The Healer of Harrow Point by Peter Walpole Read Free Book Online

said, and chuckled. But then helooked up at me again. “Tom, I don't know if it will help, but when I shot my first deer ...” He leaned his head back, and smiled from a long ago memory. “It was, let's see, the third time my dad took me hunting, and I remember I shot a small buck, just barely legal; and Tom, you see, I cried that night in bed. Okay? I mean, you don't have to spread it around, tell everyone, but I cried.”
    I stood there, four feet away, unable to breathe.
    “Anyway, I did,” he said, the words coming quickly now. “I mean, that's all. Does that help any?”
    I nodded. “Thanks,” I said. I was too scared to cry.
    “Ah, c'mere,” my father said and grabbed me in a quick hug. He ruffled my hair, turned me around, swatted me on my butt, and sent me on my way, more confused than I had ever been in my life.

Chapter 4
    Early Saturday morning I dressed in a hurry and slipped quietly into my chair at the breakfast table. I know my parents thought there was something wrong. Breakfast was unusually quiet. My mother and father stole glances at each other, as I ate in hurried silence. I headed out the laundry door to the back deck, the yard, and the fields beyond, but not before I heard my mother's quiet comment to my father: “poor guy.”
    For all the turmoil I was going through, I was still excited about the prospect of a birthday present from Emma. I felt certain that a gift from her would be something magical. Though I had spent many long hours with her since that first day, walking and talking and exploring, the only real marvels I had seen were those at the very beginning: the deer, and the cuts and scratches on my face. Occasionally she would tell meabout something she did. Once she found a doe, hung up in a barbed wire fence; it took her quite a while to get the deer untangled.
    “And then?” I had asked her.
    “Then I just shooed her away,” Emma said.
    “But was she hurt?”
    “A little. Nothing much to worry her. She was more afraid of the fence, confused by being caught, than hurt.”
    “But you healed her?”
    “I helped her a bit, yes.”
    That was as much as I could get from her that day. I hungered for the kind of wonders I had seen the first afternoon Emma and I met. I wanted my birthday present to be something amazing. It was.
    “Where are we going?” I asked, breathless from running most of the way to our meeting place.
    “Would you like to see where I live?” she asked in return. “There's someone there I'd like you to meet.”
    “Um, sure,” I said, a little hesitantly, thinking, in the back of my mind, that probably my present was back at her cabin. Maybe it was too big to bring. I couldn't imagine what it would be.
    It was a long walk to her place. I hadn't realized how far away she lived. She seemed happier than the she had been the day before, and stronger. It was a cold, clear morning; the walking warmed us quickly. I felt happier too, now that we were walking, and less expectant about a possible present, about anything. I had stowed away a few biscuits from breakfast, and Emmaand I ate them early on. We fell in side by side, and for a long time neither of us spoke. I was enjoying the silence, and her company.
    After a while, though, she began to talk. She seemed to be in a mood to teach again, which was fine with me.
    As we walked she taught me more about deer, about their families. She told me how a young, strong buck might have two, three, or even more does as his mates. The deer traveled in small groups of perhaps six, ten, maybe twelve, that were a sort of loose family: the dominant buck, his does, a few young fawns, perhaps a weaker, submissive buck.
    She said that the bucks fought for supremacy. They clashed with their heads lowered in charge, the violence of the collision sometimes so great as to snap their antlers. I could picture it; I slammed my hands together. She said that these battles, though, were usually tests of strength and will. The buck who lost