Good Hope Road: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

with shade and thick with trees, the place seemed to him unusually silent. The ground was largely free of snow but yet winter-hardened, frozen solid in the slew of frosted nights that had followed on the heels of the warm spell. Jim headed deeper into the woods, glancing now and again at the ridge ahead as if he half expected the cat to be lying there in the open, sunning itself.
    The trees grew fewer, a thin, clear light shimmering between them. A lone icicle hung from a branch. He touched a finger to the droplet beading its tip. A couple more days of sunshine like today and the few remaining patches of snow would melt as well, the creeks beginning to run in earnest once more. Cradling his gun, he walked on, mulling idly over the quiet.
    He paused before a loose stand of sugar maple. The full-sap moon had risen the previous week. Low, blue over the woods, marking the start of the sugaring season. The maples had stirred in response, the sap slowly released from the wintered heartwood. The weather that had followed – days of sunshine and frost-tipped nights – had been ideal for making the sap really start to flow. All across the hills, the maples, still bare-boughed, were turned parturient, surging with quiet tides.
    Jim rested a hand against the trunk of a maple, weighing in his mind the sap that lay pooling within, when it struck him: the tree wasn’t tapped, and neither were any of the others. That’s why it was so quiet – there was no plink-plink of maple sap dripping into buckets. He frowned to himself. Soon these maples would bud and the sap would turn, no longer suitable for syrup. Flatlanders! Frowning at the waste of it, he glanced again at the ridge looming directly ahead and walked on.
    The soil was wetter as he approached the river, the beginnings of a spring creek evident in a shallow ditch, its border of snow still pure white and pristine. A few feet ahead, another crystalline stretch, but this one lay dimpled, ice piled in telltale granular furrows about its length. He extended a foot, the ice crunching beneath his boot as he shoved it aside; underneath, the meaty, speckled spathes of a skunk cabbage. The spring flower of the woods. It simultaneously curled about itself and thrust upwards in a red, fecund heat, melting its way through the ice.
    A stray, boyhood memory: placing a spathe of cabbage in his mouth; the burning an instant later, like a hundred needles piercing his tongue. The Major, holding him above the kitchen sink, washing out his mouth.
    He was shaking the ice off his boot when he spotted the scat. A sizable pile beneath a gnarled oak, bare of foliage and thick through the butt. He hunkered down over the droppings and when he glanced again at the ridge, there she was, out of nowhere.
    Madeleine Scott. She stood with her hands on her hips, calmly watching – nearly startling the crap out of him too.
    ‘This is posted property.’
    ‘Didn’t see no signs.’
    She laughed. ‘They’re everywhere! Douggie likes people to know what’s his.’
    He stood up, brushing his hands on his shirt.
    ‘Oh, don’t leave, for God’s sake.’ She grinned. ‘I won’t tell if you don’t.’
    She came down the slope towards him, hair fiery against the backdrop of grey bark and clear sky. She stamped her feet as she reached the bottom, a light gesture that barely dislodged the mess of pine needles and soil from her boots. She seemed neither to notice nor to care.
    ‘I won’t tell,’ she repeated, shading her eyes as she looked at him. ‘Besides, if you go, Jim Stonebridge, how am I ever going to find my way out of here?’
    She’d remembered his name . A frisson of pleasure, followed by annoyance at himself for caring either way.
    She bent over the scat. ‘What are these? Droppings?’
    ‘A bobcat’s.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    He shrugged.
    ‘How?’ she persisted.
    ‘Been hunting them a long time.’
    ‘Still,’ she said doubtfully, ‘how can you be certain?’
    ‘The ends,’ he