Legends of the North Cascades by Jonathan Evison

Author:Jonathan Evison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

First Offering

It was early afternoon, though you wouldn’t have known it. You wouldn’t have known that it was raining in sheets, either, except for the trickle of ground water leaching in through the volcanic rock. Were it not for the pale blade of light knifing in slantwise from the mouth of the cave, you couldn’t tell night from day. It had been nearly three weeks since Travers’ visit, and by Dave’s count it had rained practically every day since.

He was losing Bella. And though he sensed her unhappiness, though it seemed to hang in the air between them at all times of late, neither one of them spoke of it. Once again, he was failing her as a parent.

Sugarfoot slumbered fitfully in the dirt near the mouth of the cave, his burr-tangled belly rising and falling uneasily with each breath. Sometimes Sugarfoot didn’t come home for days. And when he did, only warily did the white-pawed loner sink into domesticity.

Tito curled in the corner, his orange and white legs scissoring the air as he groomed himself with a sandpaper tongue.

Betty sprawled nearest the fire, green-eyed and black as night; so baggy and deflated after her last litter that she almost looked like a rug.

Jimmy Stewart curled in Dave’s lap, purring like an air compressor, though Dave had done nothing to encourage him.

Bella was sitting stiffly at the foot of the bed, as she had been for an hour, alert but unresponsive.

“What say we bundle up and go outside?” he said.

“I don’t want to,” she said.

“C’mon, Bella.”

“Coco,” she said. “My name is Coco.”

“You’re not a damn cat, Bella.”

“You said damn again, Daddy.”

It was true, he ought to watch his mouth, though they had nobody to impress up here. Isolation had whittled his vocabulary down to the coarse and rudimentary. So little remained in his life that required the nuances of language. It was getting to where he hardly recognized his own voice.

Mirabella, once verbally irrepressible, once relentless in her curiosity, had hardly spoken to him in the last week, and he knew it was his own fault. Despite their proximity, or maybe because of it, they were growing apart.

The week before last she’d taken to hunting with the big Toms: Sugarfoot, Tito, Boris, and one-eyed Stinky. She took to slinking around in the bear grass below the plateau, stalking mice in the woody debris beneath the canopy of fir, pouncing on anything that moved.

Her first offering was a tiny vole, its little severed head lying nearby. Dave didn’t say anything about it, nor did he say anything after the second. Now a week later, she insisted on being called Coco.

“But your name is Bella,” said Dave.

“I can call myself anything I want,” she said.

Dave had gone along with the cat thing for a few days. It was child’s play, after all. It demonstrated a healthy imagination, right? But as Bella grew more silent and watchful, moving about the periphery of Dave’s life each day, coming and going as she pleased, engaging him on her own terms, even hissing at him on several occasions, Dave began to entertain concerns.

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