Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,21

nothing about the hag or whether this might be her mutt. I imagined Samuel climbing up to her camp. Ending up in a pie. And I understood why my parents hadn’t talked about her. “He’s just a hungry stray.”

“Then let’s catch him and take him home for ours.”

But I had no intention of doing that. Maisie and Quiet and, for a while, the other puppies were ours if they were anyone’s, but this dog was not. If he was the hag’s, something had changed up there at that camp. Something had sent him down among us.

I wondered what. And I decided, just then, to find out.

* * *

—

“Git!” I suddenly yelled, waving an arm, and the dog loped off through the brush and out of sight, the rabbit flopping in his mouth, and I thought it odd that the dog had not eaten it right away, as most hungry dogs would, while it was still warm.

“What did you do that for?” Samuel said, coming out from my shadow to glare at me. “He could have been my dog, Ellie.”

“Or you could have been his boy, more likely. He’s too much dog for you. And wild, besides. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have hidden behind me.”

At which Samuel glared harder. “I wasn’t hiding. You make me sound like a baby. I’m not a baby, Ellie.”

“Of course you’re not,” I replied. “You haven’t been a baby for years and years.”

“And years,” he said. “Third time you’ve been right.”

Chapter Sixteen

The river was where we’d left it, endlessly traveling down its own winding path, through shadow and sunlight, under fallen trees furred with moss and over boulders polished by the current.

Someone, somewhere had named this the Androscoggin, but we generally called it “The River.”

At the end of the path and across some marshy ground, a flat rock above a deep pool at the edge of the current made a perfect place to drop a line. “Find me some bait,” I said to Samuel, who would have been happy to hunt crickets in September when they were thick on the ground but was less eager to forage for April slugs.

“I don’t like things that are slimy,” he said, making a face.

“Help or go home,” I said again, so he sighed a huge sigh and crawled into the undergrowth to hunt for a slug, which he found and brought back to me on a leaf veined with its glimmer-trail. “Go get me another,” I said.

I wasn’t fond of slugs for bait, either. They really were slimy. And they tended to leak their guts when I put them on a hook, leaving not much more than skin and slime behind, but I hadn’t brought a spade to dig for worms, and I didn’t like to use salamanders with their big, glossy eyes and their little hands. So I said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” and, gritting my teeth until my jaw ached, threaded the slug onto the hook as quick as I could, and dropped it in the pool, my end of the line wrapped around a good, strong stick, and waited.

Some fish were as unimpressed with slugs as I was, but a trout will take a slug, and soon one did. I yanked the line up and away, hooking the fish by the mouth, sorry as I did it, sorry as I wound the line around the stick and pulled the trout up to the rock, sorry as I beat it senseless with a rock, sorry as I put a fresh slug on my hook, sorry as I sent it down into the pool.

I shivered with their pain. Cringed as they died. But none of that stopped me from doing what I had to do.

“Let me try,” Samuel said, reaching for the line.

He was only newly big enough for this, and I myself was newly sad that my father would not be the one to teach him, but I gave Samuel the line and taught him how to hold it in two hands, how to move it slowly so the slug seemed to swim though it was dead, how to wait, wait, wait, and then yank hard to set the hook. No good hesitating if you meant to do a thing like that. Do it and be done with it, good and quick. That’s what I told him as the fish took the bait. That’s what I told him when the fish thrashed and fought so hard to be free that I had to hold on to Samuel and the