Free Train Dreams by Denis Johnson Page B

this was a person—a female—a child. She lay on her side panting, a clearly human creature with the delicate structure of a little girl, but she was bent in the arms and legs, he believed, now that he was able to focus on this dim form in the moonlight. With the action of her lungs there came a whistling, a squeak, like a frightened pup’s.
    Grainier turned convulsively and went to the table looking for—he didn’t know. He’d never kept a shotgun. Perhaps a piece of kindling to beat at the thing’s head. He fumbled at the clutter on the table and located the matches and lit a hurricane lamp and found such a weapon, and then went out again in his long johns, barefoot, lifting the lantern high and holding his club before him, stalked and made nervous by his own monstrous shadow, so huge it filled the whole clearing behind him. Frost had built on the dead grass, and it skirled beneath his feet. If not for this sound he’d have thought himself struck deaf, owing to the magnitude of the surrounding silence. All the night’s noises had stopped. The whole valley seemed to reflect his shock. He heard only his footsteps and the wolf-girl’s panting complaint.
    Her whimpering ceased as he got closer, approaching cautiously so as not to terrify either this creature or himself. The wolf-girl waited, shot full of animal dread and perfectly still, moving nothing but her eyes, following his every move but not meeting his gaze, the breath smoking before her nostrils.
    The child’s eyes sparked greenly in the lamplight like those of any wolf. Her face was that of a wolf, but hairless.
    “Kate?” he said. “Is it you?” But it was.
    Nothing about her told him that. He simply knew it. This was his daughter.
    She stayed stock-still as he drew even closer. He hoped that some sign of recognition might show itself and prove her to be Kate. But her eyes only watched in flat terror, like a wolf’s. Still. Still and all. Kate she was, but Kate no longer. Kate-no-longer lay on her side, her left leg akimbo, splintered and bloody bone jutting below the knee; just a child spent from crawling on threes and having dragged the shattered leg behind her. He’d wondered sometimes about little Kate’s hair, how it might have looked if she’d lived; but she’d snatched herself nearly bald. It grew out in a few patches.
    He came within arm’s reach. Kate-no-longer growled, barked, snapped as her father bent down toward her, and then her eyes glassed and she so faded from herself he believed she’d expired at his approach. But she lived, and watched him.
    “Kate. Kate. What’s happened to you?”
    He set down the lamp and club and got his arms beneath her and lifted. Her breathing came rapid, faint, and shallow. She whimpered once in his ear and snapped her jaws but didn’t otherwise struggle. He turned with her in his embrace and made for the cabin, now walking away from the lamplight and thus toward his own monstrous shadow as it engulfed his home and shrank magically at his approach. Inside, he laid her on his pallet on the floor. “I’ll get the lamp,” he told her.
    When he came back into the cabin, she was still there. He set the lamp on the table where he could see what he was doing, and prepared to splint the broken leg with kindling, cutting the top of his long johns off himself around the waist, dragging it over his head, tearing it into strips. As soon as he grasped the child’s ankle with one hand and put his other on the thigh to pull, she gave a terrible sigh, and then her breathing slowed. She’d fainted. He straightened the leg as best he could and, feeling that he could take his time now, he whittled a stick of kindling so that it cupped the shin. He pulled a bench beside the pallet and sat himself, resting her foot across his knee while he applied the splint and bound it around. “I’m not a doctor,” he told her. “I’m just the one that’s here.” He opened the window across the room to give her air.
    She