Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,25

cold comfort. I had seen what became of a dog that lived in a pack. A dog that hunted for a living.

“This isn’t because one more dog will eat too much. Mr. Anderson would have left us one puppy if you’d asked. This is to punish me.” My voice was even harder than hers. “You can’t make me give him up.”

“We all give up things we love,” my mother said. “Whether we want to or not.”

I thought of the things she’d lost when we’d left our town life. I thought about my father, slowly thinning away. The sight of his hideous sores. And I thought about Quiet as he had struggled in that water, waking.

I went into the woodshed. Maisie gave me a curious look. She was on her feet, licking one of her pups. She didn’t object when I crawled into the nest and put my head among those little dogs. And cried. And cried. And knew it was Quiet who licked the salt from my cheeks, soothing the last of the bee sting, while this new hurt took up a place in my chest alongside the flame that burned hotter, now that I had even more work to do.

Chapter Nineteen

I left my pack with the jar of balsam and tears and dew and river water in the shed and carried the fish back out to the yard.

“Where’s Samuel?” I said to Esther and my mother, still at the churn.

Esther turned. Looked. Turned back to me. She didn’t say anything.

My mother said, “He must have gone in to wash the fish off his hands.”

I went into the cabin and left the fish in the kitchen, by the pump.

“Samuel?” I called.

He didn’t answer.

I went through the kitchen to the washroom. The door stood open.

Samuel wasn’t in there.

But something else was.

I’d seen a snake or two in the washroom before, but not like this one.

This one was as long as I was. Black and shiny. Lying in a tangle, like a dropped rope, in a patch of sun near the floor drain. It had pushed away the little lid we put over the drain, slithered up from its shelter under the cabin and onto the plank floor, and gone to sleep.

I knew that as soon as I stepped into the room it would wake.

My first thought: Stomp on the floor and let it escape down that drain.

My next thought: Trap it.

It was a black racer. I knew it wasn’t a poisonous snake. My father had always said racers were harmless, though a mouse or a cricket might disagree . . . and so did I, since I also knew that it had a mouth full of needle-teeth. I knew that it would writhe and coil in my hands if I picked it up. Heavy. Smooth. Angry. I knew that it would bite me if it could. I knew that I would have to try very, very hard not to shriek and holler as it twisted and whipped around my arms. But I also knew that it would make Esther scream loud enough to wake the dead.

No more lullabies.

One big leap and I was at the drain, my foot over it, as the snake burst from its nap and thrashed out long and swift, racing around the room like ink from a quill.

I’d left the door open behind me.

I couldn’t let it past me, out of the washroom, or it would hide and be still and come in the night to warm itself on one of us sleeping.

So I lunged for it as it swept past me.

It’s not easy to grab a snake in full-blown panic, but I did. With both hands, as close to the head as possible so it couldn’t curl around and bite me. Its big eyes were wild. Maybe even as wild as my own. And I suddenly saw its black-and-white world. Felt the tight choke of a frog in its throat. Its ribs arcing like slender moons inside the dark galaxy of itself.

And I almost set it free.

But I didn’t.

I made myself hold it tight, as far away from my face as I could, as I hurried out of the washroom, back to the bedroom where my father lay sleeping. I hung on with one hand while I opened the door and tossed it inside, pulling the door shut and then leaning against it, breathing so hard my lungs hurt.

My hands trembled as they tried to forget the feel of that snake. The giantness of it.

I saw