Chapter 12 Inga #2
“Seasons?” Inga suggested. “Suits of cards? Er—Four Tops?” She was rapidly running out of ideas. “See, this is why I don’t name things.”
“I guess it doesn’t have to be four, as long as it’s a general theme.
What do you think of spices?” Luke pointed at a baby griffin that was rubbing its head against its parent’s fur.
“That one looks sweet, so that’ll be Sugar.
The rest are, um, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, and—some other spice. And the parents are Salt and Pepper.”
“I don’t think Sugar is a spice, technically, but it’s cute so I’ll accept it.” Inga giggled. “Some other spice?”
“I ran out of spices I know the names of. What are other ones?”
She thought back to holiday baking. “Allspice? Cloves?” Luke looked dubious. “Oregano? Basil? Uh—curry?”
“Basil is the only one of those that sounds like a name. Basil it is.”
The newly named Spice Griffins—as Inga immediately started calling them—followed them around throughout the morning whenever they were in the vicinity.
The babies were big enough to toddle around, as she’d found all too well when she was trying to transport them, and didn’t seem to mind being picked up.
Inga introduced one of them cautiously to Rogue, and relaxed when the big dog merely christened it with a swipe of his tongue.
One of the parents was usually around at all times, watching the babies (and the people) from the top of a nearby rock or bush, and occasionally hissing at the dog.
After a quick breakfast of oatmeal, shared with Rogue, Inga suggested spending some time doing maintenance on the cabin.
Luke turned out to be a quick study and a good worker, capable and smart.
He could work on his own or take directions with equal good nature.
They nailed down some loose boards, insulated a few gaps, and redid the weatherstripping on the cabin’s window.
Luke worked on roof repairs while Inga did some much-needed tidying of the shelves, sweeping off dust and checking for any signs of mice or other small creatures.
There were none; even with the accumulated damage of a couple of years’ neglect, the cabin was snug and well built.
Rogue watched them for a while and then flopped down in the sun outside the open cabin door, evidently concluding that nothing interesting was going to happen.
Luke came in, brushing off his hands. “Wow, the place looks great.”
“It’s needed a good spring cleaning for a while.” Inga hopped down from a chair, on which she had been standing to get to the backs of some of the shelves, and pointed at the table. “I found a few things.”
Luke went to inspect her finds. Over the years the cabin had picked up a variety of clutter.
She had put everything that was truly junk—tattered and water-warped magazines long out of date, filled-in crossword puzzles, old tide tables, empty bottles, ancient receipts—into a box by the stove to be used for fire-starting or any other purpose they needed.
The table held the more interesting items. There were a few books, including a couple of kids’ chapter books (adventure stories about animals) that she hadn’t seen in years; a travel chess set; a D an old radio.
“I tried that, but it doesn’t work. I think we used to use it to pick up marine weather broadcasts and stuff like that. It might need new batteries.”
“At least we won’t be completely bored if we’re here for a while. Oh hey, I found something too, actually.” Luke reached into his pocket and took out a few plastic figures, which he held out to her. “Look familiar?”
“Oh gosh, I think I do remember these.” She took them from him.
They were little plastic farm people and a couple of animals.
Aside from the colors being faded and one of them clearly having had its leg chewed on by sharp rodent teeth, they were still in pretty good shape. “Where did you find them?”
“Tucked under one of those old homemade shingles.”
Inga laughed. She put them with her other finds.
“My brothers and I used to play on the roof. Our parents didn’t mind because at least they knew where we were.
We had a bunch of toys up there. I can’t believe any of them are still here.
” Running her fingers lightly over the heads of the toy figures, she added softly, “This must have been a long time ago, maybe even when Mom was still with us.”
The words just slipped out. She hastily pressed the back of her hand to her eyes.
“Sorry, Luke. I didn’t mean to get maudlin.”
His hand touched her shoulder gently. “Look, I opened up all over you yesterday. Don’t worry about it. Your mom’s gone?”
“Yeah, we lost her in a car accident when I was just a little kid. Toddler age. I barely remember her.” She ran her fingertips over the top of the animals’ plastic heads.
“Even after all these years, we still call this place Mom’s Cabin sometimes, or well, Dad uses her name, but the whole family thinks of it that way.
Her parents built it before she and Dad were married, and she really loved it out here. ”
Luke looked wistful, and she recalled that he’d lost his mom too, and his dad as well. “Do you feel closer to her here?” he asked.
“Sometimes.” Inga took a deep breath, started to wipe her eyes, and realized her hands were covered with dust. “Darn. Look, I was thinking about running down to the harbor, cleaning up, and catching some fish for a late lunch. Want to come?”
Luke accepted the change of topic agreeably.
He brought the fishing pole that she had also found during her explorations, now leaning in a corner of the cabin along with an equally long-unused fishing dip net.
It was only once they were at the water’s edge that she remembered part of this was going to involve stripping.
Oh well, it wasn’t as if she actually minded if he saw her naked ...
She shed her clothes, very pointedly not looking at Luke, and dove cleanly into the water. The shock of the cold was sudden and acute, vanishing as she shifted underwater and broke the surface as a bear.
Rogue joined her a moment later, paddling alongside. Bears didn’t bother him at all, it was clear, and neither did the cold water.
She swam around for a while, enjoying the clean glide, while Luke sat on the end of the broken dock and attempted to fish.
After a few laps of the bay, Inga got into business mode and started diving.
It had been a while since she had fished as a bear, and they were faster than her underwater, so it took some time before one of her attempts connected.
Triumphant, she surfaced with a fish gripped in her powerful jaws.
She swam over to Luke, still sitting on the dock with his limp fishing line hanging in the water, ignored by the fish, and tossed the fish on the shore with a flip of her powerful neck.
Immediately Rogue, who she had stopped paying much attention to, shot past her and clamped his jaws on the fish.
Inga barked out a bear equivalent of “Hey!” as Rogue went running off down the rocky shoreline, the fish flopping out both sides of his mouth.
She charged onto the shore, spraying water in all directions from her soaking wet pelt, and made another gruff bark-like sound in an attempt to say “Drop it!”
Rogue ignored her and kept running. She took off after him.
Luke was absolutely no help, laughing so hard that he nearly fell over.
Inga finally thought to shift back so she could speak with a human mouth. “Rogue! Drop it! Put that down right now!” The wind was chilly on her damp skin, a day that had seemed almost uncomfortably warm to her as a bear becoming suddenly cool.
Rather than dropping the fish where he stood, or trying to wolf it down, Rogue pranced up to her with his tail wagging. He dropped it at her feet.
“Oh, what, like I’m supposed to think it was there all along?
Ridiculous dog.” She reached for it, then belatedly realized that she was standing here naked and she had no towel.
If she left the fish there, the dog was likely to get it, but going to fetch her clothes with her hands full of slippery, slimy fish seemed absurd.
She hadn’t realized quite how big it was; it had seemed much smaller to her as a bear.
“I’ll take care of that,” Luke said, coming up at her elbow. He was not quite looking—but she could see that he was peeking a little, and he looked as if he liked what he saw. “I do know how to clean a fish.”
“Do you really want a fish that was in a dog’s mouth? I can catch another.”
“It was in a bear’s mouth before that,” he pointed out.
“Hmm, true.” She noticed his eyes once more drift southward a bit.
The smile on his face let her know that he wasn’t minding a single bit of this—and neither was she.
In fact, she needed to get out of here right now before she did something she might not regret.
“Why don’t you clean the fish while I go . .. rinse off?”
Once she was back in the water, as a bear, she paddled around until she felt like she’d had the equivalent of a cold shower. When she looked to shore, Luke and the dog were no longer visible, and smoke curled up from the chimney of the cabin above her.
Inga scrambled on shore, shook vigorously to get the bulk of the water off her coat, shifted and slipped back into her clothes. As she stamped into her boots, she wondered why, if she was the naked one, she was also the one in need of a cold shower. Being around Luke did things to her.
If this wasn’t having a mate, what could a mate possibly feel like?
She found the Spice Griffins shrieking and squabbling over fish guts, and entered the cabin to delicious frying smells. Rogue lay on the floor by the door, happily crunching on a few leftovers of his own.
“Luke! Did you give him bones? Rogue! Leave it!”
“He’ll be fine,” Luke said from the stove, where he was tending the fish in a frying pan. “He’s been living on whole fish for the better part of a year.”
“Yes, but—” However, she couldn’t think of a reasonable objection.
Luke was right; if Rogue was going to choke on a bone and die, he would have done it months ago.
And when she looked at the way he was eating, Rogue was being careful, nipping at the more questionable parts of the fish and crunching on the spine. “I guess he’s an unusual dog.”
“He definitely is.”
She joined Luke at the stove. “What sort of experiments were they doing on Rogue, do you know? I know they were trying to create shifters out of the—the human test subjects.” It felt very weird to refer to Luke like that. “But what about the animals? What were they for?”
“I’m not sure.” Luke expertly jiggled the fish with the tip of a spatula, checking for doneness.
“They used them to test the drugs, make sure they weren’t going to make their expensive test subjects drop dead .
.. not right away, at least.” His gaze darkened for a moment.
Then he glanced at Rogue, and his face cleared a little.
“I don’t know if they were doing anything else.
Say, not to change the subject, but is there anything around here that might make a good side for this?
This smells great, but fish with no side dishes has been on the menu for a long time, and I wouldn’t mind a salad or something. ”
“It’s early in the year for any greens we could make a salad out of, but I bet I can whip up some stovetop cornbread. I’m sure I saw a dry mix for it when I was cleaning up earlier.”
The fish was done first, but they made themselves wait, and soon were sitting down to a meal of ocean-fresh fish and crumbly cornbread.
Inga wished she’d had some butter; the cornbread was a little dry.
But it was a perfect complement to the oily fish.
She put some of the cornbread leftovers down for Rogue.
Like all dogs, in spite of just having eaten, he was still a bottomless pit.
It was early afternoon, with the sun still high, and nothing much to do.
Luke went to feed some cornbread crumbs to the baby griffins, who had now decided he was the greatest thing since fish guts.
Inga took a walk to the top of the hill above the cabin to stretch her legs and work off a little of her lunch.
From here, she could see astonishingly far across the ruffled blue ocean, all the way out to where the edge of the sea became indistinguishable from the sky. A bank of distant fog hung like a long blue-gray curtain, and scattered clouds trailed across the sky.
She was also in a position to notice something else. There was a boat just coming around the headland. Inga waited to see if it would go on, but it nosed its way into the bay.
Inga bounded into motion, running down to find Luke, who looked up in alarmed surprise.
“Luke! There’s someone coming!”