I didn’t stay long. When the pain gets this intense, they have to sedate her to prevent seizures. The intervals between attacks keep getting shorter.
But God help me, just this once, I was almost grateful for it.
Driving through the village on my way home, I passed Algoma Sporting Goods. On impulse, I parked in front and went inside. A big store, family owned, in an older building, barnboard walls with a high, embossed-metal ceiling.
The front of the store was mostly filled with school gear: baseball gloves, cleats, basketball jerseys. I bought a Nerf football for my boys here once. But halfway back, the games change from high-school sports to woodland slaughter.
No Nerf gear back here. The clothing is heavy canvas, color-camouflaged to resemble the northern Michigan forest. The entire back wall is a gigantic display of firearms, rifles, and shotguns, three tiers of them, floor to ceiling. Every caliber from a Boy Scout beginner’s twenty-two popgun to a monster .458 Winchester Magnum, capable of killing an Alaskan grizzly at three hundred yards. Even if the bear’s hiding behind a tree.
But it was the display beside it that caught my eye. Modern hunting bows of enormous complexity, equipped with offset pulleys and wheels and counterweights and telescopic sights, arrows of aluminum, titanium, and fiberglass composites. Robin Hood wouldn’t have recognized a damned thing on that wall.
“Can I help you?” A redneck salesman materialized at my left shoulder. Paunchy with a scruffy beard, wearing a faded flannel shirt. This definitely wasn’t the Gap.
“Do you carry chalk dust for tracking strings?”
“Sure, right over here,” he said, moving behind the counter. “What’s your poison, pal, Day-Glo orange or neon yellow?”
“How about blue?”
“Blue? Sorry, we don’t carry it. I expect you can get blue dust down the street at the hardware store, though.”
“Do you know anyone who uses blue chalk?”
He blinked, confused by the question. And glanced over my shoulder, as if the answer might be behind me. “Blue? Naw, not offhand. You ain’t a bow hunter, are ya, mister?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so. 'Scuse me, I got other customers.” He beat a hasty retreat, jumpy as a kid with a crib sheet up his sleeve. I turned to see what he’d looked at... and froze. The wall behind me held a stunning display as surreal as a Star Wars set.
Crossbows. But not the ancient arbalests of the Middle Ages. More like weird weapons from Middle Earth. Ultra-modern killing machines. Hollow plastic stocks, geared cranking mechanisms, bipods and rifle scopes. Names like Revolution XS, Quad 400, and Talon Super Max.
They didn’t fire standard arrows, they shot bolts of steel, with replaceable broadhead tips, some with serrated bleeder blades sharp enough to transfix an elk.
Or gut a small dog.
At home, I actually paused in the doorway a moment, waiting for Sparky’s welcoming racket. Which was crazy. He was in the box under my arm. And he’d never welcome anyone again. But as bad as I felt about it, I couldn’t let my guard down now.
With Janie in the hospice and the boys staying with my in-laws, we didn’t need the added stress of a slaughtered dog. Better to tell everyone Sparky just... ran away. It was thin, but I could probably sell it. But to make it work, I had to conceal the evidence.
Grabbing a spade from the garden shed, I carried Sparky out of our backyard into the grassy field beyond our fence. The greenbelt stretches the full width of the subdivision, nearly a quarter-mile, room for the kids from a dozen families to play together. The homes are all similar, faux New England saltboxes with vinyl siding, set on two-acre lots that end at the edge of the field. Our lot is a bit larger, a full five acres that extends well into the deep woods beyond.
Halfway across the field, some juniper bushes shielded me from view. It would have to do. Gently setting the box down, I began to dig. In the soft, moist earth, it didn’t take long. The hole, two feet square, four feet deep, seemed much too small to contain the spirit of our rambunctious little dog. For a moment I could see Janie running across this very field with Sparky in hot pursuit...
I slammed the slide projector of my memory shut. Hard. I can’t afford to think too much about Janie. If I start to cry, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop. Janie’s always been the strong one, irrepressible. But it’s my turn to carry the weight now. She needs my strength, and so do the boys. Somehow I have to manage this. So mostly, I try to shut myself down. To keep from feeling anything at all.
But burying Sparky in that empty field, alone, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
Placing him gently in his little grave, I recited the Lord’s Prayer. Couldn’t think of anything else. Then I carefully covered him over.
The turned earth looked too raw, too visible. I was gathering scraps of underbrush to camouflage it when I noticed the blood.
Glistening crimson dewdrops, darkening to maroon now as they congealed in the autumn air. Sparky must have dragged himself past this spot earlier. Bleeding. And dying. In agony. Trying to get home.
In the late afternoon sun, the blood trail gleamed like a beacon in the grass. Showing where he’d passed. And where he’d come from.
I don’t recall consciously making the decision. But when I’d finished concealing Sparky’s grave, I turned and marched slowly into the forest, tracking the blood spoor, clutching my spade like a spear.
It was like stepping back in time. At first, the trees were scattered, mostly aspens at the edge of the wood, new growth that had sprung up after the land had been leveled for the subdivision. But a few yards beyond them, I was already deep in the primeval woodlands, poplars and pines towering overhead, their swaying limbs splintering the sunlight, dappling the forest floor, making the blood trail damned difficult to follow.
But I managed. As I took each careful step, totally focused on the sparse red spatters on the matted leaves, I felt myself slipping into an ancient rhythm. A mindset left over from an earlier age, when men had stalked this land for survival, when losing a blood trail might mean slow death from starvation...
It faded out. The distance between blood dots had been gradually lengthening until I had to stop at each small spatter and scan the ground ahead for the next one. Twice, I lost the trail and had to circle the last dot until I crossed the next. But not this time. The blood had vanished altogether.
And as I straightened up and took stock, I realized why. This was the place. I was standing in the killing zone.
Off to my left, the forest floor was roughed up in the center of a small clearing, leaves scattered, the soil gouged, torn by the paws of a small dog thrashing about in agony. I was certain of the spot. Some of the displaced leaves were smudged with blue chalk marks. And smeared blood.
I did a slow pirouette, scanning the forest around me. Most hunters favor the dawn hours and late afternoon. Perhaps the man I wanted to meet was watching me even now...
Then I spotted it. Thirty yards off. A small hut, a shooting blind, hand-built of dun-colored canvas and dead branches. Artfully camouflaged. If I hadn’t been looking, I would never have noticed it.
I approached it warily, gripping my spade fiercely with both hands. But there was no need. The blind was empty. As I peered inside, I realized I was trembling with tension, taut as a bowstring. Or a cocked crossbow. I’d really wanted the bastard to be here.
But he wasn’t. So instead of splitting his skull with my shovel, I took my rage out on his handiwork, ripping his hut apart with my bare hands, hurling the pieces as far into the forest as I could. In two furious minutes I reduced his hunting blind to a few bits of scattered wreckage. A stick here, a shred of canvas there. Nuked. Utterly destroyed.