Faith understood that theirs was a world of secrets. She told no one that she could start a fire simply by imagining a red flame or that she could leap from the roof and land softly on the balls of her feet. She could call birds and fish to her, and because of this she soon discovered that certain rumors in town were, indeed, correct; there was a serpent in Leech Lake, a large gray-scaled eel-like creature she soon trained to eat crusts of bread from her hand. She told no one about his existence, for already she had witnessed how men handled any creatures they deemed to be monsters. This winter, she had spied two hunters dragging a she-wolf from her den; they murdered her in the snow, along with her pup. Wolves were outlawed in the colony, and men went about killing them one by one, as they did with the native people. One of the first laws the Puritans had passed in 1630 was to place a bounty on wolves, and that included Indian dogs, which looked to be a mixture of a wolf and a fox. A black wolf’s fur was worth the most, and the poor mother wolf had a coat of that color. Faith had been hidden behind the bramble bushes, her hand over her mouth so they wouldn’t hear her sobs. It was a terrible thing to have witnessed, and it changed who she was. She felt her difference tenfold, and the part of her that was human was ashamed of humankind.

Another pup, overlooked by the hunters because he was so small and weak, soon emerged from the den. His half-opened eyes were silver-gray, the same shade as Faith’s own, and his coat was pure black, all the better to slip through the night unnoticed. He went to Faith as if he’d known she was waiting for him, and that she could be trusted, and that they belonged to one another. Faith raced home carrying the tiny surviving pup. Maria gave Faith a leather glove filled with goat’s milk for the wolf pup to drink, sucking on a hole cut in the fingertip. Faith kept the wolf in her bed that night, to make sure he stayed warm. She named him Keeper, for she didn’t intend to let him go. Sometime after midnight the pup ceased whimpering, and soon they were dreaming the same dream, girl and wolf alike, a dream of blood in the snow, and of warm milk, and of a bed in which to sleep without worry or fear.