gone out on the prairies to save her, and he had not returned.
Draw blood from the loup garou, he had told her, and he will change to his human form. He will tell you the secret he has brought for you.
Drowsy from a lack of sleep, she went about her errands, out in the sugar maples, moving from spigot to spigot to collect the syrup the cold nights had forced from the trees. Syrup clear as blood, the trees bleeding in a time of change between the winter and spring. The girl herself bled, not understanding why. There were no other women she could turn to and ask about it. The smell of her blood, she knew somehow, had drawn this thing.
There under the trees, goose bumps rippled up and down her arms, and when she turned, she saw the loup garou watching her from the shadows. It growled, displaying a mouth of long teeth, and loped toward her. Her feet felt riven to the earth, as if stakes had been driven through them. The growling was a softer sound than she expected, almost a purr. When the loup garou raised up on two legs, the matted hair fell away from its face. Its nostrils were flaring, and the large amber eyes held her again. She saw the lean ropy arms, the thick muscles of its thighs, the privates coiled in their dark nest. She shut her eyes, ashamed for looking. It smelled of leaves and sweat and grass. The claws were as sharp as she remembered, but here in the daylight, in the shadows of the woods, it was less a fearful thing. A boy only, she realized. A wild child. It circled her warily, still growling.
Afraid, not knowing what else to do, she opened her mouth, and what poured out was a song, a hymn her mother used to sing to her before bed.
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.
The darkness deepens—Lord with me abide.
Her voice caught and warbled, but the sound stopped the thing in its path. A boy, then. Her father, she knew in that moment, had killed its wolf mother, the only mother it had known. The boy had struck back in confusion. A boy from the War with Indians. A boy her own age.
She had been alone for a long time. Wherever her father had been, he was not coming back. The wolf child came closer, entranced by the song, the shape of her mouth. She sang on, luring it in, not knowing if it came to save or devour.
The Holden Evening Prayer service Logan introduced at the beginning of Advent season would not have gone well a few months before. This song of light and darkness in the world, which required the congregation to sit up close and sing in rounds, would have been resisted. His German American congregation was not a singing people, unless it was the old, old hymns from the brown book of worship. They had specific places where each must sit when they came inside. The men sat mostly on the north side, the women on the south. Once Logan had roped off the back pews and balcony, and mild old ladies had responded with defiance and torn down the barriers. Once he had tried to coax them to change, and they met him with stony resistance.
All that had passed now. For a short time, they would not complain. They came to be near one another, for the shelter the church offered from the ravenous winter world outside. They needed the promises more than ever. And they came to see the baby, Dena. Clara had made sure the child had a strong birth name. Dena, from the Old English. Dena, which meant “from the valley.” The news stations and journalists from around the country had come and gone. It was morning, the nightmare over, and they had to learn to live with one another once more.
They all came for Dena, even Grizz, who sat at the back of the church, not far from the Gunderson family, the boy Lee and his mother, Laura. They were all here. Grizz had scars on his hands, a stigmata. Down in that pit, in the moment of his surrender, he had spotted sharp metal spurs jutting from the aluminum sides. He had impaled his palms into these, lifted himself from the mire. A nylon rope lowered down, looping toward him. He heard a boy’s voice, Lee shouting from above that he should tie