The Ouija Board told them that the anniversary would occur in six days. “So we ought to do something on that day, six days from now, to, not to celebrate but just to keep the day. Don’t you think that would be a good day to escape, to try to find the way out of here?”
Hreapha’s paw moved the planchette to “NO.”
“No? Why not? Do you like it here so much?”
Hreapha’s paw tapped the planchette as it was parked upon the “NO.”
“Are you afraid to try to get out of here with your pups and Robert and me?”
Hreapha moved the planchette to “YES.”
Robin pondered. At length she said, “Well, we can’t stay here forever, can we?”
Hreapha tapped the planchette at “yes.”
“That’s not fair!” Robin said, realizing her voice was whining. “I can’t go on living my whole life here and never seeing anybody ever again. I mean anybody human.” When Hreapha made no response to that other than continuing to stare at Robin with her soulful eyes, Robin at length said, “Okay, I guess we’ll keep the day of the first year by doing something special like planting the garden.”
And that is what she did. She spent the six days until that day working until she was exhausted, spading up as much of Sugrue’s garden space as she could possibly spade up. She wore her boots and stood up on the back of the tines of the spade and jumped up and down on them to force them into the soil. The third day it rained, so on the fourth day she discovered she could force the spade into the soil without jumping on it. By the sixth day, the awful anniversary of her captivity, she had enough of the soil turned over so that she could rake it and plant in it all the seeds that she had selected from the seed box. Unfortunately she did not know that some seeds must not be planted until after last frost, and these seeds did not take or the tender seedlings were killed when the last frost came a couple of weeks later. Worse than that, she had no idea how deep to plant seeds, and planted most of them too deep, although the potatoes she planted too shallow.
Robin was going to have to learn gardening by trial and error, and she was going to have to remember from one year to the next what mistakes she had made. She thought of her first year’s garden as a worse failure than her attempt to put a firkin together, but that wasn’t strictly true. She would, in time, reap what she had sown. The stomach is the best teacher. The harvesting in less than a month of the first radishes that she had planted were such a joy that she made a lunch of nothing but radishes, and was motivated to do something Sugrue had never been able to persuade her to do: keep the weeds out of the garden.
Her little garden plot covered less than a third of the space Sugrue had originally cleared for a garden, so she broadcast the wheat seeds over the other two thirds, and in time took an interest in watching the wheat come up and grow, and was informed by her Cyclopædia exactly when the wheat would be ready for harvest.
As the spring passed into summer and the hot sun bore down, Robin discovered that she really didn’t need any clothes. So she stopped wearing them. They were getting too small for her anyway, and she remembered that stupid Sugrue had never realized that she would outgrow all the new clothes he’d bought for her. She had already decided never to cut her hair again, and it was down to her shoulder blades behind and to her nipples in front, and when the breeze came, as it often did, it blew her hair all around her face and shoulders, and she loved the feel of the breeze as well as the smell of it. She discovered that the breeze in her hair felt better if she washed her hair and made it fluffy, and this alone gave her the motivation to keep her hair washed.
She recalled with amusement, as if watching a movie about somebody else, the Robin Kerr who could not stand to go barefoot even when all the other kids were doing it at recess. Now when she ran around without a stitch on, that included the stitches of her shoes. Sometimes she stepped on something sharp that caused her to yell, and a few times she stepped on something sharp that pierced the sole of her foot so that she had to run to the house and get out the first aid kit and apply antiseptic ointment and maybe a Band-aid. But her feet learned to love the feel of the cool moist earth.
When work was done, she played. She went back to the practice of taekwondo, and perfected it, with her kicks and thrusts and jabs. “Come out, Adam!” she hollered, “and I’ll give you a chagi in the nuts!” She knew that he was probably watching her. Probably he was even all excited to see a naked girl jumping around like that doing her taekwondo. In the evenings before dark when she was tired of reading the Bible stories or the Cyclopædia, she would get out the third book, the only other book in the house, the Nudist Moppets, and have some fun looking again at the displays and antics, and she understood full well that if men (including twelve-year-old in-habits) got so much fun out of looking at such pictures, then Adam was probably getting more than an eyeful.
One day when he made no response whatever to her inviting him to come out and get his nuts kicked, she hollered, “Come out, Adam, and I’ll give you a kiss!”
And sure enough, that brought him out. Here I am, his unmistakable young voice said, but I reckon I don’t need no kiss.
“You’ve been ignoring me for months!” she complained. “Where have you been, anyway? Gone fishing?”
You ort to know I caint be living with ye, much as I’d keer to.
“But can’t you answer simple questions? I wanted to know about wheat and flour and needed you to answer me. Did your folks grow wheat? Where did you get your flour?”
Down to Latha’s store, where everbody else got it.
“You mean the general store in Stay More? But how did you carry it home? An eighty-pound bag of flour would be awfully hard to carry on that terrible trail.”
I took a mule the long way around, on the trail that you came in on, what Grampaw called the North Way. It took a while, but I generally had to get a bunch of other things that Maw needed from the store. And I generally wanted to say howdy to Roseleen.
“Who was Roseleen?”
He was slow in answering, as if he didn’t want to tell her. I aint tole ye about her yet, but I reckon I will one of these days.
“But you bought all your flour at the store. You didn’t grow any wheat?”
Grampaw used to grow it out in yon meader, but it’d have to be took to town to the mill, so it was easier jist to buy the flour. Mill’s been shut down for many a year.
“Well, I can’t go to Latha’s store, and I’m nearly out of flour. I’ve got just enough to make maybe one more loaf of bread.”
I notice you’ve planted a little bit of wheat. Adam laughed, as if that were funny.
“So what can I do? Do you know how to turn wheat into flour?”
I reckon it could be done, if you put your mind to it.
“Thank you, Adam,” she said, but before he could go away again, she added, “I’m sorry I said that about giving you a kiss. You don’t even have any lips, do you?”
Chapter thirty
Ma, are all people as little as Mistress? Hrolf was full of such questions, but she didn’t mind answering them. She was glad to see that Hrolf was not going to merely accept the world as it was without wanting to understand it. The other pups—and they weren’t exactly pups any more; in dog age they were already as old as Robin—rarely asked her any questions other than, When can we eat, Ma? She considered the possibility that the answers she gave Hrolf to all of his questions were passed along to his brothers and sisters, for Hrolf was the natural leader of the pack, as he had been the firstborn male.
She had explained to all of them, as soon as they were able to understand her, that Robin was their Mistress, the boss, the lady of the house, and they must not only refrain from biting her, chewing her garments or playing tug of war with them, disturbing her paper dolls and stealing her food, but also they should always obey her and worship her and be faithful to her unto death. Later, when Hreapha had begun to regale them with anecdotes and narratives, she told them stories about the man, the man who ha
d set up this house and kidnapped Mistress long ago and then had died. Hrolf was full of questions about the man and even wanted her to describe the “vehicle” that the man had supposedly owned as a means of transportation. Will I ever be able to ride in a pickup? he wanted to know. I doubt it, she answered, but there are things to do that are a lot more fun than that.
Like what? He wanted to know.
Chasing coons, she said. She explained that while he and his sisters and brothers weren’t really coon hounds—or any other kind of raccoon dog, for that matter, they probably had instincts for chasing coons and foxes and squirrels, not for man’s benefit but for their own.
What’s a instinct? Hrolf wanted to know. Hrothgar’s end stinks but mine don’t.
Hreapha chuckled. You can’t smell an instinct. It’s something you’re born with, something you don’t have to learn, something that tells you what to do, makes you do what you do without even thinking about it.
Hrolf thought about that for a while, and then he asked, Is Adam an instinct?
No, he’s an in-habit. You can’t smell him either. And you sure can’t see him, but you can hear him, can’t you?
I sure can, Hrolf said. He talks to me a lot.
Does he? asked Hreapha. What does he talk about?
He tells me what a good dog I am. And that time when the thunderstorm came and scared the piss out of all the rest of you he told me not to be afraid because it was just noise and it wouldn’t do me no harm.
You’re his favorite dog, she said. You’re mine too but don’t tell any of them I said that. Thunder doesn’t scare you, and even snakes don’t scare you, but you’d better listen to me, boy, snakes can kill you if you mess with the wrong kind. Thunder can’t hurt you but snakes can bite you to death.
I just don’t like them thinking they own the place.
They don’t own it, but you don’t either.
Hreapha’s biggest problem in the education of her offspring was trying to teach them that all of this vast wilderness in which they lived was not theirs to defend. There were even limits to how far they should mark up the immediate neighborhood—Adam’s haunt—to establish their territory, and they had to know those limits, and if other creatures encroached upon their territory they had to be willing to share. Hreapha herself didn’t like the encroachment, and she still remembered that incident of the hawk who had tried to attack the chickens (a story she had told more than once to her pups, at their request), but she did her best to instill in her brood a knowledge of the difference between harmful and benevolent creatures, while assuring them that even the most harmful creature doesn’t consider itself harmful, that a rattlesnake is just doing its job with its instinctive behavior and theoretically has just as much right to be here as we do. Still, it is good to know the difference between a rattlesnake and a king snake, the latter not only unafraid of the former and immune to its poison but also not poisonous itself. In fact, Hreapha was seriously considering giving Robin a baby king snake for her next birthday, which was coming up soon. It would make an excellent pet.
The present she’d given Robin for her previous birthday was getting rather stale. Robert spent less and less of his time around the house these days. Possibly, Hreapha realized, he was out searching the forest for a female. Or he was certainly searching the forest for food, since Robin was not able to feed him anything any more. They had made clear to him that he was not ever even to think about eating one of the chickens, and he had certainly become so friendly with the beaver family on his many visits to the beaver pond with Robin and the others that he would never consider recognizing his mother’s instinctive appetite for beaver. Robert was sometimes gone for weeks. He’d always come back, with no stories to tell or any sign of having been in a fight or an adventure of any kind. The young dogs were always glad to see him, despite their instinctive aversion for felines. And Robin always picked him up and held him and listened to him purr, and Robert still loved her, but he wasn’t truly a pet any more and it was time Robin had a new one.
The young dogs were quickly growing almost as large as Robert was, and he was practically full grown. Hreapha realized that soon she would have to honor her promise to take them hunting for something larger than the squirrels and rabbits they were constantly catching for supper in the nearby forest. Hrothgar especially needed some excitement. Early in life he had developed a compulsion to chase his tail and even to inflict bites upon it, and she needed to provide some exercise for the lad.
All of them had a regular chore which gave them a certain amount of useful activity; Hreapha called it the garbage detail. Trash and empty tin cans regularly accumulated in the house, and Robin, who wasn’t a very neat housekeeper, usually just tossed them out the door. Hreapha taught her brood how to dig holes at a distance from the house and bury the garbage and then cover it up.
I don’t get it, Hrolf had complained, the first time his mother introduced him to this accomplishment. What good does it do me, since I don’t even get to eat anything from the cans any more?
Hrolfie, we must always do anything and everything we can to make life easier for Mistress.
Why can’t she bury her own garbage? I’ve seen her using a shovel.
Listen, boy, and don’t ever forget: she is Mistress and we must honor her and worship her and sacrifice for her and please her.
Whether he passed that message along to his siblings or not, there weren’t any more complaints about their chores.
Hreapha did have a bit of a problem teaching them something that basically ran against their instincts: that they must never harm deer, especially not fawns. She taught them that fawns have no scent, and because the coloring of their coats looks like the leaves and stuff in which they sit, they often cannot be seen. Their mothers deliberately leave them all alone out in the open, because the mothers don’t want their own scent to draw any predators. So if Hreapha’s young dogs should happen upon a fawn, they should treat it like a copperhead or rattlesnake and stay away from it.
That’s not fair! Hrolf protested. They really look good to eat! My instincts tell me to eat them!
Listen, the reason you are not merely a dumb dog but an intelligent canine is that you can use your head and convince yourself that fawns are too innocent and beautiful to be eaten, regardless of what your instincts are telling you.
Hreapha considered capturing an orphaned fawn and presenting it to Robin as a ninth birthday pet, but she decided to wait until Robin’s tenth, or even, if a king snake were presented for the tenth, the eleventh. By the age of eleven Robin would fully appreciate the young deer and would know how to provide a home for it without completely domesticating it…just as Robert’s long residence in the company of a human had not, apparently, taken away his wildness.
So it was decided, eventually, practically on the eve of the birthday (again determined with help from the Ouija Board), that Robin’s ninth birthday present would be a baby raccoon. The woods of Madewell Mountain were not exactly teeming with raccoons—a coon needs at least two hundred acres to itself—but they were out there, and Hreapha had entertained her pups endlessly by speaking of the out there and all it contained. She would never tell them of the many trips she had taken with the man to the large towns far away, because she didn’t want them to feel deprived of something they might never experience in their lives. And she hadn’t yet told them about the tiny village of Stay More. Only Hrolf had been curious about the identity of his father, and Hreapha was surprised that he had even learned the concept of “father” without yet knowing anything about reproduction. She had answered his questions by describing what a beautiful beast Yowrfrowr was, and not simply beautiful, but intelligent beyond all comprehension.
Where does he live? Hrolf wanted to know. Why can’t I go visit him?
Someday you can, she told him. But it’s a long ways off, and nearly impossible to get to.
Often, at night, if they listened carefully, they could hear the distant calling of the coyotes, a sound which
always excited Yipyip, who would prance around speaking his name whenever he heard it. Hreapha had explained to them that a coyote is an attractive but uncouth dog and that a pack of them prowled the forests out there. Hreapha hoped that the coyotes would never come around here, and she hoped it would be a long time before her young dogs would have to fight them. Just as her own mother had done for her, Hreapha had taught her pups all the skills of fighting, and they sparred with each other constantly and sometimes with her. Hrolf wasn’t the best fighter. In a tussle between Hrolf and Yipyip, the latter was usually top dog. So Hreapha knew that if the time ever came when her dogs had to fight the coyotes, the coyotes would probably win.
Raccoons are vicious fighters, and the first time Hreapha took the dogs coon hunting they not only failed to kill any of the quarry they encountered, but they themselves, Hreapha included, came away scratched and bloody. And the coons had an unfair advantage in that they could climb trees. Hrolf once remarked, If God had allowed dogs to climb trees, we would be the lords of the earth.
Where did you hear about God? Hreapha wondered.
Mistress talks about Him, Hrolf said. He’s the one who made me and you and everything.
But the second time they went coon hunting, knowing what to expect and even practicing in advance, they tracked a coon until it came to a clearing, without a tree in easy reach, and all six of them pounced upon it at once, killed it quickly, and ate as much of it as they could separate from its fur. They decided that coon is much more palatable than possum or squirrel. The latter, after all, is just a rodent, while the raccoon is cousin to the bear. Speaking of bears, they had occasionally come across some bear scat, and learned the scent, and they knew that there was a family of black bear somewhere out there, but Hreapha knew they would have to wait a long time before they were big enough, strong enough, and smart enough, not to say brave enough, to go bear-hunting.
With Page 28