Howl (3 page)

A prickly anxiety crept into Robin’s body. She stared at the lake. Frozen or not, the very thought of water made her feel all wobbly inside. She sighed. There were so many things she was afraid of now. She was becoming a complete wuss.

“Do leeches freeze?”

“How would I know!”

“Remember that time you had one on your face? Did you ever freak! All you had to do was pick it off. You didn’t have to scream like that.”

Yeah, right, she thought. That was another reason to stay away from the water. The blood-sucking leeches!

Squirm jumped. “Hey, you know what? I bet we could
skate
on that ice! Want to? We could go for miles!”

He turned, ready to bound off, but Robin grabbed him. There was no way she was going out on the lake.

“Let’s go find Griff first,” she said, putting him off. “Get some breakfast.”

As she expected, Squirm tore down the stairs. As usual, food was his favourite thing.

At the bottom of the stairs, they pulled on their coats and boots and went outside. Relentless ran ahead along the path, her tail whipping happily from side to side.

Robin looked over at the property across the field. Usually she couldn’t see it, but now that it was winter and all the leaves were down, she could see the farmhouse and several mounds of snow near the house that looked like snow-covered trucks and tractors. A dog barked loudly, straining on its rope. She remembered her father saying something about a new family moving in there, but she didn’t know anything about them.

Squirm led them along a shovelled path towards their grandmother’s cabin. The snow was so high on either side of her that the tips of Robin’s mittens brushed against it as she walked. She scooped up a handful and held it to her nostrils. The snow smelled fresh and clean, unlike snow in the city. She scrunched it into a ball and threw it at Squirm. He laughed and threw a snowball back. They pitched snowballs at each other until they were breathless.

They had just gotten back on the path when it forked. One way led to Griff’s cabin, which was down near the water, and the other led to an old grey barn, which tilted to one side in the field. Squirm took the path to the barn. It was just like her brother to be heading in one direction and end up going in another.

As they walked, a black snowmobile charged out from the neighbour’s property. The hair on Relentless’s neck stood up like dozens of toothpicks. She started barking furiously as the snowmobile roared towards them. Both riders were wearing helmets with big plastic faceguards, so Robin could barely see their faces, but the driver was a big man and the passenger was a girl with a long yellow ponytail. Was she his daughter?

The snowmobile was heading right for them. Robin clutched Squirm, sure they were going to be hit. At the last moment, the machine swerved but continued to circle around them. Robin felt her shoulders tense as blue gas fumes billowed into the air. The snowmobile made smaller and smaller circles, and Robin felt as if a noose were being tightened around them. Squirm began to cough. Worried that he was going to have an asthma attack, Robin eased his face into the folds of her coat. She put her hands over her ears and started to count, something she sometimes did when she was afraid.

She heard yelling and opened her eyes. Griff was trudging towards them, waving her arms as she moved, her long braid of white hair bouncing on her shoulders. When the snowmobiler saw her, he turned and roared off.

“Idiot!” Griff said, gathering the kids in close.

Robin pulled away from the embrace. She didn’t like people hugging her any more. Hugging softened her, and she needed to be hard, on the alert and have her guard up.

Squirm watched the snowmobile charge off. “Who was that?”

“Our crazy neighbour,” Griff said. “Rick Big Shot, I mean, Kingshot. I think that was his daughter on the back. Couldn’t tell. He’s had a lot of floozies hanging around since he got divorced.”

Squirm coughed again, and Griff patted his back as she stared at the retreating snowmobile. “If he thinks he can bamboozle me into selling this place, he’s got another think coming.” Her words made white puffs in the cold air. “Come on, let’s get inside. This cold would freeze the devil himself.”

The cabin was nestled at the base of some giant, snowy trees and looked much smaller than Robin remembered. On the verandah, snowshoes hung from nails, and in the middle of the door was a large white animal skull.

“Wow,” Squirm said, touching it reverently. “Is that a deer head?”

“Yup.” Griff pushed the driftwood door handle and led them inside. The smell of wood smoke and maple syrup rushed towards them.

Griff helped them hang their coats, then using her shirttail as an oven mitt, pulled a plate of pancakes out of the warming oven. She put a pot lid over top, placed it on a rough-hewn wooden table, and got out the utensils.

Robin looked around the room. The cabin wasn’t very big, only one room, and part of the space was taken up by a four-poster bed covered with a bright multi-coloured quilt. Around the bed were fishing rods, an axe, and bundles of dried things hanging from the rafters. Herbs? Probably, Robin thought. She could smell lavender.

She let her eyes scan the walls, but they stopped suddenly on one item. A gun. She bit at the corner of her fingernail and brought her eyes back to her brother. She was hoping they would both roll their eyes at Griff’s weirdness. After all, who else had a grandmother who owned a gun? But Squirm, as during other visits, was enchanted, moving around the room, touching various bone fragments, rock, and feathers. Then he looked up.

“Hey, you’ve got Owlie.”

Griff smiled as she set out the plates. “Your dad brought him in last night. Now there’s a story….”

And I bet you’re going to tell it
, Robin thought. What was it about old people and stories? Back in Winnipeg, their eighty-year-old neighbour, Mr. Talbot, used to corner her into listening to his stupid reminiscences. Who cared?

“Tell us,” Squirm said. Robin wanted to strangle him.

Griff’s eyes danced. “It was a long time ago now. When your dad was in engineering school.”

Robin turned sharply to Griff. “Dad was never in engineering school.” She looked at Squirm. Maybe Griff was getting that strange forgetting disease. Alz-something.

“Oh, but he was. Just not for long. Not that there’s anything wrong with engineering school, it was just that your dad didn’t give a hoot about
things!
It was
animals
he cared about. But his dad, your granddad, rest his soul, wanted him to be an engineer, so that’s what he studied. Until Owlie dropped out of the sky one day and came to the rescue.”

Squirm smiled as Griff loaded pancakes onto three plates. “Really? He just dropped out of the sky?”

Griff poured hot chocolate into two cups and handed them around. “Yup! He’d been shot. We never found out who shot him, but still, he landed right on the ground in front of your dad, who, bless him, picked up the poor thing and nursed him back to life. Owlie must have had a few talks with your dad along the way, because the next thing I knew, your father had chucked engineering and signed up for vet school — which is what he
should
have done in the first place.”

Squirm helped himself to some pancakes and sluiced maple syrup all over them.

Griff chuckled. “You’re not having syrup with your pancakes, but pancakes with your syrup.” She put a pancake on Robin’s plate and continued. “Anyways, Owlie and your dad were such good friends that when Owlie died, I got him stuffed. I thought he’d be a good reminder.”

Robin ate part of her pancake but left the rest. She wasn’t hungry.

Griff nodded towards Owlie. “Maybe after lunch, we’ll take him down to the barn and see if he can spook some of the ten thousand mice out there.”

“Yeah — I’ll bet Owlie is
great
at spooking mice.”

Robin sat back and watched as Griff licked her thumb and index finger clean of syrup. How could any woman have hands so huge?

Squirm helped himself to more pancakes and reached for the syrup. He tilted the jug towards his mouth, pretending he was going to drink the whole thing, then laughed at himself, and poured the syrup over his pancakes. “This is the best maple syrup I ever ate.”

“It’s one of my better batches,” Griff said.

His eyes widened. “You made this?”

“The trees made it,” Griff said. “The trees right around this cabin. I just collected the sap and cooked it down.”

“Can I make some?”

“Sure! We’ll start as soon as the sap’s running. Won’t be long now. Spring’s just around the corner.”

Robin looked out the window. Not according to what she could see.

“Cool!”

Griff tossed her head back and laughed at Squirm’s enthusiasm.

Robin stared at Griff. There were two teeth missing from the back of her grandmother’s mouth. Gross. She turned away and began examining the cabin again. Dark eyes met hers. The eyes belonged to a woman in a large tea-brown photograph that hung on the far wall. The woman was dressed in a long, old-fashioned dress that had hundreds of buttons going all the way to her chin, and her hair was piled on the top of her head as they used to do in the old days. The woman seemed to be staring right at her.

“I’m skinning a deer out back,” Griff said to Squirm. “You can help with that if you’ve got a mind to.” She glanced at Robin. “It’s not for everybody.”

You got that right
, Robin wanted to say. Would it be rude if she left?

Squirm swallowed a huge mouthful. “You kill it?”

Griff’s brow furrowed. “Let’s just say I was looking for food, and it offered to provide.”

“Can I see?” Squirm said, licking his plate.

“Just let me have my tea,” Griff said, going to the fridge. A moment later, she held up a milk carton and shook it. “Darn, it’s empty.”

“There’s lots at the farmhouse,” Squirm said. “I’ll go get some.” He ran to the door, grabbing his coat on the way. “Be right back.”

Griff smiled at Robin. “I’m going to like having a grandson around.”

Robin sipped her hot chocolate. Not knowing what to say, she stared at the photo of the woman.

“That’s Emmeline,” Griff said, following Robin’s eyes. “Emmeline Pankhurst. The suffragette.”

Robin looked at the fiery eyes in the photograph and tried to remember what a suffragette was.

“They’re the ones who got the vote for women. Which, by the way, they had to fight tooth and nail to get. Emmeline here chained herself to the British parliament buildings. Got thrown in jail, went on a hunger strike — the whole shebang. She almost died. But she wouldn’t give up.” Griff moved her eyes from the photograph to Robin. “According to one of my great-aunts, we’re related to her in some distant sort of way.”

Robin looked at Griff’s beaming face and suppressed a yawn. As soon as Squirm came back, she was going to make her excuses and go.

Griff cleared the plates and started washing the dishes. Suddenly, she pulled her hands from the water. “Where is that boy?” She wiped her hands on a tea towel. “He wouldn’t have gone out on the ice, would he?” Her eyes grabbed Robin’s.

If he’s seen an animal out there or something else interesting, that’s exactly the kind of thing he’d do
, Robin thought. Squirm was always getting caught up in the adventure of the moment.

“Didn’t your dad tell him the ice wasn’t safe?”

Robin’s mind scrambled. “I don’t know, I don’t think so. Squirm said this morning he wanted to go skating and —” Suddenly her stomach felt as if it were full of jumping frogs.

Griff pulled on her boots. “You check the farmhouse. I’ll go down to the lake and see what I can see. Holler if you find him.”

Robin pulled on her jacket and walked quickly along the trodden path to the house. She told herself she’d find him examining some farm relic or ice formation. That was Squirm. But what if that wasn’t the case this time? What if something bad had happened? If there was one realization the last year had cut into her awareness, it was that bad things not only
could
happen, they
did
happen. Even when you begged them not to.

She quickened her pace, and when she got to the house she pushed open the door and yelled his name. No answer. She kicked off her boots and took the stairs in sets of two. He’d already started decorating his room. There were pictures of spiders and bugs on the walls, and on the floor he’d lined up his teddy bear collection. Beside that was his ant farm. Even from the doorway, she could see the ants crawling inside the glass enclosure. They might have been crawling all over her skin the way they made her feel.

She was about to leave when she saw something yellow stuffed under Squirm’s pillow.
Is that what I think it is?
She inched forward as if expecting the floor to give way beneath her. When she was close, she reached forward and touched it. Her chest swelled. It was one of her mother’s old T-shirts.

She yearned to bring it to her face and smell it but stopped herself. She tensed her muscles as she knew how to do and pushed the shirt away. Then she saw the photograph. Her eyes sank down into her mother’s face before she could stop them. Her body careened forward as if it might just be able to fall into the photograph and be with her mom. Her chest flooded with emotion and pain. She pushed the photo away and ran from the room.

Back at Griff’s, she flew through the door. He’d be there, she was sure of it. He’d roll his eyes at her worry as he did every other time she got panicky about him. But the cabin was empty. She ran back outside. Where could he be? Chasing animals? She scanned the fields. He must be out there somewhere. She stepped off the hardened path and plunged into snow so deep, it was up to her armpits. She dragged herself back to the path, returned to Griff’s and strapped on some snowshoes. Robin felt as if she were walking with each foot in a garbage can lid, but they kept her from sinking, so she went down near the lake. It was impossible with all the snow to tell where the waterline started, so she stayed well back. Relentless followed in her tracks.

She scanned the lake. To her immense relief, there was no sign of Squirm. She couldn’t see Griff either. Where had they gone? Making sure she didn’t go further out than she thought the shore was, she moved towards the point.