Brian's Hunt (4 page)

Thirty-two stitches Brian sewed, each one knotted in place, twenty across the top and twelve down the front side, all about a quarter inch apart, all tightly sewn and pulling the flaps together, and then it was done.

He had a small first-aid kit in the canoe and he took out the disinfectant bottle. It was not enough to have washed the wound but he trickled it in a line along the sewn-up seam edges and it must not have been painless as the bottle said because the dog rumbled again, though she didn’t open her eyes or change her breathing.

Then it was done.

Brian cleaned the needle and put the kit away in the canoe, washed the blood from his hands in the lake, found more wood for the fire and built the flames up.

The dog stayed where she was, four or five feet from the fire, and rested. Soon Brian could hear the sound of her snoring over the crackle of flames.

Brian squatted by the fire and let his mind float free, glad the dog was so friendly, glad he hadn’t been bitten.

He looked to the east and thought he could see a glow. Maybe a couple of hours to daylight and then . . . what?

Try to figure it out, he thought. The dog was clearly not wild, clearly friendly to people, had heard-smelled-felt that Brian was out in the lake sleeping in his canoe, had awakened him by whining.

Clearly wanted help.

But where had she come from? There was no collar on her, Brian had checked that right away, and it was a her, not a him, Brian had also seen that, but she wasn’t just a loose, wild dog.

She must have come from a trapper’s camp somewhere, maybe a Cree camp, perhaps near, perhaps far. She must belong to somebody. But Brian had seen or heard absolutely no sign at all of any people anywhere within miles, and if there had been a camp or people he would know. Animals in the bush react to people, “feel” differently if there is anyone about, and he had not “felt” that difference. Nor had he seen tracks, smudges in the grass, had not smelled smoke.

Nobody was close.

And yet, here was the dog. Obviously a person dog, a dog that wanted to be with humans, a dog that couldn’t hunt for herself well—she looked thin—and needed to be with people yet had, for some reason, left her people?

No sense there, Brian thought. He put more wood on the fire and studied the dog in the brighter light.

The dog slept soundly, snoring gently, the wounded side moving up and down. Brian liked the sound of her breathing and he thought of never having had a dog. There had always been some reason his parents wouldn’t let him have one. They were too dirty. They shed hair. His mother had allergies. He wasn’t responsible enough to take care of a puppy. Lord. Back there. His parents. He shook his head—had that ever been real, that life? That whole silliness?

He watched the wound move with the dog’s breathing.

The wound came from a fight with someone or something. It was a slash wound, not from a fall or hitting a stick.

How had it happened?

A fight with another dog? He had considered that possibility while working on the dog. It had been in a major battle with another dog and had been driven out—but Brian wasn’t sure if that sort of thing happened outside Jack London novels and he had come to realize that much of what Jack London wrote about the bush was utter nonsense. He might have been a tough man, and he might be a good writer, but he’d also been a hammer-drunk and there was a lot of silliness in what he said about wilderness.

Besides, most people wouldn’t let a fight get that far out of hand. A dog that was ripped up that badly couldn’t do much work for a while and trapper dogs were used for work, packing, pulling toboggans. And he didn’t think a dog that liked people as much as this one seemed to would leave just because of a fight.

So something else.

But nothing else made sense. The dog wouldn’t leave her home unless she was driven out and the wound was serious enough. . . .

Wolves? Brian’s thinking rolled free. Perhaps the dog was out away from camp, hunting or something, and ran into a pack of wolves. Say they hit her, wound her and in panic she doesn’t run home, back to her camp, but runs off, maybe confused, bewildered until she comes to the lake and finds Brian sleeping in his canoe. . . .

No. If wolves had hit her—and David Smallhorn had told him that sometimes they killed small dogs and ate them—she would either have run back into camp or the wolves would have finished her, eaten her. No dog in the world could outrun or outfight a wolf pack.

The wound didn’t seem to have been man-made but that was a possible explanation and one that made sense. If a man was cruel enough to injure a dog this badly the dog might run off and not come back, and Brian knew there were men that bad, had read about them, seen them in the news. Beasts. Beast-men.

But the wound didn’t seem to be a cut either, did not seem to have been made by a weapon but by teeth, or claws.

There were some big cats. Brian had seen lynx on several occasions and a forty-pound lynx certainly could inflict a wound like this. But lynx could easily get away from a dog if the dog was foolish enough to chase them, and there were rare mountain lions here in the bush, called panthers or painters in the north country, but the same rule applied. While they could easily wound or kill a dog this way, they much preferred to avoid conflict. They would kill and eat a person rather than tangle with a dog, unless it was very small. Brian had seen several accounts of mountain lions stealing poodles and other small dogs from homes around Los Angeles. One mountain lion there had actually taken a woman who was jogging near L.A., killed her, dragged the body off and eaten part of it.

But not dogs, and that wouldn’t explain the dog leaving its main camp.

Deer, moose, could inflict such a wound with their hooves or antlers if attacked, and dogs were sometimes badly injured while trying to attack deer, although more often it was the deer that were injured. Many deer each year were mauled and killed by domestic dogs; people just had no idea how vicious their pet German shepherd could be if it packed with three or four other dogs and ran up on a deer. Or sheep. Or, sometimes, a child.

But again, that wouldn’t explain why the dog ran off. Even if she tried to attack a deer and the deer injured her this badly, she would go home for help. Not run off.

And that left what?

Just one animal left in the north woods could do this.

Bear.

One blow with a clawed paw could easily rip a dog in just this manner. And heaven knew they were strong enough to do it. Brian had seen a bear throw a quarter-ton log through the air, looking for grub worms.

But again, it made no sense. If the dog was injured by a bear it would run home, not away.

No sense.

It was almost light. He put a pot of hot water on the fire to boil and make tea. Today would be busy. Like it or not, and he was coming to like it, he now had a family, someone to look after.

The dog would need food and more care and that meant he had to hunt, to kill.

He could take more fish, even panfish to feed the dog at first if he needed to, but in the end the dog would need good meat, red meat, just as wolves needed it.

A moose would be too much but a small buck deer would fill the bill and between him and the dog there would be no waste.

He would first cast for a trail and see if he could pick up sign where the dog had come from, at least a direction, and at the same time see if he could get a deer.

He could think more that evening on how the dog had come to him. Now there was other work.

When he took his bow and quiver in the dawn light the dog tried to follow him.

“No, you have to stay,” Brian tried to tell her. Then held out his hand and said more firmly, “Stay!”

But the dog had gotten to her feet, and, still favoring her wounded side, had tried to follow Brian out of camp.

Finally Brian took the anchor line and fashioned a nonslip collar and a leash and tied the dog to the front of the canoe.

The dog could easily chew through the cord and follow him anyway but she finally seemed to understand with the line tied that she was supposed to stay. At first she sat and watched while Brian walked away, and then she lay down. Brian had left her enough slack so she could get to the water and drink and once in the brush Brian peeked back, well out of sight, and the dog got up, drank a bit, then lay back down and seemed to go to sleep.

Brian worked carefully, slowly, used his best abilities at watching for sign, studying everything he could, and found almost nothing to help in the mystery of the dog.

He started with a small circle, or half circle since it ran from the lakeshore, out three hundred yards and around and back to the lakeshore and on this first loop he saw the dog’s tracks in soft mud in a small clearing coming from the north.

He began to work in that direction, making small arcs, but he found only one more mark, again to the north about a hundred yards from the first one, a dog footprint in soft dirt and just a tiny touch of blood on a leaf.

That was it.

It would have been easier in the fall, and of course much easier in the winter, in snow. In the fall there were no leaves and the grass died back and it was much easier to see things. Now, with thick foliage, you had to be standing almost on top of a track to see it, and he could find no more.

Maybe, probably, the dog had come from the north. That was it. He didn’t know from where, how far, or even if that was the true direction. The dog might have come from the east and turned south when it heard or smelled Brian. Or from the west.

And no deer either.

Oh, he saw sign. He found one pile of dung that was still warm to the touch but the brush was too thick to see a deer, let alone get close enough for a shot.

He came on a snowshoe rabbit and decided to take it. He changed to a field-point arrow—he’d been walking with a broadhead ready in the bow—but the arrow caught a twig on the way and deflected slightly so the rabbit was hit low, in the gut, and had time to scream before he got a second arrow in and killed it. They gave a piercing scream sometimes when they died. Brian had heard it many times at night when predators caught them—it was nerve-wrenching and sounded like a baby screaming for its mother. He hated it.

But more to the point, the scream—and this was probably why it had evolved—alerted all animals within a quarter mile that a predator was hunting and that was the end of hunting, for two reasons. One, all the small animals went into hiding and the deer left the area. Two, the scream brought other predators that were curious about the kill. All wolves, coyotes, hawks, cats, weasels, fox, owls, eagles, marten, fisher—any predator—in the immediate area headed for the scream and that ensured that the rest of the small animals
stayed
in hiding. Probably the only exception to this rule were ruffed grouse, which seemed to be so dumb that nothing really affected them, but they had excellent camouflage covering and in this thick foliage it would be next to impossible to see one, though they had good meat, dark meat.

So rabbit it was, and fish, and aside from chastising himself for making a shot when there was a twig in the way, Brian was grateful and thanked the rabbit.

He worked his way back to the campsite, keeping one eye open for a grouse, but he saw none. He found the dog sitting by the end of the canoe, still tied—she had heard the rabbit scream, and Brian coming, and gotten up to greet him.

“Hi, dog,” Brian said. “We have food. I’ll get some more in a bit and make a stew. . . .”

The dog wagged her tail and stood, moved against the rope and Brian untied her and had to lift the rabbit high to keep the dog away from it.

“Not raw,” he said. “Not the meat. I’ll give you the guts in a minute. . . .”

He set his bow aside, took out his knife and made a neat incision up the middle of the carcass, scooped the entrails, heart, liver and lungs out and gave them to the dog, which virtually swallowed them whole and then cocked her head, tail wagging gently in the puppy begging stance, asking for more.

“Some manners . . .” Brian smiled and thought of himself when he had first come to the bush. Watching a dog eat raw guts would have brought his stomach up.

But he had seen both wolves and coyotes kill now and the entrails were their favorite part. And this dog was more wolf than not; a pure, friendly carnivore.

He skinned the rabbit and stretched the skin high in a tree to dry. The hide was thin and fragile and very far from prime and would not wear well, but he had in mind trying to make some lures with the hair and tiny hooks he had brought to see if he could use a willow as a pole and fly-fish some of the streams between the lakes for trout. He had seen them often beneath the canoe, some of them quite large, but they were very spooky and didn’t seem to want worms for bait, and wouldn’t stand for a shot with an arrow.

He made a fire and put some water on, using his largest aluminum pot, and dumped the rabbit carcass in whole, then covered it with a lid that slid down around the outside about an inch to keep the ashes out.

Then he took one of his fish arrows, without the bow, left the dog on the bank and let the canoe drift out a short distance into the lily pads, held the arrow over the side with the triple-barbed point about a foot underwater and wiggled the point, held it still, wiggled it again.

And here they came. Small bluegills and sunfish, four or five inches long, so curious they couldn’t stand not to get close, and with a sharp motion he jabbed the point down and took one in the side, flipped it into the boat, pulled the point out and put the arrow back in the water.

In twenty minutes he had ten fish and he took them to shore, scaled them with the back edge of his knife, split them neatly and fed the guts to the dog again before he dropped the fish, heads and fins and all, into the stew, which was boiling nicely.

From his pack he threw in a handful of rice, “To give it body,” he said, smiling, to the dog, and then, “Come here. Here.”

And the dog came to him and leaned against his leg with her good side and held her head up to be petted.