This Is Not a Werewolf Story (15 page)

As I walk back to my room, I leave squishy footprints in the carpet and on the stairs. I'm cold. I'm wet. But I'm warm inside as I think about Vincent.

A hero and a storyteller. They go together. You can't have one without the other.

I wake up thinking how last night I missed the cougar by ten minutes. Did it find White Wolf? The worry hooks into my heart like a claw.

And there's a new problem. I'm scared now. I can hear that shriek in my head. It put a bone-deep, teeth-chattering, knee-knocking kind of fear in me. What makes me think I can catch a cougar with a sling and a little help from a friend?

I need information. How much do they weigh? How fast are they? How well do they see in the dark?

I stop by Dean Swift's office on my way to breakfast. He's busy writing, but for once the words won't wait.

“Do cougars hunt wolves?” is the first question I ask.
Say no,
I think.
Please say no.
If the answer's no, then I'm barking up the wrong tree.

Dean Swift looks at me for a long time.

Maybe he knows I was spying on him in the turret, and he's so furious he doesn't even know what to say. What if he calls my dad about it? There's a can of worms I'd like to keep sealed.

Then I see that even though he's staring right at me, his hand is writing. The man isn't listening.

“Do cougars kill wolves?” I ask again.

The question finally sinks in. His eyes bulge.

“Well,” he says. He stands up and puts his hands in his coat pockets so his elbows stick out a little. He looks like a penguin.

Bobo is at his feet. She sighs.

I sit down. I sigh too.

When Dean Swift looks like a penguin, we all know he is about to give a lecture.

Sometimes, when Dean Swift is very interested in and very informed about a subject—like cougars and wolves it turns out—he takes a very long time to get to the point.

I am very hungry. But I listen long and hard.

Here's the point: Cougars attack wolves, but only rarely. It has to do with territory. Sometimes a cougar gets “displaced,” which means it doesn't have a territory of its own. Then it might try to move into a wolf's territory. Or a wolf might feel its territory shrinking due to human population growth. It may begin to hunt in a cougar's territory. Either way, there's bound to be a fight. If there's more than one wolf, then the cougar doesn't stand much of a chance. The wolves will follow the cougar around, and then when it makes a kill, the wolves will leap in and chase the cougar off and eat his
dinner. Cool, huh? Well, not for the cougar. It spends so much energy making kills it can't eat, it eventually starves to death. Or it gets so hungry it does something risky—like pounce from too high—and ends up snapping its spine.

So much for the good news.

Here's the bad news: In a fair fight between predators—when there's only one wolf and one cougar—the cougar will most likely win.

First period is PE. It might as well be. It's not like the day is going to get better.

Tuffman calls my name for roll like usual. Maybe he's not holding a grudge about our voodoo doll in the woods. I don't see the bird's-nest toupee anywhere handy. He doesn't say much of anything to me. Instead he throws a ball out at us and barks, “Dodgeball!”

His feelings toward me become pretty clear though, when the first round ends.

“Raul, stand at the wall!” he yells. “And the rest of you little blue-haired ladies, don't tell me you can't hit him.”

Oh yeah, he's still mad. Guess he decided that since I used the straw man of him for target practice, he'd turn me into a bull's-eye.

“I'll give a quarter to whoever leaves a mark,” he hollers. He jingles the change in his pockets. They look very, very full.

I gulp. And dodge and duck and dart for my life.

Tuffman's pockets are empty in fifteen minutes. When the quarters run out, kids get dimes. Then nickels. The darnedest thing is that those kids throw just as hard for the pennies, in the end.

The good part is that every time Vincent gets the ball, he heaves it, granny-shot style, at the hoop at the other end of court. The bad part is that even though everyone laughs every time he does it, nobody copies him.

Of course Tuffman's gonna put a stop to that. The next time Vincent gets the ball, Tuffman booms, “What are you two, besties?”

He stalks over. “Vincent. You hit him fair and square, or you drop and give me fifty.”

Vincent glances at me.

All the boys start to chant, “Hit him, hit him.”

Fifty push-ups? Vincent doesn't have five in him.

Vincent lifts the ball. He stares at the ground. Then he looks up and takes aim.

My stomach jumps.

Right as he's about to throw it, Tuffman smacks the ball down.

“See?” Tuffman says. “Some things never change. It's always your best friend who betrays you in the end.”

They don't even know what Tuffman's talking about, but all the boys hoot.

“Burn!” says Mean Jack.

Vincent looks off to the side.

All I can do is remember Tuffman's story about how his best friend broke Tuffman's back in the woods. Why is everything he says to me lately so personal? It's creepy.

Game over, people. I'm done.

“Where you going?” Tuffman asks when he sees me heading toward the locker room. “Don't be a quitter. We're only going after you because you're so good at running away. Heck, you can get down on all fours if you want.”

My cheeks burn. I look around to see if any of the other boys heard. But Mean Jack is picking his nose, and Little John is scraping off the scab on his elbow and eating it, and Jason is walking around the room doing a chicken dance.

Tuffman sends the ball at Jason, so hard his last “squawk” comes out like a scream.

Vincent walks over to me. “I was going to take that ball and slam him with it,” he says. “He wouldn't have known what hit him.”

You promised your mom not to lie,
I almost say to him, but instead I nod like I believe him. It's not easy to change. And it's hard not to do what Tuffman wants. It's the way he says your name.

I don't blame him. But I would've done all fifty push-ups with him.

Tuffman looks over at us, the ball raised high. I pick up the bathroom pass that's on a hook by the locker room door and hold it up to him.

“Wimp!” he hollers at me. Then he says, “Okeydoke, Mean Jack, you're up. You take Raul's place.”

The last thing I hear before the ball starts slamming is Tuffman shouting, “I'm out of money, kids, so you're hitting Jackie-Girl here for the glory of it, all right?”

It almost makes me smile.

The nurse makes me ice my shins so long, I'm late to reading.

This is Ms. Tern's first teaching gig. I don't think she knows yet that the teacher is supposed to be mad at kids who come in late. She smiles when I open the door.

Ms. Tern always makes me feel better. I feel safe in her room. Is that weird?

Especially since she makes us read stories where dogs die and spiders die and moms die and sometimes a nuclear bomb falls on people and then they die later after being sick for a long time. If anyone complains, she says, “It's the curriculum.” Her voice is so sad when she says it that even Mean Jack gets a wrinkle between his eyes and looks sympathetic.

She gets up from her desk and hands me a copy of the sheet she's reading from.

“Brilliant. I thought you might fancy learning something about the history of the island.”

When she says “you” I realize she means me. Just me. I look down at my desk.

I wish I could tell her everything. I think she would believe me. I don't think she'd be afraid. Not with a right hook like she's got. She'd be a great cougar hunter, I bet.

Then she reads us the worst story I've ever heard.

Forty years ago some hunters got in little planes and boats and came to the Salish Sea and chased an orca family that scientists call the L pod. The male orcas and the grandma orcas tried to trick the hunters. They broke off from the mothers and babies and swam farther north to draw the hunters away from their families. But the hunters in the planes figured out what they were doing. They used loud noises and nets and got the whole pod trapped in Penn Cove. It's not far from Fort Casey. Then the hunters loaded the baby orcas onto trucks. They wanted to sell them to water parks where they would be trained to perform. The hunters let the rest go. But the orcas wouldn't leave. They waited in Penn Cove to see what would happen to their babies. They waited until the trucks drove off. Finally they swam away. Since that day the L pod has never returned to Penn Cove.

I'd rather spend the day bombed with dodgeballs than ever hear that story again.

Ms. Tern is a teacher, so she keeps reading. “Some of the mother orcas died that day trying to save their babies. They fought so hard they got tangled in the nets and suffocated. The hunters filled the bodies of the dead mother whales with rocks so they would sink to the bottom of the ocean floor. The hunters feared that animal rights groups would protest if they found out how many orcas had died. Eventually all these dark deeds came to light. Evil always does. And that particularly evil day has gone down in history as the Penn Cove Massacre.”

Ms. Tern sets the book down. “Right.” She wipes a tear away. Her voice is a little high up in her throat like she's got more tears bunched up in there. “I know a bit more.”

Please don't tell me any more,
I want to say.
Please
. I have the ache I get when I remember my mom tucking me into bed.

“As it turns out, two of the mother orcas were spirit whales,” Ms. Tern says. She smiles softly. “That means they were pure white. They disappeared entirely. Nobody ever found their bodies.”

My throat squeezes tight, but something in my belly jumps like it has little wings. Spirit animals. The story is sad, but now I have a name for something so important to me that I didn't think there could be a word for it. Animals that are white that shouldn't be white are spirit animals.

“Many cultures throughout the world prize spirit animals for their quote unquote ‘magical' properties.” Ms. Tern raises a skeptical eyebrow at me.

I stare back at her. Would she raise her eyebrow like that if I told her my secret?

She keeps talking. “Often times these animals are used in traditional medicines or sold illegally to wealthy individuals for private collections. International wildlife organizations believe a man named Luke Ferrier is the criminal mastermind responsible for the Penn Cove massacre as well as the disappearance of countless other spirit animals,” she says. “He is a ruthless killer.”

A chill of fear runs from my ears down my neck. I imagine a hunter in a red cap raising a rifle, white fur flashing through a screen of blackberry bushes.

“It is imperative that I find him before he further decimates endangered populations,” she adds.

Have you ever looked in someone's eyes and seen the words they don't say? Like
I'm sorry.
Or
I love you.
Or
I just lied
. The words in Ms. Tern's eyes go like this:
I said too much.

But I'm the only one listening. So I'm the only one who knows that when Ms. Tern should have said “they” she said “I.” And that she meant it, or else why would her eyes look worried? Does Ms. Tern think she's part of an international organization looking for an infamous spirit-animal poacher?

I shake my head. Vincent's right. We do have the craziest teachers here.

“Right,” Ms. Tern says. Her voice is very tidy and neat, like she's trying to sweep a little mess under the rug. “Now, let's have a look, shall we, at another document related to this issue.” She begins to read aloud from a book. “The orcas of Puget Sound are called Southern Residents. The J, K, and L pods frequent these salmon-rich waters. Many facts about these animals would surprise you. Did you know that in local native lore the orca is related to the wolf?”