Juliet and Stu were still standing in the carport, debating whether Stu should walk the six miles to the nearest neighbor’s house, when they heard something on the roof. Stu froze in place, an anxious look etched on his face.
Not knowing what he had seen or heard, Juliet followed his lead, going still and silent. A moment later she heard it. A gentle thud, then something that sounded like claws scraping the roof.
When Stu spoke, his tone was soft but urgent. “Get in the house and lock the door, and stay there no matter what happens,” he said. The next part was shouted, an anxious command. “Do it now!”
Juliet ran for the door. She hadn’t put away the key ring, but she fumbled with it briefly, trying to find the right key for the knob, sorry she had turned the thumb latch before walking out. Stu came close behind her. Behind him—she knew because she heard his exhaled curse, not its landing—was something else. She didn’t want to see what it was—knowing it was there and that it was frightening enough to make Stu run into her in his haste was bad enough.
She finally opened the door and fell inside. Stu was still behind, but she was sprawled out on the floor, and he paused, ever so briefly, maybe deciding if he should walk right on her or try to leap over. He was still standing there when something snatched him out the door again, hurling him into the yard.
“Lock the door!” he screamed.
She forced herself to slide out of the way enough to shove it closed with her feet. When she heard it latch, she pulled herself up on the knob, setting the thumb latch again, then the dead bolt. She leaned against the solid wooden door for a few moments, catching her breath.
But outside, Stu struggled with whatever had attacked them. She heard his shouts of terror and anguish, and deep, throaty animal roars. Once again she wished she had taken the advice of her neighbors and bought a gun.
Rushing to the window, she peeked out.
What she saw filled her with a kind of horror she had never imagined.
Stu had fallen to the snow-covered lawn—the snow had stopped falling; the sky was the color the edge of her hand got when she drew with a soft pencil for too long. He flailed with his arms and legs against a beast, a silvery canine with black markings. A rabid dog? she wondered.
Then it came to her. Not a dog.
Stu fought a wolf.
She remembered hearing reports of occasional wolf sightings locally. Wolves, virtually wiped out in the late nineteenth century, were being reintroduced to wild places around the West. Some farmers and ranchers objected, but the wolf-recovery forces usually seemed to win out.
The canine was huge and muscular, far larger than any wolf she had ever seen a picture of, and it snarled and snapped and pawed at Stu, who was on the ground, screaming and trying to fight but growing weaker even as Juliet watched.
Helpless.
If she’d had a gun she might have been able to hit it. Its broad shoulders and big head provided reasonable targets. But the best weapon she could come up with was one of the carving knives from her kitchen. If she went out with that, all it would get her was killed.
Stu had told her to stay inside, no matter what happened.
Did he understand what he was asking? Did he know that it would mean she would have to stand here and watch him die, doing nothing because there was nothing she could do?
He couldn’t have known the noises on the roof were a wolf, could he? He had dismissed that idea after seeing the cattle. But even if he’d thought so, he couldn’t have known how big it was, or that it could climb so well, or that it would be fast enough, vicious enough, to yank him out an open door.
She watched Stu bat at it hopelessly. The canine had one massive paw on his chest, holding him down. When the wolf lowered its head toward Stu’s throat, she cringed and squeezed her eyes shut. That lasted only an instant; by the time she opened them again, the wolf was lifting its head, its muzzle slick and red. Stu’s screams had finally stopped.
Tears streamed down Juliet’s cheeks. What had she been thinking earlier? That death surrounded her?
She hadn’t known the half of it then.
Stu no longer moved. The animal lowered its head again, then whipped it from side to side. Tearing at something. Juliet saw stringy, bloody tissue clutched in its teeth. It chewed, swallowed. The snow around the wolf and Stu’s lifeless shape was disturbed, lumpy, melting, and splattered with so much red that it looked spray-painted.
Then slowly, horribly, the wolf turned its head, looking past its left shoulder.
Right at her.
In its yellow eyes she saw a ferocious intelligence and a terrible hunger.
The cattle weren’t enough for it. Neither was Stu.
That beast wanted her.
Juliet made sure that every door was locked. Where there were curtains open, she closed them. She turned on every light in the house. She tried the phones again, even carrying her cell phone upstairs and standing as close as she dared to all the windows, in case there was a stray signal that had seeped into the canyon. No luck.
Having done all that, she sat down on the couch in the living room and pulled a blanket around herself. She shivered, even though she had turned the thermostat up to eighty and the heater blasted away. She tried to empty her mind, to force herself to stop seeing the awful way the wolf had regarded her, to stop hearing Stu’s screams and the wet ripping noises the animal made long after she had stopped watching. The last time she’d peeked from an upstairs window, bloody paw prints led away from the mangled remains of the man who had been her friend and her ranch hand.
She couldn’t assume it had left, though. That’s what it wanted her to think. It wanted her to believe that it had moved on, so she would go outside, make a run for the Bledsoe place down the road. Then it would come at her, like a cat chasing a mouse, toying with her until it got tired of the game and finished her off.
How long could she stay inside? She had enough food for a week, probably. The ranch had its own well and septic system, so water and sewage wouldn’t be issues. Electricity, like phone service, came in on wires from the road, so if it had been clever enough to cut the phone lines, it could do the same to the power. A propane tank provided heat, but the furnace needed electricity to work. To operate the thermostat? She wasn’t sure about that, although she thought not. So even if the canine shut off her lights, she wouldn’t have to freeze.
Until the propane ran out.
Surely before that might happen she would be saved. Every now and then the mail carrier came to the door with a package too big for the mailbox at the end of the lane. Or a UPS driver. The mailman might even come to check when he saw her mail start to pile up inside the box. All she would need to do then was run from the house and get inside his Jeep, or the UPS truck, and slam the door and tell the driver to drive, drive away as fast as he could. One of her friends from town might even come out when a few days went by without her answering her phone.
Her thoughts brightened a little at that. There was a way out of this, after all. She would have to stay awake during the daytime, when it was likeliest that someone would drive close to the house. And weren’t wolves nocturnal? So when the best opportunity presented itself, the canine would likely be sleeping somewhere.
She would leave this damned ranch and never return, never even look back. Let it go back to the land, let the house collapse with everything in it, she didn’t care. Let the wolf have it all.
“You can have the ranch, but you won’t get me,” she said out loud. She meant for it to sound defiant, but instead it rang hollow, pitiful, to her ears. She wrapped the blanket tighter around herself and trembled.