Part 3
Avery stepped into the kitchen before any of the adults could lower their voices.
“You lied to me.”
Rachel turned. “Avery—”
“You knew his mother was dead.”
“We found out this morning.”
“And then you decided I couldn’t handle it?”
June moved toward her, but Avery backed into the hallway wall.
“I went into that hole,” she said. “I held him while he was shaking. I think I can hear what happened to his mother.”
Rachel’s face tightened. “I was trying to protect you.”
“You keep saying I’m independent until there’s something you don’t want me to know.”
No one answered immediately.
Outside, a wolf howled from the ridge. Ash shifted in his crate, his claws scraping softly against the plastic floor.
Eli pulled out a chair. “Sit down, Avery.”
“I don’t want to sit.”
“Then don’t. But listen.”
He explained what they had found without describing more than she needed to hear. The adult wolf had likely died before Avery reached the trench. Ash had survived because he had landed on a shelf of loose soil rather than at the deepest point.
The pack had probably been calling for both of them.
“If I had gone sooner—” Avery began.
“You didn’t know he was there.”
“I heard them.”
“So did half the town. You were the only person who followed the sound.”
That did not make her feel better. It made the kitchen seem too small to contain what had happened.
Avery went to the mudroom and sat beside Ash’s crate. The pup lifted his head when he saw her, then rested his chin between his front paws.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
For the next two days, Ash improved. He ate without being coaxed and began placing weight on his injured leg. When Dr. Brooks opened the crate for an examination, he tried to hide behind Avery’s knee.
The gesture filled her with an aching kind of pride.
“He knows me,” she said.
“He does,” Dr. Brooks replied. “That’s why we need to be careful.”
Avery looked down. “Careful about what?”
“About letting him forget what he is.”
Eli showed her footage from the trail cameras. Most of the pack remained at the edge of the property, but the scarred female came closer every night. She sniffed the grass where Eli carried used towels from the mudroom and left scent marks near the tree line.
“She may be his aunt,” Eli said. “Or an older sister. Packs share care of their young.”
“But his mother is dead.”
“That doesn’t mean he has no family.”
Avery watched the scarred wolf stand motionless on the screen. “What if she won’t take him?”
“Then we’ll bring him to the rehabilitation center.”
“And what if she does?”
“Then he goes with her.”
Ash pushed his muzzle against the wire beside Avery’s hand. She had spent three days keeping him alive, counting his breaths when he slept and celebrating every ounce of food he swallowed.
The idea of handing him back to animals that might disappear into the forest felt like another kind of abandonment.
“He trusts me,” she said.
Eli lowered the tablet. “Needing you isn’t the same as belonging to you.”
Avery did not speak to him for the rest of the afternoon.
That evening, Ash managed to stand without shaking. He crossed the mudroom in three uneven steps and pulled the corner of a towel through the bars of his temporary enclosure.
Avery laughed for the first time since learning about his mother.
Then the pack began to howl.
Ash froze.
The towel slipped from his mouth. He lifted his muzzle and produced a rough, broken sound that barely resembled a wolf’s call.
The howling outside stopped.
For several seconds, no animal made a sound. Then the scarred female answered from behind the woodpile.
Ash moved toward the door.
He did not look at Avery.
On the fourth morning, Wade Pritchard drove up from the neighboring ranch. June saw his truck through the window and went outside before he could reach the porch.
Wade was a broad man in his fifties whose face looked permanently reddened by weather. He had lost several lambs that summer and had complained at the feed store that the state cared more about wolves than ranchers.
“Those animals were in my lower field last night,” he told June. “Your pup is drawing them in.”
“He isn’t our pup.”
“Then get him out of here.”
“The wildlife department is handling it.”
“I called them after my first loss. They sent me forms.”
Eli joined them in the yard. “You were offered an inspection.”
“I have work to do. I don’t have time to wait around for someone to tell me an animal is dead.”
“You have time to come here.”
Wade looked past him toward the cabin. “When one of those wolves takes a child, the paperwork won’t matter.”
Avery heard the conversation through the screen door. She also saw the coil of bright blue braided rope in the bed of Wade’s pickup.
The same color had been caught beneath a branch at the trench.
June noticed it too.
After Wade left, she told Deputy Benton what she had seen. Blue rope alone proved nothing, but the tread photographed near the trap matched the wide rear tires used on several local all-terrain vehicles, including Wade’s.
That afternoon, a hunter contacted the sheriff’s office. One of his cameras had been strapped to a tree half a mile from the trench.
The memory card contained a photograph taken two nights before Avery found Ash.
Deputy Benton placed the image on June’s kitchen table.
It showed an ATV on the old logging road. A shovel was strapped to the rear rack, and a coil of blue rope hung from the handlebar. Wade Pritchard was driving…
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