The warm yellow light of the sitting room lamp flooded out onto the back yard, highlighting the darkness of the woods beyond. Inside, a small girl sat with her parents and a book, and all three smiled. Neither mother nor father minded the time, or their daughter’s bedtime, for they didn’t usually get to spend time with her. They would have read together well into the night and gone to bed with happiness in their souls, had the girl not looked out the window.
“Daddy,” she said, turning to tap his shoulder from her place on his lap. “Look. There’s a wolf outside.” She pointed, and both mother and father looked to where her little hand indicated.
The lone young male wolf, the runt of the pack, stood on the edge of the garden, in a patch of darkness just out of the woods, barely visible. His yellow eyes glinted as he looked longingly in at the happy family.
Her father lifted her off his knee and stood, watching the creature’s shadowed outline warily. The wolf met his gaze, calm and pleading. The father’s gaze hardened, and he strode suddenly for the door.
“Go to bed,” her mother commanded quietly, hurriedly, trying to keep her quivering voice under control, before she strode after her husband, reaching down to touch her daughter’s back in an attempt to usher her from the room as she did so. The girl resisted.
“Don’t hurt him,” she begged of the closing door. The moment she was alone, she ran to the window and pressed her nose against the cold glass. There were her parents’ silhouettes, her mother’s hovering a short way from the back door, her father’s advancing aggressively across the back garden towards the wolf. He had his gun, and he had it aimed right at the creature’s nose. But the wolf did not watch the gunpoint that threatened his life. His hopeful, desperate eyes met only hers. She placed her hand against the window: a sign of friendship.
Outside, the father yelled at the creature, and, alarmed, it turned its muzzle to see for the first time the danger that lurked right in front of it.
He turned tail and ran off into the trees.
That night, the parents slept fitfully, worries of their daughter’s safety flitting through their dreams. But the locked back door was no consolation to the girl. She laid awake and listened for the wolf’s return, worrying only of the poor outcast’s wellbeing. Sure enough, she heard his helpless whining and his scratching on the door about an hour later, and she could not sleep for feeling his sorrow.
In the early hours of the morning, she could stand it no longer. She slipped out of bed and from her room, careful not to make a sound. She crept down the stairs, silent as a shadow, and reached up on her tip-toes to unbolt the door at the bottom.
The first her parents heard of it was a bang and a shriek. The mother, terrified, sat bolt upright in bed, listening intently, her heart racing. She climbed out of bed to check on her daughter only to find, to her horror, her bed empty. She cried out and ran down the stairs, her husband now on her heels. At the bottom of the hallway, they were greeted with a cold breeze from outside, and stepped around the carcass of the battered back door. The father fetched his gun from the cupboard under the stairs and the mother cautiously pushed open the sitting room door.
Inside, the little girl sat beside a scrawny yellow-eyed wolf with tangled grey fur. Both mother’s and daughter’s eyes widened; the mother stepped back and laid a hand on her husband’s shoulder, the daughter laid a protective hand on the wolf’s flank. The wolf blinked dolefully up at the parents; the father clenched his jaw and tightened his grip on the barrel of his gun.
“Sweetie, get away from that monster!” the mother called.
“Daddy, don’t hurt him!” the daughter called.
But her words were drowned out as her father took aim between a pair of startlingly yellow eyes and fired.
She never did find out what that pleading look in his eyes was for.
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