Little Wolves - By Thomas Maltman Page 0,14

enraged. The fence repelled him once, but the next time he charged it he must have hit the old post at full speed, splintering it. Grizz admired how the bent wires twisted and curled into space.

Grizz drove the staves into the ground and wound wire around the makeshift post, clamping it in place. The bull lifted his head from the dusty grazing pasture and studied his work. It was a jerry-rigged operation, and they both knew it. Just this small effort sapped Grizz’s remaining energy, and he had to sit for a moment in the waving grasses to catch his breath. And even as the work drained him, it also renewed him, quenched his ache for a spell.

A boisterous cloud of blackbirds burst from the oaks as the sheriff drove away. The flock gathered into a swirling pinwheel that carried them high above the pasture, the line breaking and re-forming before arrowing toward the mountain, where they landed in the waving grasses and went silent as though they had never been. Grizz was left alone again in the hot sun with the cows chewing their cud.

In this year of drought the leaves fell early, small and brown and skeletal. The canary grasses were tawny in the light, bending under a hot wind, and the woods stretched toward town, dry as kindling.

LONE MOUNTAIN

Once there was a mountain, a bald grassy place that looked like the skull of a man, all brow and crown, because long ago a giant had trampled the valley before sinking up to his eyeballs and drowning. The little ponds around it were his footsteps, the mounds beside it his shoulders as he shrugged underground. Maybe he was not dead. Maybe he was only sleeping. The wind off the river was his breath. Night in the valley was sentient with his dreaming. Cows that escaped pasture fences went to the mountain and vanished. He slept his sleep of a thousand years and waited and no oaks or maples grew from the grasses over his head.

“Is the giant mean? I don’t want him to wake up.” She never tired of hearing such stories, imagining the hatchet-faced mountain rising above the fields.

“Don’t you worry. He’s old and sleepy, but he watches and waits. He only wakes in times of trouble. There are wolves that live in his caves, and he sends them forth to help those in need.”

“His emis—?”

“Emissaries. They do his bidding.”

“Like the ones who came for the woman. To keep her from hurting the baby. Like the coyote who found the baby after all those people died in the war?”

“Yes, the very ones.”

“Why did the woman want to hurt the baby?”

The giant in the mountain was as old as the moon or stars, as ancient as a stone left by the seashore. Things fastened to him like lichen or mollusks so the rocks found on the mountain were like nothing on the earth. The last tallgrass prairie became the giant’s beard and eyebrows. Nowhere else in the valley could you find the Great Plains prickly pear cactus, green and bristling, among the cedar trees and prairie bush clover thick with bees.

Granodiorite. Gabbro. The rocks were living things the Indians said flew about the stars at night. The boulders were witnesses to creation. A hundred years before, the mountain was holy to the Dakotas. The sick went there to drink from a limestone spring; infertile women ate the dirt. Where red rock showed through the grass, pink as skin, the young men painted their visions. Thunderbeings and black bears and buffalo. Sometimes just a hand etched into the stone to say I was here, if only for a single heartbeat of the one who lives within the mountain.

“Will you take me there, Daddy?”

“Maybe when spring comes again. When I’m feeling more peppy and can make the climb. Then we’ll pack a picnic and sit on the mountaintop and feel the wind in the grass.”

“When?”

“Someday.”

There was no mountain near the town of Lone Mountain so far as Clara could tell, the streets as quiet as a secret on Sunday morning. The competing spires of Trinity Lutheran and Our Lady of the Sorrows peeked above leafy treetops. Silt laden, the Minnesota River wound like a thick ribbon of caramel in the valley below.

It was a pretty enough town at first glance, the women sweeping their porches, the men cutting precise patterns on riding lawnmowers. Victorian houses with gables and wide porches surrounded Hiawatha Park, a green space where the town enacted