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friend.”
    She did not really think they would, but she wanted to reassure him. The words ‘wicked child’ came back to her, gloating and nasty. Who had said them to her? A part of her feared that whoever had said those words would be out there, waiting for her among her kind to punish her for crimes unknown. But only her kind had those big leaves, so if she wanted to get onto one, she had to risk it. How could she bring Four-foot with her, though? Her kind did not get on with his, and they would hurt him if they saw him. She would have to hide him somehow.
    A sudden noise made her throw herself down in the tall grasses next to her friend. A big wooden thing with a man on top was rolling along the road ahead, pulled by a donkey. Neither the man nor the donkey noticed them, the man because he was preoccupied and inattentive, and the donkey because he was blinkered. Two-foot crawled forward until she was almost at the road, and the man, donkey, and contraption had passed by. At night, she knew, in the rainy season, her kind would drape coverings over their horses and donkeys to keep them warm. A covering like that would be big enough to conceal Four-foot, if he would hold still for it.
    A few minutes later, she had spotted the dwelling she wanted. It was one of the larger wooden hills, the ones with bigger entrances that never produced any clouds. The animals slept there. When nobody seemed to be looking, she sprinted across the road and slipped in through the doors. It was coming back to her, in bits and pieces. She had once had one of these wooden dens, she thought. Why had she left?
    It was musty in this den, where her kind kept animals imprisoned behind shoulder-high wooden walls. She heard hogs snorting about, but did not see them. The big square animal covers were folded neatly to one side of the door, on one of those wooden platforms that her kind put things on. She thought she had eaten from one once, or was the problem that she had not eaten?
    Most of these covers were too heavy – it was so hard to lift one that she could not imagine also carrying Four-foot hidden underneath. Two-foot sorted through the covers, dropping them haphazardly on the ground until she found one that was lighter. With that one tucked under her arm, she walked out the door only to find a big man standing there in front of her.
    â€œHey!” the man said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
    She considered running, but that would have meant dropping the cover, and then she would have had to go through with this whole thing again somewhere else. That didn’t seem worth the effort.
    â€œI need…” she began, haltingly.
    The man caught her arm and pulled it, painfully. The cover fell to the ground.
    â€œYou need to have your fingers off as a thief, that’s what you need.”
    Two-foot did not bother reasoning with him. Her speech was out of practice anyway. Instead, she whistled. The man shook her, thinking that she was only being insolent. He realized too late that Four-foot was bearing down on him from behind, and he had only just let go of Two-foot and turned around when Four-foot knocked him to the ground, his jaws savaging the man’s arm and shoulder. Two-foot had never heard one of her kind scream like that before. It frightened her, because it might attract others, with sticks. So she told Four-foot to leave off and stood surveying the damage to this screaming man’s body.
    She was not sure whether he would die. Another animal might last a few hours or a day like this, but her kind could be ingenious. With help, this one might even last a week, or longer if his arm didn’t swell and turn colors. The man stopped screaming and looked up at her, terror in his eyes. Four-foot sat at her side, cleaning the blood off his jaws and fur.
    â€œKeep it off,” the man whimpered. “Oh, please keep your wolf off. Don’t let it kill me! You want money? Here, take my