The Wolf in Winter Read Free

of the winter, food would become more plentiful. For the time being, he was reduced to the status of a scavenger. He was weak from starvation, butthat afternoon he had picked up the scent of a young deer, and its spoor had led him to the outskirts of the town. He smelled the deer’s fear and confusion. It was vulnerable. If he could get close enough to it, he might have enough strength and speed left to take it down.
    The wolf sniffed the air, and picked up movement among the trees to his right. The deer stood motionless in a thicket, its tail raised in warning and distress, but the wolf sensed that he was not the cause of it. He tested the air again. His tail moved between his legs, and he drew back, his ears pinned against his head. His pupils dilated, and he exposed his teeth.
    The two animals, predator and prey, stood united in fear for a moment, and then retreated, the wolf heading east, the deer west. All thoughts of hunger and feeding had left the wolf. There was only the urge to run.
    But he was wounded, and tired, and winter was still upon him.
    A SINGLE LIGHT BURNED in Pearson’s General Store & Gunsmithery. It illuminated a table around which sat four old men, each of them concentrating on his cards.
    “Jesus,” said Ben Pearson, “this is the worst hand I’ve ever seen. I swear, if I hadn’t watched it dealt myself I’d never have believed it. I didn’t even know cards went this low.”
    Everybody ignored him. Ben Pearson could have been holding four aces dealt by Christ himself and still he’d have bitched. It was his version of a poker face. He’d developed it as a way of distracting attention from his regular features, which were so expressive as to give away his every passing thought. Depending upon the story that one was telling, Ben could be the best or the worst audience a man might wish for. He was almost childlike in his transparency, or so it seemed. Although he was now in his seventies, he had a full head of white hair, and his face was comparatively unlined. It added to his air of youthfulness.
    Pearson’s General Store & Gunsmithery had been in Ben’s family for four generations in one form or another, and yet it wasn’t even the oldest business in the town of Prosperous, Maine. An alehouse had stood on the site of what was now the Prosperous Tap since the eighteenth century, and Jenna Marley’s Lady & Lace had been a clothing store since 1790. The names of the town’s first settlers still resounded around Prosperous in a way that few other such settlements could boast. Most had roots back in Durham and Northumberland, in the northeast of England, for that was where Prosperous’s first settlers had originally come from. There were Scotts and Nelsons and Liddells, Harpers and Emersons and Golightlys, along with other more singular names: Brantingham, Claxton, Stobbert, Pryerman, Joblin, Hudspeth. . . .
    A genealogist might have spent many a profitable day scouring the town’s register of births and deaths, and some had indeed journeyed this far north to investigate the history of the settlement. They were received courteously, and some cooperation was offered, but they invariably left feeling slightly dissatisfied. Gaps in the town’s annals prevented full and thorough research, and making connections between the settlers of Prosperous and their ancestors back in England proved more difficult than might first have been expected, for it seemed that those families which departed for the shores of the New World had done so in their entirety, leaving few, if any, stray branches behind.
    Of course, such obstacles were hardly unfamiliar to historians, whether amateur or professional, but they were frustrating nonetheless, and eventually the town of Prosperous came to be regarded as a dead end, genealogically speaking, which perfectly suited the inhab­itants. They were not unusual in that part of the world in preferring to be left untroubled by strangers. It was one of the reasons their