Thursday, March 23, 2006

Wolf Child

So the kid wore her wolf shirt to bed last night.

She wakes up this morning and goes into her wolf crouch, peering through her tangle of hair very fiercely -- did I mention she's been reading Jack London?

"I think I'm part wolf," she mentions.

"Well," I say, "you are, in fact."

She gives me a dubious look. I have to tell you up front I am not always strictly honest with my child. She has learned, that is, to doubt my word.

"What I mean," I explain hastily, "is humans and wolves descend from a common anscestor. So in that sense we are all part wolf."

"Oh." She ponders. "Do you think I'm one-third wolf? One-fifth?"

"I don't know the exact percentage," I admit. "Words are my business, not genes."

She thinks a bit longer, and emits a short howl. "I think I am more wolf than most people."

"I think you might be," I agree. "So long as you don't start tearing field mice to shreds with your fangs, I'm cool with it."

She giggles. "I'll just tear bean burritos to shreds," she assures me, and leaps around the bed, a wolf pouncing on burritos with all her fierce might.

1 comment:

zelda1 said...

Gotta love that child. One of the first really adult books that I read was Ophelia, and I was really young, like 8 or 9 when I read it, and it was about a cat being thrown into a well and being reincarnated into a beautiful woman. So, for probably two or three years, I believed that I was reincarnated from a cat. I climbed trees and slinked around on limbs and even tried to charm a bird, I don't think that I would have eaten it, but I stalked it. Finally, my mom told me that I coldn't be a cat or couldn't come from a cat and it was time to stop that silliness and she forbid me from reading any more books on reincarnation. I don't think she knew what that word meant, she just knew that when I told her about Ophelia, she assumed it negatively affected me.