She was glad he had not hit it. Those eyes had been luminous in the shadows, summoning.
At a puncheon table she used lucifer matches to light a lantern. Her father sat on a stump so she could tend his wounds, dabbing them with a cloth and then wringing out blood into a bucket. He took long pulls from a bottle of rye whiskey. “How deep are the wounds?”
The worst ran down the center of his cheek, an ugly ribbon of skin through which she glimpsed bone. “I’ll need my needle for just the one, but the rest should heal on their own.” While she worked, drawing tight the thread, she asked him to tell what happened, hoping to distract him.
He began by telling her how the animals he had caught in his traps were unlike anything he’d seen. By the time he checked his traplines all that remained was the fur. Something was eating the muskrats in the traps, devouring the meat and blood, and leaving behind only tufted pelts.
For three days and nights he ran his traplines and collected what pelts were salvageable, until one morning he came upon something else: a prairie wolf, a shaggy bitch, alive and struggling in the teeth of the trap. He figured this was it, the source of all his troubles. He’d heard of cunning wolves doing this before. He drew his knife and put her out of her misery, and when he did he heard something behind him. An unearthly shrieking.
The girl shuddered. She had heard the pain in that howl.
“I didn’t even see it, just felt it. It was all over me, biting and clawing. I fought back, lashing out with my fists. Somehow I hurt it enough to chase it away. God help me, but I ran after that. I left behind the remaining traps, the few pelts worth saving, and took my gun and ran. For two nights I’ve been traveling here, stopping to light fires at night, hearing that thing out there, circling the edge of the flames.”
He slept for a short while on his rope bed, his breathing labored, his bottle of rye whiskey empty. In the light of the lantern she surveyed his wounds, knowing the deepest one would scar. Abruptly, his snoring stopped, his eyes popped open, and he woke screaming. She went to him and touched the back of her hand to his forehead, which burned as if with fever or infection. “Oh, Papa.”
“No human or animal moves like that. There is a powerful dark magic in that thing. It was a loup garou.”
“I know,” she said, thinking on what she had seen. “I believe you.”
“I can feel the taint spreading inside me. The next moon, I’ll begin to change, and then you won’t be safe around me anymore.”
“You wouldn’t ever hurt me.”
“I’m going to have to go away.”
She touched his shoulder. “Please. Let’s go see the preacher. He’ll know what to do.”
He groaned. “I’m so tired. I’m going to rest for just this night. In the morning, I’ll go. You’ll be safe, because the loup garou will follow me. I’m going to go where I will be far from any people, out on the prairies.”
“The Indians are out there,” she said, thinking of the Dakota warriors who had been their worst fear until this night.
He shut his eyes again. “There is only one way to fight the loup garou. You have to draw its blood. Draw blood from it, and it will change into its human form and tell you the secret it holds.”
“Papa, what will I do if you are gone?” But his breathing had deepened. She went to her side of the cabin, descending into restless sleep. She did not hear him leave in the night, but in the morning his bed lay empty. That he had left his rifle here frightened her, as though her father was surrendering, offering himself as a sacrifice.
The girl did what she always did to pass the day. She gathered eggs from their laying hens, collected maple syrup in buckets from the trees in their grove. She was thirteen years old, and not strong enough to plow, but she knew these woods, the places where the wild grapes and berries grew.
A week passed until one night she heard something outside padding around the cabin. The boards of the porch creaked. When she called out “Papa” it went silent again. A hand scratched at the door. It whined softly, searching