Demon Child

mewling in excitement, but were growling with deep, fierce hatred. The scent of their adversary was so strong now that it probably burned their nostrils.
        Five minutes after the pack had entered the cave, the sound of fury dropped noticeably, to less than half of what it had been. A minute after that, the first of the dogs came outside, snuffling at the ground, looking so unconcerned about the taunt, expectant men on horseback that all of them felt a little embarrassed.
        The other dogs came out, one by one.
        “What does it mean?” one of the neighbor men asked.
        “The wolf's gone,” Halliwell said. “A smart bugger if there ever was one. Scooted out of here when it heard us-instead of cooping up and trying to hold us off.”
        The men began reslinging rifles in cases. They looked like a group of children just arrived at the movie theater on a Saturday afternoon to see a sign informing them there would be no matinee this week.
        The dogs were reset after they picked up the trail on the other side of the clearing, and the party set out once more.
        “Well, maybe it'll be fun after all,” Walter said.
        Jenny was not sure of that. She guessed she had a different concept of “fun” than men had. But she was determined to stick with it, simply because Walt was staying on and she didn't want to cop out and look like a quitter in front of him.
        But later, when they halted the hunt long enough to take lunch on the lawn behind the Brucker mansion, she opted out of the afternoon's trek. She said she had some things planned, some necessary chores, and that she had hoped they would catch the wolf in the morning and she could finish her business in the afternoon. But since they had thus far failed, she would have to forgo the actual moment of triumph.
        Walter understood, which was a relief.
        Richard seemed delighted that she was staying home and his delight was the one thing that almost forced her to change her mind and continue the hunt.
        Later, when the party returned to the main house at seven in the evening, she was grateful that she had not given in to that impulse, for they had found nothing, absolutely nothing, in all those hours.
        Despite their lack of success, most of the men were in a very jolly mood, as if they felt the fact of the hunt was far more important than the outcome of it. They chatted, complained good-naturedly of their riding bruises and sores. And they consumed a frightening amount of Anna's cooking, again, on the tables that had been set up on the lawn. Much speculation concerned the elusive quarry, but none of them seemed impressed by the fact that a killer wolf, possibly rabid, was loose so near their own homes.
        The two police officers behaved somewhat differently, more like men who have done a hard day's work without seeing any reward for their labors. They ate quickly, drank sparingly, and left the estate with their horses in a government van, long before the others had even finished eating.
        Walter was full of stories concerned with the afternoon's hunt, all of them touched with his special wit and with his perfect sense of comic exaggeration. He kept both Jenny and Cora laughing as he described the antics of the party of hunters. It was far better, Jenny thought, listening to Walt's account of the day than to really have gone along and experienced it.
        As usual, Richard spoiled the mood of good humor that had come to prevail. He stepped up beside Hobarth and interrupted one of the doctor's tales. “I fail to find much to laugh at,” he said.
        They turned and looked at him, saw a weary man with a tight jaw, anger barely controlled. He seemed to have aged ten years in this past week, with dark circles beneath his eyes, his cheeks sunken and his color a rather unhealthy yellow-white.
        “We have to laugh at the world,” Walt observed, cradling his pipe in the palm of his right hand. “If we don't laugh, it will break all of us.”
        “There's still a wolf loose,” Richard said.
        “Perhaps,” Hobarth said. “Or, perhaps, all the mucking around with dogs and horses drove it back where it came from, further up into the mountains.”
        “Wishful thinking,” Richard snapped.
        “What would you have us do,” Walt asked. “We are but two women and a psychiatrist, after all. Shall we go out and challenge the beast to hand-to-hand