2018.05.30

It's Wednesday.

She cringed away from the wall. The wolf was on the other side of it. Laura was too scared to make a sound. The cold was not in her backbone only, it was all through her. Mary pulled the quilt over her head. Jack growled and showed his teeth at the quilt in the doorway. Pa asked Jack to be still. Terrible howls curled all around inside the house, and Laura rose out of bed. She wanted to go to Pa, but she knew better than to bother him now. He turned his head and then saw her standing in her nightgown. He softly asked Laura if she wanted to see them. Laura couldn’t say anything, but she nodded, and padded across the ground to him. He stood his gun against the wall and lifted her up to the window hole. There in the moonlight sat half a circle of wolves. They sat on their haunches and looked at Laura in the window, and she looked at them. She had never seen such big wolves. The biggest one was taller than Laura. He was taller than Mary. He sat in the middle, exactly opposite Laura. Everything about him was big, his pointed ears, and his pointed mouth with the tongue hanging out, and his strong shoulders and legs, and his two paws side by side, and his tail curled around the squatting haunch. His coat was shaggy gray and his eyes were glittering green. Laura clutched her toes into the crack of the wall and she folded her arms on the window slab, and she looked and looked at that wolf. But she did not put her head through the empty window space into the outdoors where all those wolves sat so near her, shifting their paws and licking their chops. Pa stood firm against her back and kept his arm tight around her middle. Laura whispered to Pa that he was awful big. Pa whispered into her hair that yes and let her see how his coat shines. The moonlight made little litters in the edges of the shaggy fur, all around the big wolf. Pa whispered that they were in the ring clear around the house.