The second pup lay still. Then his chest lifted and fell, and lifted again. More evenly now. Without that long pause he’d had down by the creek. Eleanor pulled up a chair and sat down.
She remembered the milk about twenty minutes later, when the second pup started squirming and giving a weak little whine, nosing at the sweater. She had sold the goat two years ago; she was too old now to keep up with a goat. Frank brought over a quart and a half of cow’s milk every other day. Yesterday’s was still in the fridge, still fresh.
Eleanor poured some into a small saucepan and set it over low heat. Waited. Touched a drop to her wrist: warm, not hot. The same test she’d used forty years ago.
What to feed them with—that was the question. She went through the kitchen drawers methodically, one after another. Found it: a small rubber bulb syringe from the medicine cabinet. Bought years ago for rinsing something out. Now it had a new job.
She drew up the milk and offered it to the first one. He lunged, choked, spat it back out, lunged again. Eleanor didn’t rush him. One hand held him steady, the other held the syringe. It was small, patient work. Her fingers still hadn’t fully warmed up from the morning damp, but she paid no attention.
The second one wouldn’t take the milk. Turned away. Kept his mouth shut. Eleanor wet her finger and held it to his muzzle. A tiny pink tongue touched her finger once, carefully. Eleanor pulled her hand back and picked up the syringe.
When both of them fell asleep, she poured herself tea. It had gone cold while she was busy. Eleanor drank it cold, standing at the window.
Outside, the hollow lay under fog. The blooming chokecherry over the creek showed up as a white blur in the gray. She still hadn’t gone back for the buckets.
Last Friday, she had heard gunshots from the far side of the woods. Two of them, spaced apart. Hunters. Spring season allowed some things. The mother wolf. That much was obvious without much thinking. A den somewhere near the creek, in the wet low ground—good cover. Somebody must have found the pups afterward. Couldn’t bring himself to kill them, or didn’t want to. Didn’t know what else to do. Hung them in a sack on a tree and walked away.
Eleanor didn’t judge. She understood that kind of logic very well: walking away is easier than deciding. Most people do exactly that. Most people are sensible.
She set her mug in the sink. Then stopped. She hadn’t walked away. She had taken the sack and carried it home, and now two living things were breathing in a boot box by the heater partly because she had not kept walking. It was a simple thought. It passed through her mind and disappeared, the way simple thoughts do. Eleanor didn’t bother unfolding it any further.
She set the alarm for one a.m., then four, then seven. The phone lay on the nightstand beside the bed. She hadn’t used the alarm in years, and the screen looked unnaturally bright.
At one she got up, went to the kitchen, fed them. The first one hollered and demanded food with the confidence of somebody who assumed this arrangement had always existed. The second took milk from her finger more willingly than he had that evening, with a little more purpose now.
The heater hummed in the corner. Eleanor sat in the dark, holding the syringe and listening. There were sounds in the house that had not been there in eight years. Tiny paws rustling against cardboard, breathing, a brief whimper, more rustling. Small, foolish, persistent life in a boot box.
Eleanor did not think about what it meant. She just sat there. Just listened. When both of them quieted down again, she set the syringe aside and stood up to go back to bed. In the doorway she stopped and realized suddenly that she had not once gone over tomorrow’s chores in her head. Not once all day.
That was strange. Strange enough that she stood there another second, as if trying to remember where she had misplaced the habit and how long ago. Outside, dawn was already coming. In late April, darkness doesn’t last long.
The notebook turned up in a desk drawer, green cover, graph paper, bought years ago as a spare and never used. Eleanor opened to the first page, took a pen, and wrote across the top: “Feedings.” Then underlined it.
Then she ruled the page into three columns: time, amount, notes. Old bookkeeping habits don’t die. They just go looking for a new subject…
