Heart Songs. Annie Proulx

4

      Because of his color the fox rarely crossed open ground in snowy weather, but kept to woods and brush, mouse-hunting on the margins of open land. In the bitter dawn, his muzzle frosted, he headed for a bramble patch at the edge of a deserted field, hoping for a morning hare. Hare tracks ran like cats’ cradles of tangled string, looping through the briars and into the spruce, then fading to nothing in the drifts as though the hare had unfolded strange wings and flown into the trees. Nose down, the fox trotted along, hoping for the warm scent, but there was only an elusive suggestion of hareishness. He was almost on the frozen shape in the snow before he caught the hateful odor of his greatest enemy. At almost the same time he was aware of the fact of death. His heart thudded, and so great was his agitation that he ran across an open meadow, an easy target for a fox hunter, had there been one.

      During the night it turned intensely cold. A gusting wind rattled the windows and drove snow under the door. By Friday morning the snow had stopped but the wind scoured the ground bare in front of the house and built a knife-edged crescent drift across the drive.

      A melancholy inertia, one of the ancient seven deadly sins, took me when Noreen called to say she would not come that day, that her car wouldn’t start. Her voice rushed through the receiver, breathless and guilty. I wondered who she was with, maybe that husband whose name she had never mentioned, whose faults she had never described. Maybe her furious half brother, tainted with the rage of the Stones. There was a sense of mockery, the image of a curving smile and feathers flying in the wind.

      I opened the oven door of the kitchen range for warmth and treated myself to a number of steaming toddies. The wind shook the stovepipe. I was alone, the glass was always empty. I dozed in the stifling kitchen, my head ringing with whiskey and the sound of the circling wind.

      Banger stood in front of me, the kitchen door open, the wind cutting a corridor through the hot room. His bare hands were bent stiffly and his eyes streamed.

      “Lady,” he shouted. “You’ve got her, damn you. Where’s my dog?”

      We had to go through the house from attic to cellar, opening every closet and cupboard door before Banger believed that I didn’t have Lady tied to a hidden water pipe. Noreen’s blue slippers, shiny imitation satin with feathers, gleamed on the floor of the bedroom closet. I gave Banger a drink and listened.

      He had let Lady out the night before despite the snow, he said, snuffling and wiping his nose on the back of his hand. Lady enjoyed an hour or so out on bad nights. He thought she liked it because it made the warm spot behind the stove more pleasant when she came in. It seemed a strangely Puritan attitude for a dog, I thought.

      He had fallen asleep expecting the whine and scratch at the door. But morning came and no Lady. He was too worried to go into town, but spent the morning calling and whistling for her. At noon he headed into the woods, looking for her tracks in the drifting cold and shouting her name. He started to think I had lured the dog away with grouse giblets. She had been gone nearly twenty-four hours when Banger, on fire with suspicion, came through my door.

      At earliest light we cast out in ever-widening circles from Banger’s sugarhouse. The wind was dying and new tracks held. There were no signs of Lady. I thought of Stone City and again saw Banger dropping the grouse viscera in the snow as he told me about the driving away of the Stones. Lady might have remembered where those forbidden morsels had fallen. A quick, guilty trip, a hurried gobbling, then back to scratch on the sugarhouse door and go to the comfort of the mat behind the stove. I guessed she might have run that number on Banger a dozen times.

      “You already check Stone City?” I asked him.

      “No, but she wouldn’t go there unless we was huntin’ birds.”

      “Might not hurt to take a look and be sure.”

      Banger was skeptical, morose, but we turned south, struggling and sinking in the drifts like men in quicksand.

      The red bramble canes in the cellar holes rattled in the falling wind. Stone City was being washed away by waves of snow lapping up onto the random piles of boards, flooding the foundations, erasing the last traces of the Stones. The full tides of winter would drown the farm.

      Banger kicked at the snow where he’d dropped the viscera. There was nothing there except ash from the fire staining the pale snow.

      “Anything coulda picked ’em up—’coon, fox, fisher cat. Lady don’t eat bird guts.”

      We cast around the field and along the brook. Banger called.

      “See? Fox tracks, pretty fresh, too—this mornin’s. That’s what picked up them bird guts.”

      But then Banger was looking beyond the fresh fox tracks to a faint trail in the windswept snow, a shallow depression completely drifted over in the open, and, under the sheltering conifers, little more than a hint that something had dragged through earlier.

      “What made that?” I asked. “Weasel, fisher cat? Something low-slung to make that trough.” Banger looked at me with scorn and bitterness. He had seen that kind of trail before.

      It led to the blackberry brambles that encased the lower Stone hayfields in bristling armor. Banger walked into the stout, thorned canes as though into a field of grass, muttering and talking to himself. I plowed along behind him, not understanding what he already knew with certainty.

      He went down on his knees about fifteen feet into the canes and brushed the snow off the humped form of Lady. There were fox tracks circling the frozen body. Banger lifted the dead dog, but felt the resistance and laid her down again gently. He worked along the chain from the trap that held her right front leg to the snarl of links wrapped tight around the brambles. He opened the jaws of the trap and pulled out the stiff forepaw, then hurled the trap as far as he could into the brambles. It dangled from a thick clump of thorny canes, the chain bouncing in short, jaunty arcs.

      “Banger!” I shouted. “Don’t you want the trap to find out whose it is?”

      His eyes glared from his purple face. He held Lady in his arms, heavy and frozen into a crooked caricature of dog shape. He hadn’t said anything but now he screamed, “I know who done it! Old man Stone. He already done everything to me he could. He run me off here when I was a kid, shot me with a twelve-gauge, burned me out, yes he’s the one burned up my Edie and the boy after I run them all out of Stone City, and now he’s took my dog because I got his goddamn old knife! Here, you Stone, take it. Take it back. I don’t want it.”