The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
Edgar lay watching the silhouettes of the owls warp as they scanned the clearing. He wondered if they should have pushed on until they came to water for the dogs, but after so many hours of stilted, cautious movement in the dark, a crashing weariness had come over him. And yet the moment his eyes closed, there lay Doctor Papineau at the bottom of the mow stairs.
Edgar gasped and opened his eyes.
You’re a murderer, he said to himself. You get what you get.
The next instant, he was asleep.
WHEN HE WOKE, the dogs were standing above him like nurses puzzling over a patient, sighting along their muzzles and cocking their heads. The ground beside him was still warm from their bodies. He unclasped his hands from between his knees and pushed himself upright. The dogs bucked and wheeled. Essay planted her back feet and walked out her front until the cords quivered in her sides. Baboo and Tinder yawned out soft creaks from gaping mouths. The owls were gone. Across the glade, the treetops glowed carmine where the rising sun touched them. His head throbbed. He thought they couldn’t have slept more than two hours.
He sat, arms around his knees, until the unfurling weeds began to tickle his nether parts. He fetched his trousers from the branch where they hung. They were as wet as when he’d taken them off, and now cold. He lifted a foot, then stopped and peered down the leg holes. When he’d finished dressing he thought he might as well have clothed himself in wilted lettuce.
Baboo had stayed beside him, but Essay and Tinder had already slipped into the tall grass, hunting each other. Trails of grass shook and they dove into the clear and wheeled and plunged back in. He stroked Baboo’s neck and watched. The dogs had filled out in the last few months. Their chests were thick and deep, their backs broad, and they moved with a powerful, leonine grace. He clapped his hands. The grass stopped moving and Tinder and Essay cantered out. He sat them in a row and paced backward and recalled them one by one. They repeated this three times, then he snapped off a dead tree branch and rolled it between his palms to scent it up and had them each fetch it. They practiced downs and rollovers and crawls while the birds around the edge of the clearing chattered.
They were heated up then, even lackadaisical Baboo. He thought they’d better find water. His nighttime fretting seemed pointless; no creek could be far off in the lower Chequamegon. He looked back along the way they’d come. Then he led them around the perimeter of the clearing and picked a spot and set foot in the forest again.
AFTER HALF AN HOUR they descended a shallow alder-choked ravine that bottomed out in a creek six inches deep and filled with pale green grass laid over in the current like mermaid hair. The dogs began to lap at once. Edgar tossed his shoes and socks across and waded in and scooped up a handful of water that tasted like cold, weak tea. He let the water run over his feet until the dogs climbed out and sprawled near a mossy log, and then they moved on.
The slant of the morning sunlight made it easy to keep his bearings. They were traversing the ridges west of the kennel, ridges he and Almondine had gazed over countless times as they sat on the hill in the south field. He didn’t know how far the ridges went or what they gave onto. They’d seldom traveled that direction; that old life, suddenly so remote, had been oriented along the meridian of Highway 13, with Ashland to the north, and everything else—Wausau, Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago—to the south. So he gave himself just two rules: stay off the roads and travel west. Whenever he was forced to detour around an obstacle, he chose the northernmost alternative. Beyond that, he had no specific destination or design, no more than when he’d first begun training the dogs on those odds and ends in the mow. He wanted distance from that prior life. He wanted time, later, to think about what had happened and what to do about it. Until then he wanted to think about the four of them and how they should move. He was already beginning to worry about the dogs. He didn’t know what to do about food. He didn’t even have a pocketknife.
Despite himself, he wondered what was happening at the kennel. He thought about Almondine, how he hadn’t had a chance to make amends with her. He wondered where she’d slept without him in the house. He wondered if his mother was standing behind the silo that morning, signaling him to return. Perhaps they were still walking through the woods shouting his name. The thought gave him twinges of both satisfaction and remorse. The jolt of his mother’s slap kept coming back to him, and her furious expression. And Doctor Papineau’s eyes, the life dimming in them as he watched.
HIS RESOLVE WASN’T TESTED until late that morning, when they came to a road cutting through the forest. It was barely more than a dirt track strewn with gravel and overhung on both sides by trees, so desolate he felt no qualms about standing in the middle of it. The sun was almost at its zenith. He squinted both directions for mailboxes or stop signs. There was nothing, not even telephone poles, just washboards ribbed into the dirt. The long, clear line of the road was a surprisingly welcome sight, for the unceasing effort of reading the tangle of underbrush and choosing a path had begun to wear him down.
Plus, mercifully, there was breeze enough in the open to dissipate the mosquitoes, which had progressed from an annoyance to a torment as he and the dogs traveled. Every fern frond and blade of grass they brushed stirred up another cloud of the hateful things. In self-defense, he’d broken into a trot, swinging his hands around his head and slapping his face and neck, but the moment he stopped they descended again, doubly drawn to his overheated skin.
He sat on the dirt, legs crossed, and gathered the dogs. An approaching car would be visible miles away and he wanted to rest for a minute. If the traveling was hard, he thought, at least there was some consolation in watching the dogs. Back at the kennel, Essay had always been the most delinquent, the hardest to train and the first to grow bored, but in the woods she was at ease, scouting, acting the huntress, forging ahead to challenge any oddity she found: a strangely aromatic stump, a chipmunk skittering through the leaves, a drumming grouse. When she was nearly out of sight, she would turn to look back, though not always; sometimes she charged into the underbrush. It made her a flagrantly inefficient traveler, covering twice as much ground as she needed to, but whenever Edgar tried to keep her nearby she whined and dropped her ears. Baboo was the steadfast one. If Edgar told him to wait, Baboo waited like a stone laid upon the earth by God himself, pleased to know his job. That Baboo was charmingly literal had always been clear, but in the woods he was a pragmatist. He trotted along behind Edgar as he broke trail, sometimes sticking close at Edgar’s heels, sometimes dropping back. But if more than a few yards came between them, Baboo crashed recklessly forward to close the gap. Of the three, Tinder was the hardest to pin down. He always stayed in sight, neither shadowing Edgar nor launching himself into the underbrush, but whenever Essay reappeared from one of her forays, it was Tinder who met her and dropped back to touch muzzles with Baboo, as if carrying news.
Edgar sat in the sun in the road. To the far side was a deep patch of fern so lush it looked primordial. They ought to get out of the open, he knew. He was still persuading himself to brave the mosquitoes when Essay’s ears twitched and she turned her head. He followed her gaze. Far down the road, a tiny cloud of orange dust was rising and a windshield heliographed as it passed in and out of the shade.
He scrambled up into a crouch. The car was far away and at first he felt no rush. If the driver had seen Edgar and the dogs at all he had probably taken them for deer. Edgar clapped his hands, signed come, and waded into the overgrown bracken. The dogs thrashed along behind him. He dropped into the green shadow world of grass and fiddleheads and worked his way along on all fours. At the back of the thicket they came to a dense blackberry bramble, the thorns curved and sharp as scalpels. Even if he forced himself through, the dogs would balk. He chided himself for running toward the unfamiliar. He thought there was still time to cross back the way they’d come, retreat into known terrain, though they wouldn’t get more than twenty yards into the forest before the car passed.
Baboo and Tin
The car was closer than he expected, a hundred yards away and slowing down. There was no way to cross without being seen. They were maybe fifteen feet into the ferns and they had broken a path wide enough to see the dirt of the road, but he guessed they would be hidden from a moving car. He got the dogs’ attention, then signed down, his hand rising briefly into the clear. The dogs eased themselves to the ground. Essay whined and tucked her hind feet under her hips and elevated her nose in a shaft of sunlight, poking it upward in tiny saccades to take the scent.
He laid one arm over Essay and reached back with the other to touch Tinder, hoping that if he could keep two of them steady, he could count on Baboo to follow their lead. The car’s bumper appeared through the stems of the ferns, moving slowly. There was the pong! of a stone popping from under a tire. Essay quivered beneath his hand. A white front fender passed his line of sight, then a tire. A black-and-white door. Another door. Another tire. The rear bumper. When the car was some distance down the road, he snapped his fingers. The dogs looked at him.
Stay, he signed. He eyeballed Essay and repeated the command.
That’s two stays. You better stick.
He finished with one finger warningly in front of her nose. She broke into a pant and tipped her hips to the side. He raised his head out of the ferns. The car was a sheriff’s cruiser covered with dust as if it had been trolling roads all night. A lone, massive figure sat behind the wheel, arm outstretched along the top of the seat. The brake lights stuttered. Edgar dropped back down into the ferns.
He counted to one hundred. When the only sound was the heat bugs in the noon sun he released the dogs. They looked at him. He released them a second time to no effect. He understood something was wrong then and he cautiously raised his head out of the ferns a second time. The cruiser was parked two hundred yards farther along. Only then could he hear it idling. The driver’s-side door was open and Glen Papineau stood looking down the road, so big he hardly seemed capable of squeezing back in.
Edgar fell down into the ferns.
Stay, stay, he signed.
Essay swiped her tail and tucked her feet and Tinder pressed his muzzle against Edgar’s palm with a questioning stare, but in the end both of them stayed put. It was Baboo who began to rise, half in curiosity, half in confusion. Edgar clapped once, overly loud. The dog froze and looked at him through the stalks of the ferns.
Down, he signed frantically. Stay.
From up the road, he heard Glen Papineau’s voice.
“Edgar?” he called. “Edgar Sawtelle?”
Baboo lowered himself to the ground, eyes wide. They waited. Edgar heard a door slam and then the faint rumble of the engine as the cruiser pulled away. This time they waited until he began to worry that the road was a dead end and that Glen might double back. He left the dogs in stays and crept out to the road.
There was nothing to see, not even a cloud of dust.
He clapped. The dogs bounded out of the ferns and danced about him in a sort of pageant his mother called The End of Down dance. A few yards up the road he found a clear line into the woods, and in another minute the road had disappeared behind them and they passed into the evanescent stipple of the forest at midday.
BY LATE AFTERNOON EDGAR was hungry—had been hungry, in fact, for quite some time. The final vestiges of panic from the night before had been drained by the monotony of breaking trail and he felt light-headed and irritable and his stomach gnawed at him. He wondered if it was the same with the dogs. They didn’t seem uneasy. They’d spent all afternoon tramping through underbrush and fording backwoods streams. So far the dogs had only missed their morning feeding, but he was used to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and he didn’t even have a match to light a fire, much less a plan to get food.
He did have something in mind, though it wasn’t exactly a plan, since it depended largely on chance. The woods were dotted with vacation cabins and fishing shacks. What was called the Chequamegon, as if it were a single block of forest, was in fact a Swiss cheese of government-owned forest and private property, particularly around the dozens of lakes. Sooner or later they were bound to find a cabin stocked with supplies or come across a car with some fisherman’s lunch inside. They hadn’t seen one yet. He hoped that meant they were due.
The problem with that idea, he thought as they reached another clearing, was that cabins and cars were located on roads, not in the middle of the woods. And roads were to be avoided at all costs—the encounter with Glen Papineau had removed any doubt from his mind about whether anyone was searching for them. If they were spotted—even by someone driving along who later called the sheriff’s office to report a boy with a bunch of dogs—they would have a good idea where he was. Cutting through the woods, however, meant slow going. He doubted they were covering more than a mile every two or three hours, with all the underbrush and marshes and the dogs to manage and the caution with which he needed to pick his steps. A sprained ankle would be a disaster.
He wondered if someone might try tracking them with dogs. The woods near the kennel would be so soaked with his scent, the fields so crisscrossed with layers of track from his ordinary daily work, that only the purest, most experienced tracking dog had any chance. And every hour that passed, their track blended farther into the general mélange. Then there was the question of where they’d find tracking dogs, anyway. Sawtelle dogs would be useless. Field tracking was an art they didn’t practice. He could hear his mother laugh at the idea; she would tell anyone who suggested it that they might as well track him with cows.
But away from the kennel, everything changed. Their scent would be undisguised and distinctive, and between the four of them they were laying a scent track a mile wide, as obvious to a real tracking dog as if the ground had been lit on fire. The only way to break such a trail would be to get into a vehicle, but hitchhiking with three dogs was as good as walking into the sheriff’s office in Mellen. Which brought him back again to staying off the roads.
He was thinking about this problem, circling it and drawing out the alternatives in his mind, when through the trees he glimpsed sunlight reflecting off water. The late afternoon had grown cooler and the wind had calmed. When they reached the water—it was a lake—they walked out onto a small peninsula of sedge and cattails. The shoreline was irregular and densely forested. He scanned for cabins, but all he saw were pines making a sawtooth pattern against the sky and birds diving over the lake, sweeping up insects. Mosquitoes, he fervently hoped. The dogs walked to the water’s edge. Having spent no time at lakes, they reared and jumped at the small waves that washed up onto their feet.
They would have to go around the lake one way or another. Because he could see most of the shoreline to the north, he chose that direction. In the twilight they came upon a snapping turtle the size of a dinner plate marching toward the water. The dogs gathered around it, rearing as it turned its blunt head, jaws agape and hissing. He rushed over and shooed them away, thinking of the stories he’d heard of turtles’ jaws staying locked onto whatever they’d bitten, even after their heads were cut off. He kept his own feet well back from the thing. He didn’t want to find out if the stories were true.
As soon as the dogs abandoned the turtle, Tinder wheeled and backtracked along its path, then began to whine and dig. In a moment, the other dogs joined in and dirt was flying through the air. They were gobbling the turtle’s eggs, teeth clicking, when Edgar got there. He reached past them and picked up an egg. It was cool and soft in his hand, the size and texture of a leathery Ping-Pong ball. Looking at it, his stomach did a traitorous little flip. Before his mouth could water any more, he took three additional eggs from the rapidly dimini
It bothered him to see them eating like that, but he had nothing better to offer. When they could find no more eggs he slapped his leg and turned to pick a place to sleep while there was still some light. He chose a spot under a stand of ash near the water. The sky overhead was a deep cobalt. Suddenly he was bone tired. He walked the four of them out to the lake and let them drink and slipped off his shoes and rolled up his jeans and waded in. His feet stirred up silt in the water and he had to reach far out, overbalancing himself, to ladle up anything clear. Even then it tasted of algae and muck and left grit between his teeth. He drank again. He led the dogs back, carrying his shoes and socks. They curled up at once. He tried to lie between them, but a rock poked his ribs. His clothes had dried during the day, but they felt greasy and lax and his stomach was bloated with water. He thought he might gag if he dwelt on its taste. Hunger twisted inside him. He got up and found a better position, though he could reach only Essay. Baboo stood, grumbling as if to say, oh all right, and moved over and circled twice and settled with his muzzle near Edgar’s face. Shortly, Tinder followed.
HE WOKE SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT. The dogs lay curled about him in circles of slumber and somewhere a nightingale was calling, “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.” Whatever had roused him had been in his dreams. And then he remembered. He was in the air above the workshop stairs. And he was falling, falling…
SUNRISE. CLAMOR AND SCREECH of birds, as if the sunlight had set them afire. The dogs stretched where they lay. Immediately, he was thinking about food—his belly felt curdled and a coppery tang coated his teeth, as if the minerals in the ground had seeped into him. By the time he sat up, the dogs were snooping in the undergrowth. He called them over one at a time and felt for stickers and burrs, starting with their tails and moving toward their heads. They lay chewing their forelegs as if pulling kernels off a corn cob as he worked. Occasionally, they nuzzled his hands, objecting to some pinch or tug. Then he stayed the dogs and walked each of them out and trotted back and signed a release. When they returned, he reached into his shirt pocket and produced a turtle egg. Tinder first, then Baboo. Essay went last—a vain attempt to teach her patience. Having watched the others get their reward, she streaked toward him through the woods the instant he moved his hands.