'You're young,' Pat had said to him, 'But sensible enough. And it has your name on it, my father's name, so it's only right you should have it. But if I catch you firing it anywhere near the house, or near any of the stock, then you lose it. Understand me, Michael?' And Michael had nodded, eyes shining.
There was no need to fear the wolves now. With this in his hands he could blow them to kingdom come.
He built himself a hut on the western bank of the river, south of the bridge, for this seemed to him to be the place where the weirdest things happened, where the tracks were thickest. It was a crude affair, three sided and roofed with ferns a foot thick. Michael reburied the werewolf's skull by its open side, and over it constructed a hearth with stones from the river. He hoped the fire would keep it there, though he sometimes saw it in his dreams-Snarling, skeletal, shrivelled, remnants of gums pulled back from the blackened teeth.
He watched, and waited, saw September enter the year and tint the leaves, felt the wind pick up in the heights of the trees. He checked Mullan's traps daily, shotgun in hand and game bag slapping at his side, but the wild creatures shunned them no matter how he moved or disguised them. He took them up in the end, leaving the wood dean and untouched once more. Over his horizon school loomed like a dark cloud.
The wood was an eerie place in the shortening evenings, full of the rushing of air and the whispers of the trees. He heard a voice singing there once, lovely as a summer blackbird, but the sound of it made the hair rise on the back of his neck. It was singing an old, old song, making it into a-dirge, a coronach for dead dreams.
I overheard my own true love,
His voice it was so dear.
Long time I have been waiting for
The coming of my dear.
Sometimes I am uneasy
And troubled in my mind.
Sometimes I think I'll go to him
And tell to him my mind.
And if I should go to my love,
My love he will say nay.
If I show to him my boldness,
He'll ne' er love me again.
Perhaps it was the Banshee, and there was a death to come in the family. But the death had already happened, he told himself. Perhaps there had even been two.
He knew this: there was a life to the wood, an awareness. It remembered things, and it was watchful. He could feel eyes on his back every time he entered it. They were not hostile, but they were wary, gauging. He felt as though he were being weighed in a balance. But he could not guess what purpose he was being considered for.
EIGHT
THE EVENING THE girl called Cat reappeared he was sitting outside his hut with the fire bright and crackling at his feet, experimenting with weapons. The book Rachel had got out of the library for him had pictures of cave men wrapped in furs and carrying spears and odd-looking axes, flint knives and scrapers. Cro-Magnon man, tallest of the prehistoric humans who had wandered north after the retreat of the ice some sixty thousand years before. Michael was trying to lash a sliver of stone on to a hazel staff, for there was no flint to be found in this countryside. His fingers were becoming raw with the effort. String was not strong enough. He grunted irritably as once more the stone blade shifted awry.
And when he looked up again, Cat was standing on the other side of the fire, watching him.
His heart thumped briefly and one hand fell to touch the shotgun he always brought here. She raised an eyebrow, smiling, and sat down opposite him without invitation. She wore the white shift, even in this biting autumn weather. She was human enough to relish the glow of the fire, he noticed. He put the spear aside and rummaged in his bag. 'Hungry?'
She nodded.
An apple, a squashed ham sandwich and the dregs of a flask of tea. She wolfed them down, gulping the tea straight from the mouth of the flask. Her elbows were bloody, Michael noticed, and it irked him to see her loveliness marred. If truth be told, she smelled. Not of gorse blossom this time, but of herself. An unnameable smell, at once repulsive and exciting.
It began to rain, the drops pattering on the thinning canopy of the trees and dripping down on their heads. The evening was falling fast, cloud gathering. Michael threw another chunk of wood on the fire, making the sparks sail up, and withdrew into the hut's shelter. Cat looked up at the sky in something like resignation. She seemed tired, he thought, and he saw now that she was muddy and grimed.
The rain grew heavier, hissing in the flames.
'Come inside,' Michael told her. Already the water was beating dark hair lank against her temples.
'O like the rain.' Grinning. 'I hope it thunders and storms!' And she appeared so like Rose for a moment that Michael blessed himself.
It became a downpour. Runnels of water were carving channels in the fallen leaves and the bare clay, and the wood was deafening with the rattle of rain beating the trees. Drips began to come through the roof of the hut, but Michael had seen out other showers within and knew it would stand up to the weather. There was an old blanket he kept there for a floor and he shook it out, beckoning to Cat.