David Wroblewski - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Edgar walked into the shallow water of the creek and scrambled beneath the barbed wire. He lost his footing trying to reseat the post; the hole had filled with mud and suddenly he found himself lying flat in the water and wet to the sternum. In the end he left the post standing cockeyed in the stream. He’d wanted to set it back the right way but doubted it would make much difference.

He sank to the ground on the far bank of the creek. Not two but three dogs greeted him: Baboo and Tinder and Essay, Essay having crossed elsewhere on her own terms. They jostled and licked his face and danced around him like savages performing some ancient, unnamed ritual. As though they knew exactly what lay ahead. His hands, when he rose, were covered with clay. A paste of it had begun to dry and crack on his face. He cupped his hands in the creek and emptied the water over his head again and again. Then he stood and turned from everything he knew and the four of them began to make their way into the dark Chequamegon.

T HIN REMNANTS OF MOONLIGHT PERMEATED THE WOODS. SWEET fern arced throat-high over the old logging path, cloaking blackberry canes hidden like saw blades in sheaths. Spray of dark sumac. Shafts of birch and aspen, faintly luminescing. Overhead, a pale and narrowing crack divided the forest canopy, marking their way more clearly than any earthly thing. For fear of jutting branches, he held his hands across his face and let the blackberry thorns rip his clothes. Now and then he stopped and clapped for the dogs. They came and snuffled nose and lip against his palm and vanished again, so sure in the dark. He paused. Peered after them. Shadow upon shadow, all of it. He swung his foot forward and began again. All around, fireflies glowed their radium bellies. The voices calling after them had long since faded into the creak of tree trunks flexing in the night breeze like the timbers of a vast ship. They hadn’t circled; he couldn’t have said how he knew. The direction of the wind, perhaps, or the westering cast of the moonlight. When a stand of birches glowed blue where he expected a gap he understood the path had fizzled out or they’d lost it.

After a time he came upon the dogs, bunched and waiting. He counted noses, then moved his hands about in the dark, trying to understand why they’d stopped. His fingers brushed a wire, barbed and rusted, and a weather-split fence post. He slid his hands down the knotted wood until he’d located the bottom strand of wire, then he sidestepped away from the fence post, bent over and tracing the barbs loosely with his fingers. He stopped when there was enough slack to haul the wire up. He clapped twice and the dogs came forward. By touch he moved them under the wire-Essay first, he guessed, then Tinder, then Baboo. They were panting and hot as they went. He rolled under last of all and stood and pointlessly brushed off his clothes, wet and hanging on him like sheets of wax. He looked up. Islands of stars in a lake of black. The forest spectral and pathless all around. He set off in a direction he hoped was west. Hours of the night passed.

He stopped when the woods opened onto a glade. The moon was high and bright, and before him the charcoaled skeletons of trees rose from blue marsh grass. He blinked at the excess moonlight in the clearing and clapped for the dogs. High in the crown of a charred tree, an owl revolved its dished face, and one branch down, three small replicas followed. Baboo came at once. Tinder had begun pushing into the tall grass and he turned and trotted back. Edgar clapped again and waited. When Essay did not appear he led Tinder and Baboo into the trees and touched his hand to the ground. The dogs circled and downed. He paced a few steps away and unzipped his pants. His urine seemed to take with it all the warmth in his body. He peeled off his wet shirt and jeans and hung them on a branch and stood there in the night, clad only in underpants. Clammy as they were, he could not bring himself to take them off. He walked back and lay next to Baboo. Baboo raised his head and looked at Edgar’s arm draped across his chest and laid his head down again. When they were all settled, Essay stepped out of a deer track in the sedge. She sniffed the three of them and walked to the clearing’s edge and peered upward and returned and stood panting until Edgar sat up and set his hand on her croup. She downed and tucked against his back, grunting with what sounded like disapproval. One after another the dogs heaved sighs and pressed their heads tight to their sides.

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.