11 Fine Fellas at the Pond

 

Settle in.

Once, at the edge of a pond in Ontario, when the maples had dropped most of their red and the evening came early, a black-and-white dog named Sonic sat counting.

He counted the way dogs do, by noses. One by one, the fellas came down the path through the leaves, in their red toques, and touched noses with him, and sat. Seven came first, the ones who had been seen on the fact sheet. Then the three who walked a little backwards, patches flipped, who had their own reasons and didn't explain them. That made ten.

They waited. The pond went from blue to silver to dark. Somewhere far off, a car went by on a gravel road, and then didn't.

The eleventh was late. The eleventh was always late. She came out of the bushes with burrs in her fur and a leaf stuck to her toque, and said she'd been watching the cameras in the trees, and did they know the cameras go dark at night? They do. Nobody comes to change the batteries. One by one, little red lights blink out, and in their places the owls sit down instead, and the owls watch nothing in particular, which is what owls are best at.

So there were eleven, finally, and the count was right.

At the edge of the clearing stood an old jackpine, crooked and patient, its cones shut tight with resin. Sonic had asked it once why it kept its cones closed for so long. The jackpine had said: Because I'm waiting for the right heat. Not every warm day. The real one. And when Sonic asked what happens then, the jackpine had said: Then I open, and everything I've been keeping goes out into the world at once.

Sonic thought about that, lying in the leaves with ten fellas breathing slow around him and one still picking burrs out of her fur.

He thought about the long road he'd come, from very far south, from a warm place he only remembered as a smell. He thought how strange it was that he'd ended up here, by this pond, in this cold, with these particular dogs, and how it didn't feel strange at all.

The last camera blinked out. An owl settled in its place.

The fellas slept. The pond held the stars. The jackpine kept its cones closed, and waited, the way good things wait, without hurry and without forgetting.

And nothing, nothing at all, was lost.

Goodnight, kaslkaos. 🍁

11 Fellas is a response to Fact Sheet: Monitoring Canadian Activities in U.S. Politics - U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Canada