Unresolved Ending

Prologue

Two things were happening to the toddler that kept him up at night and caused him to wake early most mornings: molars in his upper and lower jaws were coming in and he was learning to walk.

The former produced an ach deep in his mouth that sometimes extended into his sinus cavities. A knot of cold cloth on which to gnaw, or a finger dipped in whisky rubbed gingerly across his gums helped. On the other hand, the latter, what his mama called furniture walking, was a new experience for the youngling. He was not a big baby, so the ability to negotiate his weight and balance came early. Learning to walk brought on a bright and intense sense of independence that called to him the moment his glacier-blue eyes fluttered open each day.

On this fateful, winter morning, the ten-month-old stood on the hay-strewn floor of a small barn, watching his Daddy prep for the dawn milking by lamplight. He held onto the leather strap of an old saddle with one hand, swaying, cooing, and gumming a small dowel wrapped in ice-cold burlap with the other. His eyes shown contentedly in his wholesome face, and in the brisk morning crimson shades stood on each cheek like scuff marks.

His father was crouched on one knee, tending to a heavy, rust-colored animal with a long face and large, perpetually wet nose. Sometimes his Daddy pointed to this round-bodied animal and said C-O-W, and the toddler’s face would light up and he’d reply O-W-E.

Anticipating this, the toddler giggled. His daddy glanced over, smiled, and produced clicking sounds that usually accompanied tickling (when he wasn’t under the O-W-E) and always made him laugh. He did so then, high and enthusiastically. The milking cow waggled her big head and mooed in a deep, baritone response that the father and son could feel as much as hear.

And this time it was the father’s turn to laugh.

Fifteen yards outside the side barn door, which opened to the eastern, unincorporated section of the property, some twenty acres, a lone wolf, gaunt and peppery white, lay flat and still in the snow. It processed the sounds and smells coming from the opening with intense focus. It represented one quarter of a thinning pack that migrated south-west in a quest for meat, a quest away from the human trappers with their deadly tricks and convoluted smells. There had been six in the family pack, but one of its siblings died after chasing a mountain ram onto a cliff face and losing its footing. Another had been shot after killing a trapper’s sled dog and attempting to drag it away. Neither were quarry the pack would have normally pursued, but the newcomers had changed the balance of life in the area like a contagion, and they, the wolves, were slowly starving.

Looking for patterns, the four wolves stalked the milking cow, the barn in which it slept, and the human keeper over two blustery days. There were other animals on the property – an aging horse, a crop of chickens, and a hog – but they were sequestered by the main dwelling and had nowhere near the potential for meat. Their immediate prey was tended to in the dawn and then let out to pasture. Though the liquid the keeper took for himself daily gave off a sweet scent – indeed, it was what lured them there – the pack was interested in the milking animal’s five hundred pounds of life-sustaining meat; they were carnivores through and through, and sustenance had been sparse in the last two months.

The keeper was male by scent, but far less tainted than those from whom the wolves ran. He was an alpha. He worked the land during the day, staying watchful and aware of his surroundings, often times stopping his chores and scanning the terrain through something strung around his heavily tanned neck. He urinated freely and often. He carried the loud stick with him as well, sometimes at his side like a walking staff, other times slung around his back, its working end (loud end as far as the wolves were concerned) long and spear-like in the sun. It left little room for attack, even when the keeper was far removed from the animals or his small dwelling with its constant tendril of smoke from the roof pipe. Yes, the declining pack had come to understand the swift and lethal power of the loud stick all too well.

Nonetheless, the recent snow fall had been heavy, and the outside goings on had declined to just a few essential chores.

The game was changing.

The boy-child let go of the saddle strap, balancing himself in the small alcove. “Owe-owe-owe,” he said happily. He began clapping his hands together and took one tentative step towards the side access. He loved the outside, the tall trees in the distance like gigantic sentries, the crisp air, and vastness of the land, how it rolled and disappeared underneath them when his Daddy walked with him in his arms. But now the outside was covered in a brilliant whiteness, the likes of which he had never seen, and the inquisitiveness tied to his learning to walk was morphing into a profound notion of exploration.

Another step. One more. “Owe!” he exclaimed and began to walk drunkenly towards the opening.

Perhaps it was his own happiness brought on by his son’s innocent repetition of the word, the only one he’d ever speak, that caused him to relax his ever-present caution in that moment. He thought of his wife and daughter, their combined beauty. They had made a delicious dinner of vegetable stew and fresh baked sourdough bread the night prior – they meaning his wife, as their daughter was only three years old and mostly watched, though she’d been intensely involved in mixing the dough – and he resolved to return the favor by letting them both sleep in.

Quietly, he re-lit the large coal stove in the cabin’s main room, which ignited with an audible woomph in spite of his efforts. He gathered his still sleeping daughter from the small mattress atop pallets in the alcove outside their bedroom and laid her next to his wife where his impression was still warm.

Their son, awake and gumming his knuckles eagerly in his crib of shaved and stained sapling bows, brightened as his Daddy reached in and lifted him up, draping him over his broad shoulder.

And now the wolf caught a scent it hadn’t taken in before. It was human at its baseline, but pure and unfettered, unlike the alpha keeper, and light years from the callous, plundering trappers. Curious, resolute, and ever opportunistic, the animal crept forward in the snow.

The toddler emerged from the opening. He dropped his dowel, squatted, and patted the snow with splayed hands like starfish and repeated his new word – his Papa’s – with vigor.

Through a keen combination of sight, sound, and smell, the wolf calculated its new query’s weight and mass to near exactness. It was an ancient and instinctive process done without thinking, something that would, over time, baffle those that study their kind and help bring them back from the cusp of extinction.

It considered the likelihood of snatching the youngling in its jaws, the strongest among animals in this part of the world, and running back to its family without being snared or shot. The odds were favorable to the predator. It discerned no acrid smells of gunpowder or veiled poisons in the chilly air – deadly lessons learned over the past year.

Yet it hesitated.

An artless, intuitive duplicity unfolded in its mind: acting on this new prey could compromise their efforts with the larger one, a kill that could sustain them easily throughout the long winter. But the pack also lived in the moment, very much so, and the fact that their stomachs were empty, hadn’t held so much as a few field mice in their digestive grips for weeks, advanced any immediate opportunity.

Ten yards.

The alpha keeper was close, just a few steps beyond the dimly lit opening.

Eight.

“Cow,” the little boy called into to the infinite, white morning, clapping his starfish hands.