Free Lambsquarters by Barbara McLean Page B

of liquid beseechment. We’d abandoned her, she was broken and rent, but we were back. She rode home on my lap, gazing up at me with longing, with promise, with submissive adoration. A quiet dog for the moment, the hunter asleep inside.
    It wasn’t long before her spark returned and she got back outside, firing herself through the fences on tilt. She ran the ski routes all winter chasing rabbits andfoxes, flushing birds out of the bush. And after running the trails she’d come inside, chew the ice from her paws and loll on her back, waving, singing, dreaming and running on the spot.
    We had a rabbit in the house by then. Thlayli, an angora with a furry head. I’d won him in a handspinning competition. His hair was long, blueish-grey and fine, and he’d sit on my lap to be combed and plucked. When he wasn’t in his cage in the front hall, he had the run of the house, and Zoë tolerated him the way she did everything else.
    In the summer, Thlayli lived outside. I made a wooden house for him, which I put inside a moveable wire-mesh enclosure. Every few days I moved it to a new place on the lawn so he could graze. Of course he’d inevitably get out of his enclosure by burrowing under it, or by hopping around during the move. He was tame and always returned to his hutch. His first summer passed without incident, Zoë nosing him when he escaped.
    During his second spring, Thlayli was shifted once again to his outside home. But his first free hop along the grass was his last. Zoë must have seen a moving blur, and she pounced. She grabbed, shook and broke his neck. Just like that. A pile of dead angora lay limp on the lawn.
    It was clear that Zoë knew what she’d done. Contrition is evident in a dog. The eyes, both avoidingconnection and begging forgiveness. The tail dragging, the ears off their semi-perk. Zoë never killed the wrong thing again. The chickens were safe; the cats untouched. For the rest of her life she killed groundhogs until they all but disappeared from the farm, but nothing else.
    She’d been a digger through the years. There was a spot by the house, under the lilacs, that she’d hollowed out on the hottest days each summer, trying to find a cool den. We gave up trying to stop her. If caught in the act she just showed her belly and exposed her neck. Old age crept up too soon, seven years at a time, and Zoë finally sang her last song. Thomas dug down into the spot under the lilacs she was always trying to reach, deep enough so she’d be cool forever. As I mourned, he laid her to rest just a few feet away from where she was born. She’s there by the house, but her footprints still sprint through the barn each summer, and her memory lives in the generations of groundhogs whose ancestors moved to safer terrain.

DARK DAYS
    THE BARN WAS TRANSFORMED by the renovation Zoë had witnessed. The floor was smooth and flat but for the paw- and footprints; the walls were straight. We installed heated water bowls in the chicken coop, and on both sides of the stable floor to provide access to the greatest number of pens. The main beam was replaced, the mud-sills renewed.
    Almost nothing was built in, just the centre posts and troughs. The space was immense, wide open and clean. Tobacco tins, sunk in the floor when the cement was being poured, left post holes when dry for arranging our pens. We drew up plans at the kitchen table, Thomas and I, with cement-king Arthur’s help. Formations for feeding, for lambing, for mothering up. Sick pens and ram pens and pens for fattening late lambs. Pens for yearlings and new stock and creep-feeding—where lambs can squeeze through a smallopening for feed, their greedy but frustrated mothers left behind. All possible arrangements with portable housing. The stable stanchions and mangers now mutable gates and hurdles, feeders and pens.
    THE WINTER WE SPENT before the renovation was worse than the state of the barn. The ram had got out the previous summer, had bred some of the ewes