Our Animal Hearts

by Dania Tomlinson

  The sky had turned purple. Llewelyna was a ways down the shore now, her yellow dress flapping in the wind. I shot after her. My father reached for my arm and caught my elbow, but I twisted loose and ran towards Llewelyna, who was blazing ahead like flame. She turned around once to see me running, but kept walking away. “Wait!” I yelled after her. She didn’t change her pace and disappeared behind a bend of land. When I finally caught up to her I pulled at the back of her dress to stop her from moving away from me. In my grasp I accidentally clutched a handful of her hair. She whipped around and in one fluid motion slapped me across the face. I fell back against the stones and held my hand to my hot cheek. For a moment I thought she would apologize, comfort me, but her face settled back into itself, unseeing.

  “Leave me alone,” she said, and walked away.

  I ran back through the birches and into the thick bushes, not stopping to step over the patch of poison ivy or protect my eyes from the whip of branches. The salt of my tears stung my eyes and blurred my vision. I slipped through the back door of our house just in case Jacob and my father were already home. I wrapped the fish in my shawl and placed it in a potato sack I found in the coal room. Then I went into Jacob’s room and gathered his jackknife and the matches from beneath his bed.

  My father and Jacob still hadn’t returned from the shore. I ran to the fence that separated our yard from the Bells’ and easily climbed it. The sack clanged behind me on the ground when I jumped down on the other side. I checked the jar to make sure I hadn’t broken it. Through the window of the Bells’ shed I could see the polished guns glowing in the cabinet. I wiggled a bit of wire in the lock on the door as I had seen Jacob do before, but it did nothing. I moved to the window and pushed; it gave slightly. I pushed again. The latch strained against my force. Something whipped through the grass towards me. The greyhound sped around the corner barking. I fell back in the grass and the dog jumped on me and licked my face.

  “Edward!” Mr. Bell called from the house. “Edward, come.” The dog ran out from behind the shed towards Mr. Bell. Once the dog was gone I pushed at the window one last time and it gave way. The gun cabinet inside was locked. I rummaged through some drawers and found a pistol wrapped in cloth. I slipped back out the window and put the pistol in my sack. Mr. Bell and the dog were nowhere in sight. I lifted myself back over the fence and landed awkwardly on the other side.

  “Iris?” It was Yuri. He stood in the near dark with a stack of firewood in his arms. “What are doing?”

  “Running away,” I whispered. Yuri placed the firewood in the woodpile and came back brushing his hands on his pants. “Please don’t tell anyone. And don’t you dare try and stop me.”

  “I’m coming,” he said.

  “I’m not joking around, Yuri.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t have time to wait around,” I said. “I’m leaving right now.”

  “I’m ready.” He shrugged.

  “Well I guess it might be nice to have someone to talk to. Just don’t get in the way.”

  “I won’t.”

  I could hear Jacob and my father walking up the drive. I peeked around the corner of the house. My father’s hand rested in Jacob’s red hair. I pushed myself up against the house and motioned for Yuri to do the same. We ran from behind the house, past the well, the outhouse, and into the forest. It was much darker among the trees. We followed the invisible path I had learned from Henry. Once we were a safe distance from the orchard, I stopped at a bush to pick saskatoons. They were hard to see in the near dark.

  “What’s on your legs?” Yuri asked.

  I looked down; red bumps had spread along my calves. Until then I had forgotten about the poison ivy. Seeing the rash made it itch.

  “It’s nothing.” I passed him my shawl to hold while I placed handfuls of berries into it.

  “Do you even know where we’re going?” Yuri asked once we returned to the path.

  “It’s too late tonight, but in the morning we’ll make it over the hills to Oyama, where the two lakes meet.”

  “What’s there?”

  I had no idea what we would find there. I had never been to Oyama, but Henry often spoke of the place where the brown lake and the green lake kissed and he and his father had once hunted groundhog.

  “You’ll just have to wait and see,” I said.

  “This is exciting. We’re like frontiersmen.”

  I smiled, thankful in that moment I had brought him along, although I wished desperately that things could be undone and it was Azami with me instead.

  “Where will we sleep tonight?” he asked. “I can build a lean-to. I’ve done it before. We’ll just need some thick brush and—”

  I stopped beneath the tree fort and pointed up. The wind chimes Azami and I had made still hung from the branches. They jingled in the darkness. Yuri followed me up the ladder. He inspected the fort while I laid out our supplies.

  “How did you find this place?” he asked.

  “Henry showed it to me. I think he came here when he was a boy.”

  “I heard Henry killed a man.”

  I shrugged. “If he did, the man deserved it.” I lit my reading candle with a match. It was completely dark outside now. We ate our fill of berries and then lay on our backs and stared at the stars through the hole in the roof where the tree went through. I sat up suddenly, remembering my rash, and scratched furiously at my legs.

  “Stop that. You’ll only make it worse.” Yuri pulled me back down beside him and took my hand in his. The itch was becoming unbearable. Tears bubbled at the corners of my eyes. “You need something to take your mind off it.” He was silent for a moment. “Did you bring any playing cards?” Yuri kept his fingers intertwined with mine. I shook my head. The shadows of bats or kami flitted past our patch of sky and set the wind chimes ringing.

  “Why did you run away, Iris?”

  “I’ve always wanted to.” This wasn’t exactly true but rather an appetite I had taken on from the novels I read. All interesting characters wanted to run away.

  “But there must be a reason.”

  “Why?” I watched the pine needles brush against the stars.

  “It doesn’t make sense. Your family is so nice,” Yuri said.

  “Why did you run away?”

  Yuri rolled to his side to face me. I kept my eyes on the stars.

  “My father hates me,” he said.

  “That’s not true,” I said, but I understood why Yuri might feel this way. I saw the way Taras and Viktor picked on him. I thought of the circular scar on his hand.

  “He hits me,” Yuri said.

  “My mother slapped me today.”

  “Why?”

  “I betrayed her.”

  “How?”

  I turned to him. “Have you ever seen something and not known whether it was real?”

  “Like a ghost?”

  I had to think about it. “Yes, but more like a spirit, a being. Or maybe just something you see that no one else can.”

  “When I was little I saw Jesus.”

  “Jesus?”

  “Viktor and I were in the forest gathering wood and all of a sudden this bear comes out of nowhere. A grizzly. And he’s standing on his hind legs, towering over us. Viktor and I froze and just waited for the bear to attack us. But then this man came out from behind a tree. He didn’t look like Jesus, not from the picture books. He was wearing a fur vest, and had long dark hair. But he was glowing. He had this ring of light around him. He stood between us and the bear. He winked at me and told the bear that we were only children, and not worth the trouble. The bear just turned and went the other way. Viktor never saw him. He says I’m crazy.”

  “Sounds like Coyote.”

  “Coyote?”

  “He’s an old spirit that takes the form of a coyote, but he can also take the form of a man. He likes to play tricks, but sometimes he does good things, and protects people.”

  “Maybe they’re the same guy,” Yuri sai
d.

  He meant it as a joke but I thought seriously about this.

  “Have you seen him?” Yuri asked.

  “Who?”

  “Coyote.”

  “I think so. He gave me a caramel.”

  “A caramel?”

  “And I’ve seen him as a coyote plenty of times. Though Llewelyna calls it a she-wolf.”

  “A she-wolf. Why?”

  “I think it’s a character from one of her old faery tales, but I’m not really sure.”

  “How do you know this Coyote isn’t just a regular coyote?”

  I turned back to the stars. “Same way you know it wasn’t just an ordinary man.”

  We were both quiet for a while.

  “So, I don’t get it,” Yuri said. “Your mother hit you because you saw something that wasn’t real?”

  “No.” I could see many more stars than I had at first. The longer I stared into the dark sky the more stars there were. They multiplied. I thought about what Henry said about learning how to look. Practising how to see. “She hit me because she’s angry with me,” I said finally.

  “Why?”

  “I see more than she thinks I should. I know more than she wants me to. But I don’t understand it like she does. I don’t trust it.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I don’t have the dreams, the premonitions. Not yet anyways.” I turned from him and closed my eyes. “But I know the lake is haunted. And I know that seeing comes easily to some and is something others need to practise.”

  “What do you mean, seeing?”

  Just then, the yips of coyotes crowded our silence. Somehow the beasts were already right beneath the tree fort. I hadn’t heard them approach. Yuri held my hand so tight I felt the beat of his pulse through his fingers.

  “They’re only dogs,” I said. “Can’t climb ladders. They won’t hurt us.” Amongst the cackle of the coyotes, there was a jingling. At first I thought it might be the chimes in the trees, but there was no wind. It sounded like bangles tinkling together. I peered through a gap in the floorboards and could see, amidst the darker dark of the shadowed coyotes, a glint of silver and gold. That was the first time I saw the orphan thief. She was unlike any Lake Person I had ever seen. She wore a hooded shawl made of fur. The whites of her eyes were hardly visible in the night as she lifted her eyes to meet mine. She knew exactly where to look to find me. She reached her pale palm up as if to grab me, and even though she was far below, I had to back away and break her gaze to keep myself from being pulled into her stronghold. There was a shuffle in the dirt below, a growl, and then quiet. When I looked back through the floorboards both the orphan thief and the coyotes were gone, quick as they had come.

  “What was that?” Yuri asked.

  The orphan thief had drained the light from the stars and left us in the ink of her absence. “Nothing,” I said. “Just coyotes.” I didn’t know how to explain who or what I had seen. She was both implausible and the only true thing I knew, like seeing my distorted double in the underworld of the lake.

  I felt the warmth of Yuri’s body as he drew nearer. Eventually his chest was against my back. I stiffened. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m cold,” he said. “Sometimes frontiersmen would have to sleep close to survive the cold nights.”

  It felt good to be touched. I relaxed into his warmth.

  When I woke in the morning it was still dawn. Yuri and I had fallen asleep beneath my shawl. His arm was wrapped around me and it fell with a thump as I sat up to stretch. I looked through the floorboards and saw something sparkling amongst the paw prints in the dirt below. I scrambled down the ladder and found a silver bracelet with leaves engraved on it. I recognized the bracelet; it belonged to Llewelyna. She only ever wore it to the rare dinner parties she attended in the city. I put the bracelet on, and then took it off and put it back in the dirt for the orphan thief to reclaim.

  When I climbed back into the tree fort Yuri was holding the fish in the jam jar. I froze. “Don’t touch that.”

  He set the jar down. “What kind of fish is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I never seen a fish that colour.”

  I shrugged and put the fish back in the potato sack.

  That day I showed Yuri how to call the deer. He looked at me dubiously when I brought the pine needles up to my mouth. A doe leapt out from a bush but Yuri didn’t see it. “It’s because you haven’t learned how to see,” I told him. I tried again but no deer appeared. We wandered through the forest looking for food. I had the familiar feeling of something or someone watching us. I looked for coyotes and found none. Every once in a while I saw Lake People from the corners of my vision. They carried out their parallel lives amongst the trees and paid us no mind.

  Later I pointed to some mushrooms in the shade of a tree. We ate the morels in handfuls that left us even hungrier. When we found the creek we followed it uphill to where it widened and calmed and we could see glistening fish beneath the surface. Yuri sharpened a branch to make a spear while I tried to weave reeds into a net. Despite our attempts to fish, hours passed and we still had nothing to eat. We sat on a rock by the creek and washed our faces and drank.

  I looked up from my cupped hands to find the amber eyes of a giant cat—a cougar, I thought. She was so close I could smell the musk of her fur. Unaware, Yuri was still jabbing at the pond with his spear. I scrambled for the gun and pulled back the hammer. A bullet shot off into the trees. The giant cat sauntered away, but she took one last look at me before disappearing into the trees. I recognized then the mottled design of her fur. I had seen a drawing of a jaguar in Henry’s book on South America and had read that the jaguar was at ease both in water and on land, as well as during the day and at night, and because of these qualities, the ancient Maya had believed the jaguar could pass between worlds. When there was an eclipse, it was said that a jaguar had swallowed the sun.

  The bang was so loud I couldn’t hear anything for a long time. Yuri’s lips were moving but I couldn’t tell what he was saying. We continued watchfully along the river. It was hours later when we could hear again.

  “What was it?” he asked.

  “A cougar, I think.” I wanted to believe it was only the shadow of leaves against the wild cat’s fur.

  There was rustling in the bushes near us; we stiffened. I thought it might be the cat again, but it was Henry. He towered over us.

  “The whole town has been looking for you two,” he said. I urged Yuri with my eyes to get rid of the gun while Henry’s back was to him. Yuri had it tucked into his back pocket. He slipped the gun into the bushes behind him. Wordlessly, we followed Henry down the hills and back into town. Yuri’s hand brushed against mine. I pretended not to feel it.

  When we parted, Yuri smiled foolishly. “I’ll see you later, Iris,” he said, as if we had just spent a splendid afternoon at the beach. The Wasiks’ cottage door opened and Taras stomped out mumbling in Ukrainian. Taras took Yuri by the collar of his shirt and dragged him inside.

  The door to my own house burst open while Henry and I were still on the steps of the porch. The skin beneath my father’s eyes was dark. He opened his arms to me and kissed me on the head. “Thank you, Henry,” he said, looking behind me. “Please tell the others she is home safe.”

  Llewelyna was in the tin tub. Her face brightened as I approached. Saint Francis raised his head and ruffled his feathers.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “In the forest.”

  “You ran away.”

  “So did you,” I said. She smiled, held the wet cloth towards me and leaned back into the tub. I ran the cloth down her arms. Despite the hot water, her skin remained covered in goose bumps. She stared at her toes and flexed them against the tub.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said.

  “That woman, in the lake, she spoke of the addanc.”

  “I’m not sure it’s an addanc.” />
  “I know,” Llewelyna said. “Henry says it’s a spirit.”

  “And in the story doesn’t Peredur kill the addanc? Can you kill a spirit?”

  Llewelyna closed her eyes and was quiet for the moment. Then she began, in a voice that was not her own: “A noxious creature from the rampart of Satanas—him death will not subdue.”

  I dropped the cloth. Her words frightened me. I wanted to ground her again. “What else did the woman from the lake say to you?”

  Llewelyna opened her eyes. “She was in a canoe with her family. They had been forced to leave their home.”

  “Why?” I massaged soap into her hair as if coaxing the story out.

  “Settlers chased them off their land with guns. Her husband was killed, her son was shot in the leg. They were forced to pass Rattlesnake Island, remember? The spirit’s home. They didn’t have time to bring an offering.”

  “An offering?” I poured some oil into my hands and ran my fingers through her tangled hair. It smelled of jasmine.

  “A small animal, a bird or a rodent.” I remembered Mrs. Bell’s dove. “She said the lake became a storm and the boat flipped. Her family disappeared in the water around her. Drowned.”

  “How did she survive?”

  “Next thing she remembered was washing up on the shore.”

  “I thought she said something about a girl. A gift.”

  Llewelyna looked at me curiously, as if she didn’t know what I was talking about. “Where is the fish?” she asked. I went to my room for the jar. Llewelyna brought it up close and watched the fish’s blue fins waver.

  “Fantastic,” she said. “Keep it someplace safe. Best not show a thing like that to anyone.” I wrapped the fish in my shawl and hid the jar beneath my bed. When I returned Llewelyna had her eyes closed again. For a moment I thought she was asleep.

  “I remember it like this,” she said and shifted. The cloth eeled through the bathwater, wavering with the currents of her slightest movements. I understood this story was a gift, an apology. I settled against the wall by the tub and closed my eyes.

  “Once there was a girl who conceived a child at an evil hour and in a dark way.”