I

Melanie

What is worse than rubbing bag balm onto chaffed udders — suddenly worse than home and chores at home — is that right at this instant on the bus to school the other kids keep two seats back from her. These rural kids of which she is now fabulously one. These losers who, when they boarded, she was desperate to do any, seriously any after-school activity with — community service, even detention — these assholes hold their mittens next to their mouths and their mouths to each other’s ears and spread dirt on her. Even after a full year of sucking up to these jerks — these idiots she called her friends until now — they scan her head, run their eyes over the left side of her scalp where a patch of hair is cropped down to a blonde inch, and know — with her father in the town’s drunk tank three times this summer, of course they know — that her father pulled her out of bed in the middle of last night and shaved half her head.

The bus lurches to a stop in the parking lot. She sits with her eyes closed in the funk of wet winter-wear, vinyl seats, and exhaust. The other students leave first. Let them. She waits until the bus empties, then stomps down the high, wet stairs, dragging her empty pack through the snow, not toward the school, but back to the highway. There’s no way she’s spending another day in that tiny human bullpen where a “clarinet” might as well be an exotic farm tool, and where the newbie teacher herds them all out to tour farms where they live and not a kid pipes up because, well, field trip. The bell jangles behind her. The thought of class with those traitors — she could puke.

At the highway she pulls off a glove and rubs the skin under her glasses between her cheekbone and eye. Her eye sockets are soft and puffed. She straightens her glasses then thumbs a passing car. When the car doesn’t stop, she jerks her hand down.

Her friends. Another car passes with a wet hiss. Those bullshits. She kicks a lump of snow off the shoulder of the road onto the highway toward the disappearing vehicle. “Those bull-fucks,” she yells. She kicks a second lump of hard-packed snow onto the lane. Her friends deserve something more violently gross than names, though. She’ll eat a rock. And right before she swallows the rock, she will stick a pin through her tongue. Or worse: pick up a red-brown tampon from the field at lunch, swing it round her head by the string, and let it fly. She rubs her thumb across her fist. Her head is freezing — colder than her ungloved hand.

She blows on her fingers and creates a damp warmth that will soon be a more miserable cold than before. She presses her fingertips to the side of her head, gently, slowly, as if reaching to pet a strange dog. Across the highway and along the valley basin the grey river, buoyant with broken slabs of ice, flows quietly. Naked aspen, mingled with mountain ash and their orange, ice-crusted berries, stand pencilled along the near bank. The road too is grey, the sky the colour of a coffee filter rinsed and dried for reuse. She hawks a loogie, wipes a thread of spit from her lip with the back of her hand, then wipes her hand on her coat. The snow she’s kicked is strewn across both lanes of the highway. It would be chancy for a car to dodge all of them. She pulls her glove back on, walks to the centre line, and kicks the lumps off the highway.

The neighbour’s rusted blue hatchback finally pulls over, spitting salty slush onto the shoulder. Melanie steps into the snow to give it room. Axel’s driving, Kendra in the front beside him with her camera, and in the backseat, this boy about fourteen, her age, slides to the middle and crams his side against a tower of deep, grey trays, the trays used to bus tables in cafeterias. The trays are loaded with baby birds and are piled, alternating width to length, to within an inch of the roof. In the rear, the plastic containers are stacked double-wide and padded around the base with old towels — even Axel’s driving won’t shake them. She gets in the car. There’s the smell from the trays, and this boy in a black kilt whose hip bone or belt — hard to tell — jabs into her side. He’s blushing, this kid, or wearing makeup, or was recently slapped. Looking at the boy — who the hell wears a kilt? — and knowing Axel, all these options seem valid. No way she’ll ask. No need to start a conversation that will force her to explain why she’s not in class, what she’s doing hitchhiking, and why half her hair is gone.

“Shut the door or get out.” Axel rattles the gearshift. Melanie swings the door closed and hits the lock. If Axel even noticed her head, he doesn’t care. Kendra probably guesses. But the kid, the boy, he doesn’t know anything — he could surmise whatever, even the truth. Her cheeks flush and she pulls off her gloves and presses the backs of her hands to her face, then her hair. Damn her for wearing all her secrets on the outside.

Cody

There’s no buckle, or the buckle’s trapped under the cushion, down the crack behind the seat where the blonde girl’s sitting, so he holds the seatbelt strap across himself with the metal clip in his hand, faking it, and riding, for the first time ever, gloriously unrestrained.

The car rounds a curve and he tenses to avoid tilting further into the girl. Axel drives fast, and the car rides low, heavy with all four passengers. The torque is different than that of the Greyhound, and it pulls at his stomach when the corner ends and the car picks up even more speed. He squeezes the metal, and the head of his seatbelt heats in his hand. He thought Axel would be dull and, you know, old. Wrong. Axel’s way past old, he’s old enough to be interesting: he’s ancient. And then there’s Axel’s fake leg, and Kendra who was introduced as Axel’s apprentice, and this crazy car full of birds. For over twenty-four hours in the aisle seat of the Greyhound, trapped in the licorice stink of the washroom’s automatic flush and the armpits and cologne of the man next to him, Cody had imagined what this year would be like with Great-Uncle Old: farm-ish, boring, lonely. Wrong. Being in a speeding car with an ancient one-legged uncle, leaning against a girl’s wet lumberjack coat, surrounded by the barny scent of so many baby chickens — this is a thousand times better than he could have hoped. This is incredible.

He rests his elbow on the curved rim of a tray and dips his fingers into the chicks. The one he cups cheeps — the sound could scratch glass. And from such a tiny bird. He can feel the wiggly warm breath in its rib cage. He runs his palm above the backs of the chicks. So many. The movement arouses the flock and chirps fill the car. Truly loud.

They’re so soft. He should fill a room with chicks, like those ball rooms in malls for toddlers. And he could be covered with the chirpers. They probably don’t weigh much. How many chicks would it take to fill a room? The car is full, how many are here?

“How many birds?” Cody leans forward so that his head is in the space between Axel and Kendra in the front. “How many?”

Axel presses the gas and rounds a corner. Kendra uncrosses her arms and cracks open the window. She’s old too, not too old, but definitely adult. Over twenty, or even his mother’s age, thirty-something. She has a pale spray of freckles over her face, ears, and neck that look like they might carry on down her skin. Her dark hair, pulled into a tight braid, hangs over her shoulder. Despite the almost wet smoothness of the braid itself, the ends below the elastic are kinked. Cody’s best friend back home had hair like that — she couldn’t keep it out of her mouth.

He sits back and pulls the seatbelt tighter. Pale blue-grey eyelids blink at him from the trays, like clouds in the chicks’ sunny, fluffy bodies. The beaks, open and chirping, are too many to count. Holy hockey, they are loud.

And numerous. The trays are stacked so high on his right he can’t see out that window and has to look left, past the girl, to see the pastures, snow, and under the snow weird purple bulges that he’s just now figured out are, delightfully, cabbages. Fields of cabbage, of cows — not milk-carton cows, but tan and chestnut things with low-slung pale, peachy-white udders — that stand in the pastures with snow on their backs.

Uncle Ancient-Axel pulls off the highway onto a gravel road, a long driveway really, and finally — finally — Cody’s feet are on ground, his canvas sneakers wet and muddy. He stretches, stuffs his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, and breathes deeply. A zest hangs in the air under the clouds and over the snow, mingles with the smell of the girl who’s now standing beside him: cow and wet felt and hay. The girl looks maybe fourteen, hopefully fourteen, his age, or at least thirteen. Or fifteen is fine, too.

He pushes back the hood of his sweater. The car is parked between a small black pickup and a low, one-storey building. A barn, or workshop maybe, with an outdoor sink and shower beside the entryway. Then there’s a cedar-shake house with a porch. Beyond the house, further up the drive, rows of skinny sheds. He tugs his backpack from the car, walks to the porch, and sets the bag out of the snow under the eaves. The sheds are clustered under netting that’s tented over their entire area. They look cheap — plywood structures with two doors each. The outer door is a chicken-wire cage about two feet deep. The inner door is part plywood and part old-style Western prison bars.

The plywood is streaked with what look like splashes of white paint, and the fibreglass roofs seem bleached, but the bars gleam. Cody rubs his ear. If this were a horror movie, Axel’s farm would be the place to avoid. To the left, across a barbed-wire fence, cows meander around a red barn and house. A dairy farm? Past the two properties, trees and treed mountains. He brushes his bangs out of his eyes. No chickens, but they would be penned in this weather, wouldn’t they?

“Where’s the chickens?” Cody calls. The girl, standing by the car, straightens her glasses and snorts.

Axel slams the driver’s door and limps around to the back of the car. He pops the hatchback. Cody walks back to the drive and follows. His sneakers have no grip, and he skids on the slush and gravel. Axel lifts the top tray from the stack in the rear of the car. Cody leans over the chicks in the tray underneath. They’re silent, maybe dead. But no. They blink, twitch their stumpy wings, and start to chirp.

“Pick it up.” Axel tilts his head toward the trays with a fast, impatient jerk. Kendra has already fetched a shop-vac, and Melanie, the girl, stacks the trays from the back seat beside the car.

Cody tugs the sleeves of his hoodie down over his fingers and grabs both sides of a tray from the trunk. He lifts, hoisting it higher than he intended — the chicks are so light, they are nothing but fluff and sound. He looks around again for a pen or chicken house.

Axel crosses the drive to the workshop/barn and manages the stairs, hopping each step on his good leg and swinging the fake up after. Cody follows gingerly, testing the grip of his sneakers on the wood steps. The entry is a hallway with two doors in the left wall, and an outside sink and shower built into the right. The sink is deep, square, and stands on thin steel legs. The shower is a sheet of plastic pushed back from a nozzle, a square of rimmed plastic flooring with a drain, and the whole nudie stage opens on a sightline to the driveway and the world.

Axel throws open the second door on the left, the one further along the hall, and drops his tray of chicks onto the patched linoleum floor inside. He shoves the tray into the room with his foot and holds the door open waiting for Cody. Cody bends, sets his tray of chicks on the ground, and slides them into the room. Axel slams the door. When it doesn’t latch, he bumps it into place with his shoulder. Cody follows Axel back outside, heads to the car and picks up another tray of birds. Kendra leans into the car and the vacuum pitches higher. Melanie tugs out a floor mat. Cody’s legs below the knees are freezing. Stupid to have worn the kilt without jeans or leggings, but this cold is not the cold he’s used to. A leaching cold, like the cold that hangs out in the low corners of swimming pools, or the murky sand at the bottom of lakes. His kilt, okay, is maybe unusual — his aunt shook her head when she dropped him at the bus stop — but here even his sneakers are out of place.

Axel

Twenty trays stacked by the floor-drain in the centre of the feed room. Two hundred peeping chicks per tray at twenty trays. Makes four thousand chicks. Sets up this week’s feed. Now to get the feeders stored — stockpiled along the back wall next to the old cement mixer — and then come the fun chores, the rounds. The walk-by of fifteen hawks and all ninety pretty gyrfalcons, but especially the white. That bird. Not a grey barb or vein. Not a fracture. And tomorrow he’ll fly her. First time out. The breach of that bird’s wing — he shakes thinking about it. Thirty years of tinkering and he’s done it. Bred falcons to perfection.

Only he can’t keep his excitement fired as he considers the boy’s weak ankles, the — what’s the kid wearing, a skirt? He looks at the kid, and damn it he has doubt. Doubt that the white will be flawless. And this irritation despite the three decades of breeding gyrfalcons — fifty-plus years’ flying and capture — when no other falconer could coax a gyr to drop an egg. Pah. Axel bends and slides two five-gallon pails out from beside the deep-freeze.

“Take one.” He shakes a pail at the boy, rattling the metal handle. The kid, hesitation from the top down, reaches and backs off. Does he have to coax him? “Take it.” The boy finally takes the bucket. Axel lifts a tray of chicks and dumps them into his own pail. He gestures for the boy to do the same, but the kid just stands there, holding the bucket by the lip. “Get on it.” Axel drops the tray and waits. The kid sets the bucket down and tilts a tray, easing the peepers into his pail. Axel grabs two wooden plugs — circles of plywood cut to fit inside the pails — and tosses one to the boy so that the kid will catch it or be hit. The plug bounces off the boy’s palm and whacks the ground. He rubs his hand down his skirt. Axel fits his own board over the chicks inside the pail, plants his fists in the centre of the board, and presses down. If the kid does not do this. But the kid does, remarkably. Axel counts out one hundred and twenty seconds — the boy staring at his shoes the whole time — then lifts the wood and dumps the dead chicks back into the tray. The kid lifts his own pail and upturns it over the empty tray. The plug clunks out. Chicks tumble after it.

Axel paws through Cody’s tray. At his touch a few birds twitch. He sorts the dead from the merely limp. Twenty or so still cheeping.

“Hold out your hand.” Axel grabs the kid’s hand and tucks the feet of a chick between his fingers. “Watch.” He takes three chicks himself, grips the legs, whacks their heads on the edge of the freezer, and tosses them back into the tray.

The boy opens his mouth, then closes it and pinches his earlobe.

Axel takes three more chicks and busts their heads on the deep-freeze. Again. Through all twenty or so chicks the kid stands there. “Ever been fishing? Haven’t you conked a trout?” What kid hasn’t bludgeoned a fish?

The kid shakes his head. One jerk, to the left, so that the boy could have meant no, or it could have been the kid not listening and tilting toward the question, asking, Huh? Whichever, seems the kid’s already tiring. He’s holding his arm up all right, but the chick dangles from his hand like he has no control over his wrist. What’s the boy done today? Nothing. No, the kid’s pale in the sickly fragile way of not enough scuffling. When Axel was a boy kids were non-stop action. Ha, he remembers when he hopped, goddamn hopped, all the way up a mountainside creek and back — having unstrapped his leg for swimming — and he thought nothing of it. Granted he was older, maybe twenty, and had already hopped freight ships and travelled everywhere there were birds, but the point is when he took off, he was only a year or two older than the boy. The point is, the kid should be ready to break his own neck and care even less about a pail of feeder chicks.

“Don’t piss yourself.” No time for this. Axel takes the chick from the boy and hits it on the freezer. He refills both pails, picks up the plug, and tosses it over. The kid pushes on the wood properly this time. Better.

After ten trays each, the kid is wiping his hands constantly on, yes definitely, a fucking skirt. Yellow fluffs all over him.

“Get used to it.” Sooner the better. Hundred-fifteen birds, the farm at capacity, and each falcon or hawk needs feeding. Axel stacks the trays of dead chicks in the corner by the freezer. He limps from the room, the kid already ahead of him washing at the sink.

Axel braces himself in the entranceway, grabbing either side of the hall, and calls. Kendra gives him a thumbs-up. She’s almost finished vacuuming the car. The neighbour girl is shaking the floor mats over the frozen driveway. And his boy at the sink, the nail brush rough and reddening the kid’s soapy skin, goddamn scrubbing his hands.

Kendra

The shop-vac shut down and the chicks stored in the feed room. The highway currently car-free, the paddock empty, the cows far-off and still. Axel done yelling instructions at the boy. Blessed silence. The type of quiet that lets her hear distance: crows hidden in the cloud-covered hills. The white noise of the river. Kendra sits in the driver’s seat and coils the shop-vac’s hose. Across the paddock, at the dairy house, the creak and slap of the front door as the neighbour Milo — sweater, no coat — steps onto the porch. He leans on the rail, raises his hand to his eyes, then lifts it further in recognition. Kendra raises her arm in reply.

“He said I could take the day off.” Melanie tugs the passenger-seat floor mat into place.

From the way Melanie cleaned the car, hoovering rock and hay and fluff from the foot-wells like their presence offended her, Kendra expected sarcasm, a vocal bite, or at least a tense tone, but the girl’s words are a flat-out lie. Too obvious a lie. What’s she thinking? That Kendra hasn’t seen Milo senseless on the deck chair the whole summer? Granted, Milo’s polite enough when he hands over the home-brewed spirits he trades her and Axel for clearing the pasture of rabbits, and Milo was decent enough — decent being maybe too strong a word — person enough to have been guilted back to the dairy farm after his old man’s stroke. But Milo definitely hasn’t been up to giving permission for what looks like years. Probably since way before Melanie was born. She doubts the girl has ever asked for permission for anything. The way he’s leaning, like he relies on the porch rail to keep him upright — she can almost smell the stale booze across the distance. So why lie? The lie is so obvious it’s rude. Why’s the girl challenging her?

“Don’t have to cover for him.” Kendra lowers her hand.

Melanie slams the passenger door and leans against it. “Who’s covering?”

“So we didn’t pick you up off the side of the highway?” Kendra snaps the vacuum hose in place and reels in the cord.

Melanie rolls her eyes and stretches her arms out along the top of the vehicle. She looks ridiculous, like Jesus on the cross, or like she’s trying to sell the car. “What’s next?” she says. With her attitude, it’s possible she buzzed her own hair. Though the style seems more in character with the boy at the sink. His coif — it’s almost a mohawk, only the top stripe isn’t gelled and hangs limply over his brow and eyes. The shorter hair at the back and sides is clipped to about an inch in length. Dark brown with a touch of curl. Cute.

The boy — what to do but laugh? — his thin legs, pale and weak. Like sprouts in early spring, or, during a sudden winter warmth, like the translucent, purple-white of January crocuses. His fingers are also violet, but a deeper purple, almost blue, from the icy water he’s washing his hands in. Axel should have looked the boy over before dragging him to kill chicks. The way the kid grinned and rubbed his hands in the bird bins the whole ride here.

And that kilt. He doesn’t have the knees for the kilt. Bud-like, bulgy things, brashly white below the hem of the black pleated wool. To think that Axel’d bragged about his nephew coming. He’d been so excited he’d gone on about how “staunch a farm hand” the kid would be, and no need to pay a boy, a relative. No need, he’d said, not even trying to be sly, to give the kid a bird.

She almost left right then and there. Plenty of places she could go. Sanders with the red-tail hawks down in Texas, or work with Verlyn at his peregrine rehab centre Alberta way. Falconers she hunted chukar with outside Alamosa at her first meet years ago. Neither Sanders nor Verlyn are breeders, but she wouldn’t have to fight them to have her own damn bird. Her own bird was part of her and Axel’s gentleman’s work contract. She should have made Axel spit on it. For the last three years she’s waited through his excuses: the sale prices too high, the gyrfalcons oversold — though they’ve only sold six in the last season — and that brilliantly plumed female? Needed for the following year’s breeding. She almost took her truck and flaked. But she didn’t. Maybe it was all that Zen patience she picked up losing the community meat draw every third Sunday. Whatever made her stay, it turned out to be worth it. Axel will give her a bird this year, finally, that ass, because otherwise she will leave, and Axel needs her. This kid he’s been ranting about — her potential replacement — is, well, a pansy.

There’s just no chance. The boy is so fresh he’s hopeless. Even the girl would be a better stand-in if Kendra took off. Melanie’s a liar and a fake, but reliable enough to set up the milking every dawn before school. Kendra climbs the stairs and shuts off the tap. The kid shakes out his hands, hitting the side of the sink, winces, and tucks his fingers under his armpits.

It’s because of this kid’s ineptitude that Kendra relaxes. She’s relaxed enough to find the kid’s discomfort funny. In fact, she’s carelessly lazy about the whole situation now that she sees what’s coming: bird, money, and a So Take That, Axel.

“What next?” Melanie asks.

Above the farms, the clouds are thick and slate coloured and sag, weighted, over the mountain ridge. “What’s next?” Kendra repeats. Up the yard Axel, carrying the white gyrfalcon on his glove, surveys the breeding pens. A pact: let the bird know they will give it what it wants. The first step in training. It’s not rage or hunger, as people assume, that inspires the birds to kill, it’s play. Kendra’s watched a falcon carry a feather a hundred metres up, release it, then smack it out of the air before it hit the ground. That’s the energy, the spirit of alert, high excitement, that she and Axel hone.

Axel bends at the knee to peer in a pen and, doing so, drops his arm. The white spreads her wing to regain balance and falters. Axel twists his forearm in response. The bird regains footing. “That” — Kendra slaps her hands together — “is next.” Let that grab her fist, that white chunk she helped hatch. And as she trudges through the snow she actually feels a burst of joy aimed at the future, at what she’s finally putting a leash on here, in this moment — life.

Milo

Across the paddock, beyond the slurry lagoon of cow dung and melted snow, over the fence, he squints at his daughter. His girl, absolutely. He recognizes the oversized red-and-black toggle coat, its plaid, felted wool that’s too big for her at the shoulders, the arms, and the waist — his coat. She drapes her pack on the fence between the properties and, as Kendra and a kid walk the trail to where Axel’s birds are, she sneaks up the stairs into the hatchling barn. He scratches his chin — beard — too much hair now to be called stubble. He woke her up drunk last night, he remembers that. Has a vague recollection of shaking her out of bed for help with his father, her grandfather. Too bad the memory isn’t gone entirely. Well, too bad he woke her.

But she should be in school. He crosses the snow and mud-slicked paddock. The cows blink at him. They seem disinterested and not at all distressed. She must have milked them again. His job. Shit, be honest, milking’s practically her job now. He skirts the lagoon holding his breath and picks up the pace. This year on the dairy, a whole childhood on the dairy, and he still can’t handle the smell of the dung pit. Of course that’s partly the hangover, which hasn’t even begun to hit properly — he’s still drunk. Unfocused and dizzy behind the eyes.

He ducks the barbed-wire fence. Axel’s place. Netting’s in good shape despite the age, or maybe it’s new. Some of the fibreglass roofs’ve been replaced on the bird boxes. Mewses are same-old, though. When he was nine — that’d be over thirty years ago, when Axel first moved here — he peeked through one of the feed slots in the breeding pens. The mewses had barely been built, and though the wood was dry, it smelled of paint enough for him check his fingers after touching the wall. The interior was dim. A triple-stripped oil drum, red and white with a hole cut in the side, had been settled into a corner. Hay, feathers, smell of bird shit like old cream and cashews. And the birds — two speckled gyrfalcons perched yellow-footed on dowels screwed into the walls. By the time he spotted them they already had their black eyes on him. That was it — he took off. Not sure what freaked him out so badly, the birds being there, or that they’d seen him, or the spooky thought that Axel might somehow know. Whichever, it kept him off Axel’s property as a teen, and his friends, well, if they had wanted to snoop their curiosity was beaten when he brought his father’s garage distillery into the conversation.

He climbs the stairs and hesitates at the door his daughter disappeared into. He should turn around and let her be. Last night might have been bad. How bad? He grabs the doorknob. He’s in the same clothes as yesterday, well, as all this week. Gumboots, jogging pants, one of his old man’s old sweaters, scarf. But how bad could last night have really been? Not like Melanie hasn’t already seen it all.

The room inside smells of pine, hay, and dust, and is washed in low red light — lit like a darkroom or brothel. What would Melanie be doing developing film? He thinks porn, then, no way. Heat lamps. Heat lamps are clamped to the counter that circles the room. Okay. That’s why the red. He closes the door behind him, tugging hard to compress the rubber flap against the insulation taped over the door jamb. The middle of the room is a makeshift wall of bookshelves. Seems like Axel’s picked up every loose piece of furniture he’s found on the roadside. Cords and extension cords from electric heaters loop half-buried in hay over the unfinished floor. He steps over the mess and runs his hand down the shelves of photo albums.

Around the room plastic sheeting is stretched taut over fibreglass insulation and stapled to bare studs. There must be over fifty lamps clamped to the counter that frames the room, and their filaments — painful to look at — reflect pink and red off the plastic. Cut-down cardboard boxes, each with a lip four to six inches, are stacked on the left. Beside them, haphazard pillars of aluminum tins.

He leans against the nearest bookcase and dusts through photo albums. The collections on the middle shelf date back ten years or more. He tugs out a thick green compilation and cracks it halfway. Infant birds. Falcons. No idea how old. White fluff barely covers their bodies. Each bird has a dot inked onto its forehead. Typewritten cue cards are sealed into the album under each photo. Date, name, and what looks like breed stock. He replaces the collection and selects another. Older. Adult birds this time. Photos have places — “Quebec,” “Tuktoyaktuk” — and dates. A third collection. This one old enough to have small plastic pockets, not the stiff, peel-back pages of the previous two. Axel as a young man — his hair pale brown or dirty blonde, difficult to tell with the camera filter — seated on a brick wall. He wears shorts, his bare legs are crossed at the ankles, and he salutes the photographer with a beer. Behind him, hills and mountains upholstered with short trees and brush that could be alpine. Blue sky above the peaks. Another photo: a young girl in a cap, no, a wimple and bandeau — a nun? — holds a hawk on a glove. She wears boots under her skirt and stands in a garden, or on the path between gardens. Flowers, no idea what type, tall-stemmed with weighty, petalled heads. The girl’s eyebrows and eyes and skin are dark — Spanish?

There’s recent photos, too, unlabelled and still in an envelope on the bottom shelf. He thumbs out the top print — Axel perched on a stool, bent over an incubator. Axel sits with his jumpsuit open and pulled half off, the arms tied around his waist. His chest is a mess of white hair but, admittedly, even at his age, he’s in enviable shape. His pant-leg is rolled up over his knee and shows off his stump. The incubator’s plastic lid is raised, and ten or so speckled eggs lie on the rods. Kendra must have taken these. Melanie isn’t in any of them. Milo puts the photos back. Enough, get on with it. He steps around the furniture.

Melanie stands at the far end of the room with her back to him. To the front of her sits an empty steel-rod contact incubator — the same incubator Axel sat beside in the photo. The rods are covered with a clear plastic lid, and dials — presumably temperature and humidity gauges — line the lower panel. With the plastic cover and metal rods it looks both like a record player and a gas-station hotdog roller, only larger. Enough room for three or four dozen eggs, normal eggs — he’s not sure about the size of falcon eggs. In the picture they seemed smaller. On the counter beside the incubator is a blue metal box with a pinhole — a candler.

Melanie leans over the counter. Her coat — his old coat — rises from the back of her knees. Way too big on her. So are the cut-off boots. She clicks on the candler and is lightly backlit — tufts of wool and dust. She turns sideways and kneels. The beam of light, meant to pierce eggs, is fierce, but doesn’t change the illumination of the room and she doesn’t look his way. A flash of red — the heat lamps again — shoots across the wire frame of her glasses. She raises her hand to the candler.

She looks different. Her jaw is relaxed — first time he’s seen it unclenched in years. Maybe ever. But that’s not it. In the beam her palm becomes a radiant orange, rosy with bones. Like a flashlight tucked in the mouth for a ghost story — how the beam shadows the sinuses. That’s not it either.

What is it? What’s different? Her usual glasses, the same frames for the last three years, but he can see more of her face than he’s used to. Her cheekbones — too wide now, but possibly pretty when she grows. Her face — her hair is cut, that’s what’s weird.

Her hair. Right. He held her. He did that.

Leave now, he tells himself. He shouldn’t be here. He’s still drunk. He should leave her alone and go. Now. Only there’s footsteps in the hall.

Melanie jerks her hand out of the light and stumbles up. The door opens. Axel scans them both. Shit.

“Wait.” Milo steadies himself on a bookcase. Melanie gives him a look — disgust? Contempt? Both. He deserves both.

Axel sucks in his cheeks and strides into the room. He seizes Melanie under the armpit. With his free arm he points to the wall and waves his finger at charts and breeding plans taped on the plastic sheeting. He sucks his cheeks again then slaps Melanie across the jaw and lets her drop. “Out.”

Milo steps toward them and stops. Do something. Do what? He coughs — Axel’s kicked up a wake of dust and hay particles. Her hair, he did that.

Melanie, one hand to her ear and chin, scrambles through the hay and cords toward the exit.

Milo raises his arms and gives her space. “You’re missing school,” he says. Well, she is.

Melanie rushes by him, shoves Kendra and some kid at the door.

Milo coughs again and wipes his mouth. Her footsteps boom down the hall and front stairs.

Kendra picks at the back of her hand. “What are you waiting for?”

She either means “Get lost” or “Why the hell is he not helping his daughter?” Why is he waiting? He runs after his kid. Down the stairs and across the drive. “Melanie.” He grabs her backpack from the fence and skids into the snowy paddock. “Melanie, wait.” He stops jogging and leans over, planting his hands on the rickety slurry fence as his daughter runs away from him, over the paddock toward their house. As much as the field lets her run: the mud’s suction on her boots half-trips her every third step, until she does trip on the porch stairs — the stairs he hasn’t shovelled — and crawls into the house.

He straightens up. His feet sink further into the mud. “Kiddo.” The front door shuts behind her, but the screen door hasn’t latched and it creaks open again. The house is not that far off, maybe a hundred metres, but the thought of following her inside makes him tired. It’s an effort to even think of crossing the damn paddock. And if he did go after her, well, what he’s done is, again, past apology. He rubs a hand over his chapped skin, fingering the cracks at the corners of his lips. Too dehydrated to even spit. Too sore — suddenly too stiff from passing out at the kitchen table — to move.

Across the field the bathroom light switches on then off. Melanie should be in class. Bent over a desk doing long division. Or, what’s the math grade eight covers? Tries to cover, in that school. The graffitied tables are probably the same tables from when he was a kid. Some of the carved “fucks” are probably his. His old textbooks — they’re probably still in use. Students are likely still allowed in the lab supplies. Well, not allowed per se, but there was no lock on the chemical cupboard when he was in eighth grade. Hell, that time he convinced the loner kid to coat his hand in water and ethanol and light it on fire. The alcohol had pooled between the boy’s fingers and the kid’s skin had bubbled. Smokies on a campfire. Barbaric.

The light’s faded, and dark blue-grey has collected at the base of the clouds. An hour or two must have passed. Time does that lately, skip him over when his mind’s elsewhere. It means, at least, that he doesn’t have to think, so that’s good. So is feeling sick — it’s deserved.

In front of him, the poles around the slurry tilt like the wind has forced them over. Not that there’s wind. He’s still holding her pack. He unzips it. Crumpled paper. That’s it, nothing else. No real reason for her to even bring the pack to school. Except to fake having it together, “it” being her life. His fault. Seven years with him. Since she was six. And almost a whole year doing his chores here at the dairy. Christ.

What’s her life actually like? Her school and friends. What are the names or looks of any of her teachers? It’s like dredging, trying to pull these thoughts out of his brain. Does she have friends? Memory. It’s like having dropped his keys in the pasture.