Free The Bestiary by Nicholas Christopher Page B

him because they hadn’t gotten their first or second choices. In addition to helping with my bestiary research, he actually offered me real-life advice, culled from philosophers like Diogenes: “To be saved from folly, Atlas, you need either kind friends or fierce enemies.”
    Mr. Hood was considered a loner himself among his more convivial colleagues. He lived alone in one of the faculty cottages by the river. Every morning he canoed or kayaked six miles. When the river was frozen, he used the rowing machine in the gym. For relaxation, but with a kind of religious fervor, he built and refurbished bark canoes, working out of a shed on the riverbank. One morning when I visited him there he explained how to construct a twelve-foot canoe.
    “First, you strip bark from a silver birch,” he said. “Unlike elm or hickory bark, birch bark doesn’t waterlog. For the frame, you use spring cedar. I choose to work only with the tools available to the Malecite Indians who lived around here: an ax, a peeling tool, and, most importantly, a crooked knife.” He handed me a knife with a bulbous grip and a V-shaped blade. “Ever seen one before?”
    “No, sir.” I balanced it in my palm and touched the tip, sharp as a scalpel.
    “It was peculiar to Maine. That bent tip is for carving and shaving the rib boards and planking. My canoes don’t contain nails or tacks. I pitch them with sap from a black spruce. Then I decorate the prow with porcupine quills. The Malecites considered a canoe incomplete, unprotected, without an insignia. I’ve used a fox and a lynx. Their favorite was a rabbit smoking a pipe.”
    I laughed. “It sounds like a cartoon.”
    “It was supposed to demonstrate their calm in the face of adversity.”
    Most afternoons after his last class, Mr. Hood retreated to the rocking chair on his porch, a pipe clamped between his teeth, a book in hand, and his white bulldog at his feet. Blind in one eye, Polyphemus was named after the cyclops in
The Odyssey.
    My own dog had died a month after I went away to school. In his cramped hand, Bruno reported Re’s last days to me:
             
    He didn’t want to leave Lena’s room. But he got short of breath climbing the stairs. We took him to the animal hospital, and saw two vets, and they said, “He’s just old.” They wanted to keep him there, but I said no. He didn’t want to stay, and I knew you wouldn’t have wanted him to. The next night he stopped eating. We brought food upstairs, but it was no use. He stayed in Lena’s room, and she never left his side. In the morning, he went over and stretched out by the window, watching the snow fall. He fell asleep like that, and then Lena saw he had stopped breathing. I’m sorry he couldn’t be with you, Xeno. We did all we could. Lena’s been crying ever since.
             
    Lena wrote me her own letter:
             
    My mother says the best way to die is in your sleep. It’s because she’s afraid my father will die in a fire. I don’t believe there is a good way to die. I hate that Re died. But he was peaceful in the end. I know how much he loved the snow….
             
    Two weeks later, Bruno sent me Re’s ashes. I opened the package in the bathroom, away from the other boys, tears flooding my eyes. The ashes were in a tight gray packet the size of a brick. I couldn’t believe my dog’s bodily self had been reduced to that. Bruno also sent along Re’s leather collar and the medallion imprinted with his name, my name, and my old address. I placed them and the ashes alongside my grandmother’s music box in the trunk under my bed. Now Re’s spirit had joined hers and my mother’s.
    Throughout my stay at that school, I felt his presence, not as a shadowy mist, but a weight that shifted gently at the end of the bed, or a rustle in the shadows, or a brushing against my leg when I walked in the woods.
             
             

    I N MY SENIOR YEAR , just before I turned