Annabel - Kathleen Winter [139]
But Treadway knew instinctively that Derek Warford did not have a lynx’s intelligence, and he knew that while he was almost sixty, his own strength still came when he needed it, and that someone like Derek Warford, who had not trapped in Labrador and had not been alone in the wilderness for months and years and decades of his life, did not know how to fight the way Treadway knew, and would not be expecting Treadway to do the thing he had planned. Still, Treadway knew it was possible that Derek Warford, because he was younger, could overpower him.
He thought a lot about that possibility, and he also thought about the question of malice: was there malice in himself, directed at this person, Derek Warford? He thought about it and he knew there was no malice. He did not want to punish Derek Warford as much as he wanted to simply remove him. A person like that, a person who would do such a thing as Derek Warford had done to Wayne, needed to be removed from the scene. That was all. It was a question of ridding this little place in the world, the Battery, of someone who had done this crime and who would probably do it again to someone else. It was not a crime about which Treadway Blake wanted to consult the police, or anyone like the police. That thought did not rest in his mind at all, the thought of police stations and forms and explaining what had happened to his son, and having to explain the femaleness of his son. But there was someone at the top of Signal Hill with whom Treadway did want to consult.
Treadway had seen a hawk from Military Road and had watched it circle the top of Signal Hill and plummet for prey, then rise and circle again. He had watched it until he knew where it lived, and now he climbed Signal Hill and took the orange he had bought at the Parade Street Dominion out of his pocket and placed it in the grass on a remote tuft of the hill.
He sat for several hours, and the orange was the only bright thing in the grass. When the hawk came, it did not alight. It was a red-tailed hawk whose body glowed red-brown. It hovered, and Treadway spoke to it in the same way he spoke to the boreal owl and to other wild animals in Labrador. He did not have to speak out loud but had only to silently present his idea about ridding the world of Derek Warford. Treadway knew a hawk is a merciless animal. He knew that if a woman happened to be up here on Signal Hill picking blueberries or partridgeberries with a baby, especially a newborn, she had better watch out or the hawk could take that baby. It had happened before, perhaps with this red hawk, and it would happen again: a hawk was a carnivore and it could take a large bird or a baby away and kill it. Treadway had seen a hawk carry off Graham Montague’s biggest rooster. He did not expect a hawk to have mercy for a person like Derek Warford.
But Treadway had read Pascal, and the Bible, and the essays of philosphers, and he had read poets, and against his own will the hawk reminded him of things he had read. It did not speak to him out of its own wildness, perhaps, he thought, because it had spent too much time circling above steeples and libraries and museums that held the thoughts of civilized men. He had not thought a hawk would do this. Now, as it dipped and circled close to him on its flight path between the crags of Signal Hill and the ocean below where its own prey lay — capelin and young cod and sea urchins with peach-coloured roe — this hawk told him something old, the same thing over and over again. It was not what Treadway wanted to hear.
“I would dearly love,” Treadway told the hawk, “to finish off Derek Warford in the manner I have planned.”
The sun was setting and the orange glowed in the grass. The hawk still did not say what Treadway wanted it to say. He had been hoping for a blessing. He had thought the hawk would understand carnage and vengeance. He thought if anyone understood how he felt in his heart at the thought of what Derek Warford had done to his son, his daughter, in