I gave him a hard stare and carried on prowling the base, while Peter kept searching the horizon.
“Peter?” I shouted, curiosity killing me. “What can you see?”
He shouted something.
“What did he say?” Charlie and I asked each other. Then we kept calling, “Peter? What is it? Peter! ”
The boy wended his way back down until he reached one of the lower branches, where he hung by his arms, milking it.
“Fires.” He dropped twice his own body length into the leaves below. “Fires and smoke all over the place.”
Chapter Two
We found Joni and Maggie in a clearing, where the skeletal remains of foxgloves stood in groups like crucified corn-husk dolls. A haze clouded the dell. It was only dampness—I flipped a log with my toe and it flaked apart, its core furred with mold—but the white mist made me sniff the air, thinking of the smoke Peter had seen.
After we told Joni about the fires, she had asked all the same questions as Charlie and I. Peter’s answers were no less obscure the second time around: it looked like lots of volcanoes going off. As I had done ten minutes previously, Joni patiently explained that there were no volcanoes in this country. “Not actual volcanoes,” Peter insisted. “Like volcanoes. In the distance. Plumes.” He wobbled his hand upward to indicate smoke rising. Joni and I shrugged at each other. Whatever the truth of it, it sounded far away.
Nevertheless, Peter’s story had given us all the willies. We agreed the clearing was creepy and followed a barely discernible path out of the trees.
The long grass was sopping wet despite the warm air; we couldn’t hope for many more days as mild as this. Even the crickets sang about the end of summer. Maggie had light-fingered a Tupperware container that she called her “happy box” and was busy filling it with things she found lovely, such as scabs of lichen and knuckle-shaped twigs. When she snatched a pine cone from Billy, he stood his ground and screamed at her, “You little bucker!”
“Shush, you two,” said Joni with a hand on Maggie’s shoulder. “Listen to these locusts mating.” She started fishing about in the undergrowth, hunkering down to press her ear to the grass.
“I want to see a locust.” Maggie jostled closer.
Joni beckoned her into the undergrowth. “Come and listen to the grass.”
Maggie got on her knees. “What’s it saying?”
Joni nudged her down farther. “Can you hear it drinking?”
“Yes!”
When Joni sat up, she held a cricket in her cupped hands.
Maggie peeped between her aunt’s fingers and let out a cry of triumph. “I got a grasshopper.” She scrabbled it into her own fist, shouldering Billy out of the way to show the others.
Once we’d negotiated the release of the grasshopper, we followed the path to some pastureland. I’d expected to arrive back at the camp, but instead we reached a post-and-rail fence, so new it was green and sappy.
“Are we lost?” said Maggie.
“It is not possible to establish our precise coordinates at the current location,” I said.
“We’re lost,” said Maggie. She pulled herself up to her full four-feet-nothing, made a great show of inspecting the sky for directions, and strode out into the field. Joni looked up from rooting in her bag and chuckled. Charlie and Peter chomped on apples. Peter asked what Maggie was doing.
“Showing me what’s what.”
Charlie kept his eyes on his sister long after the rest of us lost interest. Joni finally found what she was looking for amid the chaos of her bag: a compass and an Ordnance Survey map. She and Peter crouched over it, pointing out the contours of hills and landmarks, and even Charlie was divided in his loyalty. “Aren’t you going after her, Mum?” he asked as he got down on his knees beside the map. Maggie strode, up-tiddly-up-up, to the crest of the field and disappeared, down-tiddly-down-down, without looking back once.
I heaved myself off the fence and set out into the long grass, which sopped through my canvas shoes in an instant. I ploughed along until I heard Maggie calling. She was pointing across the valley at an eyesore of a farm, where a Georgian house that could once have been prettified to have a degree of curb appeal was now dwarfed by an industrial behemoth of a shed. The function of the hulking unit was clear even to a seven-year-old: “Cows,” said Maggie.
Their noise floated like a cloud of methane, a fat lowing punctuated by screams that sounded more like trumpeting elephants. Even from this distance, we could see the movement of the herd, with most of the black-and-white shapes in a mosh pit around the gate to the dairy shed, while a few stragglers made mad dashes—most un-bovine—around the edges.
“Are the cows hurt?” Maggie’s hand slipped into mine, and I held her cool fingers between my warm palms. A pulse ran through her thumb, rapid from the walk across the field or maybe the unsettling sight of the cows. Neither of us took another step toward the farm.
“I guess they haven’t been milked today,” I said.
“But I thought the farmer milked his cows?”
“I thought so, too.”
“Should we ask the farmer about Horatio?”
This is what we’d set out to find: a place where someone might know the dog. But there was no one to be seen. And the cows were screaming.
Maggie’s hand clenched. “I don’t want to go down there,” she said.
My shoulders convulsed in a shiver, and I heard my mother’s voice: Someone just walked on your grave. I came to as though I’d been hypnotized. What was I thinking? We couldn’t go down to the farm; the kids couldn’t see animals suffering like that. The cows’ pain was as palpable as their smell. I pulled Maggie away from the sight, but I couldn’t block out the noise. The wind had shifted and the screaming swelled, washing across the land like surge waves, swiping at our ankles as we waded through the grass back to where the others were waiting, listening.
By the time we reached the camp, dusk was leaching out of the trees, and we raced to get bedded down. We’d spent the first night squeezed into my family tent, after Joni’s yurt proved too difficult to erect without its missing instructions. Now that she’d unearthed them from her copious luggage, she wanted to put the thing up. Easier said than done.
“Your tent is a total B-A-S-T-A-R-D,” I said.
“It’s fine,” Joni answered as methodically as she worked.
“What does B-A-S-buh-buh-buh spell?” Maggie called out from inside our pop-up tent. I sat on a log by the entrance, struggling to snap Joni’s poles together.
“Mind your own beeswax, hawk ears,” I replied.
Billy wandered over and asked to play with my phone. When I refused, he asked Lola for hers instead. She gave the canvas a shake to unfold the fabric and said she’d left her phone at home.
“You didn’t bring your phone?” I said.
“Mom said we have to unplug. I brought a book.”
“But—” I stared at her narrow back, the canvas enveloping her legs like a crinoline. “What kind of teenager are you?”
“I’m reading Sylvia Plath.”