A coyote howled then, so nearby that it made Peter jump. A second one answered, and then a third. Peter sat up and slammed the window shut, but it was too late. The yips and howls, and what they meant, were in his head now.
Peter had only two bad memories of his mother. He had a lot of good ones, too, and he often took those out to comfort himself, although he worried that they might fade from so much exposure. But the two bad ones he’d buried deep. He did everything in his power to keep them buried. Now the coyotes were baying in his head, unearthing one of them.
When he’d been about five, he’d come upon his mother standing dismayed beside a bed of blood-red tulips. Half of them were standing at attention, half of them splayed over the ground, their blossoms crumpling.
“A rabbit got them. He must think the stems are delicious. The little devil.”
Peter had helped his father set a trap that night. “We won’t hurt him, right?”
“Fine. We’ll just catch him, then drive him into the next town. Let him eat someone else’s tulips.”
Peter had baited the trap himself with a carrot, then begged his father to let him sleep in the garden to keep watch. His father had said no, but helped him set an alarm clock so he’d be the first to awaken. When it went off, Peter had run to his mother’s room to lead her outside by the hand to see the surprise.
The trap lay on its side at the bottom of a freshly scraped crater at least five feet across. Inside was a baby rabbit, dead. There wasn’t a single mark on its little body, but the cage was scratched and dented, and the ground all around clawed to rubble.
“Coyotes,” his father said, joining them. “They must have scared it to death trying to get in. And none of us even woke up.”
Peter’s mother had opened the trap and lifted out the lifeless form. She held it to her cheek. “They were just tulips. Only a few tulips.”
Peter found the carrot, one end nibbled off, and threw it as far away as he could. Then his mother had placed the rabbit’s body in his cupped palms and gone to get a shovel. With a single finger, Peter had traced its ears, unfurling like ferns from its face, and its paws, miraculously tiny, and the soft fur of its neck, slick with his mother’s tears.
When she’d returned, his mother had touched his face, which burned with shame. “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”
But it wasn’t okay. For a long time afterward, when Peter closed his eyes, he’d seen coyotes. Their claws raking dirt, their jaws snapping. He saw himself where he should have been: keeping watch in the garden that night. Over and over, he saw himself doing what he should have: rising from his sleeping bag, finding a rock, and hurling it. He saw the coyotes fleeing back into the darkness, and he saw himself opening the trap to set the rabbit free.
And with that memory, the anxiety snake struck so hard that it stunned Peter’s breath out of him. He hadn’t been where he should have been the night the coyotes killed the rabbit, and he wasn’t where he should be now.
He gasped to fill his lungs and sat bolt upright. He tore the photo in half and then in half again and pitched the pieces under the bed.
Leaving Pax hadn’t been the right thing to do.
He jumped to his feet – he’d already lost a lot of time. He fished some cargos, a long-sleeved camouflage T-shirt, and a fleece sweatshirt from his suitcase, and then an extra set of underwear and socks. He stuffed everything into his rucksack except the sweatshirt, which he tied around his waist. Jackknife in his jeans pocket. Wallet. He debated for a minute between his hiking boots and trainers and decided on the boots, although he didn’t put them on.
He looked around the room, hoping to find a torch or anything resembling camping equipment. The room had been his father’s when he’d been a boy, but aside from a few books on a shelf, it was clear his grandfather had cleaned all his things out. The cookie tin had seemed to surprise him – an oversight. Peter bumped his fingers over the spines of the books.
An atlas. He pulled it down, amazed at his luck, and flipped through it until he came to the map that showed the route he and his father had travelled. “You’ll only be three hundred miles away.” His father had tried to bridge the silence of the drive a couple of times. “I get a day off, I’ll come.” Peter had known that it would never happen. They didn’t give days off in war.
Besides, it wasn’t his father he was already missing.
And then he saw something he hadn’t realised: the highway snaked around a long range of foothills. If he cut straight across those instead of following the highway, he could save a lot of time, plus reduce the risk of being caught. He started to rip out the page, then realised he couldn’t leave his grandfather such an obvious clue. Instead, he studied the map for a long moment, then replaced the atlas on the shelf.
Three hundred miles. It looked like he could shave off a hundred of them by taking the shortcut, so say around two hundred. If he could walk at least thirty miles a day, he could make it in a week or less.
They’d left Pax at the head of the access road that led to the ruins of an old rope mill. Peter had insisted on this road because hardly anyone ever used it – Pax didn’t know about traffic – and because there were woods and fields all around. He’d go back and find Pax there, waiting, in seven days. He wouldn’t let himself think about what might happen to a tame fox in those seven days. No, Pax would be waiting at the side of the road, right where they’d left him. He’d be hungry, for sure, and probably scared, but he’d be okay. Peter would take him home. They would stay there. Just let someone try to make him leave this time. That was the right thing to do.
He and Pax. Inseparable.
He glanced around the room again, resisting the urge to just run. He couldn’t afford to miss anything. The bed. He pulled the blanket off, rumpled the sheets, and punched the pillow until it looked slept on. From his suitcase he took out the picture of his mother he’d kept on his bureau – the one taken on her last birthday, holding up the kite Peter had made for her, and smiling as if she’d never had a better present in her life – and slid it into his rucksack.
Next, he pulled out the things of hers that he’d kept hidden in his bottom drawer at home. Her gardening gloves, still smudged with the last soil she’d ever lifted; a box of her favourite tea, which had long ago lost its peppermint scent; the thick candy-cane-striped kneesocks she wore in winter. He touched them all, wishing he could take everything back home where it belonged, and then chose the smallest of the items – a gold bracelet with an enameled phoenix charm she’d worn every day – and tucked it into the middle of his rucksack with the photo.
Peter surveyed the room a last time. He eyed his baseball and glove and then crossed to the bureau and stuffed them into the rucksack. They didn’t weigh much, and he’d want them when he was back home. Besides, he just felt better when he had them. Then he eased the door open and crept to the kitchen.
He set the rucksack on the oak table, and in the dim light from above the stove, he began to pack supplies. A box of raisins, a sleeve of crackers, and a half-empty jar of peanut butter – Pax would come out of any hiding spot for peanut butter. From the refrigerator, he took a bunch of string cheese sticks and two oranges. He filled the thermos with water and then hunted through drawers until he found matches, which he wrapped in tinfoil. Under the sink he scored two lucky finds: a roll of duct tape and box of heavy-duty garbage bags. A tarp would have been better, but he took two bags with gratitude and zipped the pack.
Finally he took a sheet of paper from the pad beside the phone and began a note: DEAR GRANDFATHER. Peter looked at the words for a minute, as if they were a foreign language, and then crumpled the paper up and started a new note. I LEFT EARLY. WANTED TO GET A GOOD