“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,