Bauer looked down to his coffee. He waited until he had control. "No.
The one thing, and maybe the only thing, that I will not surrender or compromise on, is my children."
"At least there's one thing. It may be a first. But you don't have any choice anymore."
Bauer stood. "Ursula," he said carefully. "If your lawyer's any good, he'll tell you you don't have a case. But if you want to fight it, then go to court. Maybe it is better to have this kind of thing on paper. But I'm going to get them summers, and alternate holidays, and every weekend if I can, at least twice a month if I can't, and I'll have it written in to the order that you can't move more than fifty miles from here. That's for openers, Ursula. Don't ever threaten me with my children again. If for any reason you succeed in getting me barred from them, then I'll take them to Europe, Ursula, and you won't see them until you're a toothless old woman. I can do it, and you know that I would. So think very carefully before you act."
She gave him a disdainful smile.
"Good night," he said.
She followed him to the door and stood there as he went down the porch steps. "When that dog comes home," she said, "I want it killed. I'll get a court order on that too if I have to. But I want it dead, so I can tell Jeff that it can't ever hurt him again, so he can sleep at night:"
Bauer continued to his car without looking back.
Orph had been painfully hungry the first two days. The ground squirrels were too quick, the field mice vanished the instant he moved, and the crippled bird he'd stalked exploded into the air, not crippled at all, and by that time he'd been led too far and couldn't find the nest-scent again.
He spent an afternoon digging up a long tunnel for nothing but a mouthful of dirt. The third day, he did not draw deeper into the woods when he encountered a human scent, as he had done before, but instead turned and moved slowly into its expanding intensity. He followed it to the edge of the trees, where it was powerful enough to overwhelm all the cracks and gabbles, weights and sinuous threads that were the various other odors and washed them back against a shallow reef of his awareness, and he stopped there and lay down in the shadows to stare at the unfamiliar house. He swallowed against the saliva that rose to the multicolored stratum of food winding in and out of the human scent. He didn't see any movement, but he knew they were there; their odor came to him on waves, a living presence, not a mark of passage. He waited until nightfall. Humans were creatures of the light. He rose in the deep blackness and padded wide around the back of the house toward the food. The sounds from within indicated their own containment; the humans were oblivious to him. The food was in a metal can, as He had kept it. Orph nudged the top with his nose. The can rocked slightly on the stone, making a noise. Orph stood still and listened to the house. Nothing had changed. He bumped the top again. It stayed tight. He looked to the house. He sniffed the air, turned his ears.
The night was unruffled. He knocked the can over.
The top popped off with a clatter, junk and food spilled out. Pieces of meat, fat, bones. He swallowed greedily. A light went on over the back porch. Orph looked up, jaws still working, crushing small bones.
The door opened, a man stepped out, raised his hand to his eyes and craned his head.
"Hey! Get out of there."
Orph backed up, ripped open a paper bag, snatched fat from it.
"Go on, damn it! Get out!" The man grabbed a piece of firewood and hurled it. It sailed over Orph's head. The man picked up another one and started down the stairs.
Orph swallowed, seized a big jointed bone with ragged pieces of gristle and turned and ran. A piece of firewood crashed against a branch as he plunged into the woods. The man didn't follow. Orph trotted until he found a place he liked, beneath a rock overhang, then settled down with the bone. After he'd ripped and gnawed off the tissue, he cracked the bone in the powerful vise of his jaws and licked the splinters clean of marrow.
Over a week, he learned. He began to anticipate the routes and movements of prey, he developed patience. He stood before mouse holes and runs, inching forward, stiffening, then the high pounce and snap of jaws. He began to catch a few, but was still hungry. He came out of the woods one night to another house and knocked the can over. There was an abundance in it. He ate for several minutes, then a light flashed from a darkened window and caught him at the food. A man's and a woman's voice. A metallic sound. And suddenly an alarming resonance in the muscles of his chest; harshness, anger from the house. Orph sniffed deeply. A powerful exudation, thick with savagery and killing; twined within it, the scent of oil, metal, and an unfamiliar pungency.
Flat thunder clapped, flame stabbed from the window. Pain seared across Orph's back. He sprang into the darkness and raced to the trees. The light swept after him but didn't touch him again.
Orph licked the hurt through the night. It scabbed over by the next evening, and itched some after that, but wasn't very painful.
When he crossed human scent, he withdrew, unhurried, but carefully.
Once be came upon one acrid with the killing odor and overlaid with the oil, metal and black pungency he'd smelled the night he'd been hurt, and he moved quickly then, putting half a mountain behind him before he felt easy again.
His cells swelled outward, he was received by the stone and wood. The tight, thin compression he'd lived with all his life abated, then was gone.
There was clarity. He celebrated, he exulted.
At moments, though, was an uneasiness, an imbalance, a discordancy, which was Orph's nearest approximation to unhappiness. He had no literal memory, the recollection of vignette, but in a sensory consortium could see the image of Him, taste His scent, hear the timbre of His voice. There were throbs of emotion: colors, warm ths hungers that could not be stifled with food, sweet touches that penetrated past the skin to thrilled organs.
These brought him back one night. He emerged from the trees in darkness to stand looking at the lighted cabin.
He could smell Him, he heard the music He played. The comfort of His closeness, their bonded roaming, the gentleness and playfulness of His hands. The strange thing that made him want to be near.
Orph stepped toward the cabin.
The woods behind him pulled. The imminence of Him drew softly. Orph shuddered.
A stale blood scent. The roar of his own throat. Teeth. The shock of His anger. Shame and confusion. The pulsation of kill tremors from Him. The moon cold and powerful on his back. The rustling of the woods. Home: Home.
Orph was palsied. He salivated. A riot in his mind, madness, unbearable pain, weakening legs, a drop of urine leaking his penis. He began to pant, he whimpered. He took a step backward, then another, and he whirled and went running into the woods.
The chain tore through the last of the spruce hole, spitting out a spray of resiny sawdust, and the tree began to lean, creaking, and Buddy Stokes hit the oil button, lubricating the hot saw, the screaming whine shrill in his ears even beneath the earplugs, but it was a part of the condition of his life, it was the music of his days, and he loved it.
The tree angled sharply and the few centimeters of hole wood left began to snap and tear in stringy fibers, and Stokes narrowed his eyes and curled his lips under in concentration and anticipation and pressed the singing chain hard against the wood to beat the rupturing, to finish it himself, and then the saw burst through, the spruce was severed, and it crashed down to the earth.
Stokes released the trigger and let the saw wind down and cough itself dead. He pulled his earplugs out. He wiped an arm across his forehead. The spruce had fallen well, where he wanted it. He was working a small rise, the land dropping at a soft decline beneath him, mostly denuded row, the limb tripped trunks scattered like the bodies of brave, mindless soldiers after a massacre. Tomorrow morning he'd cut the limbs from the trees he'd felled today, by midafternoon he could start skidding the trunks out.