The Winter Wolf (4 page)

A
melia twitched and wriggled sleepily, trying to find her pillow. It had hitched up, somehow, and now she was pressed against the wall. And she must have kicked off her duvet, too, she was so cold. Amelia gave up trying to reach for them with her eyes shut and sat up.

There was no pillow, and no duvet, either. She wasn’t even in her bed. Amelia clutched the hairy brown blanket, the only thing that seemed familiar, and tried to work out where she was. Slowly, it came back to her – that she’d gone upstairs to the attic. She must have fallen asleep in that battered old armchair. But it didn’t feel like she was still curled up there – the chair was comfy, even if it was falling apart. Now it felt as if she was sitting on straw.

She peered through the dimness, trying to see where she was. It had to be morning – she could see chinks of light showing round the door, over on the other side of the little room. But if she was in the attic, there would be light coming through the windows in the roof. Had she gone sleepwalking, and found her way to another room of the house?

It was then that the dark shape next to her – she’d taken it to be another piece of furniture – suddenly moved and blew a gust of hot breath down her neck.

Amelia squeaked and jumped sideways, and then scrambled up, reaching for the door. What was that? Where was she? She wrestled with the strange, bulky latch, all the time waiting to feel that hot breath again, as whatever it was came to eat her.

Something snorted, and there was a heavy shuffling, and as Amelia managed to pull open the door at last, she saw where she was.

The cold white glow of sun on snow lit up the little stable, and the cow that Amelia had been lying next to watched her curiously. In the stall beyond, two horses eyed her over the wooden partition, ears flickering with interest.

There were no animals at Allan House. Except for Freddie, of course. And Tom, if she was being mean.

This was not the house she had gone to sleep in.

It wasn’t even the winter she had gone to sleep in, Amelia decided, standing in the doorway and looking out at the huge drifts of snow. That couldn’t have built up overnight. It looked like days or even weeks of snow – someone had dug a path between the drifts, leading to the stable, and the snow stood in great walls on either side.

Amelia frowned. Something about that seemed familiar, but she wasn’t quite sure why.
Digging their way out
– it was what Noah had said, in his diary. There were drifts up to the eaves of the cabin, and he and his pa had to dig their way to the stable each morning.

It was just like the diary. Amelia shut her eyes for a moment, counted to ten and
opened them again, but she hadn’t woken up. And it didn’t feel like a dream. She was
in
the diary.

Slowly, she let the door swing shut and sank down next to it. Her eyes were getting used to the dimness, and it helped that now she knew what all the strange shapes were. She could still just about see the two horses, and the dark bulk of the cow. She was quite a small cow, Amelia realized. Not as big as the ones they’d seen in the fields on their drive up to Scotland. But even a small cow was a lot bigger than Freddie, which was odd, because Amelia didn’t feel very scared of her. And that didn’t make sense.

Amelia gave a little snort of laughter, and one of the horses whinnied in surprise.

“Sorry…” she murmured. “Nothing about this makes sense, that’s all.
That’s why I laughed. I can’t be here! Maybe I’m not,” she added thoughtfully. “Maybe I’m still dreaming.” Carefully, she picked her way across the hay-strewn floor and went to stroke the velvet noses of the horses.

“You feel ever so real to me. And this stable
smells
real. Not to be rude,” she added hastily, “but I don’t usually dream smells, and I think your stable needs cleaning. I suppose you must be Russet and Ruby. He said you were beautiful and you are. And you must be Lucy,” Amelia added. She wasn’t quite sure about stroking the cow. She had been riding a couple of times at the local stable and she liked horses, but she’d never met a cow before. Did they bite?

“Noah wrote that you were sad because
your calf was sold,” she murmured. “And that you stood on his foot and it swelled up, but he thought you probably didn’t mean to.”

The horses’ ears flickered again, and Amelia stepped back as one of them stamped and snorted.

“Did I scare you?” she whispered.

But the horses weren’t paying her any attention now – they were looking eagerly towards the door. Amelia turned to look, too, and heard footsteps crunching through the snow.

“Someone’s coming!” she hissed. She looked wildly around the stable, trying to see if there was somewhere in the shadows she could hide. But the stable was tiny – all she could see was a tangle of harnesses hanging up in the corner. She crouched
behind it hurriedly, hoping that whoever was coming wouldn’t stay long.

She peered round the harnesses as the door opened and a boy who looked a couple of years older than she was dashed in, banging his mittened hands together against the cold. A tall, bearded man followed him inside, wearing a fur hat just like the one Amelia had found in the attic.

“I swear it’s freezing harder than ever out there,” the boy said, as he wedged the door half open with a chip of wood.

Amelia tried not to lean out too far from behind the harnesses, but she was so desperate to listen to them talking. The boy sounded American, but not like on television, she thought, frowning. Different – harder to understand. Maybe like people talked in America a hundred and fifty
years ago… And they both definitely had old-fashioned clothes – great clunky leather boots and woollen coats. Amelia peered through the dimness in the stable and swallowed. The coat the boy was wearing, that was the coat with the wooden buttons from the trunk. She recognized the pattern, those big brown checks.

“Hey, Ruby, hey, Russet. Good girl, Lucy. Brought your hay, look.” The boy bustled around the stable, filling the nets with fresh hay, while the man – his father, Amelia guessed – swept up the soiled straw on the floor. Amelia shrank back as far behind the harnesses as she could, pulling up some straw around her knees. The boy looked quite friendly – he had dark, floppy hair like Tom’s, but his eyes were softer, blue instead of brown. He looked – nicer. Maybe it was just that whenever Amelia saw Tom he was being sneery about people who were scared of dogs. But however kind the boy was, his father seemed stern. He had a black beard, and huge black eyebrows that made him look as though he was scowling. He didn’t seem to talk much either.

The boy was petting the horses, and murmuring to them as he refilled their water buckets, and the man clapped him gently on the shoulder. “I’ll go back and chop the wood, Noah. Come and help me when you’ve finished the stable work, you hear? I’ll need the chips picking up.”

“Yes, Pa.”

Noah watched his father stride away between the snowdrifts, and sighed. “I’ve got to go out and check on the pup, though. Maybe Pa won’t notice how long I’ve been.”

Amelia saw him stop petting the horses – his fingers clenched into fists and he shook his head angrily. “I’ve got to keep him fed. And what if he wanders off? If he goes too close to the Wrights’ place, they’ll shoot him. I can’t let that happen.
I can’t… I have to help him. I’ve got to keep him alive, however hard it is.” Then he added, in a whisper so low that Amelia could only just hear, “It’s just like last year. I couldn’t save Grace. I’m not letting it happen again…”

Amelia frowned. He had mentioned Grace a few times in the diary – talking about things they’d done together, or how he missed her. Amelia had thought Grace was one of his friends, and maybe she’d moved away. But then he’d talked about Grace being in trouble for tearing her dress, and his ma having to mend it.

So she must have been his sister. Amelia’s stomach twisted as she suddenly realized. Grace was Noah’s sister. His little sister, and she’d died. That was why his voice had been so shaky. Now he was
leaning against the nearest horse’s neck to hide that he was crying.

Amelia swallowed. He’d said that Grace was pale and tired, and talked about her coughing all the time. But Amelia had never thought that meant she’d died. Probably it wasn’t that unusual to lose a brother or sister, living out in the woods with no doctor anywhere near. And even
if the doctor could get to you, there were no antibiotics, hardly even any painkillers back then. Amelia’s teacher had told her class that it wasn’t that long ago that people thought eating a fried mouse was a good cure for whooping cough.

“But how am I supposed to find enough to feed him? Especially with Pa already watching me like a hawk. I reckon the pup’s been slowly starving these last few days, he’s so hungry,” Noah muttered.

Amelia wrapped her arms round her knees and stared at the boy quietly stroking the horse’s neck. She could do it. She could go and check on the pup for Noah. Except – it was a wolf, and a wolf was an even scarier sort of dog. With bigger teeth, probably. Amelia didn’t go near dogs, ever. She’d only been up in the
attic and found the diary because she’d been trying to stay
away
from a dog!