The Scent of an Angel by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online

The Scent of an Angel
By Nancy Springer
    I am a couple hundred years old now, but I was just a nameless he-puppy in my first fur when I chose for myself an oddling’s path. A long, weathersome road it’s been, and sore paw pads. It happened because—there is no telling why it happened, really. But on the surface of it, it happened because I bespoke the haughty, braggart cat from the neighboring cottage.
    A fat black cat, larger than I was, with her tail in the air. “My mistress is a witch,” she told me with a glare of her copper eyes, “and I am her familiar. Why should I hold converse with you, dog?”
    Having experienced little more than cuffs and harsh words in my young life, I was not offended. My mother was dead, her head crushed in the jagged jaws of a bear trap, so there was no one to teach me that cats were meant to be chased. In my puppy mind I accepted the tales the cat told me as simply as I had accepted my mother’s death. “Is the old woman truly a witch?” I asked humbly. I had heard the humans say that the bent old crone in the next cottage was a witch. They said they could tell because she lived all alone and talked to herself. They said her mumbling made hens lay bloody eggs and milk cows go dry, and she could do worse than that with her evil eye. They said that when the evil fit was upon her she could fly. No one spoke to her. She limped, she stared into air, she gave no one greeting, but she cosseted her cat like an infant. Folk said she suckled it at her sagging teat.
    The proud cat did not answer my question, only repeated, “I am her familiar.” The cat declared, “She gives me milk and juicy bits of chicken to eat.” Hearing this, I drooled with envy, having known only crusts and hunger, myself. “She gives me a velvet cushion upon which to sleep.” Whereas I slept upon the hard clay floor of the cowshed. “She anoints me with fragrant oils and strokes me and calls me Precious.” I could believe it, for the cat smelled like bacon fat and her fur shone glossier than a crow’s wing. Around her smug, fluffy neck she wore a silver bell on a striped ribbon of silk.
    “I want to be a witch’s familiar,” I said.
    The cat sat on her fat haunches and purred in merriment. “You can’t,” she said with utmost scorn. “You’re white.”
    So I was, although the dirt on which I lay had yellowed my fur. White, a color easily made foul. Not like the cat’s rich, shining black. Now that she had made me yearn for some softness in my life, something more than a kick from the farmer’s booted foot, she would deny me because my fur was white? She angered me. Witch’s familiar, indeed. If a witch’s familiar had to be black, then—
    “Then I’ll be an angel’s familiar,” I said, and I turned tail and trotted away. The black cat’s purring laughter followed me.
    I kept trotting, for there was nothing to hold me to that place. Still with my milk teeth in my mouth, I trotted off, any way the wind blew, to find an angel.
    * * *
    I knew of angels only that an angel was the opposite of a witch. Where witches flew foul, angels flew fair. Where witches smoldered, angels blazed. Where witches cursed, angels blessed. Where witches glared the evil eye, angels—I was not sure how an angel looked. I had never seen one.
    This did not matter greatly, because seeing is for humans. For a dog, the way of knowing is through the nose. I would not just search; I would track. Surely I could do this. I knew how to track a rabbit or a deer or even an old leather shoe once I found the right scent—
    But what was the scent of an angel?
    The witch smelled like soot and lavender. Ghosts smelled like gunpowder—this I knew, for ghosts were plentiful, spirits of slain Indians and fever-killed babies and all the witches the Pilgrims had hung. The smell of ghosts hung everywhere over the wood lots and cornfields, especially at dusk or on nights of the full moon—but ghosts were not the same as angels. What did an