Little Wolves

LITTLE WOLVES





Seth cried out, “Dad, look! A coyote!”

His son had rapped on the passenger side window and pointed. It was a late afternoon in March when the sun’s rays warmed the frozen earth just enough that a silvery mist spiraled from the marshes. Grizz had followed his hand and there it was. At first he thought it was a small dog, but then he noticed the lean snout and long, foxlike ears.

Grizz slammed on the brakes, jerking Seth forward in his seat so hard he nearly hit the windshield before his belt snapped him back. The truck slid along the gravel road before grinding to a halt. A second later he was out the door, plucking up a .22 rifle he kept behind the seat. Dust from the road rained down around him. The coyote heard all this and yawned, displaying rows of little razor teeth. It looked indolent and dreamy with the mist rising all around it.

He took his time, balancing the rifle on the truck bed. If the coyote had not cast one backward glance as it trotted away, it might have escaped into the tallgrass. But the rifle made a small barking cough, and the animal went down. He reloaded while the boy stepped out of the passenger side and followed him into the meadow.

The coyote was a handsome creature with shimmering bronzed fur and round dark eyes and breathed as though in its mind it was still running. It lay on its side in the tallgrass, and the air around them smelled of musk and blood and its terror. The coyote’s breathing shallowed. “Aren’t you going to finish it off?” Seth asked. He held himself and shivered even though it was a strangely warm spring day.

“It’ll be dead soon enough.”

“Why’d you have to shoot it? I was only showing you where it was.”

“Because,” he said. At first the words didn’t come right. Why? Because, that was the way of things. No farmer going back to the beginning of time could allow such animals to threaten his living. So he told Seth about summer nights when the ranch house windows were open to allow in a breeze. How his mother couldn’t sleep for the sound they made. It stirred her up, that eerie howling. He told him about the calves being born in spring and how the coyotes were always there in the morning licking the birthing fluids from the blood-streaked ground, ghost shapes that were gone again before he could raise a gun. While he told him, he could see it in his mind’s eye, a primal scene: cattle tonguing the afterbirth from their calves while coyotes slunk nearby, waiting to drink the rich placental blood from the grass. “Parasites,” he said. “Little ravenous wolves. At least now there is one less of them.”

Seth’s face had gone pale. His features weren’t set yet, the bones shifting in his face as if what he would become was still being written. Seth knelt in the grass next to the coyote. It was a female, the heavy dugs showing on her stomach. “Why do you think she didn’t run?” he said, and when Grizz had no answer he asked her softly, “Why didn’t you run?”

He reached out one hand to stroke her fur.

“Don’t touch it,” Grizz warned, but she was too wounded to do more than growl with what menace remained in her, her black gums peeling back to reveal long incisors pink with froth. One filmy eye fixed him, and then she went still.

Grizz put his hand on Seth’s shoulder and started to say something when a noise caught his attention. A sound on the hill above where there should have been only silence. Seth jumped up and went ahead of him. She had died not far from a granite boulder ringed by a thicket of sumac. Seth pushed through the branches and reached in. From the dark hole where the coyote had made her den mewling cries echoed. Her kit, probably born just a few weeks before.

“Stop,” he commanded Seth. “Don’t you go any nearer.”

Seth’s back went rigid, but he didn’t turn around at the sound of his voice.

“You go on back down to the truck and wait for me there.”

He gave just the faintest shake of his head.

“You don’t want to see this kind of work, but it has to be done. It’s the only thing we can do.”

When Seth did turn around his eyes were hard and glittering. “No,” he said. “I won’t let you.” He clenched his fist, the wind rustling his baggy jacket. In the distance a red-winged blackbird sang out in warning, hearing them on the hill above. From this vantage point Grizz could see the farm and the stretch of black fields. They would need to take out the spreader now that the manure was no longer frozen, clean out a winter’s worth of mess from the barns and fertilize the fields. A long day’s work, but the boy would get to pilot the Bobcat in and out of the barn, and he loved driving it. Grizz was anxious to get down and get started.

“If I don’t do this, Seth, they’re going to starve, a long, slow death.” Such a stubborn child. When they had kept pigs, Seth hated when the runts were born. They had to kill them right off so they didn’t keep the sow’s milk from those capable of surviving. They stretched them on a board and cracked their little skulls with a ball-peen hammer. When Seth was little, it used to make him cry. He would steal those runts and take them up into the loft and hide them in a hole he’d hollowed in the hay. Then he would take out a turkey baster and fill it with milk from the kitchen and carry it to the barn. Grizz knew what he was doing the whole time and didn’t stop him. The runts all died despite his best efforts. He left the boy alone to learn that some things aren’t meant for this world. By the time he was ten Seth was hardened, and when he started growing prize-winning sows for the FFA he learned to wield the ball-peen hammer himself. And Grizz thought the whole time he had been teaching him about mercy.

“No. Not if we take them home.”

Grizz lay his gun down in the grass. “These aren’t like puppies from a dog, Seth. They’re wild things, and they belong out here in the wild. We start violating the natural order, and bad things will happen.” He squared his shoulders and leveled his gaze. “Now get back down to the truck and let me do what I have to do.”

“No.” Seth’s jaw jutted out, and he drew himself up, and Grizz saw how big he was becoming. Still, he could shove him aside, and it would all be over in a few seconds. His iron-toed boots would crush a few baby coyote skulls, and then it would be done.

“What do you think people in town will say when they hear we’re raising coyotes?”

“I don’t care. I’ll only keep them until they get big enough to live on their own.”

“The one thing that keeps us safe from such creatures is that they fear us. You take away that fear, and you’re going to hurt both them and us.”

Behind them, the whimpering of the pups continued. The boy’s eyes watered, but he kept his footing, and when Grizz laid a hand on his shoulder, he flinched. That one action, a simple flinch, took away his breath. His son thought he was going to hit him. He never hit Seth, hadn’t whipped him in years.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“We can take them home?”

“But they have to sleep in the old brood house. We can’t have them in the barn or anywhere near the cows. You’re going to have to make sure they’re cleaned every day.”

“We’ll get one of the heating lamps,” Seth said. “I’ll stretch a cord from the barn. And we can keep them in a box with some blankets. And we can feed them with the calving bottles.”

“Not a word at school, understand? I don’t want people in town hearing what we’ve done.”

Seth drew his hand across his mouth, zipping it shut.

One by one the three pups were lifted, blind and trembling, from the den and deposited in the warmth of Seth’s coat. They rode home together with that pungent scent filling up the cab and the sound of them crying so loud Grizz could hardly hear himself think. The boy talked to them in a cooing voice, wincing when a claw hooked his chest under the shirt. “Little wolves, is that what you called them, Dad?”

“It’s what some call coyotes, sure.”

“My little wolves,” he said. “I’m going to take care of you.”

All through the spring and summer, Seth fed them faithfully with a bottle they used for the calves and baby’s formula from Jurgen’s Corner, replacing the nipples that the coyotes gnawed to rubbery shreds. When they were big enough to eat from his hand, he let them go, true to his word. They’d come back every night since. The boy was not supposed to feed them anymore, but Grizz knew he took them scraps and dry dog food, and that was how they came to be so large, the size of wolves instead of bony coyotes.



After stopping the boy’s bleeding, Grizz carried the Gunderson child up from the meadow into the yard where his truck waited.

“I can walk,” Lee protested, but Grizz shushed him. The boy weighed about the same as a newborn calf, like those that slipped under the fence every now and then, got lost in the grove, and had to be carried back to the pasture. Grizz ignored the aching muscle in his own abdomen, worrying that if he set Lee down and made him walk the boy’s wounds would reopen.

Once he got him into the cab, Grizz drove him to the hospital, remembering the day he and Seth had found the coyotes. It was a good memory, one of a few he had, and thinking on it passed the silent miles that took them over the prairie.

When they pulled up at the Fell Creek Area Hospital, Grizz paused. The parking lot lay empty. “I don’t think I’ll stick around once you get inside. I don’t know what folks will say if they see us together.”

Lee was shaking, holding the wounded arm that Grizz had bound with knotted pieces of his shirt.

“When is your pop’s funeral?”

“In a couple days.”

He hated to ask it, but didn’t know when he would get another chance. “Did you know about Seth? Did he say anything to your brother?”

Lee hesitated, his nostrils flaring. Grizz thought he might start crying and worried he wouldn’t know what to do if the child did, but Lee only wiped his nose on his sleeve and looked out the window.

“You think you’re done trying to kill me?”

He turned sharply. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess so.”

Grizz knew he wasn’t afraid to die. He would have been glad to be shut of his problems. “It’s too bad your aim wasn’t better.”

“I could have hit you if I wanted.”

“Sure.” He didn’t ask about why. He thought he knew. His own son had looked at a man down a barrel and pulled the trigger. This boy thought to do the same. He couldn’t account for the feeling floating in his chest, a floating bubble of thought. To die. It would be a good thing. Only by dying could he come closer to what he had lost. Yet he could feel the steering wheel under his hands, the breath in his lungs. A child beside him. He had made promises to Seth. If he died, who would tell Seth’s story? Who would see to it that his son was buried properly? His work wasn’t done yet. “What are you going to tell people about how you got hurt?”

Lee still trembled. He was expecting for Grizz to turn him in to the law, but he wasn’t afraid either. He was hurt bad, maybe not in his right mind. His right mind. Who was these days? The cab reeked with the iron smell of his blood.

“If you don’t mention the coyotes, I won’t tell about the gun.” Grizz held out his hand.

“Okay,” he said. His eyes rolled back in his head like he might faint.

“Just tell people that you were out running and some wild dogs were chasing you and you fell down the ridge. Tell them you stumbled out to the road and someone found you and drove you here.” It was a dumb story, but how closely would people question Lee? Especially considering what his family had been through. The words his own child had carved into the desk rose up unbidden in his mind. Wergild. A blood debt. Grizz heard the words leave his mouth before he even knew what he was saying. “You have a job?”

Lee shook his head.

“You want a job?”

Another nod. “You think you could work for me, help a little around the farm?”

The boy’s hand was on the door handle. Their families were two of the oldest in the valley, had been there since the beginning through Indian uprisings and droughts. There was ugliness in the shared story, both recent and long buried. Lee looked at him, and he saw something spark in his eyes. He didn’t appear to be as dumb as people made him out. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“Just think it over.”

He grunted as he moved to climb out of the cab.

“You need help inside?”

“No. I’m fine.”

The door wheezed as it swung shut. “Lee?” he called, reaching across to catch it before it closed all the way.

“What?”

He considered a moment. “If you come see me again, next time you make sure you come by the driveway.”

Lee shuffled along the sidewalk until the sliding glass doors of the emergency room opened. He paused at the threshold, but before he stepped inside he raised his good arm and waved to Grizz.