Northern Frights, Issue 1 by Don Hutchison

Author:Don Hutchison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: ChiZine
Published: 2015-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

Throughout the early spring, when the Chinooks howled like prowling dragons, the deer returned often to Maria’s house. One animal she came to recognize, a large buck with antlers just starting to protrude. He liked the protected area underneath the porch and would rest there out of the wind.

Maria took a certain comfort in his presence. Like the Hennesseys, she too regarded the deer as a sign of sorts, but a beneficent one, a kind of guardian of the home and hearth.

“My house must have good vibrations,” she remarked to some of her colleagues in the French department. “It attracts deer.”

By mid-April the buck had acquired a companion—a smaller deer who often grazed with him in the yard. As much as she enjoyed seeing them there, Maria also knew that from their back windows the Hennesseys could see the deer, too.

There was no more shooting, however, nor did Maria speak with the Hennesseys again until early May. Alexis had just left the house to walk down the hill to the bus stop. Maria was packing her briefcase for a morning class in the poetry of Baudelaire and Lamartine. She glanced up to check the time and saw Clive Hennessey ambling up the walk.

His gait was huffing and unsteady. When Maria let him come in, she got a whiff of the unmistakable scent of gin, an odour she associated vaguely with her own grandfather—but never at eight o’clock in the morning!

“I notice a couple of deer been hanging around your house,” Clive began. “I’m concerned for your daughter.”

“What exactly is the problem?” said Maria, snapping her briefcase shut. “Do they carry diseases? What?”

“Can I sit down, Ms. Amato?”

She would be late for her nine o’clock class, but something in the man’s manner made Maria reluctant to turn him away. When he was seated in the armchair, Clive Hennessey said, “We lost a son, Ms. Amato, four years ago in March. Name of Ben. Boy about your daughter’s age.”

“I’m sorry,” said Maria, remembering the pictures on the mantel and thinking that tragedy explained Adelaide’s look of premature old womanhood. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand—”

“It was my doing,” Clive interrupted. “I see that now, but I was a hard-headed fool, a know-it-all and—” he leaned forward “—truth be told, I used to drink too much.”

Maria resisted the impulse to say something abrasive.

“Used to be an old Crow Indian had hisself a cabin up top of the ridge, where the road dead-ends there. A shaman—got hisself run off the reservation for killing a rival, was what the law said later, after the—anyway, first time I saw him was when Ben and me tried to do a little deer poachin’. The Indian and me, we came to blows. He was a tough old son of a bitch, and he humiliated me in front of the boy.

“I was havin’ trouble with Ben anyway, him rebellin’ and all. Now he sees this old Indian as some kinda hero. Starts spendin’ time with him. Pretty soon, Ben

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