Wolf and dreamcatcher geometric design

The wolf came back to the allotment on Tuesday, the night after the frost took the runner beans. I saw it from the shed door with the torch still in my hand, sitting at the end of the leek bed and looking straight at me as though I were the trespasser. Its ears were tall and its grey fur had that fine stippled texture Mr Okafor says no photograph can capture. It did not run. I could count the feathers hanging from its neck, and a small ring of netting was tied at its throat, the sort you hang over a window to catch the draughts and bad dreams, the way your mother used to.

I did what you told me to do in June and I talked to it. I said the potatoes were not for it and the compost heap was a disgrace, and I said Harold's plot had been empty since spring and nobody would mind if it wandered over there. It listened the way a magistrate listens. Then it turned, slow as a clock hand, and walked past the rhubarb into the hedge where the tin crescent is nailed to the fence post.

Here is the odd part. This morning the hoop I hung on the water butt had been unpicked and rewoven with eleven yellow leaves, and beneath it lay three crossed arrows of hazel, neatly pointed, as if somebody had tidied my garden for me in the night.

I haven't touched the leeks, and I've left the hoop where it is. Come up at the weekend and see for yourself.

Love, Maud