Running with the Pack

ran out, times got lean again, people were frogging their sweaters and re-knitting them. I’d taught them to fish, but I ended up hungry for it.

Jimmy used to make fun of me for not eating meat. He used to laugh and say that humans hadn’t crawled to the top of the food chain just to eat lettuce. But there’s a problem with being at the top of the food chain. I had read an article on pesticides killing birds of prey, they were dying because of farmers setting out poisoned grain to kill rats. The rats would eat the poison and die, and then vultures and eagles and owls would eat the poisoned rats, and they’d get poisoned. Same with sharks and mercury-tainted fish. They were at the top of their food chain, I mean, except for humans, but it wasn’t doing them any favors. Not in the end.

In the end, it didn’t do us any favors, either.

I had started eating meat. I had to. Elsbet too, though she hadn’t ever had it before, Jimmy had been all right with us raising her vegetarian, but towards the middle of that first winter, when we ran out of canned beans and damn near everything else, I traded some knitted stuff for some goat meat and we cooked it and ate it. It had been so long I couldn’t recall if it tasted strange or not, but we were starving, it wouldn’t have mattered. Elsbet hated it, eating animals. I did too. At first. But what can you do? Desperate times. Meat was scarce, though, a lot of animals had died, too, corn in their feed. The ones that survived must’ve been immune, a slight genetic abnormality or something. Recessive traits, I remember doing Mendel’s Squares in biology class. Something like that. But thinking about it I also remember reading something about evolutionary defenses, how onions make you cry because they’re trying not to get eaten, like poison ivy—one-two-three, don’t touch me, another expression—or like skunks. Maybe skunks would be a better analogy here because they’re animals. But I’m not sure. It’s all I’ve got, my only theory, I figured it out for myself.

The way it started was this: I had seen Fred Jones in town, he traded me some meat for a scarf and a hat, he didn’t have time to learn to knit, he was a farmer, his wife had died. Anyways Fred and I got to talking and I told him I was running low on yarn, and he asked if I could spin, he had a bunch of sheepskins and if I wanted to shear off the wool and spin it into yarn I’d be welcome to, as long as he got something out of it. So I went out there.

It should’ve tipped me off when I saw the flock, standing on their hind legs, huddled together, bleating at one another like it was the most natural thing in the world. But things had gotten so crazy at that point it didn’t even occur to me that I should be concerned. I’d seen odder things, everybody had, but the sheep, there they were, standing upright. I wish now I’d asked Fred if that was normal for them. I can’t ask anymore, I can’t speak, only to myself, so it’s too late. I’d ask the sheep, but they shy away from my scent, and rightfully so.

I took the fleece and began to learn to spin it. I had a book in the shop and a few distaffs, spindles, and spinning wheels Jimmy and I had ordered when we thought our shop would be a success. I mean, it was. Briefly. Just not in the way we’d meant. Actually, it wasn’t. Isn’t. Not anymore. It doesn’t matter. I got the hang of it quickly—it wasn’t too hard, really, but everything takes time. I finally had enough to knit some long underwear for Fred and a sweater for Elsbet, and I’d just started on the knitting when the wolf attacked us.

I had been cooking up some of the mutton Fred had given me. The wolf must’ve smelled it, he opened the door with his paw and just walked right in through the kitchen door on his hind legs like something out of a fairy tale, mouth open, tongue lolling, saliva dripping down his chest, I expected there to be a bonnet on his head and glasses perched his muzzle, the better to see you with, my dear. Elsbet screamed and ran, but I shot it with Jimmy’s shotgun, I kept it close by, everyone did, it was just a good idea. I wasn’t a good shot. I clipped its shoulder but it was enough to take it down and then I stabbed it through the heart with my kitchen knife. It was ugly, eat or be eaten, or maybe nature, red in tooth and claw. I threw the carcass outside and calmed Elsbet down, washed off with some hot water and we ate dinner. Then I put her to bed.

I was knitting her sweater when I had the idea—it was a shaggy wolf, and I could spin fur into yarn as easily as wool. I cut it off with the shears, and when I got bored of knitting, I’d spin it. It was coarse, terrible, oily stuff, more like rope than yarn when it was spun, and I decided to make a belt out of it, mine had snapped a month before and I’d been holding up my pants with rope.

When I put the sweater on Elsbet she complained, said it was itchy. Her cries sounded like bleating. She’d always worn shirts under her sweaters before, but they’d all gotten too tight and she had to wear it against her skin. Over the next few days I noticed her face and her hands and feet got darker, her ears longer. Then one night when I went to put her to bed I couldn’t get the sweater off, it had grown into her skin. Elsbet? I asked. Maaaa, Maaaa, she replied. She couldn’t say anything else.

She wouldn’t eat mutton after that night, or goat. It made her sick. But she could graze on leaves and dry grass when I raked away the deep, deep snows, cracked the ice. It was so cold.

As for me, I was ravenous for meat.

I’d sold most of the yarn I’d spun from Fred’s sheep, and I hadn’t much to trade other than that. Times were lean. I was hungry constantly, I even ate the wolf I’d shot, it had frozen solid in the snow and been preserved well enough. When I couldn’t stand the hunger any longer I took the axe and chopped it into pieces and fried them up, gnawing them down to the bones after I put Elsbet to bed. The more lamblike she became the more it distressed her to watch me eat, and I admit now, it was probably a pretty grisly sight.

Gradual changes never seem like change at all, which is why I think I didn’t notice what was wrong with me until I went next door to my neighbor’s house to beg for some hay for Elsbet—they kept horses, and she’d clipped the lawn bare, front and back, and we were friendly, I’d traded them some of the yarn I got from Fred. I knocked, I heard my neighbor come to the door, but he fumbled with the knob for a while before getting it open. When he saw me he screamed and slammed the door in my face. I knocked again but I heard him through the door, Go awaaaay, go awaaaaaay. I growled at him, I just wanted some hay. When he didn’t respond I stole it, desperate times, wondering the whole time if they’d gone crazy, shut up in their house like everyone else, trying to keep the cold at bay. But when I came back to my house I caught sight of myself in the hall mirror and I understood.

The pointy ears and muzzle had grown so slowly I don’t think I ever would’ve noticed them if my neighbor hadn’t said something. When I looked down at my hands I realized it hadn’t been the cold in my joints that had prevented me from knitting recently, they were little more than paws. I paced back and forth and then unknotted my wolf-fur belt and peed in my favorite corner, thinking hard. Where was Elsbet? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her, but I finally remembered tethering her in the yard to graze—had it been this morning, or the morning before, or the morning before that? Her wooly coat made it less important for her to be inside, she seemed to like the cold. I spent most of my hours in front of the wood-burning stove, curled up, always hungry, always sleepy. But that wasn’t right, she was my daughter. She should be inside.

Either I don’t remember so well what happened next or I’ve tried to forget for so long that I’ve convinced myself I don’t remember. I know I opened the door to our back yard and saw her, standing in the twilight, shivering, nibbling something. I had hay for her, I remembered then, and I ran and got it from where I’d dumped it in the foyer, and brought it outside. She must have smelled the hay first, Maaa, Maaa, she bleated, but then she smelled me and her eyes went wide. I certainly smelled her, the dung smell farm animals have, and also her little-girl smell, plastic dolls, juice. Delicious. I dropped the hay and loped towards her, I was so very hungry, ravenous, I was salivating and she couldn’t run away, easy prey, an old dog’s collar around her neck, tethered to the tree in our backyard. I had nursed her under that tree when she was an infant, later, tea parties with the My Little Ponies that had been mine when I was a girl. Maaa, Maaa, she said, begging me, but then I was curled up by the wood-burning stove again, full, warm, the rich taste of blood and stringy muscle caught in my teeth.

Elsbet. Where was she? I ran upstairs, maybe it was a dream, I remember hoping I had just eaten some more of that old frozen wolf, but she wasn’t in her room. At some point my pants tore off of me as I ran, frantic, the tail popped them and they hung in shreds, my crooked legs didn’t fit anymore, but the belt stayed on, part of me, that gray belt, gray like my own fur. She wasn’t upstairs. I paced her room, back and forth, growling, and hopped up on her bed to look out the window. There she was, what was left of her. The collar was still around her neck, her little mauled head surrounded by stripped bones and pieces of meat, lots of white wooly fluff.

I’d like to say I felt remorse, that I feel it now, but I’m not sure anymore what I make up—what are stories I tell myself as I sleep by the wood-burning stove after I’ve eaten—and what is real. I’d like to say I howled, mourning for a daughter lost, but I know what I felt was fullness, of being sated, not hungry, warm. It is how I feel as I eat Fred’s sheep, one by one, sneaking into the barn at night. It’s safe against most predators but not against me. I hear them whispering stupid sheepish things to one another as they stand