Wild Spirits
Wild
Spirits
Rosa Jordan
Copyright © Rosa Jordan, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by and means, electronic photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Editor: Shannon Whibbs
Design: Courtney Horner
Printer: Webcom
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Jordan, Rosa
Wild spirits / Rosa Jordan.
ISBN 978-1-55488-729-3
I. Title.
PS8619.O74W56 2010 jC813'.6 C2009-907478-8
1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright materials used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Published by The Dundurn Group
Printed and bound in Canada.
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Dedicated to the real-life animals featured in this story and to the real Tracy Wilson who spends her time and money caring for them and to animal lovers everywhere who are working to create safe places for wild things.
1
THE BANK
It was an old bank, the kind where the teller windows had bars so deposits and withdrawals had to be passed back and forth through a space below the bars. Maybe, Wendy thought, the bars were there so, if a Jesse James–type bank robber stuck a gun in your face, you could duck behind the counter and the robber couldn’t lean over to shoot at you. Not that banks were robbed in the Jesse James style anymore, with a bandana over the nose and a horse waiting at the hitching post outside.
Wendy felt lucky to be working at the bank. There were few jobs in the small town for girls with only a high school diploma. She had already tried working as a sales clerk and a doctor’s receptionist, but found the bank job more interesting. Some people said that with her honey-blonde hair, clear skin, and eyes so blue they were almost turquoise, she could be a model or in the movies. But you don’t find those jobs in small towns, either. Besides, she did not like being stared at. She had read that models and actresses spend 90 percent of their time standing around waiting for somebody to tell them what to do the rest of the time. That was not how she wanted to spend her life.
She did not want to spend her life as a bank teller either, but for now — she was only nineteen — it was okay. She found math easy, and had never made a mistake counting money. The only thing she did that sometimes got her reprimanded was what she was doing right now: staring out through the bars, her thoughts far away.
Her boss called it daydreaming. Ellen, the teller at the next window, jokingly called it “going into a trance.” But Wendy was not daydreaming or in a trance. She was just remembering. Like most people, she remembered a lot of things. But when she stared into space as she was doing now, she was remembering the wild things.
• • •
Wendy’s parents said she couldn’t possibly remember something that happened when she was so little, but she did. She remembered her dad spreading a blanket in the middle of the forest and she, a toddler, being placed on the blanket and told, as if she were a puppy in training, “Stay right here, Wendy. Take your nap. If you wake up, don’t go off this blanket. You understand?”
What Wendy understood was that if she left the blanket she would be spanked. She would lie down with her thumb in her mouth, and listen as her father clumped off through the woods.
Wendy’s mother, who worked during the day, believed she was being babysat by her father. Her mother knew, when she came home, that they had been in the woods, and knew Wendy’s father had gone there to hunt, because often he brought back fresh game for supper.
“How can you hunt and look after the baby at the same time?” her mother asked.
Her father shrugged. “No problem. I just put her down for a nap on her blanket. I stick close enough to hear her if she cries.”
That was not true. Wendy could tell, just by listening, exactly when he had gone so far away that if she called out, he would not hear her. So, after a few experimental calls, she didn’t call out, or cry. She took her nap, as her dad had told her to do.
She was alone when she fell asleep, but when she awoke there might be a bushy-tailed squirrel sitting on the corner of her blanket. It would stare at her with its bright black eyes — as hard as she stared back at it with her bright blue eyes. One day it was a smell that awakened her, and she saw, just a few feet away, a mother skunk parading across the clearing, trailed by four little ones. Wendy kept completely still. Luckily, the skunk family kept going. She often saw rabbits, and learned that they came in all sizes, from ones almost as small as a mouse to ones as large as her family’s big tomcat. As long as she remained still and did not make any noise, they would play around her in the grass, and even hop close to her on the blanket.
Perhaps when she was very small she had tried to touch the animals, but she did not remember that. What she knew, and it seemed she had always known, was that if you tried to touch a wild animal, it ran away. If she wanted the wild things to stay nearby, to keep her company until her father returned, she had to be quiet. She didn’t have to stay completely still, or completely quiet, for that matter. The animals made small noises themselves, and didn’t seem to mind if she did. Small movements, like brushing away an ant, were okay, too. Wild creatures just didn’t like loud noises and sudden movements. But then, neither did Wendy.
The only loud noise she liked to hear was her father who, two or three hours after he had left, would come clumping back along the trail. The wild things scattered when they heard him coming, so by the time he reached the clearing where he had left Wendy, she would be alone again.
Her father, carrying his gun in one hand and a sack in the other, would be in either