4
A strange sound awakened him.
He had been sleeping hard, dreaming, of all things, about Kay-gwa-daush and beauty marks, and at first his body did not want to come up into consciousness.
But so much of him was tuned now to reacting to odd things, a line that did not belong where it was, a sound that should not be there, an odd color or smell. He had almost gone crazy on his last visit back to civilization. Sirens and stink of smoke and bangs and rattles and noise—it had all meshed together and desensitized him to the point where he’d heard nothing because it was so overwhelming.
Here, now, every odd sound or color or line or smell meant something. He had watched wolves hunting once and they would trot or walk along and stop every few feet and look and smell and listen and they checked everything out. Everything. Any little rustle in the grass, any soft whisper of sound, every scent.
And now here he lay, awake, knowing only that a strange noise had cut him out of sleep but not what sound or where it had come from and he opened his mouth to clear his ears and held his breath and waited, listening.
The night was perfectly still. The temperature had dropped so that he had without awakening pulled his unzipped bag over the top of him to stay warm, and it was cool enough that even the odd mosquito had gone down and it was so quiet he heard his heart beating in his ears.
But no other sound.
The moon was half full and seemed close enough to touch and made it so bright the lake around him could be seen easily. The canoe rode softly on the slick water, the little anchor still holding well. Nothing wrong there.
He sat up a bit. Nothing on the shore that he could see; of course it was far enough away—a good hundred yards—that even with the bright moon he might not see something small.
But no, nothing. No sound, not even bugs, not even a loon.
And yet he was awake. Why? He trusted his instincts implicitly here in the bush and he knew there had to have been something, some big or little thing. The dream was not enough to wake him. There had to be some outside influence involved. But he could hear or see nothing. . . .
Wait. There.
A sound. What was it? Very soft, so that he could just barely hear it, and there again, soft, whimpering. . . .
A whine. A soft whimpering whine the way a dog might sound if it was begging or injured.
A dog?
Now he sat and scoured the bank but could see nothing. A coyote, perhaps, brush wolf as they called them up north, or maybe a timber wolf, two wolves, one begging from the other.
He had a small monocular in his pack. Binocu-lars were too heavy but there were times when he wanted to see things from a distance without disturbing them—he was especially interested in the eagle nests on many of the lakes because he wanted to see the young but didn’t want to get too close to them.
He took out the monocular and studied the lakeshore. It was only eight power, but it pulled in a lot of extra light from the moon and he broke the shoreline down into sections and tried to see the wolf or coyote. Or maybe it was a fox.
But there couldn’t be a dog out here, could there?
He saw nothing on the first sweep. He looked at the moon and was thinking it was probably two or three in the morning and perhaps he should just accept that it was a coyote or wolf or maybe even a small bear and get some more sleep when he heard it again.
Not louder, but somehow more persistent, perhaps a little longer in duration.
He started another sweep and was halfway through his swing, carefully studying the shoreline foot by foot, when he came to the area where he had made a fire and cooked the northern. And then he saw it.
By the log where he had lain back after eating there was a shape. Not moving, just sitting or hulking, not a coyote but certainly not as big as a wolf either.
A dark shape that might be a small bear—there were many bears in the bush, blacks, some of them cinnamon-colored blacks, and worthy of much respect. He had had a couple of run-ins, one with a bear that he had come close to shooting, another with a bear that had tried to move into his winter shelter and had been driven off by a skunk. But this didn’t look quite like a bear either.
Now it moved, stood slowly, and he saw that it had four legs, was slightly larger than a coyote, had a shiny patch on its shoulder, and unless he was completely insane was almost assuredly a dog.
Out here.
And looking at Brian across the water whining, whimpering.
Well, he thought. Just that. Well.
I might as well go see what it wants.
He sat up, completely awake now, and fetched the anchor line from the bow rope and pulled the little grapnel up and paddled toward shore.
Close on he stopped, forty feet from the bank, sixty from the dog, and studied it again. Rabies was a very real disease and while it usually killed the infected animals before they could go far or do much damage, he didn’t want to get torn up or killed if the dog was rabid.
He used the monocular again, even this close, because it gathered so much light, and scrutinized the animal. When he had paddled in the dog had come closer to the shore to meet him, but it moved poorly and seemed to favor its right side. Brian held the scope on it to see what was wrong.
It was most certainly a dog—he could see it was a female even in the dark—a nondescript kind of dark-haired malamute cross that the Crees sometimes had in their camps to pull sleds in the winter or pack in the summer. They were not so much sled dogs as just camp dogs and companions that pulled sleds when necessary. And this one seemed friendly enough, wanting to greet him. The dog had that shiny place on her shoulder but otherwise its coat was a dark brown.
And then she turned and Brian saw the shiny spot better and realized that the dog had been wounded in some way, perhaps in a fight, and there was a slash that started just at the top of her right shoulder and went down and back at an angle almost to her rear end. It had bled all down her side, and much of the blood had clotted, but in the moonlight Brian could see the shine of fresh blood.
“Oh man,” Brian said aloud, his voice almost startling him because he so rarely spoke, “what in god’s name happened to you?”
And the dog whimpered to him again in a sound that it seemed dogs reserved just for talking to humans, a soft asking sound, a soul sound, and Brian dug the paddle in and slipped up onshore to help.