“Hell Warren! You’ve got to do something.” shouted Emma at her husband. “That’s
six chickens gone in a week, it’s got to be a wolf, just look at those tracks.”
“Yeah, I’ve been looking,
Em,” Warren replied, “and there’s something strange about them, I just can’t
quite put my finger on it.”
“They’re wolf tracks alright Warren, just you mark my words, they are and you’d better be doing something about that damn killer, and fast.”
Warren and Emma had lived in their home in the mountains
for almost six years. The cabin as they called it, though it was in fact a large residence by anyone’s standards was
set in beautiful surroundings on the fringes of a national park, close to the forest and the clean fast flowing river where
Warren would spend many happy hours fishing, bringing home his catch for Emma to cook and boy, could she cook! Of all the
things he loved about his wife and there were many, Warren would have to admit that her
skills in the kitchen would be near the top of the list.
They’d both given up successful careers in the
legal industry, Emma as a lawyer of some repute, Warren as a public prosecutor with a reputation for winning cases in order
to ‘get back to nature’ as they put it and to enable Warren to write the novel he’d always felt bubbling
just below the surface of his conscious mind. Two years ago his book had been published and became an instant hit, if not
quite an international bestseller and his second attempt at literary fame was now nearing completion.
“OK, Em, I’ll go take a look,” he
said, sighing as he pulled on his heavy woollen coat, and reached up to the rack above the front door where his rifle hung
at the ready. He quickly changed into his waterproof boots, grabbed a couple of boxes of ammunition from the drawer in the
cabinet in the study and, kissing his wife firmly on the lips, stepped out into the brisk, cold morning air.
He set off in the direction of the receding tracks;
the ones he felt had a strangeness about them. The morning air was cold enough to cause him to gasp now and then as he walked,
as it assaulted his lungs and attempted to take his breath away. Pulling his hat further down so that the woollen flaps covered
his ears totally he trudged on through the thin layer of snow. Winter was approaching fast. Soon, such an expedition would
be nigh on impossible as two feet or more of snow would turn their backwoods paradise into a white winter hell and he and
Em would be forced to live off their supplies for the coldest three months of the year. At first it had been a trial and quite
frightening to have to live like nomads through the cold darkness of the mountain winter but as the years had passed they’d
adapted and got used to the life. Now it had become part of their routine and they saw nothing unusual in their annual ‘hibernation’
from the rest of civilisation.
Warren suddenly wondered as he walked,
why the wolf, if indeed it was a wolf, hadn’t attacked either their horse in the barn or Billy the goat, who they kept
in a lean-to shelter adjacent to the house. Surely they would have made a far juicier target for a hungry wolf than a few
chickens. He looked again at the tracks. He thought again about their strange appearance. Even allowing for the fact that
the wolf may have carried off it’s prize of the chickens and would be forced to stop every now and then, put them down
and rearrange them in its jaws, (he thought), there was still something about the tracks that didn’t quite add up. Not
being an expert on wolves (or any sort of animal come to that), Warren simply shrugged in perplexity,
hoping that he could solve the riddle before too long.
