Daughter of Bugle Ann by MacKinlay Kantor

Author:MacKinlay Kantor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461708087
Publisher: Derrydale Press
Published: 2013-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

7

THE BUGLE CRY had silenced before we reached the higher ground. As soon as the fire raised color in the sky, we had some company. We heard the rattle of the ancient Davis truck, and here they came, laborious up a pair of tracks which crawled from gulleys: Benjy and his father. They brought no dogs along.

Benjy installed Spring Davis on a seat, and stood with us to listen. “I didn’t have a stomach for this thing tonight,” he said, but in no way of blame.

“Pa thought it might work.”

Spring Davis sat motionless upon his stump. “You mean—with Little Lady?”

I said, “She’s bound to hear them all.”

“It’s well into evening,” old Spring said. “She might be willing to depart from him by now.”

Our hounds had been a long time making any pickup—why, I do not know: perhaps so many human paths had walked that way, and they were puzzled. Then Border Princess got the necessary whiff, and let her high squawl go, and then the rest were with her.

“She’s always right there on the cast,” my father said. “She can drive, too, when she’s got a mind. The trouble is, you can’t depend on her no way.”

She took them off. Five Point Nine and Vinegar Blink were right there, Bullard’s Daisy giving a good voice not far behind, Toul Sector silent after a few grunts. I figured he was working with the rest, but saving his old wind until he got himself excited. The fox strung over east, where Benjy and I took some timber out the year before. There were a lot of unburned trash piles such as foxes like to sneak among. They crossed the Spur, and echoed out of hearing.

I wondered just where Camden was and how she fared. I doubted then that she and Benjy had some further words that day; sometimes you find the air too charged with friction and you never even squeak. But he seemed thinner, as he always seemed when mad. His active eyes were narrowed down, and showed a gleam when shadows left his face.

And then I thought of just how Little Lady and the scrub-brush mutt had skipped away that morning, scooting wildly round and round, and running bigger circles as she sniffed the wind of liberty and found it good. Away back in fastnesses they must have run, but always he would stay attendant, courting her; and so she stuck to her opinion: dog’s opinion, just as straight as humankind, when folks are never there to meddle—that he was just the one for her.

No bell and book, but only choice and luck and final certainty. I reckoned that the first fierce race of hounds had risen from such queer determination, and maybe the chance of that same swinging gate—if early men had gates across the mouths of caverns where they slept.

I minded how my Ma had kept a fine cocoon upon a twig—one of those brown cigar-butt things which worms will spin along the water-sprouts. And then in May

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