[...] the people who invented the story didn’t have modernity. They didn’t have ruffled caps or gingham aprons or a notion of quaintness to which these garments belonged. And they presumably did not have a concept of the wilderness, not the way we do. We think of the wilderness as bounded and finite. For them, it was the matrix in which everything else took place, the default, always ready to reclaim its territory. What did it feel like to tell this story about a wild beast when the wilderness pressed so close? What did it look like, in their heads? If you take away the cozy familiarity of that image — a wolf impersonating a grandmother — what are you looking at?