It was real.
Big ears pricked, then. The wolf swiveled its head and stared up as if at the trees. No, in another direction...it stared toward the moonlight, and it was moving, then, leaping from haunches up the hill and over it, lost from my view. The other wolves stared down at me for half a heartbeat, and then followed the other. Snow crunched away until I could hear nothing but my pulse, pounding, my breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps.
“Megan!” Kara's voice echoed down into the valley as she appeared, up on the ridge, her familiar, beautiful shape dark against the moonlight. “Megan, what are you doing here?”
My voice came out as a muffled sob, and I could form no words. She moved down to me, quickly, taking me into her arms, shushing my sounds as deep, animal noises came from within me and I wept against her shoulder. I was still shaking, but my body could no longer afford the energy for it, so they were small shakes, now. It quaked with sobs, with the cold, and I could hardly feel it all. She was so warm, as she held me to her. She said not a word, and we stayed that way for a moment.
“The wolves... the wolves will come back...” I muttered, taking her hand in a daze. I began to drag her back up the hill, following the footprints like breadcrumbs in the dark. She pulled against my hand, expression unreadable.
“Wolves?”
I pointed wordlessly to the tracks. But they were no longer tracks. I looked down at them, still shaking. There were no visible paw prints, only Kara's boots drowned in a circle of disturbed snow. I didn't understand.
“I thought they'd gotten to you,” I said, muttering the words, but even I could hear how ridiculous they sounded. I couldn’t stop shaking.
“Let's get you inside.” She made soothing noises, and placed an arm about me. Together, we followed her boot prints back, back through the woods, through the night. I stared wildly about us at any noise, any break of branch or slump of snow. The trees looked treacherous in the half light, and the shadows played tricks with my eyes. I could almost see lupine shapes in the darkness...I could almost see...
“Almost there,” Kara said shortly, ushering me the final way across the yard. Soon, we were inside the cold kitchen--I had left the door open... What had I been thinking?
“They were there,” I hissed, then. When the door was shut, when we were safely inside the cabin. I could still hear my heartbeat, but I could hear Kara's, too. It gave me courage. In the darkness, I shook, but my voice remained steady. “I saw them, Kara. They were there.”
“What did you see?” she asked, voice gentle. She stripped away my jacket, my boots, my hat. My clothes were soaking, but still she pressed me to her, took me in her arms and carried me up the stairs. Nothing creaked. We moved soundlessly in the darkness.
“Wolves,” I said, whispering, adamant. “I saw wolves, and I was afraid that they'd taken you... killed you...” Despite my best efforts, tears welled up in my eyes, and then I balled my hands into fists and put my arms around her neck, and I was sobbing quietly.
“I'm fine,” Kara said quietly. Her voice was so kind. “You're fine. It's all right...”
“It's not all right,” I whispered the obvious.
She didn’t act as if she'd heard me.
---
Gramma calls these flowers bluebonnets...these ones are daisies. She's shown me what I must do if I fall down and cut my knee in the woods, she's shown me what flower is good for a stomachache. I remember all of these things and repeat them to myself, small truths beneath the trees as I wander. It's so warm, and the sunshine is so bright. I trail my fingers along the bark and smile, a wild thing of the woods.
“It's good to get your lungfuls of air in the summer,” Gramma always tells me, “Winter isn't good for you.” So she shoos me every morning into the out of doors in the warmer months, and has, since I can remember. Not that I argue. I long to race outside into the beautiful day, long to find new places, play adventures, make friends. Everything wild here is a playmate, nothing can harm me. This is my wood.
Gramma has given me cautions, though. Stay far from bears and porcupines, don't touch coyotes. She shows me their pictures from a big book and describes them to me. It's not that they would harm you, she says quietly. It's that they're more wild than you. They wouldn't know what to do with you, they wouldn't understand you. Just give them their space, and they'll give you yours.
When I wander through the trees, sometimes I think I see shapes. I'm never certain, but sometimes there are bears, or is it just my imagination? I don't know.
Now, when I see the shadow, I stop. This is no maybe-creature, no shadow created by my imagination.
This is a wolf.
Or what I've seen in my grandmother's book as a wolf. It looks sort of like the picture, but not really. The picture was so small, so flat. Here, the thing stands, almost as tall as I do. There are muscles, and it's black, not gray like on the page. Its eyes are bright and fierce, but I’m not afraid of them.
“Are you a wolf?” I ask it, because it's a perfectly logical question. I like to think it looks surprised; instead, it cocks its head at the sound of my voice, curious.
I’m not afraid as I hold my hand out to the animal with an encouraging smile. “There, there, wolfey, are you lost? I've never seen you here before.”
The animal doesn’t respond to my question. Instead, it bows its head so that it looks up, up and up through long lashes. I stand, surprised. It looks like it's bowing to me, a pretty little bow...but it's really sniffing the forest floor, and suddenly, it lifts up its head again, and turns as if to leave.
“No, wait!” I cry after it, and then before I can check myself, I'm following after the wolf. It runs away, much faster than my child's legs can match, but I still try. It disappears into the overgrown brush beside the trail, and as it slips away, I’m alone.
It isn’t the last time we will meet... I feel it.
---
I was so cold. As I woke, groggy to the wan, new sunshine, I wondered what had happened. Why was I so chilled, why were my bones aching? The covers were off my body, wadded up into a bundle at the foot of the bed. I dragged a corner over my legs, not able to work my fingers for anything more. I shook.
I remembered the dream and the previous night almost at the same time. One filled me with horror, the other with deep unease. But I sat upright, holding my arms around my shoulders, rubbing my skin, still shaking...desperate for something. I didn't know what it was, but I wouldn’t find it in bed. I crawled out, stood on my own two feet, found a sweater and went downstairs.
The sweater smelled of cedar, and as I wrapped it tight around me, it quieted my shaking a little. My slippered feet hit the living room floor, then. Kara sat on the couch with a book pillowed on her lap, my grandmother made sounds from the kitchen. I smelled the hot warmth of the griddle, of frying flapjacks.
“You're up early. Your grandmother said you wouldn't see daylight for another few hours.” Kara's grin was mischievous, and I tried to smile back as I crawled onto the couch beside her. But I was still so cold, the teeth chattered in my mouth, and I leaned against her shoulder, hungry for something I couldn’t quite describe.
“What do you want to do today?” Kara put an arm about me. “I don't really know what you guys do up here for fun--”
“Not much in winter,” I replied, as her voice trailed away. “We…read, a lot. We take care of things in the house. When it warms up a tiny bit, we go out for walks. It's really--it's a dreaming time, mostly.”
“A dreaming time.” She seemed to like that phrase, turning it over in her head. She was grinning again.
“Yes. Like, you know...” I waved my hand, trying to come up with the words, “It's a time when many animals sleep, when they dream. Native peoples thought that a dreaming time was one of the most spiritual things you could experience. That this was when all the wisdom of the next year came to you, while you dreamed.”
She held me close as we both thought for a long moment, and then I cleared my throat. “K
ara, about last night...”
“Yes?” She didn't stiffen, didn't change her tone. It was lighthearted, and gentle. But still, something had flickered in the air.
“Why did you leave?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice as casual as hers, and failed. It faltered at the end, became almost accusatory. I cleared my throat and tried again. “You went for a walk?”
“Yes. I was a little restless,” she squeezed my arm. “I'm sorry I frightened you--I didn't think you would wake. I assumed I would go for a walk, come back...you'd never even know about it.”
“I’m sorry…I was just worried about you…” My heart sunk low in my ribs, and I wondered at my questions. What was wrong with me? She couldn't go for a walk? Well, yes, she could, but it was dangerous here.
She glanced at me for a long moment. “I talked to your Gramma about it this morning. She said you were afraid of the woods now, and that you were probably afraid for my safety.”
My hackles rose. “I'm not afraid of the woods.”
“It's perfectly natural if you are,” she shrugged. “It's an ancient fear...older than man himself, even...from when we were all still animals. We come to fear the dark, feared those wide open spaces that dwell in darkness. That's where fairy tales come from, after all,” Kara chuckled and gestured to the book in her lap. It was a collection of stories from the Brothers Grimm.
“Ah, Megan, you're up!” Gramma came into the living room, bowl of batter in her hands. “Will you help with breakfast, darlin'?”
I couldn’t refuse. With a chagrined sigh, I followed my grandmother into the kitchen and took over the flipping and the stirring and the measuring.
Darkness and fairy tales and fears of forests. I burned one batch of flapjacks on the griddle, as deep as I was in my tangled thoughts. I burned my hand when I tried to remove the blackened evidence. I cursed and sucked on the offended thumb, still lost in thought.
“The wolves have not come for tea in awhile,” Gramma said conversationally, almost testing the waters. “I've missed them.”
The old, familiar feeling of sadness and despair climbed back into my heart, and I turned to her, scraping the black off the griddle. It seemed pointless to tell her this, but I had to, if only to try and forget what might have (but didn’t really, not the wolf part) happened last night. “Gramma, there are no wolves.”
She shrugged, continuing to stir. It was such a beautiful morning, sunlight danced in the kitchen, and it smelled so good in here. Gramma wore her favorite apron, and her hair was back, pinned neatly atop her head. She stared down at what she was doing with the same logical air that she approached everything. There should have been nothing strange between us.
But there was.
“You know I don't like it when you bring them up,” I muttered, unable to leave well enough alone.
“Megan, I wish you would believe me,” she countered. She hadn't said anything of the sort in a long while.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“What are you gals going to do today?” Gramma asked, when we’d devoured breakfast, washed the dishes, and had retired to the living room with fairy tale books and quilt squares and little else. Kara looked to me, and I bit my lip, wondering what had occupied my lazy Saturday mornings for the past few years. Before her.
“In winter, we don't have much to do, us folks up here,” my grandmother said by way of apology. Kara smiled.
“It's no worry to me, Molly,” she said quietly. “I would be pleased as punch if we stayed in all day. I’d don’t often get to just relax and enjoy myself, and I’m doing both here. It’s wonderful.”
“Flatterer,” my grandmother chuckled, though you could see the remark made her happy.
I shifted in my seat, opening my mouth to a possibility, then closing it when I realized it was too silly. I sat for a moment, regarding and discarding individual ideas until my grandmother spoke up again.
“What about the Red Bear, Megan?”
I choked on my own spit, in mid swallow, and coughed for a half moment before looking at my grandmother. I guess she had no idea what she’d just suggested.
“What's the matter?” Gramma chuckled.
“Gramma, if I may remind you,” I sighed, my eyes heavenward, “that the Red Bear is a bar for old men. That's...not exactly...I mean, they're really old. They don't...” I trailed off with my hands in the air, trying to explain how wrong, exactly, the situation was. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say except this: “They wouldn’t like us.”
“Pish posh,” Gramma responded with. “How do you know?”
I remembered the last time I'd been there, many, many years ago—I’d still been a teenager. Gramma had taken me on a particularly slow Saturday night at the end of March when the winds and snows were just about to change, but hadn’t yet. We were going “stir crazy,” she'd said...we had cabin fever and needed to get out. So we went. I recalled the pelts and animal bones up on the walls, grinning skulls and skulls still covered with their furs. And then there had been the men at the tables. They’d made crass jokes about things I couldn’t yet understand, but would, years later, and be more than a little revolted at. My grandmother herself had taken me out of there pretty quickly as soon as she'd had a little something to “warm her spirits,” citing that this was no place for young ladies. Here, now, I looked at my grandmother, wondering what she could possibly be thinking to assume that the Red Bear would be anyplace for two women...in love with one another.
“They're red necks,” I said with a sigh, then, folding my arms.
“Now you're just being uppity,” Gramma declared. “Kara, what do you think?”
“I think there's no harm in it--I'd like to get out, if Megan would be up for it.” I couldn't believe my ears and looked at Kara, who was grinning.
Part of my heart shuddered, but I couldn’t stare down both of them. “Whatever you want,” I sighed, biting my lip.
I had a bad feeling about this.
Yes, the place might be different now, but I kind of doubted it. The thing is, not much changed in the mountains. Places could grow and go wild or go tame, but their innate essence remained. This is how I looked at the bar, that even if the older men had left, their bones too cold to make the nightly trips, newer, fresher men would take their places, sons and grandsons of the previous breed.
Every bit like them.
We bundled up around eight o'clock, after a tasteless dinner. I drove us there, remembering the way by more intuition than my grandmother's direction. She hadn't been back in nearly as long as I, and there were only so many roads to go. I turned into the icy parking lot, the tiny, icy parking lot, and shut off the car, taking the warm keys into my hand, staring up at the flickering sign. It was lit by one fluorescent bulb that seemed to be close to its end of days, and the whole contraption swung back and forth, back and forth over the parking lot.
Kara drew me close, warming my nose with her lips. Her smile was comforting. “Come on, have a fun time with me,” she whispered.
We got out of the car and I tried to smile, but it came out half-heartedly.
The same old music filtered from the same old speakers as we opened the same old door and entered the bar. I could have sworn that the same old men turned from whatever they were drinking, talking, doing, to stare at us. But no...there were new people, young people, scattered among the watering eyes and badly groomed beards. I walked up to the bar and obviously surprised bartender (the same I remembered from my childhood) and ordered a rum and coke while I held the dirty counter and bit my lip.
“We don't get many strangers,” the bartender said brusquely, by way of apology, when he took longer than usual to pour my drink. Kara came up behind me and ordered something I couldn't quite hear over the loud twang of the country music. I stared down at the greasy counter and saw my reflection--or, something like me--wavered and wavering, looking up to regard my own eyes with murky ones.
“I'm Molly's granddaughter,” I said to th
e bartender, a little louder than necessary. The talking resumed after that, though a few men continued to look on, obviously curious. I wondered what sort of stories Gramma had told them, told them about her incredible, smart granddaughter. I'd heard her speak to Clyde on occasion, telling him in a quiet voice exactly how wonderful I was. It made me a little uncomfortable, but that’s what she’d always done...
“Megan!” The booming voice was all too familiar, and I shuddered as I turned, back already being pounded by Clyde.
“Hello,” I said weakly, trying to muster up my best smile. “Fancy seeing you here!”
“I come here every night!” he said, in response, a bit shocked. “I never thought I'd see you here, though--it's wonderful! What are you having? I'll buy it for you!”
“No, that's all right, you really don't have to...” I began, stammering.
“I was buying for her,” said Kara then, voice even and strong. Clyde did a double take as if he hadn’t seen her. He stood a full head taller than her, impressively large to her slight frame. She didn’t waver.
“Who are you?” he asked, good-naturedly.
“Kara. Megan's friend.”
“Ah. Well, any friend of Megan's is a friend of mine! I'll buy yours, too!”
“I would prefer to buy for myself and Megan.” Again with the same evenness of tone and civility, but there was now a new edge beneath the words. I blinked as Clyde silenced, staring down at her not with his usual jovial expression, but a calculating one.
“Where I come from, the men buy the ladies their drinks,” he said slowly.
“Only if the ladies are theirs,” Kara replied.
“Really, it's no trouble,” I began, but lost the words as they continued to stare at one another, expressions unreadable.
“Clyde...” I cleared my throat, “how have you been?”
“Well,” he looked at me, then, and smiled, though a bit reluctant, “I've been making big bucks plowing the roads. Your job been going well?”
Big, Bad Wolf Page 12
