Toad Words(4)

For there were woodsmen all through the land in that time, and none of them were precisely alike. They carried axes and cut down trees for houses, most of them, but they were also hunters and trappers and brought fur and pelts to trade, or wild mushrooms, or strange herbs. There was one woodsman who lived up in the hills—no one knew exactly where—who panned for gold in the streams and brought tiny vials of glittering dust to trade.

They were odd people. They were welcome in town, of course, and if land needed clearing, you sent out word and a half-dozen would show up with their great pitted axes, but they had territories rather than homes, and they wore furs instead of homespun.

“His name isn’t important,” said Grandmother. “I’d rather not…that is…oh, surely she can go home!”

The wolf, who had no name (wolves never do) said “She may do as she wishes, but I would not let a cub of mine go down that path tonight.”

“Perhaps he won’t come,” said Grandmother wretchedly.

“Then he will come tomorrow,” said the wolf, “or the next day. But I believe it will be tonight.” He heaved himself off the bed and paced toward the fire.

Turtle set down her basket, which was growing heavy, and put her hands on her hips, and said, in her very best grown-up voice, “I want to know what is going on!”

“Oh…oh, my dear…” Her grandmother fidgeted again. This was unusual. Her grandmother was not a fidgeter by nature, and she generally had little patience with maundering.

The wolf lay down. He did it all at once, with a great hwwuffff! and he took up a great deal of the cottage doing so.

Grandmother sighed. “Let us have tea. This will be easier with tea.” She got up, stepped around the wolf, and poured herself a very small drink from a small blue bottle on the mantle. She drank it.

Turtle tapped her foot. This did not look very much like tea.

“The woodsman came here earlier in the season,” said Grandmother, coughing a little on the contents of the bottle. She took down the kettle, shook it a little—water sloshed inside—and she set it on the pot-bellied stove to heat. “He offered to cut firewood for me, and I accepted. He would take no payment, but he seemed lonely, so when he stayed to talk to me, and came back sometimes for tea and to talk, I thought it was the least I could do.”

The wolf set his head on his paws. Turtle sat down on a little three-legged stool and hugged her knees.

“He seemed lonely,” Grandmother repeated. She got out two mugs for tea, gazed at the little blue bottle for a moment, then took a slug directly from it. “And odd, but many of the woodsmen are. They live such isolated lives. I thought—perhaps he had simply forgotten some of the social graces. And he said that people had been unkind to him. I felt sorry for him…”

Sarcasm is largely foreign to wolves, and completely unknown in dogs (although coyotes have a well-developed sense of it), but the sound the wolf made was very close.

“Yes, well,” said Grandmother. “I should have listened to you.”

“Yes, you should have,” said the wolf. It was a statement of fact that held no censure in it. “But you did not, and now we are here. Perhaps if you had listened, we would also be here. There is no counting the rabbits you did not catch.”

“He came more and more often,” said Grandmother, as the tea kettle began to wail. “He wanted to talk more and more. It was not so strange, perhaps. But I was tired of listening to him, because he told all the same stories of people being unkind. It was exhausting to listen to. And he would do things around the house—little things, things I do not mind doing or do not want a stranger doing—and then would be angry when I asked him not to.”

“That’s odd,” said Turtle, hugging her knees. Chores were something you did, but getting mad because you didn’t have to do them was completely incomprehensible behavior.

Her grandmother shook her head and ran a hand through her iron gray hair. “He would act hurt. He said he didn’t want to be paid, that he was doing it because I was alone out here, and hadn’t he chopped my wood? And asked for nothing in return? It was all very tiring. It was easier to just let him patch the wall or hoe the vegetables than to listen to him complain about it.”

Turtle accepted her cup of tea and chalked this up to one more example of grown-ups being strange.

Her grandmother shrugged. “It is a long story, and it doesn’t reflect too well on me. I should have told him not to come here then. My friend here told me as much. But I felt sorry for him. And some of the things were so odd, it was hard to know how to react—he would get angry over such odd things—do you remember when you brought me those scones last week, dear?”