“Oh,” said Turtle. “Um. I will. Thank you?”
The wolf nodded once, and turned like a cat in a tight space, nose over tail, and trotted into the woods. She saw him slip into a run, and the thick green ferns closed over his trail.
She realized that she was gripping her basket very tightly, and pried her fingers loose. There were red marks in her palm and across the pads of her fingers where the wicker handle had bit into the skin.
Still, she was young, and it did not occur to her to turn around and go home. There might be unkind things in the woods, but there were very definitely brothers and yelling at home.
So Turtle kept walking down the path, and because she was a little nervous, she began to sing to herself. She did not have a very good voice, and she could not remember most of the words, but that didn’t matter, because the point was to make noise and reassure herself that she was not scared, not one little bit.
Eventually she fell back into a lot of “hey fiddle dee and hidey ho,” with the occasional “hey nonny” thrown in. “Hey nonny” is a parasite that attaches itself to folk music, and left unchecked can suck an unsuspecting song completely dry. The infestation of this particular song was not far advanced, but did not bode well for future generations.
So Turtle went on, singing badly and occasionally remembering a line or two about crows in the corn and the wee yowes amongst the heather. (It is worth noting that Turtle had a vague image of a wee yowe as some kind of miniature monster, possibly an elephant.) And in such a state, she arrived at the clearing that held Grandmother’s house.
Her grandmother kept the house tidy, and flowers grew all around the front porch. Hollyhocks rose in great columns against the wattle walls and a climbing rose had invaded the thatched roof. Turtle walked under the thorny archway and tapped the door.
It was slightly ajar and swung open at her touch. She took a step inside, holding her basket in front of her with both hands.
“Grandma?” she asked, in her wavering child’s voice.
And stopped.
And stared.
There was a wolf in her grandmother’s bed.
Turtle was not a stupid child. The wolf was clearly a wolf, even across the room, not anything else. He lay stretched across the blankets, as long as a human was tall, and he raised his great head and looked at her.
It was the same wolf from earlier. She was almost sure of it.
She did not scream. She did not run away. She most certainly did not say anything foolish about her grandmother having very large teeth, because she was not a sarcastic child by nature, and even if she had been, her heart was pounding very loudly in her ears and making it very hard to think.
“Oh,” she said, in a very small voice, and clutched the basket handle so hard that the wicker cut into her fingers.
“Turtle?” asked her grandmother. “Child, what are you doing here?”
Her grandmother sat up in bed. She had been lying next to the wolf, with her arms wrapped around his neck and her face buried in his shoulder. Her voice was thick and raw and it did not occur to Turtle until much later that her grandmother had been crying.
“Mother told me to come and stay with you tonight,” said Turtle. “Um.” More explanation seemed to be needed, so she flapped her hand in the direction of the village. “My brothers…”
“Ah,” said her grandmother, with all the comprehension that one can pack into a single syllable. She pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “It would have to be tonight, wouldn’t it?”
Turtle’s grandmother was not an old woman, not in the sense of being ancient and crooked down by the weight of years. They had children early in that part of the world, early and often. I would say that she was about sixty-five. The oldest part of her was her hands. Her hair had gone the color of iron. She was still handsome in a tall, haggard way, and there was never any problem with living alone. She hired men to chop her firewood, or dragged her grandsons out to do it, but that was her only concession to age, and the broad vegetable garden she weeded herself.
Grandmother swung her feet over the edge of the bed and said “Perhaps it would be better if you went home.”
Turtle fidgeted. She did not want to go home. The woods had frightened her a little, and the best thing she could hope for at the end of the return journey was yelling and brothers.
“If she goes now, she may meet him coming here,” said the wolf.
Grandmother inhaled sharply.
“Who?” asked Turtle.
Her grandmother fidgeted a patch of quilt between her fingers.
“The woodsman,” said the wolf, when it became obvious that the older woman would not answer.
“The woodsman?” asked Turtle, puzzled. “Which one?”