Hunter’s Dance by Kathleen Hills

eat what they could raise, McIntire supposed. But you couldn’t raise chickens or pigs without feeding them, and that took money. Mike Maki hadn’t been able to do much since he’d taken that dive off the roof in July. And he hadn’t pulled a paycheck since being laid off from his wartime job at Ford’s glider plant.
    â€œHad they come across anything promising?” he asked.
    â€œTo tell the truth I thought they might of. Ross started acting pretty excited about a month ago, not saying anything for sure, but dropping a few hints, you know. With Bambi gone, though, I guess that’s that. Ross needs to find something. He’d like to stay here and keep on farming, but there’s no future in it.” Tiny spatters of blood made an intricate trail across the once-white daisies of her apron. “I feel it was an act of God that he wasn’t with Bambi, and didn’t end up dead, too.”
    â€œSo Ross came home from the dance early?”
    â€œWell, we didn’t get out of there until about one-thirty, maybe closer to two. Ross was already in bed by then.” She gave an indulgent motherly shake of the head. “I tripped over his shoes when I came in the door. The sauna was hot so he’d been home for awhile. He said he came home early because he wasn’t feeling so good. He did look kind of
kipia
all day yesterday. I didn’t ask any questions, but I wasn’t born yesterday. Well, maybe he learned a lesson.”
    McIntire had never seen Ross looking anything but
kipia.
The lid on the canning kettle began to bounce. Grace slid it to the rear of the stove, grasped one of the birds and dunked it into the scalding water. Then she lifted it out, slapped it on the table, and began stripping it of its feathers. The aroma of wet chicken feathers is nothing, McIntire knew, to compare with the sickly odor unleashed by the evisceration process. It was getting darker, and after determining that her husband’s recovery was progressing satisfactorily, McIntire left Mrs. Maki to prepare her dinner in solitude.

XII
    Why so many words and so much perplexity?
    McIntire took time for one more stop before heading home. The windows at the front of Mark Guibard’s blue-painted house were dark, but the glow of a back porch light spilling across white sand and inky water told him the doctor was at home.
    McIntire tapped on the door and went in. He found Guibard, as he’d expected, in the darkened living room seated in a chair drawn up before a window. Outside, a trio of raccoons tussled over a pan of table scraps. They reminded McIntire of overweight rats dressed for winter, but the doctor seemed enthralled by their activities. He waved McIntire to a chair and waited until the creatures toddled off with the last morsel of chicken skin before switching on a lamp and getting to his feet.
    â€œI suppose you want to know every gory detail.”
    â€œSuppose again. Just give me the highlights. What did he die of, some kind of poisoning?”
    Guibard walked to the kitchen and returned with a glass. He poured in a carefully measured three fingers from the bottle on his chair-side table and handed it to McIntire. McIntire accepted it with much greater anticipation than he did Grace Maki’s coffee. The doctor, as a self-proclaimed reformed teetotaler, compensated for years of abstinence by buying, as he put it, “excellent booze.”
    Guibard added a dollop to his own glass, took a sip and sat down. “I can’t be positive until I get some test results. But if I was forced at gunpoint to give my opinion, I’d go out on a limb and say that the contents of that boy’s stomach showed enough
Lobelia inflata
to knock over a horse.”
    â€œLobelia what?”
    â€œInflata. Old Sadie LaPrairie used to take a dose of it for everything that ailed her, smoke it even. I’ll never forget the smell. Couldn’t stand it. But it isn’t all that