Blood

Lucy knows they can survive the jackals because they have before.
There was a night between one town and another, between one mine and the next, when the family came to a line of dung laid across the road like a missive. So fresh it steamed. The ancient mule¹ stumbled. The crack of its leg split the night.
From the mule’s throat came a mewling. Three years they’d had this gentle beast and never heard her cry. Her rolling eye found Lucy.
They went on. Their one remaining mule panted, made quicker by fear and a lightened load. Their extra provisions were tossed out in the grass. The noise of jackals grew closer, then paused. The silence more terrible than howls. The family hurried on.
—
The jackals who finally enter the shack² on the first day of storm, on the day the clouds open and the bones of a child stir up from the swollen³ creek⁴, aren’t the jackals Lucy expected.
They look mostly like men. One has a brown beard, the other red as the hair of the girl who was taken. Half-familiar—Lucy must have seen them a dozen times in the low light of those early mornings at the mine. Only the hides on their shoulders are of the beast, giving off a wet, rank odor.
Like men, they carry guns.
They crash through the door before Ba can grab his pistol. The pounding rain hid their approach till too late. The brown one orders Ba into a chair. The red jackal herds⁵ Lucy and Sam to the stove. Ma, on the mattress⁷ under a heap of extra blankets, goes unseen.
“We’d like a bite to eat,” the brown one says.
Strange that a wild thing can speak so polite. He sounds like a guest in Teacher Leigh’s parlor⁸. Ba cusses as the red one bats pans and plates off the stove. He plunges⁹ hands into the cold stewpot and

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