One day, maybe a couple weeks after school let out, I went to check the Juneberries along the lake path to see when they’d be ready to pick. I wanted to get to them before the summer people did, before the bushes were stripped bare by half-assed day-trippers. I’d been walking around for about an hour, finding no good berries, when I heard the sound of a gunned motor coming down the old boat-launch path toward the lake. There was a long, anxious rustling in the trees. I stopped, waited to yell at whoever it was for going off road and trashing the wilderness. But it wasn’t a tourist. It was my dad who appeared in a cloud of dust and leaves. He was riding the ATV he’d traded the dog sled for last spring, and he lifted an orange-gloved hand as he approached. Hello. He was in shirtsleeves and his face was bright red. Sweat flowered in dirty lines around his neck.
“Hey, kid,” he said, releasing the throttle.
I humphed at him. Got on.
Though half the time that summer that ATV didn’t work at all, half the time it did, and for ten minutes that afternoon, I sat behind him on the hard leather seat as we rumbled along the overgrown trail destroying everything we touched—smashing ferns and goldenrod and baby white pine and sumac fronds— and it was wretched, and it was so delicious, too.
The next afternoon, after the fish cooler was restocked, after the last of the spring’s blowdown was chopped and stacked, I decided to take the dogs out in the woods. I’d been busy after school for months, so it had been a while since I’d gone very far with them. Jasper and Doctor sprinted ahead, pouncing on every trembling leaf and fern. Abe and Quiet—both almost as old as I was—were slower and more selective in their chases. I took them up the ravine, where I’d taken Paul all spring, and the younger dogs leapt clean over logs and boulders. The older dogs hopped up and off. I lingered atop, looked around. All around me, dogs were rolling and sniffing, squatting and urinating, scarfing down scat. Their pleasure at being off their chains gave me an ache in the chest. It was so simple to please them.
But even the older dogs in early summer could be unpredictable. By the time we’d walked for an hour, they were disappearing in the woods for longer and longer periods. Tearing off after a scent, coming back for a pat, going farther, taking risks. Before long, even old gray-muzzled Abe had found a squirrel to tree. For long stretches, I could only hear the scuffling of leaves. Time after time, I thought about shouting after them, calling them back. And time after time, they returned on their own in twos and threes, tongues lolling, grazing their wet noses against my knuckles.
Once, they were gone for more than five minutes. Long enough for the woods to return to its predog state, for birds to settle again on branches. Then all four came thundering back at once as if they’d made a plan of it, as if they’d organized at last into a real wolf pack, and I saw they were chasing something small and white. The creature shot up a spindly birch and bent it down double, silver leaves dropping in a pat-pat-pat.
“Oh, Drake,” I said. The bristling cat hissed from its branch. “How did the world go for you, then?”
The world, it appeared, was going crazy below, all four dogs leaping and nipping. I shushed them with a few choice words. There was nothing for me to do but shimmy up a rock beside the tree and retrieve the cat. He arched up when I grabbed for him, but then twenty claws sank like twenty hooks into my neck and shoulders. It wasn’t so bad being caught like that. My hands around Drake’s scrawny chest, I slid from the boulder and started walking. The dogs followed behind. They spun circles of ecstasy, panted miserably, did their endless orbits of triumph.
So when I knocked on the Gardners’ door, there we all were. Four panting dogs, one freaked-out cat, Patra looking a little shocked, and me—trying to keep from grinning.
“Found him,” I said.
I turned and, tightening one elbow around Drake, lowered my other hand to the dogs. They lay down on the gravel, reluctant but happy now, because they thought this meant the cat was theirs. “Stay,” I said, feeling like some mini-god, some deity of dogs. I wanted Patra to see this, the control I had.
Then I slipped past her with the cat and went in.
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