I felt a wildness rise inside me. An urge to run far as I could, till my head emptied out and my skin stopped buzzing and I could focus long enough to set a snare and wait for a critter to come along, and then I could leave myself completely for a time, my eyes and ears not my own, they would belong to a marten or a squirrel. Leave behind thoughts of Hatch, of Dad’s anger at me, of racing, even. It wouldn’t do for me to go a week without hunting. But even if I tried to explain that to Dad, I couldn’t make him understand. I would have to find another way.
What I had told Dad was true, there come a point when Mom didn’t just let me stay outdoors all day, but give me the run of the woods. I could stay gone overnight, even, and she never said nothing long as I told her when to expect me back.
But that only started when I was ten. Before that, Mom couldn’t seem to make up her mind, sometimes she shooed me outside and didn’t bother to tell me, Come in before dark, or remind me to clean my hands before dinner. Sometimes it seemed like she couldn’t wait to be rid of me, and when I did come home I would spot her and Scott, snuggled together in the hammock we set up in the yard summers, or building a snowman in the winter. The two of them laughing. When I got near, Scott would go on giggling and packing snow onto the man they’d made. But Mom was like water on the coldest day of the year, you could toss a cup of it into the air and it would freeze before it hit the ground. She seen me, and become brittle.
Other times, for no reason I could fathom, she would forbid me to leave the house. You have schoolwork, she would tell me, but no matter how many worksheets I done or science experiments I finished, I never got to the part of the day where the work was over and I could run off into the trees. At first I would bargain with her, if I made my bed and done all my homeschool and any chore she chose to give me, could I just go out long enough to check my traps? When that didn’t work, I tried to sneak out, waited till she was gone from the room then run for the door, only to find her somehow on the other side of it, like she had read my mind. She could be even faster and quieter than me when she wanted. Homework, she would say and point me back to the kitchen table where my schoolbooks was.
Then I pitched a fit. Threw my pencil across the room, kicked over my chair. Lunged at her when she drew near and clawed her arms till the blood come.
Upstairs, she said in her quietest voice, the one that meant I was in the most trouble.
Once, we went more than a week that way. The two of us at odds and her only making it worse the longer she kept me away from the woods. I grew surly, then sick, my stomach hollow and cold. At night, I dreamed of running through the trees on all fours and sinking my sharp teeth into the skin of whatever I caught. In the morning I woke exhausted and pale, and hungrier than ever.
The year before, Dad had took on some help. Winning the Yukon Quest for the first time, plus a handful of shorter races, he’d started to make a name for himself, and though he hadn’t yet won the Iditarod, he’d done respectable, finished in the top ten two out of the last three years. He’d got a couple sponsors who paid for some of his gear, and the number of our dogs was growing. So when a young guy named Aaron come round saying he was looking to apprentice someplace, Dad let him train our puppy team in exchange for doing odd jobs and helping care for the seasoned dogs.
There was others, too, the ones Dad called the youngsters, two guys and a girl who helped train the dogs and prep gear and food bags for races. The girl and one of the guys was both back in Alaska after going to school in the lower forty-eight, and the other guy was fresh out of high school. All three of them was interested in mushing or taking care of animals, and they worked hard for Dad.
It was my tenth day stuck indoors when Mom sent me to the woodshed to fetch some logs for the fireplace. I piled wood onto the sled and listened to the scurrying of the mice who had made their homes in the small spaces between the logs. My mouth watering. My arms sore with the effort of lifting and stacking. I hoisted one last log, turned to drop it on the sled, and there was our old barn cat, purring and rubbing against the back of my legs. I tripped over it as I turned, my arms round the log, and fell so fast I didn’t have time to catch myself. I dropped like a sack of kibble, my head smacked the edge of the sled.
I was up again in a flash. The cat hadn’t startled, only leaped out of the way when I fell, still within reach. Even sick, I was faster than the cat, it was warm in my arms and still purring when I put my hand round its head.
My belly was warm and satisfied by the time I looked up to see Aaron. He seemed stuck to the spot where he stood. Till our eyes locked and he dropped the bucket he was carrying and backed away, then turned, walked fast toward the kennel, faster with every step.
I understood then what it was about the movement of small things that had made our cat crazy, sent it jumping across the kennel with its claws out. With no thought in my head I pounced after Aaron, energy like I hadn’t felt in days surging through my muscles, even when he broke into a sprint it was no effort for me to catch up, and when I grabbed the back of his shirt and he tried to pull away, I held fast. His eyes wide when I put my hands on him. His hands pushing as I bit into his skin.
The tires of his car spun in the snow before he managed to peel out of the driveway. Dad was off on a run, but Mom had come outside, she must of spotted Aaron from the house, seen him running to the car, his hand pressed against his neck. Here and there, between where I stood and the tracks Aaron’s tires had left, the snow speckled red.
Mom didn’t say nothing. Only gripped my arm and pulled me toward the house. I could of twisted away, easy, and run off, but I thought better. She was trembling all over but her hand was steady, her fingers dug into my arm till she pushed me into my room and closed the door behind me.
When I tried the door, it only opened a crack, something was tied round the knob and stretched across the hallway.
I went to my bed. Stared at the ceiling. Warm all over and heavy with sleep, not like the exhaustion I’d felt all the time I was stuck indoors but the way the cat felt after it had ate its fill and licked its paws and found a patch of sunlight to curl up in. I understood now how clever the cat had been at cornering the mice in the woodshed, what a good hunter it was, and a small part of me regretted snapping its neck.
I felt Aaron inside me, too, but he was different from the cat. I had the cat’s whole life in me, everything it had learned and experienced. From Aaron, I only had a spike of fear and confusion and disgust that had drove through him when he seen what I done to the cat. And under that, a faint, warm glow as he, as I, thought of the beer I would grab at the roadhouse once my day’s work was done. The last thing that must of been on his mind before I bit him.
Downstairs, Mom took the phone from its cradle, then replaced it. Picked it up again, and her voice floated up to me through the floorboards, not the words but the tone, pitched low but urgent. After she hung up, the house was quiet till Scott woke from his nap. Their voices moved together to the kitchen, and then I heard water running and bowls and spoons clattering, and soon the scent of something sweet baking. I fell asleep to the sound of their conversation, muffled by the walls and floors between us.