Little Wolves - By Thomas Maltman Page 0,83

where Seth killed himself, only a few bent stalks leaning crookedly in the tilled black rows.

A crackling in the leaves made her turn. Only two of the three coyotes stood there, panting in the cold, their ribs showing through their skinny hides. The big gray was not with them. One came forward, whining, but danced away again when Clara stood, dusting the grass from her knees, and approached. They retreated into the woods, but stopped to look back at her, beckoning.

A pregnant woman alone in the woods with dangerous animals. Something like them had harried her mother through this very stretch of woods. She had died here, less than a quarter mile from town. She had died with Clara shielded close against her, absorbing the last of her warmth.

Wolves. But there were no coyotes back then, and the last wolf in the county had been killed more than a century ago. The old-timers had told her this. It had only been a few years that coyotes had come back, migrating from South Dakota to fill a place on the food chain.

She was our Duchess. A displaced person. She had to be punished for her sin.

The coyotes loped down an old deer track. Even without leaves the woods were thick and shadowy, the branches of the bur oaks braiding a canopy above her. She pushed on through sumac and bramble, following the sounds of the coyotes ahead. Eventually, they reached a small meadow, where the gray lay on his belly in the grass.

The two smaller ones circled it warily. The alpha lay gasping, and bright blood splattered the ground around him. Clara saw when she knelt beside him that he was caught in a trap, the serrated teeth closed around his front paw. She smelled spoiling hamburger, or whatever meat the trapper had used to lure him in. He’d gotten greedy, careless.

This coyote nosed her hand. Clara stroked his soft fur gently. He growled but did not snatch at her with his jaws. “This is going to hurt,” Clara said. “I’m sorry but there is no other way.” The gray tried to heave himself off the ground and strained against the trap that held him, snarling and gnashing as his tendons tore and fresh blood sprayed from the wound. The trap, bolted into the ground by a chain, hardly budged.

Clara backed away. The other coyotes yipped as he thrashed and then finally settled in a heap.

She came close once more. “You can’t do that,” she said in the quietest voice possible. She knelt again beside him. Under her breath she was singing an old spell, an Anglo-Saxon galdor to soothe a monster. His lids were shut, and she thought maybe he had lost consciousness, but when she reached for the trap, the yellow eyes snapped open. He growled once more, his black lips exposing his razor canines.

Clara’s fingers fumbled with the metal. The great hinge did not want to give way, the iron cold against her naked fingers. When the coyote suddenly lunged forward and clamped down on her arm, she started to scream, but realized he hadn’t punctured the cloth with his sharp teeth. He was just holding on. She swallowed, finished her spell, and slipped her hands deeper into the trap to get more leverage. Then she tugged with all her might, straining until the trap opened just enough that the gray could slide his injured paw out.

He pulled away from her, limping on three legs. Clara saw that he had left behind digits from his partly severed paw in the trap. When she let go off the hinge, the trap snapped again, causing the gray to snarl. Delicately, she plucked the long, bloody claws from the grass and put them in her pocket. The smaller coyotes licked the gray’s face, sniffed at his wound, and then they bounded off together into the woods.

Clara should have headed home, but down in the valley she could make out the farm where Grizz Fallon lived, smoke coiling from his chimney. If it was true that Seth had tamed these coyotes, his father might know what to do with them, some way to keep them from coming into town where it was only a matter of time before they were killed. Or hurt someone. She followed the same old deer path down through the woods toward the house and then cut across the property, passing a wheelbarrow abandoned next to the stump of a fresh statue, a creation twisting into the tree