Tim Wynne-Jones - The Boy in the Burning House

Before he saw the beaver pond he was walking in it. The road was squelchy wet even though it hadn’t rained for days. He rounded a curve in the rutted lane and there it was, as wide across as a football field and stretching out of sight into the alder scrub on one side and the poplar woods on the other.

A beaver emerged from the far undergrowth dragging a branch. Jim watched it for a moment. Quietly leaning Gladys against a tree, he raised the business end of the shovel to his shoulder as if it were a rifle.

“Bang!”

With a loud slap of its tail the beaver vanished underwater. Jim pretended to blow the smoke off the mouth of the barrel.

“Take that, you lousy varmint,” he said. Then he headed around the edge of the pond through the submerged grass towards the dam site.

He knew whatever he did today wouldn’t be enough. The beavers would be back. It was like a hockey game, his father used to say. The fourth period would be sudden death.

Mud sucking at his boot heels, Jim clambered to the top of the dam and started in chopping at the latticework of branches and sticks that constituted this latest instalment of Hawkins against Nature. The dam was wattle and daub: mud interwoven with grass, weeds and supple willow canes that made the wall hard to tear apart. Putting his back into it, Jim lifted a shovel load that came up with a great sucking sound and the stench of rotten vegetation. The dammed water rushed through the breach.

He worked for a good twenty minutes without stopping. The air was still warm but the wind was freshening. The dry leaves overhead shimmered, gold-edged and dying. There was no sound but the prattle of blue jays, the squelch of muck and, loudest of all, the water gushing and splashing over his feet.

Jim straightened up, out of breath. Gladys was watching him from her resting place against a sapling birch.

There was a noise in the woods. Jim turned to look. A moment passed before a squirrel appeared on a dead log and scolded him. A hawk circled overhead, screeching. Jim craned his neck.

The racing water slowed to a trickle. He had done a pretty good job. He wasn’t sure how much more he could do. The big thing had been getting here at all.

He leaned on his shovel, sniffed the air — a great big lung-filling sniff.

“Ah, corn and potato chowder,” he said. It was the kind of thing his father would have said. A set-up for Jimbo. “Funny, all I smell is beaver poop.”

Jim sloshed his way through the cloudy remains of the pond to dry land and Gladys. He patted her on the shoulder.

“Glad,” he said. “You did such a good job this summer, you got a promotion. We want you to keep the beavers from fixing up this here dam. You think you can handle it?” Gladys wobbled her head, nodding. “Good for you,” he said. Then he picked up the scarecrow and waded back to the hole in the dam. He drove her broom-handle base down into the mud, twisting it until she stood firmly in place. Then he took a step back and looked solemnly at her grinning mug.

“Now, here’s the gross part,” he said. “Beavers don’t see so well. So — and I don’t want you to take this personal — the only way we’re going to keep those beavers away is if you smell bad. Bad as a human being.”

Gladys stared dumbly at him. He felt dumb, too — talking to a scarecrow. He remembered the first time his dad told him they were going to pee on the scarecrow.

“And that would be because we’re perverts?” Jim had said.

His father had laughed. “Not so. To a beaver, human beings stink to high heaven. Eau de wee-wee is the answer. They’ll be wary of coming too close.”

Like wolves, thought Jim, staking out their territory. Then, without further ado, he opened his zipper and let fly.

There was another disturbance in the woods while he stood there baptizing Gladys. Another squirrel, he thought, as his eyes travelled to the source of the noise.

But what he saw there wasn’t an animal — not a small one, at least. He caught a glimpse of black hair, a flash of pale skin. Enough to be certain that what he saw was a girl.

There was the initial shock, and then a moment of bottom-of-the-barrel humiliation followed by an adrenaline rush of blinding rage. Like a rocket, Jim exploded out of the muck, charging over the dam towards the woods, pulling up his zipper as he ran and yelling his head off. The girl had a good head start on him and she was wearing sneakers, not gumboots, but even though he fell a couple of times, slipping in the mud, tripping over branches, something drove him on with a will and he stayed with her.

It wasn’t just the shame of being caught like that. It was something else. A grudge. Unfinished business with the forest. And there was more. She was laughing at him. Laughing like a crazy person!

He chased the girl through face-slapping firs, down muddy deer paths, across rocky mounds and over a rotting split-rail fence. He chased her along Incognito Creek and then scrabbled up the steep wooded slope to the back meadow, catching glimpses of her but never catching up to her.

And then she was gone. He was on the high meadow now and she was nowhere to be seen.

He heard a train coming. Standing up to his waist in the tall grass, as still as a scarecrow, he watched it pass, a slow freight. From where he stood he saw only the rusty tops of the cars. Then it was gone, rattling its way southeast towards Ladybank. He strode to the fence line and peered down the embankment to the tracks. She wasn’t hiding there.

He whirled around, as if maybe she was lying low or creeping up on him. He cupped his hands.

“This is private property,” he yelled at the wild field. “Don’t come round here!” His words echoed off the wall of dark woods that surrounded the field. Big-man words in a high-pitched kid’s voice. He listened for laughter, heard nothing but the distant clatter of the train.

Then he heard a dog.

The barking came from up the tracks. It sounded ferocious. Scared stiff, Jim swore under his breath, wishing he’d kept his angry outburst bottled up. Once in a while, wild dog packs came around, more dangerous than wolves. Berserk. They would kill cattle just for the fun of it.

But as the barking came nearer, Jim realized it was only one dog, and as it came nearer still, he recognized its voice.

The cornfield dog — that’s what he called it — coming up the tracks like a noisy caboose trying to catch the train. Then it veered up the embankment from the railroad bed, shinnying under the fence — a lab retriever with a pelt the colour of corn husks, shaggy and uncombed, full of twigs and burrs. It came straight for him and ran around him like a dirty blond whirlwind, barking up a storm.

“Cut it out,” said Jim. “Shut up, you stupid mutt.”

The dog sat, but its body wriggled with excitement and its mouth lolled open. It wore a collar but Jim had no idea who it belonged to. It showed up sometimes when he was out on the land, always with this eager look on its face, as if anything you might be up to would be more interesting than sitting around the farmyard watching laundry dry.

“Whoa, boy,” said Jim, calmly now. He reached out to scratch the dog’s head, but it suddenly tore off again before he could lay a hand on it. It stopped over by the woods to see if he was coming.

“I don’t have time for games,” Jim shouted. The sun was already nearing the tree line and he didn’t plan on walking back through the woods in the dark.

But the dog barked again and raced towards a towering pine tree right on the property line. The dog stood at the base of the tree, four-square, looking up, barking for all it was worth, its tail wagging hard enough to start a brush fire. And following its gaze, Jim saw the girl, all in black, perched like a crow on a branch, scowling down at him.