Bill Cheng - Southern Cross the Dog

For days, they hauled their chains and hunted the land, with little to show and few words between them. Roan watched his brother draw into himself. He was his opposite. Where Roan was small and slight, Bossjohn was heavy-built like a bear. Powerful and muscular under the sheaths of fat. In all things Bossjohn was slow and deliberate. His anger built in a slow burn across his body, pulling drifts of red across his skin.

Were he not the younger L’Etang, Roan could’ve led their clan, not hiding and sneaking like coons, but with salt and grit. Where Bossjohn was weak, Roan would have been forceful. He would not have brought that muskie home, would not have nursed that bugheway nigger on their food, on their kill, would not have left their cousin alone with him. First chance, he would’ve skinned him like a rabbit, do him easy and stretch that hide across a tree for all there bugheways to see. Bossjohn! His brother’s weakness brought bile into his mouth. Slow up, he told himself. He tried to soothe the fire in his blood. He was a trapper. And if trappers understood anything, it was waiting.

FOR DAYS THEY’D SEEN THE smoke above the trees, the scare of birds that fled into the sky. They rose hours before the dawn and made their way east through the corridor. First light broke and they went down on their bellies, Injun-crawling up the high scrub to where they could watch the bugheway, witness their great work. Below, in the gully, where there once had been a field of high grass to hunt rabbit, was a concrete pit and a large stone wall. The bugheway came in on their machines, beetling through pylons of dense forest. There was so much noise — the hornet whine of engines and metal groaning against metal. They watched for hours, Bossjohn turning cold and pale as whole walls of earth crumbled violently under the bugheway’s command. There was a crack, and the air filled with red, rolling upward and through in a hot coppery breath.

They returned to camp to find their packs in tatters and their rolls shredded to bits. Their stores of food had been pulled from the trees and raided. What hadn’t been eaten was dragged into the bushes and left to molder in the mud. There was sign all through camp — paw prints, scratch marks, a mound of dry hard scat.

Bossjohn and Roan salvaged what they could. They moved the camp north, flanking the river in hopes that the panther could not approach from behind. At night, they took shifts, gazing warily into the unbreaking darkness beyond the firelight.

Their fortunes turned when after a rain, they spied sign of stag near the run. They stalked it west, tracking a set of cloven prints that were fresh pressed in the rain-soft dirt. They gave it slack, let it gain ground, while they broke trail toward a hill, downwind from the stag. They spied it in a clearing through a fence of hedge cover. It bent its thick brown neck down to a patch of clover, whisking the flies from its ears. Roan set his rifle while Bossjohn sighted. He rocked the shaft slow on his knee, pivoting down — the nose aimed just above the neck.

Bossjohn rested his hand on his shoulder, squeezing lightly.

Easy. Easy.

Roan let the air slow through his nose. He threaded his finger around the trigger, drew back the hammer. It made no click.

Suddenly the stag raised its head. It looked off to the west, then took off into the bushes.

Roan looked from the rifle and down into the clearing.

Wha—!

Bossjohn hushed him. His hand clamped down hard on the shoulder.

Roan looked and he saw something move through the brush. It emerged into the clearing where the deer had been. A man. A bugheway. The man looked around the clearing, took a few steps back the way he came, then stopped again.

He lost, Bossjohn said.

Roan brought his cheek back down to the rifle. He pivoted again. Sighted.

What you doin’?

Roan gon’ have he reward.

The man unhitched his pants and was now pissing against the base of a tree.

Roan tightened around the trigger. The gun jumped from his hand. A shot discharged, finding nothing. The man looked around, bewildered. Roan looked and saw Bossjohn’s hand forced hard against the barrel.

What in hell you doin? Bossjohn hissed.

Roan looked back down. The man had run off, his trousers drawn hastily over his lily-pale flesh. Roan’s face burned with rage. He took his hand from the stock, let the rifle fall from his grip so he would not be tempted to use it. Bossjohn grabbed it up and stalked off down the hill.

Slow, Roan told himself. Slow, slow.

WHERE THE TREES BROKE, RED dust and smoke rolled in from the east. It came like a locust cloud, falling earthward in headlong plumes. For days the run bled rust, and Bossjohn and Roan would pull drowned beavers from the rocks, their hides smelling, crawling with lice and maggots.

Then one night Bossjohn sat Roan down.

Mebbe Frankie be right, he said. Mebbe here ain’t ground for L’Etangs no mo’.

Bossjohn heaved his body forward, let out a slow breath.

No mo’ no mo’, he sang.

Bossjohn measured his words carefully, flicking his eyes up to meet his brother’s before casting them down again at his boots. Noises hitched and unhitched in his throat. He was tired, Roan saw. Old.

When here autumn come, gon’ scrap we camp and head we down ’a Muskethead. Trade for what I’s can, see’n if we can’t set root out there a ways.

Roan nodded, saying nothing. Bossjohn looked at him for some sign and he gave him none.

Say bon? he said.

Oui, Roan answered softly. Casually. Say bon.

That night Roan lay on the grass while his brother kept watch. He did not sleep, but still he dreamed. In his dreams, he saw fire. Bright and red, choking the air in fullsmoke. It swept down like a rug on the country, then out, through the marshes, the forests, out into the bugheway camps, and it took in its breath the weak, the stupid, the dithering. Then it stood itself tall in a chimney from earth to sky and blazed on heaven high.

When his brother tapped him lightly to take his panther watch, Roan lifted his heavy body to the fire. The air was chill and sharp in his lungs. It did not take long. He heard his brother drop off, the deep sonorous snores sounding from his throat.

The hours passed and the cricket pulsed softly in his ears until all at once they became silent. Roan looked out into the darkness. He angled his ears and sniffed. He looked back at his brother’s sleeping form, then back into the darkness. He grinned. The time had come. He took up his rifle, stood, and then he took up his brother’s. Without a word, he walked off into the dark.

In the still-dark, Frankie would rise and make up their packs before setting out into the trapping grounds. As she and Robert hiked, she’d count the owls, swinging her arm through the inky air. They swooped invisibly from perch to perch, and she read their number with seriousness, prognosticating the fortune of the coming day’s haul.

She would point and one would glide from its branch.

You see? Good luck.

They’d make their way west. The swamp, he learned, lay across a series of underground springs and aquifers, running in bands of salt and brack and potable water. He paid attention to the trees, how dogwood turned to willow turned to cypress turned to blackgum. They’d move through the rings, come to a pond of standing rainwater. Birds would gather in the shallows, puffing their breasts at one another. None of them big enough to eat.

She’d ask for his hands and he’d offer them to her, palms out. Then she’d slather on a cake of mud and when he looked at her bewildered, she laughed. Hide we smell, she said, and she did the same, smoothing the mud under her neck, in the pits of her arms.