The first story in Tracy and Wolf was written by the lovely Thunder and edited by myself (it took many years for her to forgive me.) It was written as a stand-alone story, future stories only filled in the holes rather than extending it.
The blizzard had been raging for days, and to ten-year-old Tracy, the whole world was covered in snow. Every day piled new inches of fresh snow upon the old, and made the short trip to her friend’s house more and more impossible with each passing hour.
Frustration grew into desperation to escape the confines of their small house, and the thought of her friend being so close, yet so far away, kept her small face pressed tightly to the window in the front room, her sharp hazel eyes seeking the break in the weather that would let her at last escape.
One morning, after what seemed an eternity of solitude and loneliness, the snow stopped falling and rubbing her sleepy eyes just to make sure, she began to dance in delight. It took a great deal of nagging and persistence, but her parents finally surrendered and asked her older brother to drop her at her friend's farm on the ski-doo, and with a squeal of delight she ran outside to wait for her brother, and like kids everywhere, neither could see the point in wearing a helmet.
The gut-wrenching sound of the ski-doo squealing along the barbed wire fence drew instant fear from their neighbours, and with horror in their faces, they immediately ran to where the last of the terrible sounds still hung in the chill morning air.
It was a scene of utter horror. Danny was obviously dead. His neck was twisted and his blank eyes stared towards the heavens, and Tracy was sitting beside him, cradling him in her arms, covered in both of their young blood. She had deep gashes down the side of her once pretty face, and down the entire left side of her body. Their blood stained the snow red and added to the horror of the scene.
She spent a great many months in hospital recovering, but the doctors in the small country hospital could do nothing to remove the terrible scars that now disfigured the entire right hand side of her face. They would remain as a reminder of this day for many years to come.
On her return home she was to find that many things had changed. Her once loving parents now blamed her for her brother's death, and never stopped telling her just that. Worse still, she believed them, because in her own mind the accident would never have happened if it wasn't for her insistence on going out that day.
Tears never ending, looks of hate from her parents, unrelenting guilt, all of these things forced a young, innocent girl to go looking for her father's razor blades late one night. Almost with a smile she drew the blade across each wrist, slicing deeply into the flesh, and making innocent blood run once again. She was very near death when her younger sister, Jenny, found her, pale and half unconscious in the bathtub, and demanded her parents take her to the hospital.
She felt almost as alone in the hospital as she had at home, but at least here she had one visitor, and he came every day. Her Uncle Wolf (Bill really, but everyone in the county called him Wolf). While growing up she had seen very little of him because her parents did not like him. "Too wild", her father had said, and looking at him it was easy to believe just that. He wore his hair long at the back, short at the front, his face was covered in scars from too many fights, (rumour said he had never lost), and she knew that tattooed on either side of his massive chest were two wolves. They were the talk of the town, and she guessed that it was the tattoos that gave him his nickname.
As he stood by the side of her bed she thought he looked a fearsome sight, even though it was obvious that he felt awkward and constricted in his Sunday clothes, and yet, when he looked at her his face became tender, and she could see right into his heart through those big, green eyes, into a tenderness and kindness that no one but she had ever seen.
On the day she was released from hospital, her fourteenth birthday, only her Uncle Wolf was there waiting for her, standing alone beside an old, battered truck that had seen many better days. Her parents had finally tired of having her in their house, and had asked him to take her, and he had agreed, as he had no family of his own.
Uncle Wolf smiled as he helped her into the truck, and as they drove away she did not look back. As the old truck drew nearer to his farm she felt the strangest feeling, excitement. For the first time since her accident, she felt she was going home.
His house was not much to look at, a run down old cabin with a bedroom added to the side that looked like an after thought. He had never been married, and, she thought with a smile, it showed. As she wandered around the small room looking at the little treasures he had accumulated over a lifetime, she thought she saw many opportunities to repay his kindness, but there was another surprise in store for her.
Unlike at home, her Uncle Wolf had his own system for running a household, and she soon found that she was part of a team. They cooked together, cleaned together, chopped firewood together. In fact they did everything together, and he was not short on praise when she did things well either. She began to smile more often, and one day when her Uncle Wolf did something silly, she surprised herself by laughing for the first time since her brother had died.
It wasn't long before her Uncle Wolf enrolled her into the local school, and on her first day he stood looking very alone, she thought, as the bus rolled down the dirt road. She watched him through the rear window as he stood there until the bus rounded a corner and he disappeared from view. She was surprised to find that she was crying.
Later that day Wolf got a frantic phone call from his niece. "Please Uncle Wolf'" said a sobbing voice on the other end of the phone "Please come and get me. They are laughing at my scars and calling me a murderer."
It was only five minutes before a furious Wolf strode through the schoolyard. Children scattered at his approach and then he was upon her tormentors. Picking two up by the scruff of their necks, he hurled them bodily away, and watched as the others fled, as did their courage when facing a man instead of a scared young girl. Holding her around her small shoulders, they walked slowly back to his old truck, a bitterly crying girl and fiercely glaring uncle.
The next day he applied for home schooling, and as in everything, they did it together. Both took the time from their chores to learn together, and from time to time she glanced at his sun-browned, scared face, and saw his forehead wrinkled in concentration. At those times she smiled softly to herself, and gently helped him with whatever was troubling him. Deep within her the little girl was changing, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, she was growing into a gentle, kind and loving woman.
It was there that her next great hurdle lay. The woman inside her started to fall in love with the wonderful man who was her uncle. His gentle smiles, his silly jokes, and the way he always supported her in everything, and most of all, his huge, loving heart.
One day while they were working together in the fields, shortly after her Uncle had taken a quick break to fetch their lunch, the Raven boys came calling. Finding her alone for once, they started to torment her, laughing at her scars, calling her Scar face and Murderer. Then one ripped off her blouse, exposing her innocence to their dirty, little eyes.
They go
