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Today was to be a Big Day in Greenbottom. Always an early riser, Agatha was up even before the midsummer sun itself. She had work to do: a special supper planned to celebrate the end of school—forever.
When one life ends, another begins.
That little homily had been swimming around in her thoughts for several days. It had been a favourite saying of her mother’s, but it didn’t come from the Wisdoms, so where had the old dear acquired such privileged information? Certainly, she had never claimed that it was a direct revelation from the Immortals, and who else would know? Agatha had found the adage comforting as her Big Day approached.
She could never have guessed how apt it would prove to be.
* * *
Dressed in her workaday frock of faded green and white calico, she brushed out her grey-blonde hair and wound it into her usual bun. Then she peered in the mirror and sighed. Old age is not for quitters, she reminded herself. So Father Comfort said, although he admitted it wasn’t written among the Wisdoms.
Quietly, so as not to wake Bessie or Ian, she limped downstairs, feeling her knees being cranky, always at their worst first thing in the morning. She checked the larder box at the front door, but today’s fresh bread had not yet arrived. She lit the fire and set to work making a couple of peach pies. Bessie was sure to complain that they weren’t apple pies, but the apples weren’t ripe yet.
Leaving the pies to sit until the oven was hot enough, Agatha went outside to catch the main dish. The spring’s crop of chickens was growing fast, the cockerels becoming a nuisance to one another and all the rest. There wasn’t much meat on them yet; Ian would eat two by himself, plus whatever Bessie and Agatha had left of another. Waste not, want not. When one life . . . Argh!
It was too early to milk Grouch, the goat. The day was clear and calm, but there had been wind in the night—she had even thought she heard thunder once—so there would be more windfall peaches and plums to collect. She must drop a hint to Ian that it was time to pick the ripe ones.
She had about half an acre of yard behind the house, enough for the goat, a few chickens, some fruit trees, and a fine vegetable patch. She kept it all spanking tidy, with very little help from Ian, although he did look after the heavy digging and the wood chopping in winter. It was enclosed and divided by neat picket fences, built by long-ago lodgers in part payment of their board. Heading along to the far end, where the chickens lived, Agatha had to pass the vegetable patch and—
She felt a jolt of anger. The cabbages! Someone had mashed one cabbage completely into the ground and knocked over another and also dug a shallow hole in the freshly turned soil of the potato patch nearby. Three shallow holes, each in the shape of a paw print—five pads and four claws. If those had been made by a dog, it would be bigger than a horse. A cat’s retractable claws wouldn’t show like that.
Then she saw the adjoining lawn. It was time she took the scythe to it again. It was a tiny lawn, just enough to lay out clothes to bleach in the sun; at present, it was shiny with dew, but the silvery sheen was scarred by the same enormous prints, as if the monstrous visitor had jumped over one fence, run across her yard, and jumped out the far side. She thought of the old tales of krendel, which had supposedly looked like dogs but stood eight feet high at the shoulder, monsters that came from unknown lands to eat livestock and people.
Then she chuckled. After more than forty years, this was her last day as village teacher. The older boys had decided to play a trick on her—the older boys and their big brothers, she decided, maybe even fathers, too. There must have been a lot of them in on this, to make the dies and stamp them in so often.
Two dies, not one, because the hind paws were correctly shown smaller than the fore paws. A good tracker had been in on the plot, for the prints were grouped by fours in a C-shape pattern, right for a dog in a leisurely gallop. A teacher in a one-room school gathered enormous amounts of mental wool, as she liked to think of it. She had always required older children to make presentations on some topic that would interest the others, usually something their fathers had taught them about stars or fish or birds. Tracking was always a popular subject, turning up every year or two, so Agatha could judge this hoax better than most village dwellers would, and she could see that the jokers had slipped up on the ends. The imaginary monster hadn’t jumped over the fences, just stepped over them without breaking stride.
Granted that it was impossible, that might not be too implausible. With paws bigger than a carthorse’s hooves and legs to match, such a monster might not have found a three-foot fence any obstacle at all. Still smiling, she carried on harvesting fallen fruit. She caught a trio of the pesky young cockerels and wrung their necks with an expert twist apiece. When three lives end . . . Were three eggs just hatching, somewhere in the world?
