Finding Creatures

by Casey June Wolf

didn't look toward me. Then we turned into a yard thick with bushes and old cars. Sitting in one of the cars was a girl around our age. She glanced over her shoulder and stiffened with surprise. She scampered out of the car, hanging on to a bent, half-naked doll. The girl didn't look a second time at Bobby or at me. She looked straight at Angel with a stricken expression.

  "Where did you go?!” she cried. Angel stopped in front of her and made her fluttery chuckle noise, and the girl burst into tears and threw her arms around the mare's neck.

  The girl, it turned out, was named Manjeet and to her, Angel was Sita. Over the rest of the summer, the list grew. Children who had played with Angel at lunchtime or on weekends. Lonely children seeing her for the first time. Children who'd spied her in their yards but never approached her. Children who had known her long ago, who thought they'd never see her again, and there she was, and there we were, too. One by one, we learned each other's names, and all the names for Angel.

  Somewhere in there, I tested my faith hypothesis. If it was prayer that had brought Angel to me, was it prayer that had brought her to the other kids?

  It didn't pan out. Bobby was a little bit Catholic, but he never prayed. Manjeet prayed to a different kind of God, or maybe several. I wasn't sure. Some of the kids were Protestants, and a lot weren't religious at all. If it wasn't faith, maybe it was wishing. Really, really hard. Or maybe it was being horribly lonely.

  Bobby's family began to attend St. Hyppolytus', our church, and he and I quickly “made friends". When Mom saw this she

  talked to Dad, and he talked to Bobby's parents and soon they were over in our yard having hotdogs. While the grownups talked shyly with each other, I took Bobby to the garden where I'd met Angel, then down to the ravine where I thought I'd found dinosaur prints a few days earlier. I showed him where they'd been—all you could see now were a few broken stems.

  "Wow,” he said. Then he pointed to the bulges on either side of my shorts.

  I pulled my men out of my pocket, and Bobby brought out soldiers of his own. We settled down in the weeds and started our war.

  "Down, Corporal!” Bobby hissed to one of his men. “The Jerries are in the bushes!”

  To my own men I whispered, “Vee hav zem, Kapitain. Zey cannot ezcape now!”

  A quiet crunch lifted my gaze. Seeing my attention shift, Bobby turned, too. It was Angel, pressing her way into the ravine. Manjeet was on her back.

  I didn't know how to react. I was always thrilled to see Angel. But no one ever rode her except me. The others might crowd around and pet her, but I never offered them a ride.

  I was stricken.

  "Angel!” Bobby said, as surprised as I was. He stood up, soldier in hand. Angel kept walking toward us, pulling here and there at the undergrowth, apparently with not a care in the world. Manjeet smiled apprehensively down at me. She slumped forward and clung to Angel's neck.

  Manjeet didn't dare descend. I wanted to ask her how often she rode Angel, but I couldn't. I wanted to talk to Angel, but everyone was there, and quiet. I thought I should finish the game with Bobby, pretend not to care, but I fell apart. Not loudly, like the time Angel disappeared. Not obviously, I hoped. Inside, like an old barn when the ceiling caves in but no one outside knows, unless they see the slight listing of the walls.

  It was the first time I'd felt awkward with my friends, and I hated Manjeet even though I knew it was wrong. Angel was my horse, wasn't she? My guardian angel. Even though she showed me all those other children, I couldn't believe she could love them as much as me. Or—God help me!—more.

  Angel lifted her head and looked at me. They had been there about five minutes by then. She walked over, made her fluttery sound, and nuzzled my hair. I raised a hand and stroked her silently, looking down at her softly flaring nostrils. Then at last I met her gaze and tears sprang into my eyes. She lifted her nose and rubbed it gently against my face, all scratchy, and huffed a few times and stared down at me. After several moments, she swung her head over to Bobby, who looked nervous and concerned. She rubbed her forehead roughly against his arm and he stumbled back a couple of steps. Then she turned around and started back up the ravine. Manjeet turned on Angel's back and looked at us. She looked a little sad. That hurt, even while I hated her.

  Once, I heard someone say that if you had enough faith, you could move a mountain. It didn't make sense to me. Why would you want to do that?

  But what else, what more important miracle could you effect? What could I do if I had faith enough? What would make me happy, but more importantly, what would also be right? I still wanted to do what was right—I did. But I couldn't kid myself that I would be happy being a horse and carrying other kids around any more—I didn't even let them sit on the horse I got to ride all the time. I couldn't pretend I didn't want Angel all to myself. And at that moment, I wasn't sure I had any faith at all.

  School began not long after Angel's final visit to my home. Bobby was in my class, and so were several children I recognized from my walks with her. A lot of us had no other friends in the neighbourhood. But we'd seen each other, and we all knew Angel, and so there was a certain trust already there. Shyly, with a smile, a

  shared pencil, a walk around the schoolyard at a time, we started making each other's acquaintance. We started to form a gang.

  "I know,” said a younger girl one day, who had known Angel two summers before and had found her twin sister through her. “Let's call ourselves Angel's Kids.”

  "Angel's Gang,” countered Gerry, who had a hole in his heart and was always pale and nervous about playing. “Like the Dewdrop Gang I heard about. It sounds more tough.”

  "I like Angel's Kids,” said Bobby. He looked at Manjeet.

  "Sita's Soldiers,” she said, thrusting her lip out.

  Me, I inclined toward Angel's Soldiers—or Dinosaurs—but I couldn't think how either one made sense, so I didn't mention them.

  We were haggling that way when Manjeet glanced up and her eyes went wide. “Look,” she whispered, pointing furtively toward the lane in front of the school. We all looked.

  It was Angel. She was walking quietly down the road with no one on her back. On the far side of her was an enormous animal with a wide, high crest sweeping up from the back of its head, and three long horns rising from its beaked face. It was walking in long strides, its belly high up off the ground, its tail—as thick as Manjeet was high—held out straight behind it.

  The triceratops would now and then shift its gaze back and forth, taking everything in. It stared over at us for a long moment and Angel turned our way, too. She tossed her red-black head and whinnied a loud greeting, which sailed out over the schoolyard like a trumpet blast.

  Most of the children, and the sisters who watched over the scene, did not respond. But here and there throughout the yard children raised their eyes in surprise, only to have them widen in amazement. And over by the school, where she had just stepped out of the shadows, was the nun Angel and I had followed, the one I had first stumbled onto in the woods, peacefully alone.

  She was staring in the direction of Angel and the dinosaur with unhidden shock. Her hands opened and the papers she was holding fell to the ground. Without hesitating, she stepped forward, down the stairs, through the gate and out toward the lane. She walked straight past Angel as if she didn't see her and stopped in front of the dinosaur.

  The bell rang and people lined up in two rows, girls in one, boys in the other. Sister St. Paul called to us to get in line. Then she followed our gaze to the sister and the triceratops standing on the road. She crinkled her forehead. “What are you staring at?” she asked.

  We looked at each other, then her.

  "We don't know, Sister,” Bobby answered. “We thought maybe we heard a noise.”

  Sister St. Paul shrugged and got back to work on the line-ups. In moments we were ready to file inside.

  At the door, I turned back one last time. I thought about moving mountains, and faith. This wasn't about faith, though. I kne
w that, and wondered if it was more even than loneliness that we all shared. Looking at my straggly crowd of new and almost friends, I felt happier than I had in a long time, since those first days hanging around on Angel's back. And looking at the sister who'd seemed so lonely that summer, I felt that happiness growing wider still.

  The sister laid a finger gently on the dinosaur's closest horn-tip, and the triceratops lifted its beaked face slightly and closed its eyes. A smile of wonder lit the nun's lips, and her linen neckpiece bent up and rose stiffly as she lifted her hand to trace the cheekbones and crest of the marvellous animal.

  I glanced along the road and into the trees on every side as we were ushered up the stairs and into the convent, stopping at the door for one last good look around. Manjeet met my eyes and smiled shyly. I felt my whole body relax as I smiled back.

  I turned slowly and stepped over the stone lintel.

  And I never saw Angel again.

  About the Author

  Casey June Wolf was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and transplanted to Vancouver in 1967. She writes occasional poems and speculative fiction stories, her most recent publication being “Posture of the Infinite” in Canadian Tales of the Fantastic Vol. IV (Red Tuque Books, 2014). Her single author collection Finding Creatures & Other Stories was published by Wattle and Daub Books in 2008.

  Other books by Casey

  “Claude and the Henry Moores”

  Go to my blog for other stories in podcast and online.

  And in the meanwhile you can order my print book:

  Finding Creatures & Other Stories

  To order, click here.

  For reviews, excerpts, and more, click here. 

  $15.95 plus postage and handling. 

  ISBN 978-0-9810658-0-9

  “Wolf uses different genres, different voices, different cultures—in short whatever she needs to make the story work. What ties it all together is her sure-handed prose and a depth she brings to her writing, that indefinable element that rises up from between the lines and gives a good story its resonance…”

  —from the introduction by Charles De Lint, author of 

   The Onion Girl and Dingo.

  Literary, science fictional, slipstream, and fantastic—this medley of stories is grounded in the present day, weaving backward to the life of Saint Francis, and forward to a time when Earth is a memory, and new humans are finding their place among the stars.

  Wolf’s characters grapple with personal integrity and connection with others, with the imperatives to abandon fear and hate and to question cherished beliefs. A Haitian street kid with a mercurial coin, a skid-row waitress with a passion for palaeontology, and aliens inadvertently trapped in sculptures by Henry Moore, journey side by side with a northern Native man searching for a place to bury a dead spaceman, and two teenagers who build an old-style science-fiction machine with a very modern purpose.

  Wolf’s unexpected approach to story telling interlaces humour, compassion, and a compelling affection for human and nonhuman with a fine-spun unorthodoxy in these understated tales of this world and beyond.

  Connect with Casey June Wolf

  You can find me at Twitter: https://twitter.com/CaseyJWolf

  at my blogs:

  Another Fine Day at the Scriptorium https://finedayscriptorium.blogspot.com

  and Den Page of Casey June Wolf https://cjunewolfden.blogspot.com