Lone Wolves Read Online Free Page A

ran home. As usual, the dogs barked excitedly when they saw her. When she burst through the door, her grandfather was squatting on a blue tarp on the floor skinning a beaver he had caught during the day.
    â€œClose the door!” shouted her mother.
    Denny closed the door, and before taking off her parka she blurted the news.
    â€œA teacher was killed by wolves!”
    All three adults stopped what they were doing and sat down with Denny at the table to hear the amazing story. Bear attacks on people were commonplace, especially in the summer and fall, and they had all heard stories of wolves killing and eating sled dogs, an easy meal when chained outside to a dog house. But it had been a long time since they had heard of wolves attacking people. The last one either Denny’s grandparents could remember was back in the 1950s, when a woman was killed in her village while carrying a bag of groceries home from the general store.
    â€œBetter keep an ear and eye out in case they come around here,” said Sampson, looking to make sure that his rifle was still leaning beside the door. “Thirty miles not far for a wolf, especially if they follow the river.”
    After a while, everyone went back to work.
    Sampson finished skinning the beaver, and his wife cut up the dark meat for a stew. Nothing went to waste. In the old days, even the teeth were used as amulets worn about the necks of infants. It was believed the teeth instilled the power of industriousness and hard work, a desirable trait in a people who had to live on such a harsh and unforgiving land.
    Sampson called his granddaughter.
    â€œDenny, come give your granddaddy a hand.”
    As he held down one edge of the hide on a board, fur down, he instructed her to nail it. Then he pulled the opposite side of the hide taut across the board so she could nail it down as well. In no time at all, the beaver pelt was properly stretched into a circle and ready to be scraped, the first step in tanning any hide. The work would normally be done outside. But in the winter, when it was so cold and dark outside, both large and small game were often butchered inside the house. Sampson had cut up caribou and moose on the floor dozens of times.
    Denny knelt beside her grandfather, watching him scrape the fat from the skin.
    â€œGrandpa, I thought wolves didn’t attack people?” she said, trying not to imagine the last terrible moments of the teacher’s life, her utter horror when she must have realized what was happening.
    â€œThat true most the time,” he said without looking up. “But wolves are wild. Everything wild is unpredictable. Take a family dog. One moment it’s on its back letting you rub its belly, and the next it attacks a child or somebody else. That dog is a thousand generations removed from its wild ancestors. And yet, some ancient memory of hunting and killing lies just beneath the surface.”
    Denny nodded. She had heard many stories of dogs attacking children, not only in her own village, but in villages all over. She knew one woman who, as a young girl, had half her face bitten off by sled dogs.
    The old man turned the board so he could scrape the hide from a different angle.
    â€œVillage dogs in a pack are even worse. Being in a pack erases half of those thousand generations. They turn half wild. Now imagine a wolf, never made to serve men—not even once in all of wolf history—running in a pack, killing to survive, without no mercy and hard as the land itself.”
    â€œBut why did the tikaani kill her?” Denny asked, using the Indian word for wolf. “Why didn’t they just catch a moose or a caribou?”
    The old man chuckled.
    â€œIt not that easy, Granddaughter. Big as the land is, sometimes it’s empty, especially in winter. Maybe all the caribou go away someplace else. Maybe them wolves starving. They had to choose between their life and the woman’s life.”
    Deneena was quiet