The North Runner by R.D. Lawrence

Author:R.D. Lawrence
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781554883387
Publisher: Dundurn

CHAPTER 7

She knew that I was going to kill her. Her eyes said so for those few seconds during which I sighted down the barrel, aiming directly at her forehead. Came the sharp crack of the gun and the recoil that took my eye off Sussie’s head. And she was dead.

My eyes were closed when I lowered the gun, but I had to open them to make absolutely sure that she was past feeling the agonies of the bear trap that had crushed her pelvis, mangled both of her legs, and ripped open her stomach, near the groin, where the full milk dugs were. I looked. Her accusing eyes were closed, the small, purplish, lymph-filled bullet hole made a third orb, between the other two; at the back of her head was a great red hole in which were mixed lighter pieces of brain and chips of bone.

The powerful trap, anchored by a long chain to a twenty-foot poplar pole intended to act as a drag in the event that a bear stepped into the deadly gape lay a few feet away from the dog’s mutilated body, its big steel fangs bloody; the gore also smeared the jaws and dripped onto the grass, forming a carmine pool that was even now coagulating. Sussie had been in the trap a long time.

The September sun was not yet above the trees when I turned my back on Sussie and set out for the homestead that lay about a mile south of the abandoned farm where the bear trap had been set by an unknown. But even across that distance, I could still hear the dogs howling in the barn.

It was their howling that had wakened me before daylight that morning, a continuous farrago of distress that caused me to jump out of bed, dress in haste, and go out to see what the trouble was. As I walked toward the outbuilding, I heard the distant, agonized yelping, coming from due north. It was faint, almost drowned by the voices of the other dogs, but I knew at once that Sussie was in some kind of trouble.

Four weeks earlier the bitch had given birth to pups, Yukon’s children. In her desire for privacy, she had crawled under the barn floor from the outside, finding for herself a good and secure den in which to nurse her little ones. Because of this, I allowed her to run free, but she showed no desire to leave the area of the farmyard, at first being too busy feeding her pups, of late too jealous of them to go farther than the house. I didn’t know how many young ones she had delivered; the only way to get at them would have entailed cutting through a couple of the hewn logs that floored the barn, which I was loath to do and didn’t consider necessary in any event, supposing that when the pups were ready, Sussie would lead them out. I often listened to their mewling voices

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