We paddle in silence. I can see the trouble in her eyes. I hate when she looks like that. It’s how she always looked when she thought about the kitten—that mysterious kitten. She’s growing more and more upset now. More upset with each stroke of the paddle.
I pull her out the only way I know how—by giving her a piece of me.
“It always stunned me nobody else could smell things as I did. At first, anyway.”
She’s interested. Alert. “You mean back when they pulled you out of the woods?”
“Yes.”
“You thought everybody had a great sense of smell, but then they didn’t, and you were surprised?”
“Yes.”
“Wow,” she says. “It must have been like entering another world.”
“It was.” It’s working. She’s back with me. I tell myself it’s for the best—that the more I can string her along, the less distance I’ll have to carry her.
But really I just don’t like to see her distressed.
“Of course they hadn’t used smell to survive. I understood it when I remembered back to what it was like when I was a boy. I had only to sit at the table and food would appear, or toward the end, in the root cellar.”
“The root cellar?”
“A small room set into the ground on the side of a house—”
“Dude, I know what a root cellar is.”
“So yes, I would hunt by smell out here. It was especially important in winter, but harder then, too, because cold animals have a fainter scent. It was worst of all when there was no snow and cold out. I would have to use my sense of hearing.”
She stills. “Would you say your sense of hearing is as good as your sense of smell?”
“Maybe.”
“Huh.”
“Most often I’d hunt through stillness. Pretending to be part of the scenery. When the rabbit hops by, you snatch it. If you wait long enough, something will scamper by.” I lower my voice. “It was a trick I used at my most desperate. Even a starving kid can wait.”
We’re moving faster now, getting down a rhythm. She’s moving. Focusing on me, on the task of paddling together.
“Why didn’t you just ask for help? Couldn’t you have found campers to help you?”
“Why would I ask for help? The police wanted to arrest me.”
“Wait—I thought you were eight.”
“Yeah, and the police were after me.”
“The police don’t arrest eight-year-old boys.”
“They wanted to lock me up even then,” I tell her. “Just like now.”
“That’s not how it works. A kid out alone? So many people would have helped you.”
“No thank you.”
“What do you mean,no thank you? People would’ve wanted tohelp—”
“Help me get locked up or killed,” I growl. “Or paraded in front of cameras like a sideshow beast at the circus. Wanting my story.”