2018.04.30

It's Monday.

Pa said it couldn’t be a wolf unless it was a mad wolf. Ma lifted Mary into the wagon. Pa let them take a look at the horses. Pet and Patty were still biting off bits of grass. Ma asked if it was a lynx or a coyote. Pa picked up a stick of wood; he shouted, and threw it. The green eyes went close to the ground, as if the animal crouched to spring. Pa held the gun ready. The creature did not move. Ma asked Pa not do anything but Pa slowly walked toward those eyes and slowly along the ground the eyes crawled toward him. Laura could see the animal in the edge of the dark. It was tawny animal and brindled. Then Pa shouted and Laura screamed. The next thing she knew she was trying to hug a jumping, panting, wriggling Jack, who lapped her face and hands with his warm wet tongue. She couldn’t hold him. He leaped and wriggled from her to Pa to Ma and back to her again. Pa said that he was beat and Ma said that too. But she asked Pa if he had had to wake the baby. She rocked Carrie in her arms, hushing her. Jack was perfectly well. But soon he lay down close to Laura and sighed a long sigh. His eyes were red with tiredness, and all the under part of him was caked with mud. Ma gave him a cornmeal cake and he licked it and wagged politely, but he could not eat. He was too tired. Pa said it was no telling how long he had kept swimming nor how far he had been carried downstream before he had landed. And when at last he reached them, Laura called him a wolf, and Pa threatened to shoot him. But Jack knew they didn’t mean it. Laura asked him that if he had known they hadn’t mean it. Jack wagged his stump of a tail; he knew.