 |
| Ten dogs is a lot of feed. |
Chapter Ten
Harry Morden was out in the kennel…
Harry Morden was out in the kennel. With dogs you could never take a day off. He’d cashed his unemployment cheque, and he’d picked up a half a dozen twenty-kilogram bags of food. He gave them kibble in the mornings, and would toss them scraps of fresh game just after suppertime in the evenings. He believed it would help to keep them sharp and enamored of the smell of blood. For that reason, he made sure to leave a bit of skin and fur on the scraps, which they obtained by shooting deer mostly.
Their private hunting club had its own little intelligence network, and from time to time would get a call from some sharp-eyed motorist. Just last week Harry and Slick got a call and jumped in the truck, half-drunk as they were, and pulled a freshly-killed deer out of the ditch where it had crawled after being struck by a cube-van.
Totally illegal, those animals were supposed to be properly disposed of, so you had to be quick before the cops or the Ministry of Natural Resources showed up. While he fed the dogs rabbit from time to time, tracking rabbits with dogs was not a big priority, and so he only did it when he was desperate. Harry had ten dogs, and they could go through a lot of food. Harry had an illegal trap line that took up a lot of his time. He could only check it at night or in extremely bad weather. In summer he didn’t bother with it. In summer, since he didn’t get around as regular as he should, the game would often rot in the snare, which he made with brass wire hung from a low branch or a strong frame rigged up from materials found in the area. The smell would ruin the site for further trapping, so winter was best. The carcasses stayed frozen. Trap a rabbit, you could eat it, trap a raccoon, you had to have somewhere to sell the skin. In that sense, he wasn’t a pro.
It’s just that dog food is expensive.
He spent a lot of time out here in the kennel. He felt an affinity with the animals that he certainly didn’t share with his wife, who had taken to the vodka with a vengeance after their third son was born. Post-something depression or so the doctor said.
He could have lived with even that, up to a point, as long as she still cooked, cleaned and sewed, and did the shopping. As long as she stayed off his back and didn’t criticize too much. Harry liked a drink himself from time to time. In fact, he was resolved to never run out of beer as long as he lived, and for the most part, he’d been very successful in this ambition. No, it was the pills that were fucking up the relationship between him and Bethany. Getting her on the disability pension had been a pain in the ass. At some point she and Harry went down to the tribunal, which Harry assumed would be three people for some reason, but it turned out to be just one guy. Harry testified, and signed on the dotted line that they couldn’t fuck anymore due to her drinking habit, and said a few other things as well. Harry had told the tribunal guy about his wife being up all night, drunk as a skunk, and how they were fighting all the time but she could never remember it the next day and stuff like that. She sure as hell couldn’t work or anything.
A pill-head like her might nod off and fall into the machinery.
The province had eventually coughed up seven hundred and sixty bucks a month for her, and since he was working at the time, the money was a blessing. Really, she should have gotten the full rate of about a thousand a month, but she wasn’t one to go and appeal, and they had just given up on the process and learned to live with it. Since it had taken two years to get it going, the cheque for the arrears had looked like a fortune to her.
They had some bills to pay off, and there was no way in hell she would refuse it and go on fighting. Not when there was one mother of all shopping trips on the horizon—
Now that Harry was laid off at Scudmore Lumber and Building Products, he realized that that had been a mistake. As for Harry, he couldn’t read or anything, so that was it.
Harry had dropped out of school when he was sixteen years old, back in Grade Nine. The house, a single floor bungalow, was silent. Just a hint of vapor rose from its galvanized chimney in the frosty air. It was early yet. The tires of a delivery truck howled down the road in front of his house.
Harry and Bethany and the three boys, two still in university and one a fireman in Vancouver, had pretty much lived on the three-for-one pizza deals.
END
Images. Louis.
Louis has all sorts of books and stories on Amazon. Check him out on Fine Art America.
Thank you for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment on the blog posts, art or editing.