Ghost Roll by Julia Keller Read Free Book Online

the creek bank she’d taken off as if she had fire-crackers tied to her tail. She seemed determined to ignore him. It wasn’t like Goldie to act this way; she was a good dog. Something had gotten hold of her and wouldn’t let her go, just as surely as Andy’s traps captured skinny gray-black raccoons from October to February, the official trapping season allowed by state law.
    Goldie plunged forward, whipping back and forth between the leafless trees. She crossed the dirt and the rocks and the low scrubby bushes and the scat and the sloughed-off hunks of bark and the burrs and the seed pods and the dead insects and the dented green Mountain Dew cans. All emitted excellent smells, smells that under normal circumstances would have caused her to pause and savor—but the smell drawing her forward asserted its dominance. It separated itself from the others. It was the King of Smells. It ratcheted up in deliciousness a few notches more, even after it seemed that it couldn’t get any more wonderful.
    Goldie was getting close.
    â€œI mean it, you rascal! You get back here! Goldie, come on!”
    He was wasting his breath. The dog had it in sight now, mired down there in the creek itself, a broad hump of brown. It was snagged between a rock and a batch of cattails that, wind-whipped and top-heavy, arched low over the greenish-silvery water like skeletal fingers reaching into a fingerbowl. Goldie’s hearty bark startled two turkey vultures, newly returned from their winter journey south, in mid-feast. They rose quickly and corkscrewed away, broad wingspans catching the circular updraft of air currents. They would be back. They had infinite patience.
    Goldie slid deliriously down the bank—not even trying anymore to maintain her balance, enjoying the free fall of four scrambling paws and a glorious sense of anticipation—and collided with the hump. The smell exploded in her nostrils. She uttered a brief yip of joy.
    She was up to her belly in the frigid water, water that had recently made its late-winter pilgrimage down from the mountain to creeks like this one, and she was thrashing and nipping at the hump, trying to unravel the core source of its splendid stink. She didn’t mind the cold one bit. She pulled at a section of the brown mass. There was a quick sound of ripping cloth as something came away in her teeth—but it tasted bland, and she spat it out, flapping her tongue to rid herself of the unimportant. A few brown threads dangled from her left incisor as she returned to the mysterious mound. She moved to the other side of it, parting the water with her wide golden chest, prodding the object repeatedly with her muzzle.
    â€œThere you are, you ornery dog, you!”
    Andy looked down at her from the top of the bank, hands at his sides, breathing hard. The left sleeve of his denim jacket was torn and his ball cap had been knocked askew. Low-hanging branches had done the damage. A few years ago he might’ve been able to keep up with her when she broke loose that way, running a good half mile like a furry streak of lightning. But he was sixty-one years old now. And creaky as hell. Arthritis pinched at his joints as if somebody—a mean somebody—had taken a pair of pliers to them.
    â€œWhadda you got there, Goldie?”
    He descended the bank carefully, gingerly, heel-hard, keeping his body sideways so that he wouldn’t go headlong if he stumbled, grabbing at the thin branches of spindly trees and then releasing them again after he’d descended further. Goldie had gone for the water at another angle, but he went this way because there seemed to be a bit of a path here already, two faint parallel lanes of pushed-down plants, a running indentation. Then a branch snapped back and whacked him in the face— Dang, he exclaimed—and he broke it off and kept going.
    Down below, Goldie splashed around like a young pup. Her tail was going in wild, incessant