Turtle nodded vigorously. She loved pickles. Pickles were one of the great unrelenting good things in life, and the highest state that a cucumber, which was otherwise a rather wet and insipid vegetable, could aspire to.
“And he … well, he said a lot of things. Not nice things. I don’t know what he was expecting, but I wouldn’t take that kind of talk from your grandfather, so damned if I was taking it from some crazy woodsman who hung around the place like a puppy waiting for a kick.” She gave an awkward little laugh into her tea. “I am old enough that I should have known better. If I had driven him off early on — well, maybe it wouldn’t have come to this. But I felt sorry for him. Stupid of me, but there you are.”
“Pity is a poor kin to mercy,” said the wolf.
“And what do wolves know of either?” snapped Grandmother, nudging the wolf with her foot.
“Of pity, very little,” said the wolf agreeably. “But of mercy we know much, particularly when it comes with teeth. That is what we are doing here tonight, is it not?”
Grandmother sighed. “I suppose.”
“What happens tonight?” asked Turtle, leaning forward on the stool.
Grandmother gazed into her tea.
“Tonight,” said the wolf, “I believe the woodsman is going to come to kill her. And we will kill him first, or not, as may be.”
“Perhaps it would be best if Turtle hid in the outhouse for this,” said her grandmother.
Turtle wanted to protest — if somebody was going to get killed, she certainly didn’t want to be hiding in the privy and wondering what was going on! — but the wolf beat her to it.
“Your children are cubs too long already,” he said. “You do them no kindness by teaching them to be fools.” He yawned. “And if she stays out there, what is to stop him from finding her there first? It is better that she stay here. If she is here, we are close enough to help her.”
“The wardrobe, then,” said Grandmother, and bowed her head.
“How do you know he’s going to try and kill you?” asked Turtle, whose eyes were so wide that she thought she might never blink again.
“He killed the goat,” said Grandmother. She swiped the back of her hand over her eyes. “That makes me the angriest. That poor goat. She never did anything to anybody. She was a nice goat.”
“He killed your goat?” Turtle had listened to the description of the woodsman with the general ambivalence of children, but this was something else again.
Like many people who live close to the land, Turtle’s family divided animals into two camps. There were those animals that created food — milk cows and laying hens and and plow horses and the better sort of nanny goat — and there were animals that were food. And while the latter went unnamed (unless it was “Dinner”) the former fell somewhere between employees and family. They had names. They had personalities.
Even Turtle’s mother had to wipe at her eyes when the black-speckled hen had died last year.
So far as Turtle was concerned, killing a goat — particularly that rarest of breeds, a nice goat — put the woodsman in a camp of villains that included the devil, her father’s mother, and Attila the Hun.
“And the worst of it,” said Grandmother, getting up to pace and gesture with the sloshing tea cup, “the worst of it was that he somehow expected that to make it better! Like chopping the poor goat’s head off was going to make me glad to see him again!”
“What did you do with the goat?” asked Turtle, who was a practical child. There was a lot of meat on a goat.
“I couldn’t deal with it,” admitted Grandmother. “I was too angry. My friend here took it.”
The wolf grinned and dragged his tongue across the white fringe of his teeth. “We are not sentimental about our meat. To keep live prey about the house is a strange foolishness of humans. But I accept that this is a human thing, and to kill another’s house-prey is a great crime.”
He stood up and stretched, and the cottage got a great deal smaller again. “Soon, now. The woods are quieting in the wrong sort of way. Someone is coming.”
Grandmother checked the blue bottle again, stuck her little finger in the neck, and licked the thin film of moisture again. “Very well,” she said, tossing it down. “Turtle, get into the wardrobe. If things go badly — if — well — if something happens — ”
“Something is going to happen,” said the wolf, amused. “Perhaps we will all sit around like cubs in a den, and frighten each other with what we imagine to be outside, but even that is something.”
“I shall kick you,” said Grandmother with dignity.
“I shall bite off your leg,” said the wolf, grinning.
“Very well, then,” said Grandmother. “Turtle, if I am — killed — then go with the wolf. He will see that you get home safe. And if we are both killed, then stay in the wardrobe and do not make a sound until he has left, then run home as fast as you can.”
“That is better,” said the wolf.
Turtle climbed into the wardrobe. It was a few inches off the ground and creaked a little. There were winter blankets piled on the bottom, under the hanging clothes, and she was flexible enough in the boneless way of girl-children to curl herself up inside.
The keyhole let a little shaft of light inside, and there were gaps under both hinges. By shifting ever so quietly inside, Turtle could see both the door and
