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The Wolf Letters
Will Schaefer was born in Perth in 1974. After finishing school he worked on farms, railways, drilling rigs and building sites before completing an honours degree in history and ancient history at the University of Western Australia in 2004. He is married with two children and is employed as a town planner. The Wolf Letters is his first novel
Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
© 2011
All rights reserved.
Copyright © by Will Schaefer
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and enquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher,
Hybrid Publishers
PO Box 52, Ormond 3204.
First published 2011
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Schaefer, Will, 1974-
The wolf letters / Will Schaefer.
9781921665219 (pbk.)
A823.4
Typeset in Baskerville
Cover design: © Gittus Graphics
Digital Distribution: Ebook Alchemy
ISBN: 9781742980584 (Epub)
Conversion by Winking Billy
To my family, with love and gratitude;
and to my friends, especially Sam, Jason,
Justin and Nick,
with much love and gratitude also.
Acknowledgments
So many people helped me with this
book over the last five years that I can
hardly list them, let alone thank them
sufficiently. I could never have produced
the book without their help.
I’d like to thank my wife, Sandra, for her
patience and trust, and my parents and
siblings, for their unstinting faith in me.
Lots of friends gave helpful feedback: big
thanks to Dave Robinson, Colin Coley,
Filippo Fidelio, Max Beckerling, Kate
Wilkinson and Jeremy “Sureclix” Beard.
Thanks to the Reece family, especially
Lesley from the Fremantle Children’s
Literature Centre. Thanks also to the
many folks who’ve been so supportive
but I haven’t the room to list. You know
who you are.
Extra special thanks to Sean Doyle of
Lynk and Jan Scherpenhuizen for the
honesty, encouragement and epoch-
makingly-good editorial input, and Louis
de Vries and Anna Rosner Blay from
Hybrid Publishers for taking me on and
being such a pleasure to work with.
1
“… the dark death-shadow drove always against them,
old and young;
abominable he watched and waited for them, nightlong
walked the misty moorland.
Men know not where hell’s familiars fleet against their
errands!”
Beowulf, c. 700 AD
August 26th, 1936. A suffocating morning. Heat - awful, inescapable - had returned to my patch of southern England for the sixth day in a row.
The sun was a powerful and hated foreigner to us. Thin, milky clouds were perishing above the warming city. Long, sharp church-spire shadows retreated from the playing fields of Allminster University. A blue haze slowly cooked from the leaves of my college’s oaks, elms and beeches. The old city baked like a Roman tile.
No wind. From the window of my stifling college office, I could see the air begin its shimmering ascent from Stafford Road. I heard insects - hundreds, thousands of them, chirping like fanatics of the heat.
It would be noon in three hours. By then the carthorses would be loping, miserable and thirsty. The city’s trams would clang and clatter over softening rails. Soot and smoke from factories on the outskirts of the town would settle in a grimy shroud upon its centre and the birds would leave the hedges for the deeper shelter of the trees.
I let out a sigh. It was hard to concentrate, not least because of the weather. For two hours I had struggled with the lecture I was due to read at tomorrow’s scholars’ conference. I caught myself rubbing my eyes, stretching my face with my fingers and decided that my lecture, “Anglo-Saxon Poetry and Historical Fact: A Study of The Battle of Maldon“, would have to wait a few minutes.
I lit my pipe and watched the blue smoke drift slowly out through the open window. Feeling myself relax a little, I permitted my eyes to wander. Monday’s edition of The Allminster Telegraph lay on my desk, where Claude had left it for me. The missing artefact … this was big news around here. The whole college, especially my two closest friends, archaeologists Claude Pownall and Kenneth Tiernan, had been talking about little else.
The Allminster Telegraph
