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button. The room filled with the recorded singer’s darkly searching voice. Gail tried to remain neutral, unmoved, critically appraising the haunting melody, but, as always, Barbara Jean’s music evoked in her feelings of undying sadness, longing, joy, reverence, and quaking awe—all at once. There never seemed enough of her to experience the song fully, and each time she heard it a new dimension tunneled open, unexplored. She leaned against the sofa and clasped her hands together as the first verse lilted toward the refrain and into a place beyond the uncanny skill of the musicians, beyond words, beyond notes, beyond music itself—a place where the sublime simply exploded inside her heart.
    Gail hurried back to the porch and tried to play along with the recording, but she sounded awful. Her fingers couldn’t move fast enough. Some of the chords were elusive, unknown. Her tone lacked clarity, and it was not just a failure of technique. She, as a person, lacked depth, imagination. The musicians on the recording were not only more practiced, they were different in kind, better.
    This was the reason she played in a second-rate country band,
     where her audition had not involved any bass playing at all, only, “Turn around once, slowly.”
    She put her bass down and just listened, staring into the back yard. Though she could not play as she wished, at least she knew what was good. Barbara Jean’s voice floated through the doorway and merged with the mottled patterns of sunlight. After several minutes Gail looked down at her hands, watched them fold into her arms, and smiled.

GRIEF
    T HE CRYING BEGAN WITH RISING, SONOROUS HOWLS. THEN A shrill, hysterical whine joined a succession of rapid yelping barks. Primeval moans intoned the interminable sorrow ofabanbarks. Primeval moans intoned the interminable sorrow of abandonment, mocked by a wild, warbling laugh. Taken all together, they sounded to Jacob Helm like demons at a drunken feast.
    But of course there were no such things as demons, and in the next instant he wondered if eight or ten people had decided for some reason to come to his remote home on the edge of the woods in the middle of the night to scream at the top of their lungs. He moved quickly away from the kitchen table, where, unable to sleep, he had been rebuilding an old carburetor, and stood beside the open window. But the frightful sound was not quite like people screaming, either, at least not normal-sized people. Little people perhaps. Very small people might be capable of . . . and then he knew what they were: coyotes.
    He’d never heard them this close before.
    Their voices continued. Coyotes—he was sure of it now. He’d read about them after moving into the area five years ago. Canis latrans, creatures of the forest and fields, often heard but rarely seen, also called prairie wolves though not as large as wolves. Nocturnal predators, they ate mostly mice and insects, supplemented by road-kill. They were not generally aggressive but were opportunistic. They lived in groups for mutual protection, mating and raising pups, though they mostly hunted individually or in pairs. Membership was for life. Packs rarely accepted new members.
    “I hear you,” he said through the screened window. “Go away.”
    When the howling finally stopped, Jacob glanced at the clock. He returned to the table, wrapped the carburetor in newsprint, closed his eyes, and attempted to think about sleeping. He needed at least
     a couple hours of unconsciousness. His body ached with the frustrated desire for rest, but his mind’s thirst for wakefulness remained unquenched.
    Then he heard them again, further away—on the ridge above him—this time even more shrill and desperate.
    And out of the center of these sounds came something much wilder. A new cry cut through the night air in a single shaft of terror. And if the earlier sounds could be said to resemble the screaming of little people, this more primitive voice could only