The Scent Keeper(7)

There. In the midst of all the big, musty smells, there was something new. Soft. Small. Its warmth didn’t move like the chickens did, but lay still, like a rock soaking up the sun.

Eyes still closed, I made my way carefully across the coop. The smell was clear as a beacon. I put my fingers out, swept them across the dried grass. One of the chickens pushed against my knee and I moved her gently aside. I lowered my hand, searching. There.

I came out of the coop, the egg held aloft, my grin bright and broad. I was a scent hunter. Just like Jack.

“And that’s how you do it,” my father said, smiling.

I found another egg, more quickly this time, and we cooked them both for breakfast.

“What’s my next task?” I asked my father after we had eaten. “That one was too easy.”

He cocked his head at me. “Find the first day of spring,” he said.



* * *



If any quest required patience, that one was it. We had just started winter and spring was an eternity away. I knew how the dark days would come and the rain would settle on our good humor until it was cold and sodden. The storms would arrive and the winds would scream and the trees would throw their branches at our roof. Winter was no time to go searching for scents. Smells in the winter were sad things, moldering by the fire or curled up under the roots of trees. But Jack would do it, I told myself, and so every day I put on my jacket and went hunting.

In the end there were more smells than I ever would have thought. The rain and the fog opened them up to anyone who was paying attention. We didn’t really get snow on our island, but each time the cold left and the rain came I could smell life wanting to come back, like a tide shifting in the ground. I could hear the trees whispering, “Is it time yet?”

The days grew shorter and shorter, until finally the world tipped and the balance shifted back in the other direction. A change was coming—I could smell it. It was like the rustling in your dreams before you finally wake up in the morning. That gentle tug on the strings of gravity as the slack tide changes direction and starts to pull you out to sea.



* * *



One morning I awoke to a new and familiar fragrance coming in the front door. My father had always told me that my birthday was the first day of spring. Not a specific day of the year, but the feeling—an undercurrent of warmth waking up the earth. The scent of violets. Green in the air, he called it. It didn’t matter that sometimes we went backward into winter again; my father told me that happened all the time. There was no problem with celebrating more than once, he said, although I only got to count the first one for my age. Eleven for me, then.

My nose told me my father was not in the cabin, but as I listened I heard his footsteps approaching on the trail. There was another sound mixing in with them, too, but this one was brighter and quicker. I scrambled down the ladder. The sounds came together up the porch stairs, and then I saw my father standing in the door. With him, held loosely on the end of a rope, was a goat, black, with one white hoof. It was beautiful.

“Look what I found,” he said, as if discovering a goat was a natural occurrence. We were on a small island surrounded by water. The only new things that arrived came to us by magic, in black plastic boxes. But there was a goat, on a rope held nonchalantly in my father’s hand.

“Happy birthday,” my father said.

The goat watched me, its yellow eyes bright and amused.

“I’m Emmeline,” I said, stepping out onto the porch. The goat raised its white hoof in the air, as if to command us to do her bidding. I knelt to be nearer to her, and she lowered her hoof and leaned forward, butting her nose against my hand until I petted her.

“A real Cleopatra,” my father said. The goat looked up at him, her head cocked.

“Who is that?” I asked, gently running my hand down the stiff, short hairs of her neck.

And he told us about the long-ago ruler of a faraway country, who got her way using boats filled with rose petals and baths of musk.



* * *



Cleopatra the goat rapidly became Cleo, but both names fit. She was still young enough for a nickname, but she had aspirations of grandeur, my father said. She ruled us from the very beginning.

My father set about making a shed for Cleo—her palace, he called it.

“Your job,” he said to me, “is to get her acquainted with the island.”

“By myself?”

“You’re old enough now. And you won’t be by yourself, will you?” He smiled. “There’s nothing to hurt you here. Just promise me you won’t go to the beach,” he added, his voice serious.

“I promise,” I said, and I meant it. The idea of having free run of the island with Cleo at my side was better than anything I could imagine. I would happily take whatever restriction was required.

Every day after that, the moment my foraging or gardening or lessons were over, Cleo and I set off. At first I kept her on a rope, but it soon became apparent that she would go wherever I went—or perhaps more accurately, that I would go wherever Cleo did. She always led, but never more than four steps ahead, always looking back to make sure I was with her.

We made a game of tracking every path on the island, some so faint that I had never seen them before. I thought we had discovered them all, but then one day we found a slight indentation in the mass of salal bushes that grew between the trees like a great sea. Normally, getting through their stiff branches was impossible without a machete, but someone had made a path once and the hint of it was visible in that gap in the forward line. Cleo’s thick hide didn’t care about the sharp edges of the leaves, and her feet were sure between the roots. She threaded her way through and the trail seemed to open behind her. I followed, worried that the bushes might close again and we would never find our way home, but Cleo was determined and I couldn’t turn back without her.