by Paul Moffett

Wesley loved the chickens, but he knew Max was the most important animal on the farm.

The Klassen farm was only about three hundred acres of workable potato fields—not large, but enough. The potatoes mostly went to McDonald’s, to become anonymous French fries.

The land was flat, but the homestead was sheltered by a small forest, and the house itself sat on a hill. It wasn’t a livestock farm, but they did keep chickens.

Wesley took personal responsibility for their daily care, and for collecting the eggs. Waldemar and Sheila sometimes whispered that Wesley might be the real farmer among the children. Maybe the land would go to him. Leslie was destined for university, and the whole world seemed open to the twins. Waldemar said it was a shame to divide the land. But nobody much wanted to think about his death. It was a long way off; he wasn’t even fifty yet.

Besides the chickens, the farm also had two or three horses, none used for work anymore. Occasionally they raised pigs to slaughter. Wesley didn’t help with that.

And naturally, there were cats and dogs.

Max, a brown and black German Shepherd, was never invited inside; in truth, he didn’t want to be. The outdoors was his domain, even in a Manitoba winter.

On cold nights he slept in the barn. Max patrolled the borders of the homestead, chasing out any intruders—two-legged or four. He wasn’t wild; he obeyed Waldemar’s commands eagerly and treated the whole Klassen family with a mixture of deference and protective responsibility. But it would not be entirely accurate to call him tame, either. The family fed and watered him. Ashley bathed him and brushed his fur when she deemed it necessary, though he tolerated neither collar nor leash. He sat and stayed, and he came when he was called, but he didn’t do any silly tricks like rolling over and begging. Visitors were warned that he would bite if he felt he had to.

He was a hunter.

Max chased, caught, and killed squirrels, gophers, and rabbits if any were foolish enough to venture too close to him. He chased deer, and not like a terrier chasing a truck down a city street. Max knew exactly what he would do with a deer if he caught it. So did the deer, which was perhaps why he had never yet caught one.

Max left the chickens alone. They were in their coop, and he stayed out of it. Better, he kept foxes and coyotes away. He also magnanimously granted freedom of movement to the rooster, who did not stay in the coop but strutted wherever he pleased.

Max was ambivalent about the cats.

The cats mostly stayed in the barn. Nobody fed them. They didn’t have names. They ate mice and rats and birds if they could get them. They were more genuinely working animals than the horses were, because keeping the barn free of vermin was important. There was often a cat following Wesley, rubbing itself against his legs as he fed the chickens.

For the most part Max let the cats be, as long as they showed him proper respect.

But one small calico delighted in tormenting Max. She scratched at his nose and hissed when he came by, and he growled in return. Despite this, she was one cat Max never chased. He sometimes growled in her direction and slowly advanced while she backed away and hid, but he didn’t pursue.

The calico liked to walk on the tops of the doors and the eaves, trailing her tail just out of Max’s reach. She would come onto the farmhouse and walk back and forth on the top of the open screen door as Max sat on the porch, his eyes fixed on her.

One July evening the children were all sitting on the porch, enjoying the sunset over the trees. The porch faced due west, and on a summer night when all the chores were done, when the air was warm but not hot, when the crickets began their song and the sunset seemed to last for hours, it was a lovely place to sit. Leslie was reading a book of poetry as usual, and the twins were talking lazily to each other about the moons of the solar system. Wesley was just watching the sunset, his younger siblings, and Max, who was curled up on the porch.

“Did you know that all the moons of Uranus are named after Shakespeare characters?” said Ashley.

“Moons of Uranus!” laughed Dan.

“Shut up!” giggled Ashley.

“The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind,” said Leslie.

“What are you talking about?” said Ashley.

“It’s Shakespeare, dummy,” said Leslie, not looking up from her book.

“I bet Uranus—” started Dan.

The calico slipped off the top of the door.

It yowled in distress while scrambling in the air, trying to right itself. Trying to gain traction against nothing. Max snarled and leapt. The cat’s cry of distress turned to terror and then to silence. Max caught it hard by the throat before it hit the ground, and bounded into the woods.

Leslie jumped up. “Max! Max! Bad dog!”

Ashley and Dan stood too. Dan stayed frozen in shock, but Ashley raced after Max. Wesley called after her, “Stop, stop! It’s too late!”

“What do you mean too late?”

“Ashley, the cat is dead. You know Max—this is what he is.”

“But it’s not prey!”

“Ah!” said Leslie, “as the heart grows older,
It will come to such sights colder.”

“Shut up with your Shakespeare,” spat Ashley.

“That’s Hopkins.”

“Why can’t you ever just be like a person?”

Dan shook his head. “He’s a killer. I can’t believe Max would just . . .”

Wesley turned on them all, angry. “You can’t believe Max would what? He kills things all the time. And if you don’t understand that animals die, then you don’t belong on a farm.”

He turned and stormed inside, slamming the door behind him.

That night in his bed, Wesley cried himself to sleep as the cat’s final pitiful whimper replayed in his head. In the morning he told his parents that they could count him out when it came time to divide the land.