They looked like the creatures I’d met in the forest two weeks ago.
I debated telling Darlene what I’d seen. Or what I thought I saw. I had a virus at the time. So who knows?
I settled for a half-truth. “Sometimes my mind embellishes things when I draw.”
She shrugged and headed off to see a dog about an ear, and my gaze returned to the drawings. I grabbed a pencil and a printout on diabetes in cats, flipped it to expose its blank backside—Darlene would no doubt have words with Ardyth on the waste inherent in single-side printing—and sketched the face. I couldn’t tell you why I remembered anything about the creature’s eyes. It had been dark, the moonlit path striped by the shadows of the bare branches above. But I visualized it as though its face hung inches before me. Which in fact it had, for a microsecond, as it tore into my arm.
I knew from my work at the game farm that a wolf could see straight into your soul. Two weeks ago, the creature’s eyes had pierced right through me, but something about them was different. Wolves were intelligent, but what I’d witnessed smacked of recognition—not just of me as potential prey, or of me as a human, but of me as an individual.
That gaze had read me as another human might. How was that possible?
The sketch beneath my fingers acquired substance as I shaded. I’d drawn the eyes not only with an odd shape but with the whites showing at both corners. It gave the beast an almost human expression.
As I examined my work, I recognized more discrepancies. The forehead rose high and broad with a more extreme dish to the muzzle than a wolf’s, shorter overall with a heavier jaw, and a lower positioning of the ears. But my memory of the legs seemed the strangest. Many people think animals possess legs that bend differently from those of humans, but they don’t. Animals with paws run on pads beneath the knuckle joints of fingers and toes, so the most obvious joints are actually their wrists and ankles. Their elbows and knees are up close to the body, and shoulders and hips are wrapped in heavy muscles. If a human crouched on all fours and rocked forward onto their fingers and toes, they would mimic how cats and dogs naturally move.
Enhanced by my glimpses through the window, my inner sight drew the hind legs of the creatures longer than the fore and more bent than a wolf’s—the stifle, which would be the human knee, dropped below the body due to a longer thighbone. This gave more bend to the hind leg, making the animal capable of tremendous leaping potential when those angles unwound. I’d drawn the hips narrow and the chest unusually broad across the shoulders, with powerful pectoral muscles. The front limbs were almost ape-like, with elbows hanging below the breastbone, long from shoulder to elbow, with a roughly equal length to the middle foreleg joint.
The animal shaped up strangely under my pencil: the head bear-like, the hind legs folded beneath with their strange angles—resembling an animal adapted to making great leaps rather than galloping—the front legs muscled below massive humped shoulders. And the eyes, elongated horizontally by the shape of the eyelid—a primate’s eyes, rather than the oval ones of a wolf.
I stared at my drawing. How much could I trust my interpretation? Because if what I’d drawn was accurate, I didn’t know what those creatures were, but they definitely weren’t wolves.
* * *
The animal issue had my work life in turmoil, but other aspects seemed determined to keep pace.
As low man on the totem pole, Dillon pulled crappy shifts at the garage in Beausejour. He worked into the evening and on the weekend. I told myself I didn’t time it deliberately, but I often dropped in on Peter and Chloe for tea while he was at work.
At first, I re-established my previous pattern with Peter, dropping in for my twenty-minute tea to compare notes about the day. But three days in, my twenty minutes morphed into two hours.
Every day, as I left Chloe with Peter and headed out for my evening run with Keen, I gave myself a long inner tirade. The problem with arguing with oneself is that sabotage is all too common. Despite my best intentions, I was falling hard for Chloe. But she was spoken for by Dillon the Sasquatch, who could crush me like a bug.
What the hell am I thinking? I had a million reasons why it wouldn’t work between us, with Dillon as the Everest in that mountain range. But something about her pulled at me, and I couldn’t resist.
After four days of downward slide toward boyfriend fists the size of hammers, I arrived for tea with a self-made pact that I wouldn’t stay a minute over my allotted twenty. An hour later, I headed out with Keen and my new running partner, Chloe.
Sometimes life is determined to get you into trouble.
Chloe paced me even though her stride didn’t match my own. She chattered as we traveled the trail in single file, seemingly unaffected by the brisk pace, while I panted out replies. Sometimes I led, and sometimes she did, her long chocolate brown ponytail swinging with her fluid strides.
My heart pounded with more than mere exertion.
Keen bounded along in pure delight. In her doggie eyes, the shared run elevated Chloe to the level of Chrissakesdess of Good Things.
I am sooo screwed.
At one point, Chloe paused where the trail forked. “Let’s go that way.”
“That’s the six-miler. I haven’t used it all winter. It’ll be blocked by deadfall, and there’s a boggy patch this time of year.”
“Sounds like fun!” She headed down it.
There were trees across the path, but instead of stopping to push them aside, Chloe either ducked beneath or jumped over them. Soon it became a competition to see who
