Wolves...

She was cleaning her shotgun. If she had lived in the city people would have been aghast that she was cleaning a gun, and appalled that it was her own gun, and she had known how to shoot it and how to clean it for years already. But out here? People lived differently. A gun was just another tool on the ranch. Instead of in the city where it seemed that a gun wasn’t a tool but was owned by many who were.

There had been a wolf attack the night before. One of the calves had been taken. Tonight, they would bring the herd in closer to the house. The riders would stay up all night with their dogs at heel. Circling the mothers and babies to make sure that there were no more thefts.

Though she could never really think of it as a theft. More a cost of doing business here. The wolves were here first. The people took over the land. Planted grass, chased off the wildlife, and put in herds of docile, easy, prey. Losing a young one or a sick one to the wolves seemed inevitable.

Her family agreed for the most part. They didn’t kill the wolves that hunted their herd. They scared them off. Made them look for easier pickings. Which in a way was just chasing their problem away to become someone else’s problem. But you did what you needed to, to protect your herd. And the wolves did what they needed to as well.

When she was little her mother read her bedtime stories. When they would finish the story her mother would ask her what the lesson was. She learned that most of the stories we tell children we tell them to learn a lesson. Stories about getting lost in the woods were to teach you to be safe and stick to the path. Stories about getting popped into an oven for eating the witch’s house taught you not to take things that didn’t belong to you.

When she heard the story of Little Red Riding Hood in school she came home and asked her mother what the lesson was supposed to be. Red met the wolf on the path. She hadn’t been someplace she wasn’t supposed to be. The wolf snuck into her grandmother’s house and ate her. The grandmother wasn’t someplace she wasn’t supposed to be. The wolf was doing things no wolf would do. What was the lesson?

Her mother responded by giving her Goldilocks and the Three Bears to read. She told her mother she’d, obviously, already read it. But her mother told her to read it again. Thinking of the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood while she did.

What was the lesson?

Goldilocks didn’t get punished for breaking into the bear’s house and eating their food and breaking their things. She just got chased away. But what did I think happened to the bears?

What happened to the wolf?

How did a woodsman happen to be there right away? And why did he cut grandma open so quickly? And what happened to grandma’s house?

Maybe the stories were a distraction to be scared of the wolf instead of the woodsman.

When you are reading the stories, always remember to think about the wolf and the woodsman and the little blonde who thinks she can take whatever she wants. Who should you be scared of?

Protect yourself from the wolf. Protect your herd from the wolf. But know that they are doing what nature says they should do to survive.

But always question what the woodsman and Goldilocks are planning.

And keep your gun clean.