Part 4 (2/2)

He sniffed the boxes and the chairs and the sofa. He pushed his nose deep between the sofa cus.h.i.+ons, where he picked up Marjorie's scent, old and faint and almost undetectable. Where was she? And where was the scent of s.e.x that had never been more than a day old on previous visits?

Uncle Ted and the Pack came in the front door talking, which made their usually slow pace even slower.

”So where'll you go?” Dad asked Uncle Ted gently.

”I haven't made up my mind,” Uncle Ted said. ”But I can't stay here, not now. Maybe later. I'm putting my stuff in storage until I make up my mind where to go, which might take a while.”

”Well, if you need help, all you have to do is ask,” Dad said.

”No, he doesn't have to ask,” Mom said. ”We're helping whether you ask or not.”

”Hey, look, sis,” Uncle Ted said, smiling lamely (but at least smiling). ”No need to get bossy here. I'm a big boy. I can take care of myself.” Dad elbowed Mom in the ribs at the sound of his own words.

Thor listened carefully to the odd-sounding conversation. Something was wrong with the way Uncle Ted was talking to Mom and Dad. Something disturbingly familiar, and at the same time, disturbingly out of place. Thor poked his nose into a box and didn't look up. He didn't want to be obvious about studying Uncle Ted, but his attention was riveted on the subtle nuances in Uncle Ted's voice.

He observed Uncle Ted for a few minutes, but still couldn't decide what was wrong. Uncle Ted was hiding something from the Pack, that much was obvious. First of all, he was both hiding and not hiding his emotional state. He was making it clear to the Pack he was terribly unhappy, but not allowing them to see just how unhappy he was. Typical human behavior.

But there was more to it than that, a deeper subterfuge that was obscured by the obvious one. What was it?

Thor's span of attention was stretched beyond its usual limit. An odd smell in one of the boxes caught his attention. He lost track of the mystery of Uncle Ted's secret and went back to his general-purpose olfactory investigation.

He finished with the boxes and sniffed the sofa again briefly, going back to the familiarization routine that had been interrupted by Uncle Ted's strangeness. Mom, Debbie, and Brett had made themselves comfortable on the sofa, which didn't make his job any easier. He picked up a whiff of Marjorie's scent again, which brought back the question of her whereabouts.

He followed his instincts to the wrought-iron spiral staircase that always gave him so much trouble. He climbed up the steps two at a time (his problem with the staircase was coming back down). He wanted to check Uncle Ted's bed-sheets.

He bounded onto the bedroom deck, an oversize balcony above the living room, and went straight for the bed, which was just a mattress and box springs on the floor. Unlike the Pack, Uncle Ted never made his bed, which made Thor's job easier. He stuck his nose deep in the sheets and snuffed around. He found only the faintest detectable trace of Marjorie, not on the sheets but on the mattress beneath. There was no detectable aroma of s.e.x, which wasn't surprising. The smell of s.e.x fades much faster than the smell of skin oils.

The picture was complete. There was almost no trace of Marjorie anywhere. Uncle Ted had been alone for some time. That must be why his emotions were so mixed up. Thor's sympathy went out to Uncle Ted. Nothing is worse than loneliness.

There was a cardboard box filled with laundry in the bedroom. Thor thrust his snout into it and got a surprise. Inside was the scent of a strange animal. The scent was strangely dog-like, but the animal was not a dog. Its scent was wild, feral, unlike any animal scent Thor had ever encountered before. And even stranger was the fact that he hadn't picked up the scent anywhere else in the house. Just in the box. Uncle Ted must have encountered a wild animal outside and gotten its scent on his clothes, then left the clothes in the box.

”Thor!” Dad called from the living room. ”Get down here!” Thor was glad to oblige. He'd found everything he was going to find up there.

He negotiated the first steps of the spiral staircase cautiously. The stairs were steep, and curved inward too tightly for his long, horizontal body. On top of that, they weren't solid. They were metal grids that Thor could see through, an unsettling quality he particularly disliked. He took three or four tentative steps, then tumbled down in a kind of controlled fall, his feet guiding his descent rather than carrying him down.

The first time he'd gone up there, when he was a pup, he'd gotten stuck, afraid to negotiate the scary, see-though steps. Dad had to come up and carry him down, which was humiliating beyond belief. The next time the Pack visited Uncle Ted, he bounded up the stairs again before remembering what had happened. When he realized what he'd done, he looked at the stairs, pulled back, recalled the embarra.s.sment of being rescued, and forced himself down in exactly the same manner as he did today. His technique was primitive - even Thor thought so - but it worked. He'd never improved on it.

When he reached the living room floor, Dad was in the kitchen area, holding the back door open.

”C'mon,” Dad said. ”Out you go.” Thor needed no coaxing. He dashed through the door into Fantasyland. There was a lot of territory out there, just waiting to be explored.

His nose led him up the hillside. There was a path behind the house that got just enough use to keep it from being swallowed up by the underbrush. At the top of the hill it joined a popular hiking path that followed the ridgeline of hills through the area. The ridgeline path was older and, since it got more use, better defined. Hikers came through on a fairly regular basis, leaving garbage behind that attracted animals. It was a great place to sniff and explore.

Skyline Trail, as it was known, was almost a quarter mile up the hill from Uncle Ted's house, and hikers normally pa.s.sed by without ever knowing anyone lived on the hillside below. Only at night could a hiker spot the house from Skyline, when light glowed dimly through the foliage below. But hikers rarely used Skyline after dark, and almost never took the little footpath down to Uncle Ted's house - Skyline was two miles long, with a hundred paths leading off; most of them led nowhere. Most hikers took Skyline all the way to the end, where it led out of the hills and into a state park, where friends waited to pick them up.

Thor had no idea why the myriad hikers along the summit didn't come down the hill, but his nose told him that was the case. Whenever he picked up a human scent on the path leading up to Skyline, it was invariably Uncle Ted's or Marjorie's. Now he picked up only Uncle Ted's scent, and an occasional hint of the Wild Animal he'd smelled in Uncle Ted's laundry.

He trotted up the path briskly, but not so fast that he might miss something interesting. In past visits, he'd frequently spotted animals off the path and gotten in some invigorating chases.

Less than halfway up the hill, he found the scents of racc.o.o.ns, opossums, deer, squirrels, chipmunks, and a cornucopia of droppings. And the Wild Animal. Something about the scent made the hair on Thor's shoulders rise slightly, and he listened more carefully to the forest sounds around him.

The Wild Animal's scent got stronger as it went up the hill, which was odd in itself. Scents don't usually get more or less intense as they go along. They only get stronger if they're joined by the scent of another animal of the same kind, or if the animal stops and lies down, or does something to leave more of its essence behind, like scratching itself against a tree. But there was no sign that the Wild Animal had stopped, and no second scent. The scent just got stronger.

Very odd.

Thor wanted to sprint up the hill, follow the Wild Animal's trail to the end, see what he could find out about it, but some deep-seated instinct advised caution. Very strongly. He proceeded cautiously.

Just a few hundred feet below Skyline he picked up a fresh human scent. A woman. The scent appeared out of nowhere, as if the woman had walked down the path toward Uncle Ted's house, then turned around and gone back. He followed it up the hill for a few feet when he realized the Wild Animal's scent had stopped where the woman's scent started. He doubled back to find the end of the Wild Animal's path, and found his mistake: The scent trails didn't end, they left the path, and went into the dense underbrush on the hillside. Thor followed the overlapped trails.

About thirty feet from the path, the woman's trail entered a wide patch of berry plants whose stems were covered with sharp thorns. And here Thor picked up the unmistakable scent of human blood. The woman's scent was stronger here - she was probably struggling to get through the brambles, sweating, getting cut, and secreting more odor in the process. Thor stepped through the brambles carefully, lifting his feet high in the air and looking for an opening in the thorns before gently, tentatively setting them down.

Humans seldom stray from paths, Thor knew. Could the animal have led the woman off the path? But would a human follow an animal across a dangerous field of thorns? Would an animal cross the bushes in the first place? Everything seemed wrong. The questions fluttered wordlessly through Thor's mind and vanished as quickly as they appeared, but they changed the scenario in his mind.

The woman wasn't following the Wild Animal; the Wild Animal was chasing her. A trace of blood just inside the bushes confirmed his judgment. The woman was not being careful. She was in a hurry. A yard or two in, he found a different blood scent. The Wild Animal was in a hurry, too.

A few steps in, the thorns stopped him. Ahead the brambles were higher than his ears. Only a desperate animal, fleeing for its life, would run through this thicket. Its pursuer must have been either desperate or mad. He stretched his neck forward and sniffed, and confirmed a hunch - the Wild Animal's scent didn't follow the woman's scent through the thorns. The Wild Animal had turned back after running a few feet into them.

Thor carefully backed out of the berry patch and picked up the Wild Animal's scent trail. As he expected, it went around the thicket. He followed it to the edge of the berry patch, where the Wild Animal had circled around to the other side, to the spot where the woman had emerged from the thorns.

He found the place were the chase picked up again, and found another faint but familiar smell - that particular mixture of adrenalin, sweat, hormones and enzymes that make the smell of fear. That was a surprise. Fear is a fleeting scent, and the trails were at least a day old. For the scent to still be detectable, the woman must have been overflowing with it. As the path led away from the berries, the scent of fear got steadily stronger.

This was where the Wild Animal had begun to catch up with her.

The trail led over a large fallen tree with lots of sharp branches, dangerous to navigate. The woman had been looking for obstacles to slow her pursuer down. Thor picked his way through the maze of dead branches, and finally picked up the scent he'd been expecting for a while - the smell of death.

As a predator, he was not frightened by the smell; in fact, he liked it. It charged his blood with adrenalin and piqued his curiosity. But it also put him on guard.

He stepped onto the trunk of the fallen tree, mindful of the sharp branches that pointed at him like accusing fingers. As he hoisted himself up, he caught his first glimpse of his quarry, lying on her back on the gra.s.sy hillside, staring at the sky with dead eyes. There were no other predators around. He cautiously stepped up for a closer look.

She wore hiking boots and shorts, and her bare legs had been horribly lacerated by the thorns. The cuts must have been painful, but they hadn't killed her. She'd died when the Wild Animal ripped out her throat. Afterward, he'd torn her s.h.i.+rt apart and opened her torso from her neck to her naval. The ground was sticky with blood, which thousands of ants were busy cleaning up. Some of the ants marched into her body, where they fought with maggots for her remains. Thor didn't like the idea of setting his paws down in the writhing sea of insect life that surrounded her, so he leaned as far forward as he could and sniffed from a distance.

His nose picked up the odor of liver, one of his favorite foods, and curiosity got the better of him. He stepped lightly over the ants and leaned his nose into the opened torso.

The Wild Animal had ripped through her thorax in search of an organ, but somehow he'd missed the best part - her liver was still intact, untouched except for a few maggots and ants. The smell of liver, even with the odor of decomposition setting in, was intoxicating. But Thor resisted the temptation to eat.

He was no dummy - he'd learned a few things about meat in his time, and he knew better than to eat meat found outside.

It had been a painful lesson. He'd been on a walk with Dad one weekend in the woods at home. Dad had brought Thor's tennis ball, and they walked to a little clearing where Dad threw the ball to the far end, behind a big tree. When Thor got there, he found a thick, raw chuck steak lying in the gra.s.s like a gift from the G.o.ds. Thor helped himself to the succulent meat - and his mouth and throat caught fire. He yelped and howled and whined and vomited, but nothing put the fire out. He ran back to Dad, who was unable to help, then back to the creek behind the house. He drank as fast as he could, but it hardly helped. As soon as he stopped drinking, the fire started up again. It seemed to burn forever.

In fact, he was back to normal in about a half hour, but it was the longest half hour of his life. The next day, out with Dad again in a different part of the woods, the ball again landed near a tempting treat.

Beef liver. Irresistible. He drooled uncontrollably, but held back for a moment, remembering the chuck steak. But steak is steak, and liver is liver. He succ.u.mbed to temptation, only to have the same horrible lesson repeated. Since then, he'd twice found meat in the woods and pa.s.sed it by both times.

<script>