Part 7
No one followed her.
Leah lifted a hand when one of the volunteers shifted as though he might help. “Let her choose the distance.”
The mother wolf moved slowly, each step costing her, but she did not falter. Her pup swung gently from her mouth. At the edge of the timber, she stopped once more. The trees behind her were dark and snow-laden, the world she belonged to and the world that had nearly taken her. She looked back at Eli for a long moment.
He wanted to say something. A foolish impulse. A human impulse. Thank you, maybe. Take care. I’m sorry for every time I thought the wild owed me anything.
Instead he touched two fingers to the brim of his hat.
The wolf disappeared into the trees with her child.
The brave shepherd puppy ran three steps after her, then stopped, confused by the leaving. He barked once, not in fear but protest. Eli bent carefully and scooped him up before he could follow. The pup squirmed for only a second, then pressed his cold nose under Eli’s chin.
“She’s got her own babies to raise,” Eli rasped. “And you’ve got your brother.”
The injured puppy rode up the rope line in Leah’s jacket, wrapped like a fragile parcel. The brave one refused everyone but Eli, so Frank rigged a harness and brought man and pup up together with more teasing than dignity. By the time Eli’s boots touched the upper ridge, his legs shook hard enough that Frank gripped his elbow.
“Hospital,” Frank said.
“Vet first.”
“Eli.”
“Frank.”
Leah, already packing the injured puppy into a heated crate in the back of her vehicle, looked between them. “He can come to the clinic and then I’m driving him to urgent care if he doesn’t cooperate.”
“See?” Eli said. “Professional compromise.”
Frank muttered something about impossible old men but opened the truck door for him.
The ride down the mountain felt unreal. Sun flashed off snowfields. The road where Eli had stopped the night before had been churned by rescue vehicles and search dogs. His own truck sat crooked near the ditch, one door taped shut against the wind, the headlights off, the passenger floor still cluttered with the spilled life he had been carrying away.
Frank saw him looking at it.
“I read the note,” he said again, softer this time.
Eli stared out the window. “You weren’t supposed to find it until tomorrow.”
“Good thing I’m nosy.”
The brave puppy slept against Eli’s lap, worn beyond resistance. Eli kept one hand on the little dog’s ribs, counting the steady rise and fall.
“I was done,” Eli said after a while. “That’s what I thought.”
Frank kept his eyes on the road. “And now?”
Eli looked at the puppy, at the mountains, at the red smear of flare smoke still faintly visible above the ridge.
“Now I’m late.”
The wildlife clinic outside Redwater was small, warm, and smelled of disinfectant, hay, and wet dog. Leah’s assistants took the injured shepherd puppy straight back for X-rays and warming. The brave pup woke when his brother vanished and began crying with a force that startled everyone in the lobby.
Eli followed the sound as far as they would let him.
“He needs you out here,” Leah told him kindly. “Let us work.”
“I can sit on the floor.”
“You can sit in that chair before you fall over.”
The chair was vinyl, cracked at the arms, and the best thing Eli had felt in years. He sat with the brave puppy tucked inside his coat, the way the injured one had been through the chase. Frank brought coffee Eli could barely taste and a blanket Eli pretended not to need. A nurse from urgent care came by to look him over and declared, with restrained disapproval, that he had bruised ribs, strained muscles, mild hypothermia, and the stubbornness of a fence post.
Leah returned nearly an hour later.
The brave puppy lifted his head.
“Good news first,” she said. “His brother’s leg is fractured, but clean. No internal bleeding that we can see. He’s dehydrated and exhausted, but he’s young. With care, he has a real chance.”
Eli closed his eyes.
Leah sat across from him. “Bad news is they weren’t lost from a loving home yesterday. No collars, no chips, no recent food in their systems. Someone may have dumped them near the ridge, or they wandered from a property we haven’t found yet. We’ll file the reports and check missing notices, but…”
She did not finish. She did not have to.
The brave puppy tucked his head deeper under Eli’s coat.
Frank leaned against the wall. “If nobody claims them?”
Eli opened his eyes. “Nobody who left them in a storm gets to claim them.”
Leah’s mouth softened. “There are procedures.”
“I know procedures.”
“Do you?”
“I know enough to sign whatever keeps them from going back to the cold.”
Frank’s expression changed then, the way a man’s face changes when he hears life return to a voice he thought had gone hollow. “You sure?”
Eli looked down at the puppy. The little dog’s one upright ear had wilted with sleep, and the folded ear lay warm against Eli’s shirt.
“No,” Eli said honestly. “But I’m more sure than I was yesterday.”
That evening, Frank drove him home instead of to Bear Creek. The cabin waited at the edge of the ridge beneath a roof heavy with snow. Smoke did not rise from the chimney because Eli had left it cold. The windows stared dark at the road. For a moment, sitting in Frank’s passenger seat with a sleeping puppy against him and a bag of pain medication in his coat pocket, Eli felt the old emptiness inside the house waiting to swallow him. Then the puppy woke, lifted his head, and barked at the front door like he owned the place. Frank laughed under his breath. “Guess somebody’s moving in.” Eli climbed out slowly. Every bruise protested. He took the spare key from under the loose porch board where June had always told him not to leave it and opened the door. The house smelled like cold ashes and cedar. On the kitchen table, exactly where he had left them, lay the Bear Creek forms…
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