Lonesome Animals by Bruce Holbert Page B

afternoon shade. They dozed happily and he envied them. A few early geese creased the blue sky. Their clatter sounded like laughter, and Strawl watched them for twenty minutes trying to predict in which pothole they might light. He rose and crossed the dirt to Stick, pumped water into a bucket and let the horse drink, then withdrew some coffee and chicory from one saddlebag and his coffeepot from the other. Hayes smiled and took the collection inside his house and lit a Franklin stove and perked the coffee, then returned with two cups filled, a sprig of mint that grew naturally behind the house in each.
    â€œYou kill anyone recently?” Strawl asked him.
    Hayes took another quarter of an hour to answer. Strawl would have expected some grand prevarication from another man, but Hayes’s only intent seemed thoroughness.
    â€œIt would have been recent,” Strawl told him. “And with a lot of folderol. And more than one.”
    Hayes looked into his hands. “My mind doesn’t work like it used to,” he said. “It ain’t worn-out like old folks’. It just quit working in words somewhere back. What I recall seems inclined toward more weather and smells and what I remember of them I can’t say because the words quit me when the weather does.” He looked like a child. He was crying. Not sobbing, just tears welling below his eyes and sliding down his cheeks. “I don’t remember people for a long time,” he said. “I admit I have had killing in me. Maybe it sneaked back without me knowing.”
    Strawl finished his cigarette.
    â€œI suppose you’ll need me for a trial.”
    Strawl shook his head. “You didn’t do it.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”

    â€œThese dead men. Someone would have to thought about it,” Strawl told him. “It’s more meanness than a man could muster on accident.”
    Strawl smacked his lips and two of the dogs approached. Strawl patted their heads and listened to them pant in the heat. Another brought him a stick and left it at Strawl’s feet. He tossed it and watched all three dogs climb over one another like rough children. One returned the stick and Strawl threw it again, and they all went forth once more, though this time they became so occupied with wrestling one another, the stick slipped their minds.
    â€œThat’s it, then?” Hayes asked.
    â€œThat’s it,” Strawl said. “Sorry to have intruded. I know people have to be an inconvenience to you.” He pumped some water into a cupped hand and washed his face. “Rutherford, you seen anything unusual, at all, come this way?”
    Hayes said, “Fire north.”
    â€œForests burning all over this summer.”
    Hayes said, “Wood smoke, tamarack likely. Nothing pitchy as planks or studs and stringers or hardy as fruit trees. Stove likely or camp.”
    â€œHow far north?”
    Hayes sniffed. “Not to Canada,” he said. “But not much short of it.”
    â€œCan you catch a whiff now?”
    Hayes nodded.
    â€œHow come you didn’t locate me by scent?”
    â€œYou weren’t on fire.”
    Strawl smoked again. Alone, a man’s senses honed upon open country like a blade across a whetstone, Strawl knew; his own were sharpened in a similar fashion. He had known those who claimed to navigate by scent, but none whose talents went beyond what seeing and hearing could deliver to an ordinary man paying attention.
Hayes had no reason to lie or gloat, though. Strawl did not doubt his sincerity. But cross a blade against a stone long enough, even the best steel passed its edge and you possessed nothing but a bone handle and filings.
    â€œYou seen anything else worth mention?” Strawl asked.
    â€œWell, I did encounter a new trail with a lot of blood in a spot and a dead baby.”
    â€œThat might qualify, Root.”
    â€œThe trail I wouldn’t think much about. Game track