Winter of the Wolf Moon by Steve Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

gonna be now.”
    “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did you take it?”
    “To hurt him,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest. “It’s the only thing I could think of. Pretty lame, isn’t it?”
    “Here,” I said. I put the puck on the table. “You should keep it.”
    She stared at it on the table and let out a long, tired breath.
    “Is he that bad?” I said. I thought I had had this guy pegged pretty well when I met him, the kind of guy who doesn’t want to do anything else but play his sport, and can’t deal with the fact that he’s not quite good enough. I saw it all the time in baseball, guys who got cut and then spent the rest of their lives taking it out on the rest of the world. There’s one on the end of every bar in every town in America. But the way her voice sounded when she said she wanted to hurt him, maybe there was something else. Something a lot worse. “I know it’s none of my business,” I said.
    “You know those wolves I was talking about?”
    “Well, yeah, I kinda figured you weren’t talking about real wolves and real moose.”
    “Let’s just say Lonnie’s the first wolf,” she said. “Not the worst wolf, just the first.”
    “I don’t get it.”
    “You shoot one wolf, there’s more behind him. Bigger wolves. With bigger teeth.”
    I let that one go. I figured she was just talking about the rest of his hockey team. I should have asked her about it. But I didn’t.
    The woodstove started to heat the place up a little bit. She felt comfortable enough to take off her coat and sit down at the table. She told me about growing up as an Ojibwa, getting out of the U.P. as soon as she could, going downstate for college, dropping out, working a lot of jobs. No matter how bad it got, she never thought of coming back up here. Then she met Lonnie. She didn’t tell me much more about him. Shedidn’t tell me what he had done to her, or why he had brought her back up here.
    She asked me about myself, about why I had so many long stories. I surprised myself and told her a couple of them. Not all of them. I guess it just felt good to talk to somebody. It was the first time since Sylvia left.
    “You’re the lonely man with long stories,” she said before I left. “If I could make you an Ojibwa, that would be your name.”
    “What’s your Ojibwa name?” I said.
    “I don’t have one anymore,” she said. “I gave it up a long time ago.”
    “It’s going to be cold tonight,” I said. “You better leave the water running a little bit. Just a trickle. It’ll keep the pipes from freezing.”
    “I’ll do that,” she said. She came to the door as I left. “There’s a good lock on here, right?”
    “Yes,” I said. “Although you don’t have to worry. You’re in the middle of nowhere.”
    “Thank you, Alex,” she said. “Good night.”
    As she closed the door, I felt a vague, distant sadness for both of us. Standing there in the darkness, waiting for my eyes to adjust to it again, feeling a cold wind coming through the pine trees. We had both been through so much. Different problems but the bottom line was the same. People are bad for each other. And yet we keep trying. We can’t stand to be alone.
    It was late. I needed to sleep so I could get up the next day and do everything I could to help her. It surprised me how much I wanted to help this woman. Maybe it was a chance to show myself I could still do something right, after all the mistakes I had madein the last year. Something meaningful besides splitting wood and plowing the snow off the road.
    I went back to my cabin and slept. In the middle of the night I thought I heard her voice, but when I lifted my head it was nothing but the drone of a snowmobile engine. All night long those idiots keep driving those things through the woods. I cursed the man who invented them and went back to sleep.
    The next morning, there was six inches of new snow on the ground. The fire had gone out in my woodstove, so I