when she was very small she had tried to touch the animals, but she did not remember that. What she knew, and it seemed she had always known, was that if you tried to touch a wild animal, it ran away. If she wanted the wild things to stay nearby, to keep her company until her father returned, she had to be quiet. She didn’t have to stay completely still, or completely quiet, for that matter. The animals made small noises themselves, and didn’t seem to mind if she did. Small movements, like brushing away an ant, were okay, too. Wild creatures just didn’t like loud noises and sudden movements. But then, neither did Wendy.
The only loud noise she liked to hear was her father who, two or three hours after he had left, would come clumping back along the trail. The wild things scattered when they heard him coming, so by the time he reached the clearing where he had left Wendy, she would be alone again.
Her father, carrying his gun in one hand and a sack in the other, would be in either a good mood or grumpy, depending on how the hunting had gone. He would shake Wendy’s blanket, roll it up so she could carry it, and they’d set off for home. Sometimes, if he was in a hurry and she wasn’t keeping up, he would yell at her. Other times he would pick her up and carry her.
When they got home he would open his sack and take out the furry things he had shot. They looked like the animals that had kept her company, but not as real. Her father would quickly remove their skins and cut them into pieces. Then they didn’t look like animals at all. They looked like pieces of meat, which her mother, when she got home from work, would cook for supper.
Deer often wandered into the clearing when her father was not around, when she was there alone and quiet on her blanket. Once she opened her eyes from a nap to see a big deer stepping right over her. Behind the big deer came a very small one, probably a brand new fawn. It did not step over her, but stumbled, and stepped on her. Its hooves were so tiny that getting stepped on didn’t hurt, but it did surprise her. Neither the fawn nor its mother paid Wendy any mind. The doe stopped close by to browse on some bushes. The fawn stuck its nose under her belly to suck milk. Wendy, lying on her blanket, remembered clearly how she looked up at underside of the mother deer’s belly and saw the small teats where the fawn was getting its milk.
That was the only time a deer ever came so close as to actually touch her, but many times deer crossed the clearing where Wendy waited, or stopped to nibble on nearby bushes. That was why, when her father took his gun and went on weekend hunts with his friends, and came home with a dead deer, Wendy eventually realized what “hunting” meant.
She was five years old when, walking into the woods one day with her father, they startled a deer. The big antlered buck threw up his head and stared at them. Her father quickly raised his rifle. Wendy dashed forward, screaming at the deer, “Run! Run for your life!”
That was the last time her father ever took her with him when he went hunting.
• • •
“Hey, Wendy, wake up!” Ellen hissed. “If Mr. Smart catches you off in a trance again, he’s going to hit you upside the head with a computer print-out.”
Wendy grinned sheepishly and turned her attention to the computer screen, to input data as she was supposed to when there were no customers. But just then a customer came in. The moment Wendy saw Danny Ryan, she knew he would come to her window. He always did.
Danny was a serious eleven-year-old with shaggy brown hair. His dark eyes were bright and watchful. They reminded her of the eyes of a wild animal, not sure whether to stay put or run, because it doesn’t know whether to expect kindness or cruelty.
Danny’s dad, a soldier, had been killed about five years earlier, and his mother had remarried. Wendy had never met Danny’s mother or his stepfather, but she knew that they had been in trouble a few times for drunk driving and fighting. Maybe because of how things were at home, Danny spent a lot of time wandering around downtown. If he saw other kids coming along the sidewalk, he’d cross to the other side of the street. If he didn’t — and this Wendy knew because she had seen it happen — they’d taunt him. Instead of trying to defend himself, Danny would hunch his shoulders and hurry away, as if he had important business elsewhere.
In fact, he did have a kind of business. He collected aluminum cans that he sold to the recycling centre. When not in school, he worked at this project almost continuously, and earned a surprising amount of money for a kid his age. Once, after his stepfather broke into his piggy bank and took all the money, Danny’s grandmother, who lived far away and was just there for a visit, brought the boy to the bank and helped him open an account. After that Danny came to the bank at least once a week, marched straight to Wendy’s window, and made a deposit.
“Hi, Danny,” Wendy greeted him. “How much are you depositing today?”
“Nineteen dollars,” he said, shoving the money through the barred window.
“You’ve got over three hundred dollars in your account now,” she said encouragingly. “What are you saving it for? A bicycle?”
Danny narrowed his eyes at Wendy in a way that made her think that he was making up his mind whether or not she could be trusted. Apparently deciding that he could count on her not to laugh, he said in a low voice, “Not a bicycle. A llama.”
“A llama?”
Wendy did not laugh. When she was Danny’s age, she had often visited farms near where she lived. The cows and horses grew used to her, and allowed her to pet their calves and foals. But her favourite farm animal was an exotic one, a llama. When the mother llama had a baby, Wendy thought it was the cutest thing she had ever seen. She thought, Someday I’ll live on a farm. Instead of cows and horses, I’ll have llamas.
Wendy looked through the bars of the teller window at the boy. She did not find his desire to own a llama funny at all. He was just different, the same way she as a little girl had been different, caring about things that sometimes caused other kids to tease her.
“Why a llama, Danny?”
The boy looked in both directions, as if to make sure no one was near enough to hear what he said. Then, standing on tiptoe and leaning close to bars that separated them, he told her, “Llamas spit.”
“You want a llama because they spit?”
Danny smiled the way you do when you’ve just shared your biggest secret with somebody, and whispered, “I’ll train it to spit on people who pick on me.”
2
TRIPOD
“Ready, Wendy?” Ellen held out the bag of money she had just finished counting.
Wendy glanced at the clock. It was 3:45 p.m., the time when, each day, she and Ellen had to walk across the bank parking lot to the ATM and refill it with cash.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Wendy sighed, and took the bag of money.
They stepped out of the air-conditioned bank into blistering heat. The breeze that blasted Wendy in the face felt like a hair dryer on high. But heat wasn’t the worst part. The worst was that they had to cross the lot in full view of cars driving along the street. Wendy felt that all the people in those cars must know that the canvas bag she carried held thousands of dollars. What was there to stop one from zooming into the parking lot and holding them up?
From the corner of her eye she noticed that one of the passing cars was a police cruiser. She turned her head quickly, in time to catch a big grin from Kyle Collins. In high school Kyle had been a couple
