The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
And the dogs, in turn, discovered that if they waited after he’d asked them to stay and disappeared into a cabin, he would always return. Together they practiced new skills he devised. They had long understood what was being asked of them during a stay, whether in the training yard or in town; now he asked if they would stay in a forest glade when they were hungry and the flickers pounded the ground, thumping up millipedes, or squirrels harassed them, or a rock sailed over their heads and rattled the dead leaves. Several times each day he found a likely spot, shielded by sumac or bracken fern, and he placed them in guard over something small—a stick he’d been carrying that morning, say, or a bit of rag. Then he walked off into the forest, careful not to push them past the breaking point since he had no way to correct them. Later, he tied a length of fishing line to the guarded thing and asked them to move only when it moved, keeping it surrounded. When they got that right, he’d sail back into their midst signing, release! and throw himself at them to roll and tickle, toss the thing for them to catch, see to each of them in whatever way he’d learned was the greatest delight for that dog.
He learned, too, the limits of their patience, different for each of them. In a stay, Baboo was as immovable as the hills, and likely to fall asleep. Essay, ever alert, was the most tempted of any of them by the skitter of a rock pitched through the ferns. And Tinder, equally likely to stick or bolt, who twice jumped up when Essay broke her stay and licked her muzzle and coaxed her back into a sit.
They agreed, more slowly, that running away mattered as much as staying. After some time he could ask them to find a spot elsewhere and wait. At first they ventured only a few feet; later, they ran until he couldn’t see them any more. They agreed it was important not to bark when they needed his attention or when they got excited. They practiced these things many times each day, whenever they tired of breaking trail through the underbrush. He began to link the idea of running away and guarding; he put the thing to guard on the ground and walked the dogs away from it, then made them return, watch it, scoot along with it as it jerked through the dead leaves on its string. He spent long evening hours picking through their coats for ticks and burrs. He checked their feet a hundred times each day.
And he compromised his idea of their destiny in order to live. They could make only as much progress as food allowed. What point was there in bolting northward if they starved halfway to wherever he intended to go? They had to pick a route that kept them hidden and let them harvest food. That meant a pace slower and a route more circuitous than he’d imagined.
He became an expert burglar of vacation cottages and fishing shacks. Mornings, while the campers fried bacon and flipped pancakes, he and the dogs lingered in the weeds; later, those same cabins would stand empty, ripe for plundering. He learned to enter without breaking, and always left without taking enough to be noticed. He carried few supplies, and none that would tie him down. A can opener and a jackknife and, later, when their diet made his teeth and gums feel buzzy, a toothbrush. A child’s Zebco spin-casting rod, small enough to carry through the woods. A fisherman’s satchel with a bobber and some hooks set in a piece of cardboard. With a little skill, he provided for them all—panfish, mainly, but sometimes a bass or a bullhead, too. Plenty of nights they went to sleep hungry, but seldom starving. The cabins yielded Twinkies and Suzie-Q’s and Ho Hos by the armful, deviled ham and custard pies and corn chips and peanut butter to eat straight from the jar, handfuls of Wheaties and Cap’n Crunch washed down with soda, and an endless procession of wieners and salami and sardines and Hershey bars. Occasionally he even found dog food, which the dogs gobbled from his palm like the most uncommon delicacy.
And he stole Off!, that balm of peace and contentment, that ambrosia of the skin. Heavenly, wonderful, miraculous Off!—above all, the Deep Woods variety, whose bitter flavor and greasy viscosity came to signify something as essential as food or water: a day unmauled by deerflies, a night of refuge from mosquitoes. He stole it from every cabin he tiptoed through—all of it, remorselessly. Wherever they spent more than a day, he hoarded two or three of the white-and-orange aerosols, and a batch of Bactines as well.
Rainy days were hard. Sometimes there was no better shelter than the base of a thick jack pine, and if the wind blew, that could be no shelter at all. Rainy nights were torture: great, racking storms, with lightning exploding all around. If he looked into the strobed rain too long, he ended up curled and oblivious, for if there was no figure to be seen in the falling drops of water, he felt abandoned, and if he saw anything—a shape, a movement, a form—he screamed, silently, despite all resolution to the contrary.
Other dogs were a problem, idiot dogs that, having scented them, loped into the woods, disregarding the cries of their owners to come back, come home, come play…Some trundled along like clowns, others, looking for trouble, like snipers. Baboo, especially, took umbrage, and he led his littermates in savage charges, ignoring Edgar’s protests until the marauders ran howling away.
They drifted from lake to lake, like stepping stones across a creek, moving westward through the Chequamegon. Sometimes Edgar learned the names of the lakes from leaflets inside the cabins—Phoebus, Duck-head, Yellow—but usually it was just The Lake. Without maps, they found themselves hemmed in by marshes and forced to backtrack. The dogs had long since grown expert at finding turtle eggs; one or the other would suddenly track down and run along a tangent and start to dig. The eggs ripened and grew ever more disgusting, apparently in equal proportion to their delicacy. But Edgar helped with the digging and pocketed a few for later, as rewards. He tromped along the rushes at shorelines until frogs leapt toward the waiting dogs, who pounced and munched.
He stole matches whenever he spotted them. During the day he wouldn’t build fires, wary of smoke-watching rangers in towers, but at night he allowed himself small, yellow cook fires, kindling them with papery curls of birch bark. After he tamped them out with dirt, he and the dogs slept listening to the yips and moans of beavers. At daybreak, loons cried.
THE LAKE WAS NAMED SCOTIA, and the Fourth of July holiday had brought campers in such droves that Edgar and the dogs were forced to retreat far from the cabins and campsites. Though he couldn’t be sure exactly which night the Fourth itself would fall on, firecrackers had been popping for three nights running. He’d moved them down near the lake, into the woods across the water from a small campground. He picked a spot well inland and was preparing to light a little pyramid of sticks and birch bark when a barrage of husky whistles came across the water. He turned to see red trailers in the air followed by three loud whomps. He led the dogs to the water and onto a spit of land occupied by a pine grove and they sat. The sky was filled with sculpted clouds, stars blazing in the interstices. A dozen campfires burned in the campground. He heard music and laughter and children’s shrieks. Silhouettes ran between the fires and the lake, whipping hairy sparklers through the air. A fiery beetle skittered across the beach, crackling and sparking.
Another round of rockets lifted over the water. A string of firecrackers crackled. Single and double flowers blossomed, big as moons, and in the aftermath red and blue particles showered down, reflections rising from the water to extinguish them in the meeting. The dogs sat on their haunches watching. Essay walked to the lake’s edge to nose one of the spirit embers, then turned and nuzzled Edgar for an explanation. He only sat and watched and lifted a hand to cup her belly.
Somewhere a song played on a radio. The campers began to sing, voices quavering over water. A dog howled, followed by a peal of laughter. The dog carried on, voice high and keen. After a while Tinder lifted his muzzle and howled in response. Essay was up at once, licking his face. When he wouldn’t stop, she joined in with her own yike-yike-yow! and then Baboo completed the trio. The camper’s dog listened as if considering some proposition and then yodeled again. Edgar knew he should stop them, but he liked the sound. It was lonesome in the woods that night, more than usual, and he couldn’t resist some connection, however tenu
After a while the dogs fell silent and the campers stopped. For a time it was quiet. Then, from the hillside north of the lake, where no cabins stood and no campfires burned, there came a basso oooooooooohr-ohr-ooooh that ended in a high chatter. Edgar recognized that howl at once, though he’d heard it at the kennel that one night only—a cry of such loneliness it drove the warmth of the July night into the stars. Essay leapt up, hackles raised, then Baboo and Tinder. Edgar set his hands on their backs and guided them down and he walked out on the wind-scoured cobble and waited. A burst of nervous laughter issued from across the lake. Then, slowly, all the sounds of the night crept back: the peepers and the crickets and the swish of the wind in the trees and from farther away the rumble of heat lightning and the eerie calls of owls and nightingales and whippoorwills. But the howl had come only once, and would not again.
HE DREAMED THAT NIGHT of Almondine, her gaze unflinching, seeking the answer to some question. It woke him in the dark. When he returned to sleep she was there again. He woke in the morning desolate and weary, dwelling on the things he missed. He missed the morning chores and the simplicity of breakfast at a table. He missed television—the afternoon movie on WEAU. The softness of their lawn. Second only to Almondine, he missed words—the sound of his mother’s voice and The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language and reading and signing things out to the pups in the whelping pens.
And he woke hungry. He collected the Zebco and the satchel and kicked leaves over the dead coals of the fire and they traced the lakeshore to a spot he’d fished the day before. From the satchel he pulled one tattered leg of a woman’s nylons, rolled up his jeans, and waded barefoot into the lake. He returned with a handful of minnows in his makeshift seine. A few minutes later he popped a sunfish out of the lake, gutted it, set it aside for the dogs, and threaded another minnow onto the hook. He fed the dogs in turns, making sure each of them had their share, scaling and filleting the flesh from the bones and tossing aside the skeletons, and when he finished, he gave them each two heads to take away and crunch. He himself would not eat the fish raw. To the south was a cottage he’d raided once; if he couldn’t get into it now, he would have to wait until he could roast himself fish in the evening.
He left the rod and satchel and led the dogs away. When they were close to the cottage, he stayed them and pushed through the undergrowth for a better look. The cottage sat near the lake at the end of a long dirt drive. It was painted bright red with windows neatly trimmed in white. Two families were toting things to a car. He backtracked to the dogs and waited. He heard the chatter of children’s voices, the slam-slam-slam of car doors, and a motor starting. When all was quiet again he brought the dogs forward and stayed them at the clearing’s edge.
A second car, a brown sedan with a leatherette-covered roof, sat parked in the weedy yard. There was no sound from the cottage except for a pair of gray squirrels bouncing loudly across the roof. He looked in a window, then knocked at the door. When no one answered, he slid the window up and levered himself onto the sill. A few minutes later he slipped out carrying two peanut butter sandwiches, a package of bacon, and a stick of butter. In one back pocket he had a Hershey’s candy bar and in the other a bottle of Off!
He was passing the car again when he remembered the car keys he’d seen glinting on the countertop inside the cottage. He looked through the driver’s-side window at the stick shift on the floor, an H pattern engraved on the knob. He didn’t think he could drive it, but for a moment he let himself imagine it anyway: sitting behind the wheel as they sped along a highway, windows down, Essay up front and Baboo and Tinder in back, their heads out the windows in the streaming summer air.
And then what? How far could he get in a stolen car? How would they buy gas? What would they eat? At least the way things were now, though they moved at a crawl, there was food almost every day. With a car, there would be no waiting outside cottages, no stealth. Worst of all, taking a car would destroy the illusion that he and the dogs were long gone. The Forest Service airplane had stopped flying above the treetops a week ago. He hadn’t seen police cruisers trolling the roads since that first day. Flyers had stopped appearing in cabins. But someone who steals a car exists. He can be chased, tracked, caught. And even if they took back roads (not that he knew which back roads to take) the four of them would be a spectacle. Taking a car meant stepping out of their phantom existence and back into the real world.
He trudged back to where the dogs lay stretched out and panting. He sat and fed them strips of bacon and squeezed the stick of butter into pats they could lick from the platform of his fist. Afterward they hounded him for his peanut butter sandwiches.
Get lost, he signed. He turned around and around, then relented and pinched off a corner for each, requiring each to do some small thing. Lie down. Fetch a stick. Roll over and show their belly to the sky. But he kept the Hershey’s bar for himself, broken and softened and melted to pudding by body heat. When he’d licked his fingers clean he set off for a place he had in mind to sleep.
THE FOUR OF THEM WERE ensconced in a clearing near the fishing spot. Edgar had anointed himself with Off! and begun to doze, the dogs stretched out around him alligator-like. Clouds unfolded and unfolded beyond the treetops. Waves passed through the reeds at the water’s edge, hush, hush, and timbreless voices piped across the water—Mom, where’s that shovel? I thought I told you not to do that! Laughter. A delighted toddler’s long screeeeeeee. Go fill this up from the lake. Car doors slamming; dishes clanking, bottles breaking. Not in the car, you won’t.
Baboo lay whimpering and jerking his leg, dreaming of voles running along weedy tunnels. In his dream, he’d shrunken to their size and bounded after them, blades of grass passing swiftly as he gained, but he was full-size, too, inside and outside the tunnel, big and small at the same time. And likewise with the other dogs, drafting the warm afternoon into their chests and exhaling sighs, dreaming and listening to the whoosh and slosh of water and the wind in the trees.
At first the dogs had thought they’d left home on a lark and would soon return. Now it seemed their world had come unmoored and their home traveled with them while the earth turned beneath their feet. Creek. Forest. Marsh edge. Lake. Moon. Wind. The sun presently baking them through the treetops. Back at the kennel they’d slept near Edgar many times—in the mow, in his room in the house, even in the yard—but it had never been like these recent nights, never curled beside him so intimately that his thrashing drove them to their feet, where they stood and watched him struggle against some unseen threat. It raised their hackles. They dropped their heads beneath their shoulders and grumbled and peered around. So vulnerable he was with his blue skin in the moonlight and his arm twisted over his face and blood pulsing beneath his skin. At such times only Essay wandered off, hunting in the dark.
They worried when he walked off for food. They argued among themselves. He’s gone. He’ll come back. What if he doesn’t, what happens then. He will. Ofttimes, in his absence, the trees bent round, carrying their freight of jays and squirrels engrossed in bitter dispute. Sometimes he returned bearing delicacies unknown before. Sometimes he came empty-handed but ready to play.
That afternoon, they’d set their fretting aside. The place was familiar. There was nothing to do but flick away flies and let the sun pass. Edgar half slept, more hypnotized even by the afternoon sun than they. He didn’t catch the scent that drifted into the clearing, nor react to the sounds that, one after another, the dogs heard. It wasn’t until they leapt up—Essay first, then Tinder, and then, in a big scramble of leaves, Baboo—that Edgar finally woke and stood and saw what had happened.
BY THE TIME THE YOUNGER of the two girls reached the glade, she and her companion had long since talked themselves out. They came to a driveway cut into the woods that ended at a red cottage. A car was parked
The boy was already watching her when she looked up. He was standing on the far side of the clearing, tall and limber-looking, with thick shocks of hair hanging across his forehead and over his eyes, all of which suggested youth, though in the bright sun his face seemed lined like an old man’s. A heartbeat later she saw the three animals standing around him, one forward and one at either side. Wolves, she thought, but of course they weren’t. They were dogs—shepherds, maybe, though not any kind she’d seen before. Their coats were chestnut and black and their tails swept down to trace the extension of their hind legs. But what struck her most was the poised stillness of their bodies, and especially their gaze, fixed on her and unwavering.
Then the boy gestured and the dogs were whisking through the clearing. One leapt away into the woods. The other two bounded toward her in an unswerving line, their shoulders rolling lionlike and their backs bowing and stretching. The sight made her gasp. When she looked up, the boy was pointing at her. He pressed an upright finger to his lips, then held the flat of his palm out in a way that clearly meant she should be quiet and stand still.