“All right. But why did you have Kootenai Bob tied up, and what has Kootenai Bob got to do with this, anyways?”
“Not Kootenai Bob! I had the dog tied up. Kootenai Bob weren’t nowhere near this scene I’m relating. He was before.”
“But the dog, I say.”
“And say I also, the dog. He’s the one I ties. He’s the one slips the rope, and I couldn’t get near him — he’d just back off a step for every step I took in his direction. He knew I had his end in mind, which I decided to do on account of what Kootenai Bob said about him. That dog knew things — because of what happened to him, which is what Kootenai Bob the Indian told me about him — that animal all of a sudden knew things. So I swung the rifle by the barrel and butt-ended that old pup to stop his sass, and wham! I’m sitting on my very own butt end pretty quick. Then I’m laying back, and the sky is traveling away from me in the wrong direction. Mr. Grainier, I’d been shot! Right here!” Peterson pointed to the bandages around his left shoulder and chest. “By my own dog!”
Peterson continued: “I believe he did it because he’d been confabulating with that wolf-girl person. If she is a person. Or I don’t know. A creature is what you can call her, if ever she was created. But there are some creatures on this earth that God didn’t create.”
“Confabulating?”
“Yes. I let that dog in the house one night last summer because he got so yappy and wouldn’t quit. I wanted him right by me where I could beat him with a kindling should he irritate me one more time. Well, next morning he got up the wall and out through the window like a bear clawing up a tree, and he started working that porch, back and forth. Then he started working that yard, back and forth, back and forth, and off he goes, and down to the woods, and I didn’t see him for thirteen days. All right. All right — Kootenai Bob stopped by the place one day a while after that. Do you know him? His name is Bobcat such and such, Bobcat Ate a Mountain or one of those rooty-toot Indian names. He wants to beg you for a little money, wants a pinch of snuff, little drink of water, stops around twice in every season or so. Tells me — you can guess what: Tells me the wolf-girl has been spotted around. I showed him my dog and says this animal was gone thirteen days and come back just about wild and hardly knew me. Bob looks him in the face, getting down very close, you see, and says, ‘I am goddamned if you hadn’t better shoot this dog. I can see that girl’s picture on the black of this dog’s eyes. This dog has been with the wolves, Mr. Peterson. Yes, you better shoot this dog before you get a full moon again, or he’ll call that wolf-girl person right into your home, and you’ll be meat for wolves, and your blood will be her drink like whiskey.’ Do you think I was scared? Well, I was. ‘She’ll be blood-drunk and running along the roads talking in your own voice, Mr. Peterson,’ is what he says to me. ‘In your own voice she’ll go to the window of every person you did a dirty to, and tell them what you did.’ Well, I know about the girl. That wolf-girl was first seen many years back, leading a pack. Stout’s cousin visiting from Seattle last Christmas saw her, and he said she had a bloody mess hanging down between her legs.”
“A bloody mess?” Grainier asked, terrified in his soul.
“Don’t ask me what it was. A bloody mess is all. But Bob the Kootenai feller said some of them want to believe it was the afterbirth or some part of a wolfchild torn out of her womb. You know they believe in Christ.”
“What? Who?”
“The Kootenais — in Christ, and angels, devils, and creatures God didn’t create, like half-wolves. They believe just about anything funny or witchy or religious they hear about. The Kootenais call animals to be people. ‘Coyote-person,’ ‘Bear-person,’ and such a way of talking.”
Grainier watched the darkness on the road ahead, afraid of seeing the wolf-girl. “Dear God,” he said. “I don’t know where I’ll get the strength to take this road at night anymore.”
“And what do you think? — I can’t sleep through the night, myself,” Peterson said.
“God’ll give me the strength, I guess.”
Peterson snorted. “This wolf-girl is a creature God didn’t create. She was made out of wolves and a man of unnatural desires. Did you ever get with some boys and jigger yourselves a cow?”
“What!”
“When you was a boy, did you ever get on a stump and love a cow? They all did it over where I’m from. It’s not unnatural down around that way.”
“Are you saying you could make a baby with a cow, or make a baby with a wolf? You? Me? A person?”
Peterson’s voice sounded wet from fear and passion. “I’m saying it gets dark, and the moon gets full, and there’s creatures God did not create.” He made a strangling sound. “God! — this hole in me hurts when I cough. But I’m glad I don’t have to try and sleep through the night, waiting on that wolf-girl and her pack to come after me.”
“But did you do like the Indian told you to? Did you shoot your dog?”
“No! He shot me.”
“Oh,” Grainier said. Mixed up and afraid, he’d entirely forgotten that part of it. He continued to watch the woods on either side, but that night no spawn of unnatural unions showed herself.
For a while the rumors circulated. The sheriff had examined the few witnesses claiming to have seen the creature and had determined them to be frank and sober men. By their accounts, the sheriff judged her to be a female. People feared she’d whelp more hybrid pups, more wolf-people, more monsters who eventually, logically, would attract the lust of the Devil himself and bring down over the region all manner of evil influence. The Kootenais, wedded as they were known to be to pagan and superstitious practice, would fall prey completely to Satan. Before the matter ended, only fire and blood would purge the valley …
But these were the malicious speculations of idle minds, and, when the election season came, the demons of the silver standard and the railroad land snatch took their attention, and the mysteries in the hills around the Moyea Valley were forgotten for a while.
6
Not four years after his wedding and already a widower, Grainier lived in his lean-to by the river below the site where his home had been. He kept a campfire going as far as he could into the night and often didn’t sleep until dawn. He feared his dreams. At first he dreamed of Gladys and Kate. Then only of Gladys. And finally, by the time he’d passed a couple of months in solitary silence, Grainier dreamed only of his campfire, of tending it just as he had before he slept — the silhouette of his hand and the charred length of lodgepole he used as a poker — and was surprised to find it gray ash and butt ends in the morning, because he’d watched it burn all night in his dreams.
And three years later still, he lived in his second cabin, precisely where the old one had stood. Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.
Just such a dream woke him in December his second winter at the new cabin. The train passed northward until he couldn’t hear it anymore. To be a child again in that other world had terrified him, and he couldn’t get back to sleep. He stared around the cabin in the dark. By now he’d roofed his home properly, put in windows, equipped it with two benches, a table, a barrel stove. He and the red dog still bedded on a pallet on the floor, but for the most part he’d made as much a home here as he and Gladys and little Kate had ever enjoyed. Maybe it was his understanding of this fact, right now, in the dark, after his nightmare, that called Gladys back to visit him in spirit form. For many minutes before she showed herself, he felt her moving around the place. He detected her presence as unmistakably as he would have sensed the shape of someone blocking the light through a window, even with his eyes closed.