The tension between the ideal of frontier self-determination and Wilder’s captivated preoccupation with anarchic wolves and Indians would never be reconciled, making this the strangest, the most unnerving, original, and profound of all her books. The little house was porous. Malaria entered. Buffalo wolves, the gray wolves of the plains, surrounded Pa on the prairie, then circled the house, howling in the moonlight, terrifying and beautiful. Laura heard them through the chinks in the wall, and Pa held her up to the hole cut for a window, the better to admire them. Prairie fires swept past, and
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