Wolf and skull pencil design

I found the skull on the north ledge the morning after the big sea, and I would have left it for the gulls if the wolf had not been sitting over it like a verger guarding the collection plate. You will laugh, but the wolf frightened me more than the bone. It was grey as wet slate, its ruff standing up in spikes like the driftwood the storm had thrown against the wall, and it showed me every tooth it owned before it showed me anything else.

I stood still, as Father taught us with the bull at Carrow, and waited for it to decide I was not worth the trouble. It took its time. Its eyes were the colour of lamp oil when the wick is turned low, and they stayed on my hands rather than my face, which I took as a kind of manners. When I finally bent for the skull, the wolf only lowered its head until its muzzle was level with the bone, as if it were showing me where to take hold.

I carried the skull up the two hundred and twelve steps. The wolf followed at a distance, stopping on each landing to look back at the sea. In the lamp room I set the skull on the sill beside the brass, and the wolf came up behind me and laid its chin on the stone beside it. When I lit the wick, it sat and watched the beam go out over the water, and I understood that Ned Harrow had kept this light for forty years with a dog that never once left him.

I have not been able to settle the thing in my head, so I am writing it down. Come up at Easter and see for yourself. Bring the good tobacco, and mind the third step from the top, it is loose.

Yours, Ed