Read Online Sing Fox to Me by Sarak Kanake - Free Book Online

living room first, then the bathroom, and then he looked outside. Deep grooves ran through the dirt, as though his dad hadn’t been able to get away fast enough. His dad was gone. His bags were gone, clothes, toothbrush, keys – all gone.
    Back inside, Jonah checked the coat rack at the back door. His dad’s shoes, coat and beanie were gone, but his leather satchel was still there. It was his teaching bag – Jonah and Samson weren’t ever allowed to go through it. Jonah looked around. Maybe his dad would come back for it? He lifted it over his shoulder, but the strap was sized for his dad, so the bag hung at Jonah’s ankles. He set it down on the table and looked through the house for a note explaining where his dad was and when he would be coming back.
    No note. His dad had just left.
    The dog, Queen Elizabeth, stirred in front of the hearth. She pulled her tail out of the way of the tumbling coals.
    â€˜Hello, girl,’ he said, reaching out.
    The dog growled, and Jonah pulled back his hand as if she’d already bitten him. He wanted to move further away from her, but his legs didn’t know what direction to carry him in. This wasn’t his house. The dog growled again, as though she knew what Jonah was thinking.
    Gently, he backed out of the room and kept going all the way to the kitchen. He held his hand tight to his chest in case the dog decided to come after him and pounce. Then he hit the kitchen bench. ‘Ow!’ He held his breath, but Queen Elizabeth didn’t follow.
    The dinner dishes were still in the drying rack next to the sink, and the curtains were pulled back. Jonah doubted that Clancy ever closed them. He ran his hand over the benchtops. They weren’t smooth and plastic-coated like the ones in his mum’s kitchen. These felt like raw wood, mostly smooth but with rough patches. Something jabbed into the end of his finger. He looked down, but nothing was there. He turned his hand over and looked closely at his skin. There was a splinter at the base of his index finger. Jonah held the tiny bead of blood to his lips and pressed his tongue against the wound. The cut was too small to cause him any pain.
    What if Clancy didn’t want them to stay? Their dad often complained about the day Clancy threw him and their mum off the mountain when she was pregnant. If Clancy could do that to his own son, what was going to stop him from throwing Jonah and Samson out too?
    Jonah knew one thing for certain. If they did have to leave the mountain, Samson was on his own. Jonah wasn’t going to get stuck looking after his brother. No way.
    He poured himself a glass of water and drank it standing up, looking at the orange stain on the wall. The tail imprint, sticking straight out, was lighter than the rest of the shadow. Maybe it had been made by a huge wild dog? Nah, Jonah doubted his granddad would’ve had a dog skin on his wall with Queenie sleeping on his floor. A kangaroo skin, maybe.
    After finishing his water, Jonah replaced the glass on the drying rack without rinsing. He turned around and stared at his dad’s satchel on the table. Had David left the bag on purpose? He might even have left it for Jonah.
    There wasn’t much inside the satchel, just some loose papers, notebooks, a few novels and collections, an open packet of Fisherman’s Friends. Jonah combed through them all before he understood – his dad had been so desperate to get away, he’d left the bag by accident.
    Jonah tried to close it, but a bunch of papers got in the way. He pulled some of them out.
    Poems, in his dad’s handwriting. Usually Jonah didn’t care about his dad’s poetry, but today he found himself turning the pages over and taking a look. One seemed older than the others. He read it first. Pretty soon he had read them all. Most he didn’t understand. Some were about Tasmania or animals in the bush, and in many it was snowing or about to snow. Those