Effigy Read Online Free

day.
    The bodies are neatly arrayed—both adults on the long workbench, their pups nearby, lined up on a bale. Hammer and the Tracker laid them out according to her wishes before they left. She saw them to the door, where Hammer sucked deep, grateful breaths of open air. Partway to the ranch house, he pinched the bridge of his nose and shot a glimmering stream of mucus into the dust. The Tracker went the opposite way. By the time Dorrie turned her head after him, he was a smudge of deeper darkness against the field.
    She lingered at the door long after both men had disappeared. When she finally returned to her workbench, she took her time over the finer measurements—those which Hammer had no use for, but which were essential to her. Girth front of hind legs, girth back of forelegs, girth at neck behind ears. The mother wolf was far thinner than her mate, all muzzle and legs. Older, too.
    Once Dorrie had set down the numbers, she went on to make five detailed sketches, noting the placement of every ridge andhollow—anywhere the inner workings showed through. When she could fuss over the drawings no more, she busied herself with the arrangement of materials and tools. Her skinning knife and scissors, the razor-fine scalpel, the toothy saw. These she laid out within easy reach, along with a pot of arsenical soap, a stiff-bristled paintbrush and a tall, battered tin of finely ground salt.
    As a rule she dispensed with these necessary preparations in a fevered rush, impatient with anything that stood between her and the primary cut. Tonight she moved as though ploughing through silt. Even when all lay in readiness, she stalled by taking down Major Greene’s
Collection and Preservation: A Taxidermist’s Guide
. Paging through the section on large mammals, she found nothing she didn’t know by heart. After that she pored over the specimen itself, her eyes tracing the big male’s particulars—the dark saddle mark over the haunches, the blunt, bluish snout.
    By rights she should begin with the mother, get the blood out of that snowy ruff before she does anything else. She’ll have to rub the stain with a wad of benzoline-soaked cotton, dust the damp shadow with plaster, beat out the chalk powder once it’s dried. She knows this, just as she knows she’ll skin the white wolf last.
    She rolls the male onto his back. His legs are sufficiently pliable, hours having passed since the initial stiffening. She presses them apart. Using the blue muzzle as a lever, she turns his head to one side and parts the fur midway between the forelegs with her finger and thumb. The skin beneath it she parts with her blade.
    One long, clean cut brings her to the anus. Next, a steady incision across the chest and up the inside of the right foreleg. Gaining speed, she skins all four limbs down to the last joint, dislocating and folding them free of their skin. The paws she leaves entire,suddenly huge on empty lengths of fur. Her fingers are in charge now, and she begins to feel something of the familiar delight in their skill.
    Having peeled the tail and skinned out the back and neck, she slows a little around the ears. These turn inside out as though it’s a trick the animal knows, skin giving up cartilage with so little fight she need use no tool beyond her own chipped and brittle nails. She burrows down to just above the left eye, stretching the brow taut until the eyelid reveals itself in a thin white line. Guiding her scalpel along this delicate limit, she leaves the lid intact. She does the same on the right side, then presses on to negotiate the whisker roots, the black fringes of lip and, finally, the dark apex of the nose.
    A body oozes when it’s flayed, a fact Dorrie has been unconsciously addressing from the first incision, scattering handfuls of sawdust on and around the pelt. Rolling the raw wolf onto its flank, she works the skin out from beneath it, bunching it up to one side. Forelegs come free with a cut at the shoulder joint,