Cormac by Sonny Brewer

Author:Sonny Brewer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Dogs, General Fiction
ISBN: 9780385666732
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

WE DISCOVERED the intruder the day before I was to go out of town, to fly to San Francisco and begin the book tour for The Poet of Tolstoy Park. Cormac and I went around the corner of the house to the garage.

Cormac knew something was up before I did. When I reached down to take hold of the garage door handle and twist it to raise the door, he became excited, jumping from one side of my legs to the other, trying to dash around me.

“Just hold on,” I said. He barked, and leaped into the air. “What the—”

When I raised the garage door he dashed inside, barking and racing to the farthest corner. That’s when I saw what he was after: a huge brown and gray squirrel sprang from one shelf to another, knocking a gallon of paint to the floor. Of course, the lid came off and pea green paint splattered and spread across the floor. Which, for the moment, I was able to ignore.

The chase was on. I became the kid from Lamar County, Alabama, who had hunted rabbits with a Long Tom twelve-gauge single-barrel shotgun. I forgot that I was a civilized man. I yelled in a voice that hearkened to my Scottish highlands ancestry, a battle charge cousin Rob Roy would have been proud of.

“Where is he, Mick?!” I flew to the corner where the squirrel was hiding. Cormac actually jumped into the air when the blasted critter ran into view, twitching its tail, chattering. It scampered to a higher shelf.

Did I say I don’t like squirrels? A squirrel in a park is okay. A squirrel in my attic or in my garage is not good. I’ve known them to eat through electrical wiring and start fires in homes. They gnaw rafters. They gnaw holes into air-conditioning ductwork. And, if they had hairless, slick, and gray tails like rats, neither would anyone else like these arboreal rodents (tree rats).

The previous year, squirrels had invaded the attic at either end of my house. They dug into the insulation, down to the ceiling board right above my bed, and above John Luke’s bed down the hall. Both of us had to listen to them scurry around up there, their sharp little claws scraping just above our heads. I finally had to go into the attic and remove the gable vents at both ends of the house and toss out their leaves and straw. No, there were no baby squirrels, or big ones, for that matter, at home when I evicted them and their ton of yard debris. Now this squirrel was maybe shopping for new digs in my garage.

“Where is he, Cormac?”

Cormac was up on his hind legs, his forepaws on a bottom shelf. His ears were high and his eyes wide. His tongue wagged out after each time he barked.

“Get the squirrel, Mick!”

But it was hiding somewhere in the assortment of stuff on the shelves, so I grabbed a broom. I don’t know if Cormac

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