A Phase of the Moon
By Brendan Ray
“The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society…”
Article 16 (3) – Universal Declaration of Human Rights
I
I love summer! I love the way that every flower is in bloom, every fruit is ripe and the warm west wind carries all their scents to my nose. I can smell more than you ever could, it’s the nature of a four-legged beast. Telling you what I smell would be like trying to explain the difference between navy and turquoise to a blind man. Don’t take it personally, that’s just the way of wolves and men.
What do I sense? I smell birds sleeping in the trees, and rodents in their dark holes and deep tunnels. I can feel them under my feet and over my head as I run past. I can smell pollen from the daisies that I rolled around in earlier in the night; their residue hangs on my pelt. I can hear my younger brother just behind me, trying to catch up, and hear my younger sister running even further behind him.
The usual order of senses on the hunt is just that: Smell, hear, and finally see. We can smell the track of baby black bear. Black bears are easy to track. They smell like human garbage; so debauched have they become that humans provide their preferred pillage and not the forest. They’re perhaps as outside of the regular animal kingdom as my siblings and I are.
We give light chase, fuelled by the lure of fresh meat and the possibility of a kill. We don’t give full pursuit until we can hear or see the furry walking snack. We keep ourselves to a quick pace, faster than the two bears go, but we don’t exhaust ourselves, until finally our cheery hunting bears fruit.
My brother barks with excitement, as he’s the first to see them: a mother and cub, lumbering through the woods. The mother bear perks up right away and roars right back at us. An angry and defensive mother bear is something that would frighten any right-thinking beast, and self-preservation is never far from instinct, but we won’t be scared off. We’re not as strong as her, but we’re faster and more refined hunters.
Brother and I circle around mother and child, barking all the while. Her attention is on us, splitting directions and splitting her focus. Our sister drops down to her belly and folds back her ears. She’ll be inching closer and closer, so that when the mother swats and one of us, sister can grab our tasty morsel.
I bark brazenly and rile my fur, and mother roars at me for display. I roar back and my brother howls behind her. She looks over her shoulder quickly to check on him and I strike in quickly. Not fast enough. She swats me with that tree-trunk of a paw and sends me reeling, but Brother then jumps on her from behind. She runs out from under him and he leaps back to make her give chase, and that’s when sister strikes.
She darts in, grabs the leg of the little beggar cub and backs up as fast as she can. Mother Bear sees what’s going on and turns on our sister, but not before she manages to turn tail and start running at a full sprint. The lumbering bear will never catch up with our fleet sister, even if she is carrying more than half her weight worth of bear cub.
We join sister in flight, with the thundering furry mother giving chase. Brother and I can laugh as we go, but sister’s mouth is full, so she’s forbidden laughter. We run until the mother finally gives up the ghost and stops chasing. She resumes her lumbering, knowing that by the time she reaches us, all that’s going to be left of her cub is the remains of our meal.
After our onerous joy, I come close to sister and take a bite at the black meal. Sister drops it and catches her breath, as brother and I grab limbs and start finishing the screaming cub off. He expired, (possibly she – who really cares for such things from food) and the three of us gorge ourselves on the carcass.
By the time we could hear the mother catching up with us, we were all quite sated. We’d been sated before the hunt began, to be honest. This hunt wasn’t about food, it was about keeping ourselves sharp. During the summer, there’s a time of plenty. There’s all the food we need, just waiting for us, but when the seasons change, then we’ll have to rely on the pack hunting skills that we’re practicing tonight.
We’d disappeared into the woods by the time mother bear’d come to inspect the damage. She nudged her half-eaten youngling with her snout, and then sat down remorsefully. We didn’t give her a second thought, she lost her cub, but we gained practice. It’s a cruel reality in nature, but better that others suffer than for us to weaken. We went back home, frolicking and dancing all the way.
II
I groaned when I woke up the next morning. I felt absolutely terrible, but my father was looking out for us. The best way to wake up, and you can disagree with me if you have a different (and ergo wrong) opinion, is to the crackling smell of bacon on a skillet.
“Hi, Dad,” I greeted my father as I staggered through the door. “Slept outside again, sorry.”
“Well clean your feet, Bran. Don’t bring mud and fleas into the cottage!”
“Sorry, Dad,” I apologised and went back outside.
The cottage was a red, box-shaped summer house in the boreal forest of the Canadian Shield. It was alone on an isolated road, and the distant end of a pristine and icy lake called Lac St Denis. There was no beach, just rocky cliffs leading from the cottage plateau down to the water, and pipes and pumps to bring the lake-water up to the cottage. I went to the side of the home and grabbed a black rubber hose to clean off my feet.
“Over here,” came a voice from the woods. I saw my younger brother, Hugh, step out from behind the trees. “I need the hose, or Dad’ll yell at me, too.”
Hugh was taller than me, even though he was still in high school. He had a bean-pole build, tall and thin, and scruffy light-brown hair.
I let him clean off his feet, and then we dried them off on a towel by the door before we went in for breakfast.
“Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad! Morning, Brigid!” Hugh greeted the room. “How are you guys doing this morning?”
“Fine, you?” Brigid said with passing disgust. “You both slept
outside again?”
“Yeah,” I answered with a touch of embarrassment. “Caught up in the moment. How ya’ feelin’?”
“I’m fine, but I’ve got to get home and have a shower before we head in to the office.”
My sister Brigid was twenty-five and worked with me at HRDC, Human Resources and Development Canada, the world’s most boring bureaucracy.
“I’ll drive you home, and then we can go to work,” I answered cheerfully and then checked on brother, “You, Hugh?”
“I’m going to stay up here with Mom and Dad for a few days.”
“No, you’re not,” Mom corrected him. “You’ve got summer school, so you’re going back to town with your brother and sister, right after breakfast!”
“It’s no problem if I miss a few days, I know this stuff.”
“If you knew that stuff, you wouldn’t be in summer school,” my father added his words of wisdom to the debate. “The only reason that you’re up here on a school night is because of the full moon.”
“Yeah, fine,” Hugh said in the indignant and unwashed manner that teenagers are wont to adopt.
“Speaking of which, how did the hunt go last night?” Mom asked.
“Great, we nabbed a bear cub,” I answered, and seeing the look of shame on Brigid’s face, I decided to pick on her in my loving, brotherly way. “It was Brigid who caught it, right from under her mama’s nose!”
“Knock it off, Bran,” she sulked. She was like an alcoholic, always remorseful in the mornings. “Mom, how long was it until you stopped changing?”
“Older than you,” Mom smiled vaguely. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t last forever. Bran can already prevent it when he wants.”
“When I want,” I nodded.
“Great,” she answered. “Well, one down, two to go.”
“Two more wild nights!” I announced with enough enthusiasm to make
her feel worse. “Then you can go back to sleeping in town, instead of up here in the middle of nowhere with your crazy family!”
“Speaking of back in town…” Dad motioned to his watch.
“We’re going, we’re going!”
We thanked Dad for making breakfast and drove into town. We drove
to our parent’s house in the suburbs, we all had quick showers and got ready for the day at soldier’s speed. We dropped Hugh off at Brookfield High School, in order to give his second best at his second try at grade eleven math, and then Brigid and I went to the office.
We didn’t get into the office as quickly as expected however. The parking garage was crawling with police. I parked the car in my reserved spot, and we stepped out into the stale carbon-filled air.
We stopped dead when we smelled more than the poisonous exhaust of internal combustion engines.
The parking lot was a cubic collection of levels and perpendicular extremities, it normally smelt of steel and exhaust. No gifts of nature would be found there.
It was as though someone had put a flower in hog-rendering plant. The disgusting odour of the cars could outstrip anything else, no mater how sublime. We still both smelled the glorious smell that led us to hunt last night, that smell that woke me up this morning. The smell of carnage and red flesh.
“What seems to be the problem, officer?” I asked the nearest constable as we came in.
“Do you work here, sir?”
“I do.”
“This section of the parking lot is off limits for now,” he said, indicating the C3 section reserved for another office, “But we’ll be done soon enough. You can park here, but you’ll have to enter through the main door to get to work. Sorry for any inconvenience.”
“No problem,” I said smiling. “I hope nothing bad happened.”
The officer said nothing, but motioned for us to turn around and be on our way, and we politely were.
“Did you smell that?” Brigid asked me once we were outside.
“Wow, sure did.”
“I smelt man-flesh. Someone was killed down there.”
“Not just killed, slaughtered by the smell of it. The whole garage was fat with it!”
We walked through the front door of our office building and it seemed as though nothing was wrong with the world.
“You gonna ask the security guys at the desk what happened?” I asked playfully. “I think the one with the curly hair likes you. Maybe he’s interested.”
“Shut up,” she joked back. “I’ll ask, because I’m curious… and so are you.”
“Bonjour Richard, ca va bien?” she asked the guard in guard in her showy French. “Que-est qui as passé dans la sous-sol?”
“I don’t know de details,” Richard answered in his barely comprehensible English. It should be pointed out that he speaks to me in French, but he’ll try to chat up the girls in English. “But they’ve been down there since about four o’clock this morning.”
“Merci beaucoup,” she answered him, and we stepped into an elevator to head up to the seventh floor, where we both work.
“Well,” I began.
“Well,” she answered.
“There’s probably one of the cousins running loose. Do you want to call the folks?”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions, it could be some normal run-of-the-mill psycho.”
“I want to check it out, either way. Are you going to call the folks or not?”
“I’ve got a really busy morning, could you?”
“Sure,” I answered in an uncommitted way. “Are you going to be heading back up to the cottage?”
“Yeah, I can sometimes function with only one night, but I don’t want to unless I have to. I’d be a wreck if I fought it off without the silverware.”
“I understand. I might stay, but you can drive up with Hugh, tonight. I’ll call Mom and Dad and say that we’ve got a problem.”
“Great.”
And with that, we stepped out of the elevator and went about our days. My day was a typical day for a government worker. I had three coffee breaks before lunch, chatted with my friends and managed to attend a fruitless meeting, late, before going to the gym. All and all, a fine day.
The one thing that I didn’t manage to get done, was to call my parents. There’s no land-line up at the cottage, and cellular reception is negligible. I called our neighbours, the Theriaults, but there was no answer at their place. The cottage was a great place for isolation, and it was only an hour and a half outside of the city by car (two and a half hours if Brigid were driving,) but that isolation was also a problem sometimes.
When four thirty rolled around, I went to Brigid’s desk and we went down to the parking lot. The plan was to go to our parents’ home, get Hugh, stop by the grocery store and head back up the cottage. This plan was going to run into the briefest of snags.
Blood had been spilt in the parking lot last night and curiosity demanded investigation. I follow my nose to the corner where it must have happened, my skin tingled, like I’d walked into a room with a live electrical current, and the smell of stale blood still floated about. There’s no air conditioning in this place, so it’ll probably be like this for days. It’s so strong that I imagine that even the normal folks who come through here on daily business could smell it, but they probably wouldn’t know exactly what it was.
“Hey, Brigid,” I began once the car was onto the downtown streets. “I’m going to stay in town tonight. I haven’t been able to contact Mom or Dad, so I’m going to go snooping around.”
“I’ll stay and help,” she offered.
“No, if you stay, then Hugh’ll want to stay as well. He can’t drive up alone, and the folks’ll worry. He’s a teenager and he can’t keep his gifts in check.”
“He’s a lot more mature than you give him credit for.”
“Be that as it may, he’s not so mature that he won’t change and run amok through downtown, which is exactly what I think someone else is doing. I’ll see if I can find them, and then talk them down. Hopefully, tomorrow morning I’ll call in sick and take them up to St-Denis. Don’t know who they are, but they’re family.”
“Where are you going to look?”
“There are three parks and a homeless shelter near HRDC where they might be hunting. If they can’t control themselves, they’ll be outside polite society. It’s probably some homeless kid, just hitting puberty. That’s why we haven’t noticed anyone else in the city before. The full moon brings ‘em out.”
“Tonight’s the second full moon, so you’ve got tonight and tomorrow to find him, otherwise you can wait until next month.”
“I’ll do it, but you may want to have Dad call me from the Theriaults. I’ve never gone after a lost pup alone before.”
“If it’s just a kid, you should do fine, but if it isn’t, then lay off and we’ll all come to town tomorrow, ok?”
“Sure,” I answered, although I had no intention of putting my tail between my legs and having others come to my rescue.
We drove to our parents’ big suburban home in Barhaven and met Hugh, who was about as enthused as any teenager taking math in summer school.
“If Bran gets to stay, I want to stay!” he insisted once we explained the plan.
“No, you have to go up to the cottage and run it out, then maybe you can stay here tomorrow night.”
“You’ll need our help!”
“I can find a pup!”
“It might not be a pup! It might be a gypsy!”
“It’s not a gypsy. If there were a gypsy in Ottawa, all of cousins from all over Ontario and Quebec would be here hunting in town.”
“I want to stay and help!”
“You want to stay here and not drive up and down to the cottage every day. Sorry Hugh, but that’s the way things are. You and Brigid’ve gotta go. Call me in the morning as soon as you’ve got a signal on cell phone.”
“This is no fair!”
“Oh no,” Brigid joked. “The poor teenager’s being oppressed by his big bad family.”
“Sorry, Hugh.”
“Fine!” he grumbled
Brigid and Hugh were out the door by five thirty, plenty of time to get to the cottage before sundown. I had to get ready for my second night of hunting.
There’s a box in my parents’ basement, where they keep the good silver – that is to say, where they keep all the silver. Bracelets, necklaces, pendants and rings are kept in a safe box, kept away from prying hands. We don’t have any silverware for eating, the idea would be kind of ludicrous, I’d put in on par with uranium knives and forks, asbestos crock ware, or a public discussion of Quebec sovereignty.
I don’t put any of it on, of course. I just kept some ornaments in pouch, and put the pouch in to my mom’s Toyota. When the sun began setting, then I put it on, just to be safe.
I parked mom’s car in my HRDC office building, as public parking downtown is ridiculously expensive. I step out of the car, and the smell is back on me again.
I also smell something else.
The faintest whiff of what you might call “wet-dog smell,” is to me a complex fingerprint of hormones, musk and tell-tale signs of recent activities. The explosion of which erupted here when blood was victoriously spilt. I smell oestrogen and pheromones. My prey is female, and taking some chemical to ward off fecundity. That’s not an uncommon habit among the general population, but it’s an incredibly vulgar sin amongst us.
There’s so much else here, a whole day’s smudge of people walking through here, cars spoiling the air, and since the police had been here at four this morning, that means that the olfactory fingerprint here is about fifteen hours old. As luck would have it, that’s still fresh enough for me to get a rudimentary sense of my prey.
I run my tongue over my teeth to inspect my canines, fortunately they aren’t growing, but they will be soon.
I grabbed my pouch and start walking into the night. The first park is called Confederation Park, and it’s between the Rideau Canal, Elgin Street and city hall. It’s hard to describe Ottawa’s parks to someone who’s never been there, the whole down-town core is greener than some forests, and many of the parks have names that are known only to city planners and maintenance guys. Those parks all blur into one in the perception of the average pedestrian.
Confederation was empty, so I walked northwards towards the National Arts Centre. More greenery. Our kind likes greenery, the forest, the woods, that’s why there are so few of us in cities. Most packs live either in the forests or small villages. Mine is pretty unique for living as we do.
The moon’s rising. I can name more of Luna’s craters than I can of US states (dorsas, catenas and craters are easier to see with the naked eye than Wyoming), but she’s not what I want to see tonight. Her presence is like honey-wine, sweet and smooth, but it’ll drive me crazy if I’m not careful. I can feel myself yearning to go feral, and I stop in the park and throw my pouch on the nearest bench. There are a few teenagers nearby, pretending not to be smoking pot.
I reach into the bag and take out jewellery, which I start putting on. The kids look at me as a weird sight, but don’t do or say anything. Ottawa’s culture is pretty passive, even to the obscure.
The silver is so cold that it sticks to the sweat on my skin. It’s uncomfortable and it makes my hands shake as I put on the watch and bracelet. I feel as though I’ve just been sprinting and quickly stopped once my electrolytes went wonky. The necklace was only a thin chain, no broader than my thumb and a half a centimetre thick, but it chilled my skin and seemed to catch and pull at every one of the hairs it touched, catching them in its teeth and ripped them from the carcass of the back of my neck. I hate silver.
Luna hates silver, too. It prevents me from stepping into her world, and it blocks her gifts. It’s a sin to wear, because we’re not supposed to reject the gifts, but in the real world, it’s the only thing that can keep our rational human side in the driver’s seat. If I didn’t do this, I’d be running savage again.
So there I am, I’ve got the silver-shakes and I’m wandering around the parks of downtown, which is near where all the meth and chemical dealers are. They seemed to casually identify me as an easy mark for sale and wander in my direction. I felt like a goddamn tourist in a trap, getting swamped by locals, peddling their wares like a Cairo bazaar. I can’t really continue hunting like that, in the open, the centre of attention. You wouldn’t believe how many different smells these guys had on them; from drugs to sex, sweat to shit, those people live a hard life and they were everywhere. I felt like culling the herd then and there, nobody would miss them if I killed a few. .
“Get away from me!” I yelled and pushed through them. I knew that I’d have to keep my senses about me, but that was going to be hard under current circumstances.
After an hour or so of trolling the parks, homeless shelters and green-spaces of downtown, I took to walking the streets. The By Ward market is place best explored on foot, as all the streets are one-way and nobody knows how to drive around. Near Dalhousie Street, I caught whiff of something familiar.
On that street, for a few blocks, is Ottawa’s polite excuse for a red-light district. Ladies of the night walk about plying their trade and that was where I followed the scent. I walked for a block and a half before I saw her.
We can always recognise our own, and I saw a lost pup, a new cousin, standing on the street in a blue skirt and bra, and inconceivably high shoes. She was walking along, making eye contact with every man she saw as a potential customer, and keeping an eye on traffic. She bent over to talk to a car with an open passenger-side window by the time I reached her space.
“Take off, buddy, the police are behind you,” I announced and her potential customer tore off down the street, as fast as traffic would allow.
“You asshole,” she said with an accent that I couldn’t quite place, and then our eyes met. She did a double take when she saw me, as though she saw a familiar face that she couldn’t quite place, she seemed instantly ashamed. “I know you.”
“I don’t think so, but I’d like to know you. Are you hungry?”
“It’s a hundred and fifty dollars to find out, Handsome.”
“Were you working last night? Near the HRDC building on Queen Street?”
Her eyes glazed over, and her pupils expanded and steeled against me.
“Are you a cop?”
“No, I’m like you,” I began. “But you’re a lot older than I’d figured. How are you keeping it together? The change, I mean.”
“No… no, no, no...” she shook her head when she spoke, and she looked as though she were about to change. She was obviously a lost pup who’d developed coping mechanisms. “You stay away from me, Crackhead, or I’ll fucking kill you.”
“Calm down, you’ll make a scene,” sais I. “Stress can force the change even when you resist it. Now just relax…”
It was too late by then. Her eyebrows were thickening, her teeth were sprouting. She was barely keeping it in. I did what I thought then was the smartest thing I could, I stepped back and walked away, took a quick turn down one of the perpendicular side streets and disappeared into the night, leaving her there to practice her coping.
Stress was doubtlessly what led to her killing someone last night. Maybe a john, maybe a pimp, who knows. It wasn’t really important right now, she was. I returned to my car, and I began stuffing the silver into the glove-compartment, and let Luna in.
I’ve yet to see a good horror-film about our kind – they’re always gorily obsessed with the change, but the change is something that comes naturally to us. It’s painless and fast, my clothes were gone, and my paws were on the cement floor of the parking lot in no time. I trotted happily out of the underground cave and went into the night air.
The second night of the full moon was a clear and gorgeous one. It would have been perfect, if not for all these annoying people. Their drugs, their cars, their alcohol and oily food litter the night with smells that obscure. That’s why lost pups hide in cities. They can’t be tracked easily. I could find her from kilometres away in the forest, but in town, I’d have to be almost atop her in order to pick her out. That’s why it was a good thing that I knew her grounds. If she’d taken a warren near Dalhousie, then that means that she lived near where she worked. Our kind are very territorial, and if she were running on instinct, then she’d be nice and predictable.
I ducked in and out of cars and pedestrian traffic unnoticed and found a nice little hole for myself to crawl into. In the parking lot down the road from her corner, I put my furry belly into the dirt and watched quietly and intently, until she sensed my presence and called it a night.
I didn’t wait long. She abandoned her post and went home after a few cigarettes, to a flop-flat on Saint Patrick Street. The front door was wood, painted red, and she disappeared behind it. Her house was probably built as a duplex, but who knows how many cordons it had now. Buildings intended for one family thirty years ago were now home to three Chinese families, or twenty Arab sojourners, or any variety of ethnic and social divides.
I cantered outside the front door and took a leak on the brick wall beside it. This would make finding it easy tomorrow, during the day. I’ll come back with the rest of my pack, and Dad’ll decide what to do with this one, he’s still the alpha. If he decides she’s a lost pup, then we might take her in, or send her to some cousins far away. If he decides she’s a gypsy, a wandering adult hunter, set in her ways, then we’ll have to defend our territory by chasing her off. If she doesn’t chase off, then we’ve got another problem, but one that we’re all pretty familiar with.
Having marked the side of the house with pee, I went off to the park to sleep on the soft grass.
III
“Hello?” I managed to answer my cell phone.
“Son?”
“Dad. How are you?” I mumbled. The sun was floating overhead and woke me from my well-earned rest. Nobody seemed to pay any mind to someone sleeping in a park and waking up to his cell phone.
“What happened last night?”
“Did Brigid tell you about the office?”
“Yes.”
“I went out hunting, I found a cousin in the market, she was… hookin’ on Dalhousie.”
“How old?”
“I don’t know, eighteen, maybe twenty. I’m not very good at guessing those things.”
“Is she alone, or does she have kin?”
“I don’t think so. She lives in a flop-flat on Saint Patrick. I can take you there.”
“Alright, good. Your mother and I are coming into town with Brigid and Hugh. Are you at home?”
“No, but I will be soon. I’ll put on some coffee.”
“We’ll be there in an hour or so. You get ready.”
“Yes, Dad.”
An hour or so came far too quickly for my taste. I’d barely returned home and made it through my first pot of coffee when the family minivan arrived for disembarking. Mom, Dad, Hugh and Brigid unloaded and we greeted with the usual hugs and kisses. Mom dragged Brigid off to the kitchen and magically turned back time to the nineteen fifties, when the women-folk stayed in the kitchen and cooked breakfast and the men-folk discussed politics in the den.
“So what was she like?” Dad began.
“She was short, darkish skinned but possibly still white...”
“Was she In’jun?”
“I don’t think so,” I said with trepidation, before trying to reinforce my answer. “No.”
“Are you sure? We don’t need any more problems with our neighbours. Things have been bad enough since our last sit down.”
“She didn’t look Aboriginal,” I repeated, trying to modernise his lingo.
“We should double check,” Hugh suggested the obvious.
“She lives in one of the old houses on Saint Patrick; I marked it. We can go check it out after breakfast.”
“Maybe we should go now, before everyone’s awake, like.” Hugh seemed a little overly aggressive for his own good.
“Breakfast first,” Dad said. “We have to be strong, not hungry.”
“Are we going to bring the girls?” I asked.
“Your mom’ll stay here, but we’ll bring Brigid along.”
“Brig’ won’t like that!” Hugh guffawed.
My father’s eyes were uncharacteristically sharp and pounced on Hugh’s attempt at humour.
“But she’ll do it none the less!”
Hugh froze.
“She, and you and you,” he indicated my brother and I, “you all have a primary responsibility to your family, and protecting our territory from incursions. If other cousins move in, if some Indian Wendigoes move in, or if Gypsies wander into our territory, we have to defend it. If we don’t hold it, then we have to move on and take a new hunting ground. That means ‘Goodbye cottage, goodbye jobs, goodbye school!’ Have you kids got that? If we let her stay, more will come.”
“Yes, Father,” Hugh and I said in unison.
“You have to remember that our gifts aren’t some kind of fashion that we wear. It’s who we are. We’re not civil servants, students and retirees. We’re not townies or Canadians. We’re more than family, we’re a pack, and we’ve got a tribe and clan to think about. We hold our stake and don’t concede it to interlopers.”
I hate it when Dad gets like this. He’s from that post-WW2-generation that still thinks the world is in a state of siege, that the Germans or Soviets are lurching around every corner; that Wendigoes are hiding behind every tree and Gypsies in every alley. The modern city isn’t really the castle that it used to be, and we’re hardly alone here in town.
The modern city doesn’t trump the laws, however, and the castle walls still needed to be manned when the time came.
Dad led Hugh and I down into the basement, where the weapons were kept. Silver bullets were lined up in trays at the bottom of the safe. Dad took the trays out and put them on the workbench. Hugh and I didn’t need any instructions, we opened the weapons locker and peered in at the handguns.
The three of us stood around the table, wearing latex gloves, loading two revolvers and two automatic pistols with silver bullets. The guns were what could be considered “grey market,” in that Dad bought them on a golfing trip to the States a few years back, but didn’t bother declaring them at customs when he came back to Canada, or registering them when the government decreed that all gun-owners must. They weren’t untraceable to us, but unlike some Hollywood movie, no rogue police officer would scour the earth to investigate any mysterious circumstances of the prey we were hunting. A working girl is nobody’s darling
The gloves were to protect our skin from the silver, rather than our identity. I can actually wear a silver bracelet. Store bought silver is typically an alloy with copper, germanium and rarely gold or platinum. Sterling silver’s always cut with even more of chemistry’s alphabet soup. These bullets were pure silver, a substance which most people outside a silversmith’s or a chem lab never see.
Most of the city is wide awake by nine in the morning, but the slummy areas are awake later into the night and stay burrowed in slumber longer into the morning sun than the rest of the city.
We left Mom at home, and the four of us piled into the minivan and went downtown. We escaped the morning rush-hour and turned onto Saint Patrick at ten thirty-one in the morning.
“Here we are,” I announced once we approached the house with the red door. “See the stain on the front steps?”
“That’s lovely,” Brigid said sarcastically.
“We’ve made it here at any rate,” Dad said, finding a nearby parking spot on the street. “Is everybody ready?”
“I am,” Hugh was the first to volunteer his youthful enthusiasm to the group.
“Same here,” Brigid lacked our younger sibling’s energy.
“You know I am,” I’d resigned myself to the duty, I was neither excited nor dreading it. “Let’s go.”
The four of us nonchalantly exited our vehicle, walked up to the red door and we walked right in. The house was a duplex, with two doors in the interior antechamber. This close to her warren, it was easy to tell which door was hers, we could all smell her track on the left door. Dad knocked, and after a minute there was no answer. Hugh reached out and checked the handle, which turned and the door slid open.
“Well?” he asked more with his raised eyebrows than with words.
“In we go,” Dad pointed his nose in the direction of the home and the four of us walked into the stranger’s apartment, closing the door behind us.
The main room looked as if it had been ransacked by drug-fiends. There was a stack of empty pizza boxes in the corner and the smell of body odour hung in the air alongside incense and bug spray. The couches were covered with bits of food, and the sink full of dirty dishes.
“Just lovely,” Brigid poked an empty McDonald’s take-away bag and a family of cockroaches fled for the cover of darkness.
“We can wait,” Hugh said. “She’ll have to come back sooner or later.”
Sooner came before later and the big red door creaked open.
“Into the kitchen,” Dad ordered. “She needs to come in and close the door behind her. We don’t want her to run.”
The four of us stood back into the filthy kitchen and the girl from the other night stumbled into her apartment. She had a white plastic bag under in either hand, full of sundry foods from Lebanese grocer on the corner.
“Hi there,” I announced once she’d closed the door behind her.
“You!” She gasped, but didn’t lose her grip on her groceries. She nervously looked at the other three people standing with me in her kitchen. “I ain’t working now.”
“I know,” I answered. “My father wanted to ask you some question.”
“You’re father?”
“How old are you?” Dad interjected himself into our little tête-a-tête.
“What’s it to you?”
Dad didn’t move, but stared into her eyes. On her controlled face, her eyes were like dark-water ponds in autumn. They were cold, non-reflective and hiding something.
“You’re twenty five,” Dad answered with confidence. I hated it when Dad did this; he could look in someone’s eyes and tear the answers out with his own. “And you’ve met packs like us before. You’ve talked your way out before.”
She swallowed.
“Look, I didn’t know that you guys’d called dibs, I’ll be on my way. No problem.”
“You’re lying. You’ve been travelling from town to town for more than ten years, building a body-count and then moving on.”
“Hey, that’s not true!” she started to say, but was cut off by the quick motion of Dad’s pistol coming from under his polyester shirt.
My siblings and I tried to follow suit, but Dad let three shots fly before any of us were in the fray. I don’t know how many shots were fired, but she was on the ground and convulsing while blood sprayed from her open wounds before I was ready to take fire.
We were out the door, in the car, and driving with the flow of traffic in less than two minutes. The car was very quiet.
“You did a good job tracking her, Bran,” Dad announced.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“You two in back did a good job, too.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Hugh croaked.
“Yeah, thanks,” Brigid acknowledged. She looked out the window at the late morning traffic that was filling out as noon-time approached.
“You guys will have to act faster next time,” Dad added after a minor interlude of silence.
“Yeah, I thought you were going to talk to her and scare her off,” was my opinion.
“That was my plan, but then I saw her plan. I could tell that she had a weapon nearby. She’s killed our kind before. We couldn’t let her stay in town. She’d run amok eventually, and spoil our grounds. She was a mad-dog.”
“I’ll be faster next time,” Hugh mumbled quietly.
Brigid was wholly silent for the rest of the ride back home.
Lac Sainte-Denis was a deep water glacial lake. The water was always cold and the fish were few and far between, but it had a fierce beauty to it. The green forests met the black water with only a few beaches on the landscape. The hills of the Canadian Shield protected the lake with a pre-Cambrian record and stood now to keep the winds off the water’s surface. The sun started to lie back westwards against those hills, and bounce it’s rays to the eastern shores.
Hugh was down by the rocky shore-line when I found him.
“You ok, Hugh?”
“I’m alright,” he lied. “How about you?”
“I’m fine,” I answered honestly. “Are you upset about today?”
“A bit.”
“Don’t be,” I sat on a rock opposite him and looked out at the lake. “If we didn’t kill her, we’d just have more and more of them coming in every year. Tolerating shit invites more.”
“We could have talked to her.”
“No, we couldn’t have. We’re not diplomats. If we’d let her go, she’d have thought us weak. She’d just dig into her warren and defend her territory.”
“We didn’t have to kill her,” Hugh seemed about to break up over this.
“We didn’t have to kill that bear cub two nights ago. Think of how much moose-meat we gave away last fall during season! We hunt because we hunt. We defend our territory because it’s ours. There’s no cosmic justice at play here, just nature, red in tooth and claw.”
“We’re more than just nature.”
“A tree is more than wood, but it’s still wood.”
“Humph.”
“Sun’s setting, moon’s rising, Hugh. You ready for another hunt?”
“I’m going to try and resist it tonight. See if I can keep my ape-face on. Brigid’s going to do the same.”
“Good luck with that, guys. I feel like breakin’ out.”
I slapped his shoulder and returned to the cottage. I’d resisted for much of last night, and needed to let loose tonight. The call of nature could be postponed, but never ignored. I won’t resist what I was born to do; I am that I am.
