Lifting the Sky (24 page)

I wiped the sweat off my forehead. Beside me, Stew Pot lay panting. His black coat soaked up the sun.

I don't know what I'd expected—maybe to find Shawn sitting in the shadow of my tree, or to see him come galloping over the hills heading for our meeting place. Each day that went by I'd felt less sure about everything. He could've left a note by my tree. Thrown a rock at my window …

I could run over to his grandma's place. It couldn't be
more than three miles, though it might seem like more with all the gorges and hills in between. But how could I go panting up to his door, saying, “Excuse me, but why haven't you come by to see me all week?”

It was pretty obvious he didn't share my feelings. Didn't give a hoot that I even existed. For sure he was sorry now that he'd ever opened up to me, the nosy white girl. He didn't want to see me again. That was all there was to it.

Maybe it was a good thing Mam was about ready to pull out. At least now it wouldn't be quite so hard….

My chest heaved. I leaned my head against my tree and spread my arms around its thick shaggy trunk. The bright sun made the shiny stones and tiny white bones glisten. I remembered when I'd spied Shawn's hand reaching up to touch the blue ribbon that now looped down by my cheek. I reached up and untwisted it from the branches. Tugged it out.

What good had they done, all my prayers and wishes? What good at all?

I stared out at the huge landscape. No dust billowed up. No horse came galloping over the hills. If this was the end of our stay at Far Canyon, I'd better find Lone One and Light of the Dawn to tell them good-bye.

I let the ribbon flutter to the ground. “Come on, Stew Pot,” I said. “No use wasting what little time we have left….”

Stew Pot followed behind me as I climbed down the back side of the hill. At the base, I checked one last time for signs that Tivo might've stood around waiting for
Shawn. He hadn't. I straightened my shoulders and held my head high and hiked on.

No antelopes in the bowl-shaped valley.

Often, at this time of day, the pronghorns would be taking it easy, the moms sitting around chewing their cuds, the young ones playing or sleeping. Lone One was a real loner, and I'd only once spotted her and her fawn with the herd. I wondered if Light of the Dawn got picked on because she was slower and limped.

“Cripes, but it's hot. One more hill, and if they aren't there we'll go back,” I promised Stew Pot. Poor panting doggie. I should've made him take a drink of water before we took off. Should've taken a drink myself.

We'd barely climbed out of the valley and up to a rounded rim when we spotted her down in a shaded hollow below us. Lone One had heard us come clattering across the rocks and stood stiffly at alert, ruff up, her white rump flagging alarm. Stew Pot hunkered down. I froze. After a moment Lone One's alarm system melted, her ruff and white flag lowered, and she turned her attention to scratching at the ground with her hoof. She tugged at something with her teeth, jerked her head back and forth, and yanked a root out of the ground. She ate it like I eat spaghetti.

On the rounded hill above her, at the base of a rocky wall-like ridge, Light of the Dawn suddenly popped up. She shook her head furiously and scratched at an ear with one tiny black pointed hoof and then she sank quickly back down.

I swatted at a fly. They bothered me too. Down in the hollow, Lone One folded up her front legs and then her back ones. She didn't close her eyes, but they seemed to glaze over as she sat there and chewed on her cud.

What good had it done to find the exact place I'd drawn, and someone there who was nice to me and my mom, and a boy who'd become more to me than a friend, and then to have my dad come back—what good had it done?
None at all.
It would've almost been better if
none
of what I'd wished for had ever happened. At least then it wouldn't hurt nearly as much as now, when everything was crumbling away.

I stared up at the sky. I wished I could just be swooped up there, become a little cloud, drift about, and then
poof!
Vanish. No hurts, no memories, nothing.

It was the stillest, hottest afternoon ever. I closed my eyes. Beside me, Pot snored.

None of us, not even Lone One, saw it or heard it.

Stew Pot must've been the first to sense the wolf, the first to spy it slinking over the rocky ledge toward the fawn. Under my hand I felt the hairs on his back stiffen. I felt the growl in his throat before I heard it, and then felt him spring up, his growl ferocious as he sprang down the hillside toward the fawn. I jumped up and grabbed a chunk of dead sagebrush and bounded after him while the loudest scream ever screeched out of my throat. A small tan blur rushed past me and I was somehow aware of two antelopes dashing by as I flew, yelling and waving my stick, charging after Stew Pot toward what now was a whirlwind of
ferocious snarls and deep growls. “NOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOO!” I screamed, and suddenly the wolf streaked back up and over the rim.

The fight couldn't have lasted more than five seconds.

But on the hillside, a furry black mound lay still.

“NOOOOOOOOO! STEW POT!” I cried as I crashed to my knees beside him. “DON'T … NO! YOU CAN'T!”

My hands worked their way under the mound, under his head, and around the thick ruff on his neck. On the back of his neck I could feel a warm stickiness. I stared at my hands. Blood. A small puddle had already pooled on the ground.

All shivers and jitters and prayers and pleas, I looked up at the sky and asked, “Please, please, what do I do? HOW?”

In my head I heard, “Don't panic, don't freeze.”

Already my hands must've been running on automatic, one clutching the front of his throat, the other pressing against the deep bloody gash on the back. “How could I live without my best friend?” I sobbed, and then I took a huge breath. I gulped down all the sunlight around me and then sent the light rushing into my hands. I heard high-pitched moans coming out of my mouth as I bent over my sweet hero dog.

The light pouring out of my hands grew stronger.

The tiniest mewing yelp slipped out of Pot's throat. His eyes opened and then closed again.

Somehow my hands kept going, tugging at my
T-shirt, trying to rip it, then tearing it and leaving a ragged band that barely covered my chest.

“The wound is closing up, it's closing and sealing up,” I repeated over and over while my shaking hands wrapped and tucked the bandage around Stew Pot's neck.

A shadow floated over us. Two ravens circled. “
Shoo!
Go away,” I cried. The ravens flew higher but still slowly circled above us.

“Sweet Pot, I need to run to get help,” I whispered as I looked wildly around. But how could I leave him? Those ravens would fly down and begin picking away at him as soon as I left. And what if the wolf came back? My chest heaved.

“Oh, Stew Pot,” I wailed. “I can't do it. I'll never be able to carry you all the way home. But I can't leave you, so what do I do?”

Stew Pot's tail swished once.

I looked up at the ravens, and suddenly, out of nowhere, something popped into my head from a book my mom used to read to me after my dad left. Something Christopher Robin had said to Pooh Bear. “Remember this,” he'd said. “You're braver than you believe. And stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

I took a deep breath. Let my arms go limp, and tried lifting Stew Pot. “This won't hurt,” I said, but it did, and he whimpered as I tried to lift him. I couldn't do it. I took a deep breath and tried again.

He wasn't as heavy as I'd thought. I staggered to my feet.

Each step down into the hollow where Lone One had dug up her root—when was that, fifteen, twenty minutes ago?—and then up and over the rim where Stew Pot and I had snoozed, and then down into the bowl-shaped valley and into the sheltered canyon where the fawns had been born… It was like the repeat of a horrible nightmare.

Again I found myself trying as hard as I could to find the tiniest soft spot in my heart for the wolf. This one had been gray, and smaller than the black one that had taken Lone One's other fawn. If it'd been the big black one it would've gotten Light of the Dawn for sure, and just as surely Stew Pot wouldn't have survived the attack. I might not have even been able to scare him away with my shouts and my stick.

“We're lucky, really lucky,” I said into Stew Pot's furry ruff. But in spite of the heat, I shivered.

How many times I slumped down onto a rock to rest my arms and catch my breath, and how many times Pot squirmed so uncomfortably that I set him down on the ground, I don't remember. But somehow we made it to the trail that led out of the canyon and then down to the fence. Somehow I eased Pot to the ground, slipped through the wires, then reached through it and pulled him to me.

“Mam'll be there,” I said into Pot's furry ruff, “and she'll rush us off to the vet in Dubois.”

It wasn't until I rounded the corner of the house that I saw the brown pickup. My heart did a somersault in my
chest. My dad had come back! I'd been wrong! He'd come back!

It didn't strike me right away that Ol' Yeller was missing.

“Somebody, help!” I yelled as I fumbled to open the front door, and then the next one into the dark hallway, and the one into the kitchen. “Help,” I said as I stumbled into the kitchen. No answer.

I pressed my mouth against Stew Pot's furry head at the sight of the empty wine bottle on the table. The two glasses, the plate with a few crackers and some slices of cheese in it. They'd been sitting there not long ago. Where were they now? Where were they
ever
when I needed them? My arms felt like mush. I hunched over, Stew Pot's legs almost dragging the floor as I staggered across the kitchen and through the living room toward the bathroom. I thumped against the door with my shoulder and edged in.

My breath was all short hollow puffs as I shifted Pot's weight to keep from dumping him on the floor. My knees crumpled as I laid him down on the rug. I yanked the bath towels off the rack and settled his head on them. “Stay,” I wheezed.

As if he could do anything
but.

Wiping the sweat off my forehead, I dashed back into the kitchen. What was I supposed to do now? Where
were
they? They'd probably gone off to the bunkhouse to find something for dinner. Maybe they'd gone to the barn? But Stew Pot needed help, and he needed it now.

What did I need? Penicillin. Mam kept it stored in
the fridge. I flung open the fridge door, swept milk and juice bottles aside, grabbed the bottle, stared at it blankly, then searched through the cupboard over the sink for the syringes and antiseptic. What else? Roll of bandages? I frantically searched through Mam's stash of medical supplies. What? No bandages? The box clattered to the floor as I dashed up the stairs to my room and grabbed two T-shirts. I glanced at my blood-smeared self, grabbed a fistful of clothes, stumbled back down the stairs, swept the medicine onto my pile, and skidded into the bathroom.

I turned on the faucet. As the tub filled, the room filled with steam.

Later I'd remember the whole bathroom scene as if it had happened inside a gray thundercloud, and how the constant booming sound could've been rushing water, my heart pounding, or Pot's shallow breathing. Somehow bloody bandages got taken off and the hair around the ugly gash clipped with Mam's pair of nail scissors. “This won't hurt,” I remember promising, and then Pot's startled, hurt eyes telling me that I'd lied as I poured a full bottle of antiseptic on his wound and then gave him a supersized penicillin shot in the shoulder. I remember ripping and wrapping my T-shirt, crisscrossing it under a leg, around a shoulder and neck. I don't remember stripping off my bloody clothes, but I do remember sinking into the tub, and how even with my eyes closed I could still picture the stiff bundle of bandaged-up doggie that lay on the bathroom floor. And I remember how I wondered if anything I'd done had helped, or if I'd done just
the opposite of what one was supposed to do when your dog got bit by a wolf.

What I don't remember is why I decided to take Stew Pot upstairs after I'd finished my bath. I do remember lugging him up, and then the words I said.

“I'll keep you safe,” I promised. “I'll sleep here beside you tonight.”

It was one more promise I wouldn't keep.

I'd hardly settled Pot into his beanbag and covered him with my blanket when I heard Ol' Yeller chug up the road to the house. Truck doors slammed. The front door banged. I held my breath for the sounds of the next two doors banging, but then I figured I'd left them open. I heard Mam's gloves slapping down on the kitchen counter. Thanks to the hole in the floor I could hear everything. Thanks or no thanks…

“I'm not asking you to stay.” Mam's voice had a knife-sharp edge to it.

“You're still my wife,” came my dad's quick reply, “and I was not saying I wanted to stay. It was a suggestion. An idea only. I could live here between jobs. Until I get the money to do that film I'm thinking of making. But you seem to think this is your own private territory.”

There was a long pause. I crept to the hole and lay with my ear to the floor.

“What I think is that it's high time we got divorced. Legally. Desertion should be reason enough.”

I heard the
bam
of the fridge door. Above its hum I could hear my dad snort.
We should put up a sign,
I thought.

PLEASE, NO SLAMMING DOORS—
FRIDGE WITH DELICATE NERVES!

My dad had probably driven up not long after I'd left for the hill—had they been doing nothing but arguing the whole time? It was a good thing I was already flat on the floor because all of a sudden my tummy felt really icky.
They have no idea I'm home,
I thought,
and that I can hear every word….