Three Winters
The mayor did not believe her at first.
The mayor was not a bad man. He was just busy. He had a celebration to plan. He listened politely.
Anya had been ready for that. She had brought Mrs Tannen, and the village forester, and an article she had clipped from a newspaper about a forest in Bavaria where the same thing had happened with bad results. She had also brought, very carefully bagged, a tuft of grey fur she had gathered from the clearing — proof, of a kind, that she had been there.
The mayor listened more carefully.
It took six weeks of meetings. Anya went to all of them. She was, eventually, listened to. The new road was rerouted around the eastern end. The villagers agreed to keep their dogs in at night. The hunting club voted, narrowly, to suspend deer hunting for three winters.
The wolves did not come back at once.
They came back the next autumn. The forester saw two. By the spring after, there were nine. Anya, very quietly, kept track of the count in her notebook.
She never went back to the clearing. She had a feeling she should not. The wolves had agreed to come back; they had not agreed to be friends.
But one morning, very early, Anya went to the edge of the forest with a small piece of bread. (Bread, again. Anya had not realised, at the time, that she was doing something her great-grandmother might have done.) She put the bread on the stump where she had