Eleanor went down to the creek with two buckets. She needed water for the beds she had just planted. She followed the familiar path almost by feel: here the pine, here the rut, here the split-trunk birch. She was thinking about the gate hinge. Today for sure. It was getting ridiculous—three weeks and she still hadn’t found half an hour for one piece of hardware.
The chokecherry over the creek emerged from the fog like a dark shape, its white blossoms almost glowing in the damp. Eleanor set down the buckets, reached for the dipper, and saw it.
Something dark hung from a low branch. Heavy. Lumpy. A sack tied with rope. It swayed a little, though there was no wind at all.
Eleanor froze. One hand was still on the bucket handle, and later she would notice how hard she had been gripping it. Then she heard the sound. Faint, broken, barely a sound at all—almost just air, with the slightest trace of something alive in it. But she heard it.
The buckets stayed where they were. She stepped toward the tree, slowly at first, then faster, and reached up for the sack. The rope had been pulled tight, the way somebody ties a knot when they want to make sure it won’t come undone on its own.
Eleanor yanked the sack down with both hands, and it was heavier than it looked. Something inside pushed weakly once, and she stopped for half a second. Then her fingers moved faster. The knot wouldn’t give. Her hands were stiff from the cold damp, and one fingernail snapped against the rope. So she bent down and took the rope in her teeth.
The sack opened. Wet burlap, dark with dew. Inside were two of them. Gray, each about the size of her fist, eyes still shut, ears flattened to their heads.
Eleanor looked at them for one second. Exactly one. Then she pressed the sack to her chest, turned, and headed for the house. Fast, as fast as her legs and the muddy path would allow. The buckets stayed by the creek. Later she would tell Frank she ran. For her, that counted as running.
She dropped a newspaper onto the kitchen table, spread the sack over it, and opened it carefully with both hands, the way you unwrap something breakable. Both alive. That was the first thing she checked, poking gently at their sides and necks with her fingers. Breathing. Unevenly, with pauses—especially the smaller one—but breathing.
Cold. That was the main problem. Eleanor was already reaching for the faucet, already filling a bowl with water, not hot, just warm. She tested it with her elbow, the way she had once done years ago when Mike was little and still needed that kind of care.
She wet a cloth and wrung it out. Wiped down the first one. He jerked and shoved his nose into her hand. Alive and pushy. Good.
The second lay quiet. His chest rose and fell with pauses a little too long for comfort. Eleanor set the first one back on the newspaper, took the second into her hands, and began rubbing him in steady strokes, without hurry, the way you knead dough. Monotonous. For a long time.
Warmer, she thought. First warmer. Everything else later.
She tucked the first one inside her sweater, right against her body. He immediately started wriggling and jabbing at her ribs with what she assumed was his nose. Eleanor ignored him. She kept rubbing the second.
The box came from the top shelf of the closet, left over from a pair of winter boots she had bought three years earlier. Big, sturdy, still smelled like cardboard. She set it on the floor by the radiator. The heat had already been turned off for the season. End of April. She touched the metal and grimaced. Cold.
She went to the corner where the old electric space heater had been sitting since winter, orange with a metal grate, bought back when Walter was still alive. She pushed the button. At first nothing. Then it hummed, coughed out the smell of burnt dust, and started putting out heat. Good.
She opened the bottom dresser drawer. Walter’s sweater lay at the very bottom—gray, thick-knit. She had put it there eight years earlier, in those first days after the funeral, and had not touched it since. She simply moved other things on and off it whenever she needed something, then laid them back again.
Eleanor took it out without thinking anything specific, just grabbed the first thing that felt soft and warm, and laid it in the bottom of the box. It looked soft. It looked warm.
She set both wolf pups on the sweater and placed a hot-water bottle beside them—a plastic bottle filled with hot water, wrapped in a kitchen towel so it wouldn’t burn them. She checked it with her hand. Just right…
