Alice's Arc

Chapter 13 of 20

Saturday morning Alice came back to the ridge with a scent tin in her satchel and a plan she was not sure would work. The tall creature was already waiting behind his cedar, thirty feet off, exactly where she had put him. Rose stood beside him in her green and yellow boots, arms folded. Biscuit sat at Alice's knee and watched them both. The problem was simple. Alice could train Biscuit with hand signals and voice. She could not train the creature with anything. He did not speak her words, and she did not speak his. If he was going to learn beside her dog, she needed a bridge. She tapped her stick in the dirt and the ball of light on top flared, then dimmed. She had been thinking about it all night. The light ran off a small circuit she had already rewired once for the phone. She turned the dial down low and pointed the stick at a log ten feet ahead. "Mark," she said to Biscuit. He trotted to the log and sat. She raised the stick. The light pulsed twice, short and short. Rose watched the pulses. Then Rose spoke a low string of sound to the tall one. He rose from his crouch, walked to the log, and sat down beside Biscuit. Alice's throat went tight. She tried it again with a different target, a stump at the edge of the pines. One long pulse. Rose translated. The creature went to the stump. Biscuit followed on Alice's hand signal and sat at his side. "How," Alice said. Rose shrugged. "Light is a word he already knows. I fill in the rest." A small raccoon in a blue-green shirt scuttled out from behind Rose's boot, dragged a strip of cloth across the clearing, and vanished into the huckleberry. A red-headed bird dropped from a branch, picked up the far end of the cloth, and set it neatly at the base of the stump. Alice stared. Rose did not explain. "He brought friends," she said. "They help." By noon Alice had run four drags with three students working the line. The creature learned the sit, the mark, and the wait on light alone. Biscuit read the creature the way he read Alice, and Alice began to read the creature through Rose. When she called the session done, the tall one stood, pressed a palm flat to the cedar bark, and walked back up the slope. Rose stayed. "He'll come tomorrow," she said. "Earlier. He wants the harder ones." Alice looked at her stick. The light was steady now. She had a bridge, and she had a second tracker on the ridge who knew ground no map had ever held. She also had a problem she had not planned for. Biscuit was no longer the only dog in her training.