The wolves are going wrong. I notice it in the howls, first.

Traditionally, after lights-out, but before the the old, slow bulbs have shed all their heat, I kneel by the end of my bed to say my prayer, and the wolves say theirs in unison. Tonight, their usual smooth chorus is broken and out of tune. Some of the voices are stopped-up, whiny, or breathless. Others are absent. I cannot sleep after this disruption of routine and I am crabby all the next day.

Around midday, I see one limping across the marshy edge of the loch. It is unmistakable even from the parapets: a shivering black blot on a landscape that should be as still as a painting, in corduroy blue and algae green, washed out by fog.

Father is with a patient, and the maids are feeding my baby brother his supplements in applesauce, so I go to look by myself, wrapped up in a huge fleece that was Mother’s, stumping painstakingly across the grounds on my too-small legs.

Its jaw is the real problem. Something forgot how wide a jaw is supposed to open, and the poor wolf’s mouth has stretched all down its neck and chest and belly until half the length of the creature hangs open, flapping cheeks and drooling teeth, so you would almost think it had been gored by a sword.

I’m not supposed to go near on my own, of course, so I only sit some ways away in the silty sand and try to make helpful notes in my journal. It is clearly confused, wandering in a place it shouldn’t be at a time it shouldn’t be, and the way it stumbles suggests unseen damage.

A fantasy blooms in my mind that it may have tried to eat something too big – a heavy pregnant deer or a random escaped elephant – and stretched its long jaw wider and wider, egged on by its chanting peers, not aware of the changes it was forcing upon itself. But that’s the stuff of fairy tale, of course, and I don’t write it down.

It’s gone by nighttime, but Father keeps watch with me the next day, and we meet another injured wolf. Though they’re not injured, really, just different, and for the worse. This one has three very long legs, and one normal. It can’t walk right. It doesn’t seem able to realize that one of its legs doesn’t match, and it keep breaking out into a run and then falling pitifully onto its left front side. Once we’ve brought it inside, we notice two more fetal legs growing up out of its hairy chest.

I’m surprised by the anger in Father’s expression, not having realized there was anyone to blame. But he points across the loch at the shadow of the town, with high cigarish smokestacks in the center. He tells me about pollution and the way it causes mutations. I marvel at that – it’s just like I thought at first. The instructions inside the wolf have become confused. They are doing the best they can, just misguided and deluded.

I fetch and hold the tools for Father as he works on the poor wolf. He explains what he’s doing carefully – sedation, amputation, setting, and stitching – which makes me proud, since he trusts me to soon hold the needle. Soon, the long legs are short and the extras are gone, and the poor wolf looks right.

In two days, we bring in another wolf. Its fins have come out webless, just spindly helpless fingers, and it can barely swim. It’s small and hungry. Though, if the wolf is hungry, that means many smaller creatures are still alive.

Sometimes I think about nature. I think about the way the wolves eat the rabbits and the whales eat the krill, on and on in an endless bloodbath. I have asked God, “Why are you stuck in the sky? Are you in prison for mass-murder?” But he does not answer, of course, because they don’t allow him many calls and he saves them for the Pope.

But when I start to feel squishy and squelchy about nature, Father takes me downstairs to our tapestry, where it is all laid out in only two delicate dimensions. I see the worm in the mouth of the vole in the mouth of the hawk in the mouth of the eagle, and it could never be any other way. We are both very proud of the tapestry so far.

A wolf crashes into the southwest tower, and I have already run to meet it on the parapet before I remember how dangerous it is. It slumps on the cobblestones, dripping from the mist, with one leathery wing crumpled beneath it. The wolf’s beak has doubled side-to-side into two independently clicking jaws. As I look closer, its eye seems about to split, seems caught in mitosis. A conjoined pair of irises wobble inside.

Father runs to join me and throws me my thick gloves. We race to bring the wolf down to the lab before it can expire. Its blood streaks the ancient stone stairways, and it is thrilling.

In the operating room, we find a yellow sparrow caught between the wolf’s left set of teeth, its body only half torn away.

“What’s order for the spider is chaos for the fly.”

I remember reading that one day in the Encyclopedia Philosophical, and going to share it with Father.

Father said,

“The spider’s right.”

Father lets me operate on the crashwolf. He stands by and guides me, reminds me about cauterizing edges and reconnecting vessels, as my hands shake with excitement. The extra beak must be removed, and so must the eyes entirely. There's no salvaging their aberrant shape.

Finally I have flattened it. The workmanship is rougher than I’d like, but I think it will still look good as part of the whole. We lay the tapestry out together on the clinic floor, and I feel its softly pulsing warmth under my fingers. There is a rabbit already, waiting for its partner. I line up the wolf’s single beak around the round white shape, letting the teeth overlap but not pierce the thin skin. The wolf’s paws tesselate with the rubbery fin of a dolphin and the smooth, heavy cross-section of a rhino’s horns. We have straighened and laid out both wings, and I carefully sew their curved edges onto the reciprocating shapes of turtle shells and frog legs.

I sit back and admire my first addition. Father pats me on the head, and I’m pleased. A hundred eyes swivel on this lumpy quilt, blinking and watering, and two hundred legs struggle to run. They are animals, and they can’t understand.