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

angel smell like?
    I had no idea.
    Angels had to be scarce.
    I trotted along a rutted wagon road with my stubby snout uplifted and my pink nostrils whiffing the damp air. I smelled mice and shrews and voles in the hay. I smelled worms and robins, bugs and bluebirds. I smelled beech trees and red squirrels and rabbits. I smelled springwater and moss and a distillery midden. I smelled deer turds. I smelled something dead enough to roll in somewhere. Or maybe that was the scent of an angel?
    It wasn’t, but I rolled anyway, then trotted on.
    Three days later my paw pads were cracked and raw, I was starving hungry, I no longer cared to roll no matter how ripe the carrion; I was so weak I could barely walk. When I whiffed a good smell of potatoes and mutton simmering, I turned toward it, staggered to a farmhouse and sat whining by the kitchen door.
    “Where did you come from, puppy?” exclaimed a woman’s voice. She came out, picked me up in gentle hands, patted me. She said softly, “I believe the angels sent you.”
    She fed me, then filled a washtub and bathed me—I did not like that part, but bore it without biting because she had given me soft cooked meat to eat. After she had soaped me clean, she rubbed me with a feed sack and made me lie on the warm hearth to dry. I dozed, and when I awoke she was brushing my fur with her own hairbrush. She brushed me all over until I lustered like white velvet. “Good puppy,” she whispered, her eyes red and weary and intent on me, her hands taut and intent.
    Finally she took me upstairs to her daughter, who lay sick in bed. The little girl hugged me in her arms.
    That was long ago. Although I slept on the child’s bed and licked away her tears if she cried, and lay close by when she was too weak to hold me, I do not remember her name or how long I stayed with her—a week, a month? But I do remember the night she died. Snuggled against her side, I lay dozing when her shallow breathing stopped. My head jerked up and I nuzzled her face, but she did not move, and in the room I whiffed—something, a fragrance that made me tremble, scent of sunfire, white wild roses, lightning—I could not say what was that shiversome aroma. Scent of glory incarnate—but just as I sampled it, in a breath it was gone. I lay yearning and whimpering until morning.
    “The angels took her,” the woman said.
    When she put me outside, I trotted away. I trotted on to track my own angel.
    * * *
    I headed any direction whence the breeze blew, so that every breath of air carried to me the scents of carrots and newborn calves, mud and marshes, birchbark and timothy grass, lamb slaughter and wood smoke, horse manure and pig manure and sheep manure and cow manure and a dead woodchuck baking in the sun—all the scents of the world, but never that otherworldly scent for which I searched.
    I traveled far. I was larger than a cat now, and instead of my puppy fuzz I had grown fur that hung in white feathers from my belly and legs. I had learned to kill rats and rabbits to eat, I had learned to lift my leg when I peed, and sometimes I turned aside from my road when I whiffed the sweet aroma of a she-dog in heat. Sometimes, but sometimes not. The memory of that other warm, fierce, ethereal scent abided strong in me, sweeter even than the scent of lust.
    That was long ago, and I am no longer sure of my memories. Things happened; perhaps then, perhaps some other time.
    It may have been then—yes, I am almost sure that it was during those days that I saw a wagoner lashing his patient draft horses up a steep hill, roaring and laying on with the whip as they strained and stumbled and dripped sweat. I leaped into the wagon and bit him in the leg as hard as I could. He screamed and dropped his whip, then turned his wrath on me, and I led him a lively chase as his horses rested, baiting him out of the wagon and down the road and across some old woman’s turnip patch before I left him in a thorny bog and trotted on my