The Wolf Road Read Online Free Page A

Trapper in my head. He taught me to tie a snare, taught me to set a deadfall trap and shoot a squirrel from fifty yards. All I had to do was help him clean the kills, prep the traps, stretch and scrape the furs, and tend to the hut. I slept on the floor by the fire and him in his bed. Though, thinking about it, I don’t think he slept much. He hunted a lot at night, said the wolves come out at night but he never brought back a wolf pelt.

    That was my life then and damn if it weren’t fun. I was a new person, I forgot my old name quick, and I was Elka from then on. I could make a bow and arrow from sticks and shoot me a marten. I forgot my sums and my letters. I forgot my nana and near forgot my folks, though them words in the letter never went out my head. All them skills Trapper taught me I remember to this day, but there are big ol’ patches a’ them years that are fuzzy and dark, whole months a’ winter what went in a blink. Much as I tried, I couldn’t fill up them gaps.
    But hell, I was an idiot kid. Trapper was my family even though I didn’t know a sure thing about him, but I figured quick I didn’t know much more ’bout my parents and they was kin. Trapper was the kind a’ family you choose for yourself, the kind that gets closer’n blood. He was my daddy from then, I just needed to find myself a momma.

Three winters I spent with Trapper afore I found her. Ten years old and my skinny arms and back was strong with hard living. Trapper weren’t the friendly sort, but him and me quick found our rhythms. Shit, I think he even started to like me.
    We had rules a’ living but thinking on ’em now, they was mostly for me to follow. Don’t ask no questions. Don’t wander out a’ sight a’ the hut. Don’t talk to no people ’bout him. Last one weren’t no trouble; I hadn’t seen another face ’cept Trapper’s in three years. The rage I had in me when I was with my nana, what made me scream and shout and tantrum, weren’t there no more. Trapper saw the wild in me and didn’t try to tame it and cage it like my nana done. I didn’t have no bars to rage ’gainst no more. You trap a wolf and he’s going to snarl and rip you up till he can get free, but once he’s out there, treading his own path in the snow, you ain’t got much to fear ’less you provoke him. Trapper knew that and I saw that same fierce in him.
    We was closing in to winter, just a few weeks we figured till the white blanket would come smothering. Winters were eight months a’ harsh. Snow up to your eyebrows, winds what’ll rip your skin right off your bones, trees hunkered over with the weight a’ the season, like crooked old men at a whisky parlor. Trapper said since the Damn Stupid, winters got colder, snow deeper, and ice thicker; summers got sweltering like them tropics far down south. Any animal or man what could survive the whiteout would come out the other side fiercer and that much harder to kill. Made living long a rare thing indeed. Folks now are wrinkled up and wizened where the same years would a’ looked fresh-faced afore the Damn Stupid. People round here get killed by hailstorms and drought, ’stead a’ invisible diseases and bombings. Nature ain’t friendly no more, but least nowadays it’s honest ’bout it.

    Trapper had me chopping logs to kindling in the rain, stocking up for the freeze. Chopping wood weren’t no fun and our ax was blunter’n a river rock.
    “Shit,” I said when the rain made my hands slip and the ax stuck hard in the wood. I threw the whole thing, log and ax, into the woodpile. “I might as well chop down an oak with a dead rabbit all the good that blade is.”
    Trapper was cleaning his rifle ’neath the awning, prepping for a hunt.
    “Why don’t you never let me come with you?” I shouted so he could hear me over the weather. “I could help dressin’ them deer, hauling meat.”
    He didn’t even look up from the barrel. “You want to freeze up solid in the night?”
    I wiped