Part 5
They were trying not to get caught.
By noon, the storm had weakened enough to leave the world exhausted and bright. Caleb returned to Kettle Creek with Deputy Mallory Cruz from the sheriff’s office and a state wildlife investigator on speakerphone. He wanted Emma to stay at the clinic. She did not argue with him. She simply got into Hannah’s truck with a field camera, evidence bags, and the expression she had inherited from her mother whenever Caleb mistook concern for authority.
So he said nothing.
The road looked different in daylight, almost innocent. Snow had softened the edges of the tracks, and the trees glittered under a thin crust of ice. But the woods had not managed to hide everything. Caleb found the branch he had jammed upright beside the trail, then the blue tape half-frozen to it. Mallory photographed the boot print before the sun could soften it further. Emma placed a ruler beside the track and took close images without stepping near the impression.
“You’ve done this before,” Caleb said.
She did not look up. “Hannah helps with evidence collection when wildlife cases go legal. I volunteer sometimes.”
“Since when?”
“Since Mom got sick.”
The answer came without blame, which somehow made it worse. Caleb stood there with his hands in his coat pockets and felt the old familiar failure shift inside him. All those years he had imagined Emma on the far side of a closed door, and here she had been, driving the same back roads, helping the same animals, carrying her grief into work instead of away from it.
Mallory cleared her throat gently. “Caleb.”
He followed her gaze. Ten yards beyond the first print, under a drift near a fallen cedar, another cable loop hung from a bent sapling. It was set at chest height for a wolf, invisible from the road unless a person knew where to look. Farther in, they found a bait pile buried under snow and a second steel trap chained to a root.
Emma stepped back from it, face pale. “How many?”
“Enough that this wasn’t one bad decision,” Caleb said.
They worked the ridge for two hours. The pattern emerged slowly, then all at once. Blue survey tape marked approach points. A narrow path had been packed by boots and then dusted over by fresh snow. Tire tracks near an old turnout showed where a pickup had backed in more than once. Caleb photographed the tread. Mallory bagged a scrap of cut antenna wire found near the base of a spruce.
The final piece came from Emma’s field camera.
Hannah had placed several motion-triggered cameras in the area months earlier for the wolf study. Most had been too far from the trap site to catch much, but one camera facing an old beaver pond had recorded a pickup at 5:42 a.m. the previous morning. The image was grainy, the license plate unreadable under snow and road salt. But the back window showed a white decal shaped like a jumping walleye over the words HARLAN’S BAIT & TACKLE.
Caleb knew the truck.
Everyone in Iron Ridge knew the truck.
Wade Harlan had run the bait shop for twenty-two years. He sold minnows, coffee, propane, and every opinion in town before breakfast. Caleb had written him two citations years ago for illegal sets too close to a protected corridor, but Wade had paid the fines and told anyone who would listen that the state cared more about wolves than families. Last fall, after his old hound vanished near Ash Creek, the anger in him had turned harder and less public.
Mallory looked at the photo and then at Caleb. “You sure?”
“No,” Caleb said. “But I know where to start.”
They found Wade behind the bait shop splitting kindling beside a stack of minnow tanks. He was sixty, thick through the shoulders, with a weathered face and a cap pulled low. When he saw Caleb, Mallory, and Emma step out of the truck together, his expression did not change. That, more than anything, made Caleb tired.
“Hell of a storm,” Wade said.
Mallory did the talking at first. She kept her voice even, asked about the truck, the road, the blue tape. Wade answered too quickly, then too slowly. He said half the county used blue tape. He said his truck had been parked out front all morning. He said wolves were everywhere and nobody in St. Paul cared what they did to people trying to live up here.
Caleb listened until Wade looked past him and saw Emma.
“What’s she doing here?” Wade asked. “This a family visit now?”
Emma did not flinch. “I helped keep her pups alive last night.”
For the first time, Wade’s eyes moved.
Caleb saw it. So did Mallory.
Wade recovered fast. “Pups?”
“The female you snared was in labor,” Emma said. Her voice stayed quiet, but something in it sharpened the air. “One pup was born in the snow because somebody cut her collar and left her with her mouth wired shut.”
Wade’s jaw worked. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know what hypothermia looks like in a newborn animal. I know what crushed tissue smells like when a trap’s been on too long. And I know she still tried to clean him before she had enough strength to lift her head.”
“Emma,” Caleb said softly.
She stopped, but she did not look sorry.
Mallory stepped in and told Wade they would be seeking a warrant for the truck and outbuildings. The words were procedural, careful, and unsatisfying. Real consequences rarely arrived in clean dramatic moments. They came in paperwork, phone calls, evidence logs, and people claiming they had been misunderstood.
Wade looked at Caleb then. “You and me used to understand each other.”
“No,” Caleb said. “I understood that you were angry.”
“My dog was torn up.”
“I know.”
“You know?” Wade laughed once, empty and hard. “You ever find something you loved scattered in the snow?”
The question hit a place Wade had not aimed for. Caleb thought of Maggie’s hospital bed, Emma’s unanswered messages, the kitchen mug left by the sink. Loss did not make a man cruel, but it could give cruelty a place to hide if he kept feeding it.
“I know what it is to lose something,” Caleb said. “I also know it doesn’t give you the right to make another living thing suffer.”
Wade looked away first.
That evening, back at the clinic, Caleb found Emma sitting in the dim recovery room outside the wolf enclosure. The she-wolf was asleep behind reinforced glass, her bandaged leg stretched out, three pups tucked against her belly. One of them was weaker than the others. Emma watched that one as if watching hard enough could keep it breathing.
Caleb took the chair beside her but did not sit until she shifted her coat off the seat. It was a small permission. He accepted it carefully.
“You were good out there,” he said.
“I was angry out there.”
“Sometimes angry tells the truth first.”
She folded her hands between her knees. “You know what I kept thinking last night? She was trapped, hurt, half-dead, and she still knew where her babies were. She still tried to reach them.”
Caleb looked through the glass. The mother wolf’s ears twitched in sleep.
Emma’s voice did not break, which made the words harder to hear. “When Mom died, I kept waiting for you to reach for me. I know you were grieving. I know you loved her. But you left the room without leaving the house.”
Caleb closed his eyes. There were a dozen things a coward might say to that. He could explain work. He could explain shock. He could explain how the house had seemed full of Maggie and empty of air. None of it would change the fact that Emma had been right.
“I did,” he said.
She turned toward him then, wary of an answer that might try to excuse itself.
Caleb kept his hands folded, because if he reached for her too soon, it would be for his comfort, not hers. “I don’t know how to fix that,” he said. “But I know I did it. And I’m sorry.”
Behind the glass, the smallest pup made a faint sound. The she-wolf woke at once, lifted her head, and pulled the pup closer with her muzzle. Emma watched her for a long moment. Then she reached to the side, pulled the second chair a little nearer to her own, and left it there…
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