had no names for them, and she mourned the fallen after every storm. She knew only the simplest words for the creatures she caught sight of,
mouse
or
squirrel
or
bird
.

They learned a little in school
—bear
and
moose, birch
and
maple
—but it wasn’t until the proprietor of Jim Dale Outfitters on Dogleg Road came to visit her class that Edal awoke to the mass of all she didn’t know. It weighed on her like shame. She fretted over it on the school bus home, three rows back in her usual spot, the seat beside her unclaimed. The walk up the winding driveway only made it worse. Maple trees lined the margin, but what kind? Jim Dale had mentioned sugar, white and black, as well as several others she couldn’t recall.

The solution came to her as she pushed her key into the front-door lock. The house was lousy with knowledge. Surely in all her mother’s sprawling, dust-furred jumble there lay something she could use.

Little light penetrated the front hall—a single column from the frosted window in the door and, down the far end, dim spillover from the panes above the kitchen sink. Edal set down her backpack and squinted to read the spines of the nearest stack.

She found four books in the hour or so before her mother came home. Nothing from the front hall, but the mound behind the couch yielded up
Trees, Shrubs and Flowers to Know in Ontario
and
Tracking: The Subtle Art
. Upstairs on Nana’s
dressing table,
Canada’s Many Mammals
was a brick in the untidy pyramid that hid the oval mirror from view. The last discovery was in rough shape.
Ontario Birds
was one of several dozen swollen paperbacks piled up between the toilet and the tub.

Letty didn’t like her books to leave the house, but Letty would never know.
Ontario Birds
wasn’t a field guide as such, but it helped Edal narrow down what to look and listen for, depending on where she stood. Ovenbirds called
preacher
in the undergrowth; grackles squawked like neglected hinges down where the creek mislaid its purpose and became a waterlogged stand of stumps.
Wick, wick, wick
could be a yellow-shafted flicker, but
wack, wack, wack
meant a pileated woodpecker, drummer of the woods.

There were line drawings in black ink: an osprey snatching up a fish from the shallows, a chimney swift clinging to brickwork, a ruffed grouse tilting to land. Edal found herself returning to the pair of turkey vultures on page sixty-four—one soaring in the distance, the other hunched in the foreground, meeting the reader’s eye.
The Turkey Vulture builds no nest. It deposits two, sometimes one or three eggs on the ground beside a stump or within a hollow log or cave in some wooded wilderness
.

She dreamt of coming upon such a cache. A single egg would be best,
creamy white, blotched with rich reddish brown and pale lavender
. She wouldn’t touch it, but she would return every day, creeping close in time to witness the hatching, the bare black face and downy body slick with yolk. Eventually the parent birds would come, banking down between the trees to land heavily on the shadowed ground. Neither would
cry out to its young; they were silent birds, save for the odd croak or hiss. They would bring food in their mouths, their throats, even their stomachs—
tidbits from the putrefying carcass of a horse or hare
. Looking out from the brush, Edal would understand what the book’s author had understood before her, that
what seems a gruesome ritual may in fact be a labour of love
.

Throughout the book, the body parts of certain species appeared in isolation: the heron’s beak a massive darning needle, the cormorant’s foot a webbed and sinister hand. Figure Six showed a flying gull, and beneath it, the same bird in the same attitude—only plucked. Edal had held many feathers to the light, but the naked gull was what made her see. Plumage allowed for streamlining, waterproofing, warmth. Not to mention beauty. Not to mention flight.

Perhaps oddest of all, Figure One presented a crow’s skeleton standing upright as in life. It took pride of place opposite the first chapter, with its question of a title: “What is a Bird?” The bone-crow offered only a partial answer. Animal and not animal. Not entirely of this earth. In evolutionary terms, birds could be thought of as reptiles with long, elaborate scales. Except for a certain four-chambered creation. The bird heart was close to mammalian, cousin to the quartered organ that kept time in Edal’s own chest.

Canada’s Many Mammals
helped her get her bearings too. She hadn’t far to look: porcupines gnawed the porch steps; cottontails lived in the back brush pile; raccoons mined the compost, retreating to keep watch from the cottonwoods whenever Edal came bearing the ice cream bucket full of scraps. The large, moon-coloured rat she’d watched trailing its
many babies across the yard was in fact a Virginia opossum; if she were ever to come upon one curled motionless on its side, she’d know better than to believe it was dead.

It appeared she’d been safe enough trusting the woods. The weasel family were consummate killers, but were bent on smaller prey. Lynx were the ghosts of the forest, and she’d have been lucky to get within a stone’s throw of a coyote, let alone a wolf. Foxes could be a problem when rabid, but she had yet to see one come wobbling with foam on its lips. As for bears, they were out there, all right, but they tended to be shy. She could remember going with Grandpa Adam to watch them paw over the dump.
Just be careful you don’t surprise one. Be sure and let him know you’re there
.

She longed to come across an otter, but suspected the creek was too shallow to sustain such a find. In the meantime she made do with the beaver pond. It was a long walk—beyond the culvert that fed beneath the highway—but well worth it. Surrounded by sharpened stumps of standing-beaver height, the pond featured a good-sized dam, as well as the grassy mound of a lodge. Flat tails slapped warning. Dark bodies slipped between lily pads, came slithering down muddy banks.