There were two sets of tracks, side by side, one smaller than the other. The larger of the tracks was bigger than any dog or fox could have made. The paired wolves had been standing, perhaps for a long while, regarding what lay in the clearing beyond the forest. The sharp imprint of their nails pointed, like an arrow’s mark, back towards the house. Then the tracks wheeled sharply about, disappearing into the bracken. She saw a soft bit of gray undercoat still clinging to a thorn briar, insubstantial and filmy like the downy top of a puff-away weed. She plucked it from the branch and brought it to her nose. The heavy, musky smell was stronger there, reminding her of her own body at the bleeding time.
Once, when she was fourteen and living in Andover, her father had trapped and killed a young wolf. The wolf was small enough for her father to carry the carcass home over one shoulder. “Hardly worth the skinnin’,” he had said. But he had skinned it nonetheless, making a fur frill for her cape. The fur, more white than gray, had a warm lair scent about it, as though the pup still carried within his very skin his mother’s milk. It had been a rare kindness from her father, and he was wounded deeply when she gave the fur over to her sister, Mary. It was the smell of it she couldn’t abide—the overwhelming smell of brutalized innocence.
“These are smart ones,” Thomas said. He had come to stand next to her and she startled at his voice. “I’ve never seen the cunning like. They never even touched the bait.”
She took a few steps back from him, hiding the bit of fur under her apron. “Well, what are you going to do about it?” she asked impatiently, coloring darkly at her own thoughts.
“We’ll need a sweeter come-hither,” he answered.
The tone of his voice was hard to place. Not mocking, but flat and dry in a way that made her think he was masking something not quite proper. Narrowing her eyes, she said, “I suppose you’ll be wanting to risk freezing two chickens now instead of one?” She snapped the hem of her apron, clearing away some unseen clod of dirt, and fought the impulse to move back another step.
“No,” he said, drawing out the o as if singing the final amen to a solemn hymn. “I’ll be thinking something larger, and more tempting.” He said the words slowly and carefully, as if speaking to someone cleft in the head.
A bead of sweat vibrated at the curve of his jaw, like oil on heated metal, and the heavy scent of musk and burned wood pulsed from his clothes and skin. She paused and waited for him to speak. She was not certain he had been sparking her with his talk of tempting, sweet come-hithers, for men rarely spoke true their intentions, but she would be wary for a reach and a grab nonetheless. Yet Thomas only stood, his arms tightly crossed, the vertical lines of his face impressed deeper into the hollows of his cheeks.
When it was clear he wasn’t going to offer anything more, she returned to the house and began cleaning in earnest. The boards on the floor were swept, scrubbed, and sanded. The table was polished with butter and ashes, the great pot scoured and greased. The pewter was rubbed, and the blankets were shaken, the ticking boiled, the mattresses taken out to be emptied and refilled with new husks. The great cloud of winter’s detritus was lifted and settled back down over her head, and with it came a growing irritation.
She set a narrow-backed chair under the eaves to stand on and began sweeping out the gutters with violent thrusts of the broom, practicing in her mind what she could have, what she should have, said to Thomas. The leaves, erupting with spiders and mice, first exploded in rustling showers, falling to the ground brittle and sharp, like shards of thin glass. Will soon began to scatter the leaves over the newly swept yard, throwing and kicking them into the wind. Martha had only just resolved to chase him away when Will asked, “Who’re ya talkin’ to?” He had come to stand next to the chair and craned his neck to see what lay on the roof. From the look on his face she knew she had been revealing her thoughts aloud.
“I’m talkin’ to the mice,” she said, her irritation firing to red, and with the next jab of the broom she felt the handle break in two. “Now see what you’ve made me do,” she muttered, stepping off the chair. Will retreated quickly backwards, his arms shoved behind him, wide-eyed and frightened, as though he had broken the shaft himself.
Seeing his stricken face, she softened her tone. “I don’t suppose you can mend it, then.” He shook his head, and fearing he would begin to cry, she asked, “Have you ever seen the down of a wolf?” She pulled the tuft of fur out from under her apron and showed it to him. He looked at her wonderingly as he stroked it gently with one finger.
“Will Thomas kill it, then?” he asked. His childish wriggling and shifting about had given way to a sudden, doubtful silence.
“He will try,” she answered, nodding what she hoped would be taken for a certainty.
“And what if he cannot?” he whispered. His face had begun to crumple into fear, his brows crouching low over his eyes.
“Then,” she said solemnly, smoothing her hand once across the runnels of his hair, “we shall have to run very fast indeed.” Her lips, which had been downturned, arched up into a teasing smile, and the boy whooped away, loosening his fear into the cascading piles of leaves.
Watching his exuberant dash across the yard, she was suddenly very tired, the last of her anger extinguished, smothered within the press of punishing labor. She sat on the chair and brought the bit of wolf down to her nose. She breathed in the wolf’s scent, a scent brought from ceaseless roaming over darkened fields and haunted fens, through gates of slanting twilight. The odor, both sharp and intimate, offered up the violent submission of the kill, and a no less forceful submission into coupling. Thoughts of an obdurate Thomas slipped unwanted into her mind, and she opened her fingers, letting the wind blow the clump of fur across the yard, where it mixed with the leaves and was gone.
THE BOUNTY FOR the wolves was raised to seventy shillings apiece and Patience agreed to sell to Thomas the smallest of her four lambs for the pen. Martha took the hen, still ruffled and peevish from spending the night in the open, and put her back into her roost. Thus was it ever with men considering women, she mused, watching the bird settling herself deeper into the straw; plain and pecking creatures, such as herself, were passed over for those more meek and tempting.
A heavy rain had fallen the night before, bringing with it a chill wind that blew and cracked at the roof with empty branches. With morning, the wind had stopped, leaving pollen-green ponds in each rut in the yard. Early buds, torn loose by the storm, floated like rafts on miniature oceans, making intricate swirls and arcs in their wake.
From the open common room window Martha watched Thomas as he stood in the yard, looking for rain to fall from the clouds dispersing darkly over the rooftop. She knew he was ruminating over his plans to bait the pen with the lamb. From a reeking pail he spread new entrails in a line to the pen, wiping the trap door with the oozing guts to hide his own scent.
He led the lamb struggling and bawling against the tether, wild-eyed at the coppery smell of blood, and tied her to a stake inside the pen. The creature was still piebald from having the wool eaten off her back by her brothers, hungry and near to freezing from the desperate winter. Still, she was clamorous and lively and would bring the wolves to trap, if they hadn’t already tracked onto another’s field.
Patience came to stand in the yard as well, watching Thomas carefully, her every gesture a testament to her worries over the possible loss of a valuable lamb. She called tersely to Will, who had followed Thomas inside the pen, laughing and excited to a fever by the thought of wolves coming to their very door. Jabbing at the lamb with a stick, the boy cried desperately, “Can’t I help kill th’ wolves too, Thomas?”
Thomas shook his head and, leading the disappointed boy out of the pen, set the trip rope to the swing door carefully. When he was satisfied, he started for the house, to gather up his gun and some quilts for the long night in the barn, Martha thought. She could hear John rustling about in the hayloft, excited over the prospect of the kill, singing a fragment of so
me bawdy tavern song, the lyrics sly and unseemly.
Thomas whistled a warning to John to lower his voice, and glanced at the open house window. He startled to see Martha’s face peering out at him, motionless and staring. She quickly closed the casing, but she continued her vigil through the small leaded panes. Outside, beyond the window, she could see the dark, rippling shape of a crow settling itself on the last small island of snow in the yard, picking at the still-red spatters of blood from the bait.
A rushing, half-formed thought of silent beasts with snapping jaws made her head jerk up and she grasped suddenly at the casing. Thomas, sensing her alarm, even through the barrier of glass, wheeled about to find only the wet and glimmering yard, reflecting the last of the day’s curdling light.
MARTHA COULD FEEL Thomas watching her during the supper hour as she ladled soup mindlessly into bowls. Her usual precise movements, economical and sure, became, as the hour passed, disjointed and awkward. Even as Joanna knocked over her bowl, a thing that would normally have set her to scolding, it only served to further dispirit her, and she sopped up the mess without a word.
They had no sooner finished scraping the last of the soup from their bowls when Martha stood abruptly from her chair and walked to the shuttered windows, opening them to peer out into the blackened spaces of the yard. The lamb had ceased its crying and there was no sound beyond the caustic settling of the hearth.
Patience, anxious and fretful, took Will and Joanna by the hand and retired to bed, the men leaving soon after for the barn. Martha quickly cleared the table and, pinching out the candles, placed herself at the open window to keep watch.
She followed the scattered rays of candlelight from the tin lantern in the hayloft, and then, as the men settled themselves, that light, too, was extinguished. Martha raised herself up on her toes, elbows braced against the windowsill, and arched her neck to follow the clouds lifting ever higher into the ceiling of the sky. Through the scrim of vapors the light from a slivered moon glowed dully, like a flame through smoky glass. The evening breeze blew in chilling gusts from the west, where the forest bracken grew, and she knew the wolves, when they came, would not be able to smell her scent from the open casing. She heard a rustling behind her and turned to see William creeping along the wall towards the door, his fingers outstretched as though he would open it. Her glance startled him and he pulled back his hand, but he stood his ground for a moment, looking defiantly at her. Shaking her head, she gave him a cautious eye and pointed him back to bed.
For hours, a fragment of song she had learned long ago worked ceaselessly through her head. She had heard it from an ancient virgin aunt who had come to be nursed through her decrepit ravings, finally to die in her father’s house. In truth, the old woman was her mother’s great-aunt, and was hardly a corporeal being as she lay shivering beneath piles of quilts, her bones loose and untethered beneath her skin, like sticks inside a bleached linen bag. She had been laid on a cot close to the hearth, and through every meal, through every task done within the house, the Allens listened to the old woman mumbling in fear or to her shallow, whispery singing:
What comes at night, with scalding breath,
With teeth that bite and claws that tear,
With cunning eyes and fur doth wear;
It is not wolf, but man, and brings a maiden’s death.
And as the old woman died, she had caught hold of Martha’s wrist and, motioning her closer, said through laboring, gaping lips, “Young woman… be ye ’ware of untrue prophets that come in the cloth of the lamb… for they be wolves… and wolves be footmen to the Beast….” When Martha raised her head again, the aunt had passed beyond, her eyes still open and fixed on the lintel above the door.
A swift movement of shadows at the outermost rim of the forest, like water over rocks, caught her attention and she poised, motionless, gripping the sill with cramping fingers. She could see no definable figures in the yard, only bands of greater and lesser darkness. She listened for something beyond the gentle rustling of branches above the roof but could hear nothing moving across the damp earth.
A sudden, bleating scream was cut off by a ripping noise, like cloth being torn from a loom. Then, the dull snapping sound of the trap coming down brought an enveloping silence. The scream had come from the lamb, she was certain, and yet an unreasoning, terror-filled image assaulted her that William, restless and curious, had crept out undetected from the house. With a hammering fear she ran to the door and, flinging it open, realized she had left it unbolted. She stumbled off the steps into the yard, not thinking if the trap had been sprung too soon, or too late, leaving the wolves free and blood-lusting, thinking only of what might be trapped inside the pen.
Nearing the barn, she heard a low, throaty growl. The sound was close, but she could see nothing between herself and the woven structure, which in that moment appeared as insubstantial as tatting lace. There were noises of a weakening struggle, a high-pitched whistling squeal which could as easily have come from a small child as from an injured lamb, and then more tearing sounds. The dark was absolute, as though black curtains had been hung within, and she took another two steps forward, straining to see through the slats. She could hear breathing then on the other side of the slender barrier, the cautious, overlengthy intake and exhalation of air, like muffled twin bellows, accompanying the wet and urgent sounds of feeding.
“Move away,” Thomas said tensely, appearing out of the darkness. She heard him curse and call to John for more fire for the firing pan; the fuse on the flint had gone out.
The illumination from John’s open lantern now flooded and filled a good two-thirds of the pen, but she could no longer hear or see the wolves in the shifting wall of shadows that clung to the back of the enclosure. She cautiously pressed herself against one side of the cage, her fingers encircling the coarsely woven slats. As she pressed one eye to an opening, she felt, rather than saw, the rush of heavy form and energy.
In an instant, Martha was eye to eye with the great wolf as it stood on its hind legs, its scabrous, working jaws on a level with her chin, its pelt yellow from the wavering light. The wolf’s hackles were raised in a great bristling collar about its ears, and as the steam from its mouth spackled her face, she could feel the other, smaller wolf catching hold of her skirt, jerking her body hard and holding her against the shattering wall of the pen. She heard sharp, cracking sounds and felt the wood weakening beneath her fingers. The wood cut sharply into one side of her face, drawing blood, but for every effort to free herself, the frenzied surge of teeth at her hands gave her no purchase to push herself away. Her captive eye, pressed against a widening gap in the slats, could not close itself for terror, and she wildly tracked the wolf’s eye within a hand’s breadth of her face, reddish gold and unblinking like a rust-stained moon; and she saw there was no vengeful, manlike designs in its gaze, only the singular will to free itself.
The world narrowed to the closing span between them, and she inhaled sharply, breathing in a fleck of bloody foam from its laboring tongue, and tasted the salt from a still-warm body. Her jaws, unhinged by fear and anger, became an open cavern and she screamed. A sulfurous explosion behind her deadened her hearing to all but her own voice. She felt a forceful ripping away of her hem as the smaller wolf was flung backwards from the bite of the lead shot. Still she screamed into the roaring mouth of the standing wolf, as though she would offer up every part of her frothing innards, liver, spleen, and heart, feeding them to the beast one by one like boiled sweetmeats. The second shot exploded, shattering the wolf’s throat, laying open the tender gray neck. And with a great geyser of blood, it crashed heavily to ground.
As the wolf fell away, she felt hands grabbing her shoulders, encircling her, dragging her away from the pen. She was spun about and shaken, her neck bobbing loosely over her shoulders, spineless and weak with terror. She could see John, ashen and spent, as he stared at her with bulging eyes; and her cousin as well, standing barefoot in the yard, open-mouthed and sobbing
over the children, who were safe at her side, hiding their faces within the folds of their mother’s thin night shift.
Thomas bent over her and wiped the blood away from the scratches around one side of her face where the wood had gouged the flesh, looking for and finding an open bite mark at her lip where a wolf’s poisonous spittle could hide, turning her from woman to changeling, to be chained to a post, ranting and howling away the rest of her days. He carried her to the house, where Patience bathed her face and hands and spread a quilt over her quivering form.
Later, she would come to stand in the rim of torchlight, silently watching the men winching up the wolves, one male and one female, side by side in death as in life. With immense skinning knives, the men opened up the carcasses like wings and sluiced buckets of rainwater over the fur, carving out the organs until both were clean of blood. It was only when they began to strip the fur away from the muscles and sinew, revealing the pink and defenseless flesh beneath, did she slip away again.
CHAPTER 6
THE FIGHTING BITCH was short in stature, her forelegs deeply bowed, but with a massive head. They called her Whistler, not for any sound she herself made, but for the sound the opposing dogs often made through their throats after she had buried her teeth deep into their windpipes. This was to be her fifteenth fight, and her owner, Samuel Crouch, had bet heavily on her. She was the odds-on favorite to win, even though the brute in the ring with her was larger and younger as well.
Their two respective handlers held tight to the straining leads, the dogs already lathered in great, glistening mantles of sweat and spittle, their snapping jaws tearing at the air. The crowd standing around the circular walls of the pit pushed aggressively forward, each man eager to see the match. A roaring had begun that was greater than the usual gaming noise. Bettors called encouragement to their fellows standing close by or threw insults, friendly or not, to men on the other side of the ring.
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