The Taking

stairs. The windows remained faintly luminous, as if with the reflected glow of the aurora borealis.
        Although her disquiet slowly gathered the force of apprehension, just as a revolving hurricane spins ever greater winds around its dead-calm eye, Molly crossed the foyer to the front door.
        Flanking the door were tall, French-paned sidelights. Beyond the sidelights lay the porch onto which she had looked from her office.
        The coyotes still gathered in that shelter. As she drew near the door, some of the animals turned once more to gaze in at her.
        Their anxious panting painted pale plumes on the glass. From behind this veil of smoking breath, their radiant eyes beseeched her.
        Molly was inexplicably convinced that she could open the door and move among them without risk of attack.
        Whether or not she was as tough as she believed herself to be, she was not impulsive or reckless. She didn't possess the fatalistic temperament of a snake handler or even the adventurousness of those who rode rafts over white-water rapids.
        The previous autumn, when a wildfire churned up the eastern face of the mountain, threatening to cross the crest and sweep westward to the lake, she and Neil had been, at her insistence, the first among their neighbors to pack essential belongings and leave. Her acute awareness of life's fragility had since childhood made of her a prudent person.
        Yet when writing a novel, she often shunned prudence, trusting her instinct and her heart more than she did intellect. Without risk, she could get nothing on the page worth reading.
        Here in the foyer, in this false-aurora glow, under the anxious gaze of the gathered canines beyond the French panes, the moment had a mystical quality, more like fiction than reality. Perhaps that was why Molly considered hazarding onto the porch.
        She put her right hand on the doorknob. Rather, she found her hand on the knob without quite recalling when she had put it there.
        The roar of the rain, escalating from a cataclysmic chorus until it became the very voice of Armageddon, and the witchy light together exerted a mesmerizing effect. Nevertheless, she knew that she wasn't falling into a trance, wasn't being lured from the house by some supernatural force, as in a bad movie.
        She'd never felt more awake, more clearheaded. Instinct, heart, and mind were synchronized now as they had rarely been in her twenty-eight years of experience.
        The unprecedented September deluge and everything about the odd behavior of the coyotes, not least of all their uncharacteristic meekness, argued that the usual logic didn't apply. Here, providence required boldness rather than caution.
        If her heart had continued to race, she might not have turned the knob. At the thought of turning it, however, she felt a curious calm descend. Her pulse rate declined, although each beat knocked through her with jarring force.
        In some Chinese dialects, the same word is used to mean either danger or opportunity. In this instance, as never before, she was in a Chinese frame of mind.
        She opened the door.
        The coyotes, perhaps a score of them, neither attacked nor growled. They did not bare their teeth.
        Amazed by their behavior and by her own, Molly crossed the threshold. She stepped onto the porch.
        As if they were family dogs, the coyotes made room for her and seemed to welcome her company.
        Her amazement still allowed a measure of caution. She stood with her arms crossed defensively over her chest. Yet she felt that if she held a hand out to the beasts, they would only nuzzle and lick it.
        The coyotes nervously divided their attention between Molly and the surrounding woods. Their rapid and shallow panting spoke not of exhaustion after a long run, but of acute anxiety.
        Something in the rain-swept forest frightened them. Evidently, this fear was so intense that they dared not respond to it with their customary snarls, raised hackles, and counterchallenges.
        Instead, they trembled and issued soft mewls of meek submission. Their ears were not flattened to signal an aggressive response, but remained pricked, as if they could hear the breathing and the subtle footfalls of a fierce predator even through the crash of rain.
        Tails tucked between their legs, flanks trembling, they moved ceaselessly back and forth. They seemed