Part 3
Luke came through the clinic’s side door less than fifteen minutes later with wet hair, no coat, and one boot unlaced. The high school was four blocks away; he had run over in his shirtsleeves. At eighteen he had Cole’s height and David’s habit of entering a room as if he expected to be asked to leave it. He stopped when he saw Warden Keene.
June nearly scolded him; then she nearly stepped between him and the uniform. Instead, she pulled out a chair.
“Sit down and tell us where you found them.”
Luke remained standing. “You said they were alive.”
“They are,” Lena said from the doorway. “One appears dehydrated. Both are stable enough for transport. Their mother may not have that much time.”
The last sentence reached him. He sat.
His story came in uneven pieces. The previous morning, he had followed Cole to the line cabin in his own old pickup. From there they took Cole’s utility truck to check a line of legal predator traps near an outfitting lease north of the Mercer grazing allotment. One untagged trap sat beyond the marked route, inside a drainage closed to trapping. What it held was not a coyote.
“Dad said it was a big marten at first,” Luke said. “Then it turned and he knew.”
The wolverine was alive, caught by one front foot. When Cole saw that she was lactating, he followed her tracks upslope and found a den under the snow shelf beside an uprooted spruce. Luke expected him to call the state reporting line. Instead, Cole dug out the two kits and put them in a ventilated dog crate.
“He said a man he knew could place them with a licensed wildlife facility,” Luke continued. “He said if he reported the trap, they’d take his license because the set was over the boundary. The business is already behind. He kept saying this fixed two problems.”
Keene’s pencil stopped. “Did he release the female?”
Luke shook his head. June gripped the edge of the table.
“You left her there?”
The boy’s face went gray. “I went back.”
Near dark, Cole had locked the kits in the line cabin while he drove into town to arrange their pickup. Luke took the crate, photographed the trapped female and the location with his phone, then drove to June’s ranch by the old service road. He called her twice from the yard.
June remembered the phone glowing on her nightstand. She had seen Luke’s name and turned it facedown. After the last argument with Cole, she had decided father and son needed a night to cool off.
“Why didn’t you come inside?” she asked.
Luke looked at her then. “Because last time I did, you called Dad before I got my boots off.”
Luke said it without raising his voice. That made it harder for June to defend herself.
He had carried the crate into the barn and hidden it beneath the loft, intending to call the wildlife hotline anonymously from school. Mabel had followed him, crying at the crate. Luke knew she still had milk and moved the kits into the apple box, hoping she would keep them warm for a few hours.
“I knew it was stupid,” he said. “But they were cold. I thought if I told you, you’d make me take them back before you even looked.”
June wanted to deny it. She could hear the answer she might have given the night before: Cole is your father. You don’t know the whole story. Don’t bring his trouble here.
“I might have,” she said.
Luke rubbed both hands over his face. The raw skin at the base of one thumb caught June’s attention, but she waited to ask about it. He had finally begun speaking without watching her for the moment she would stop him.
Keene asked for his phone. “You can refuse, and you can ask for an attorney. But if the photograph still has location data, it can get us to that animal faster.”
Luke unlocked it and placed it in her hand. “Use it.”
His photograph showed a dark animal twisting in crusted snow, one foreleg pulled toward a low anchor. Its location data were intact. A second image showed the den. With Luke’s written consent, Keene copied and logged both, returned his phone, and called the wildlife response team.
Lena drew June aside. “If those kits belong to that female and she can be released, the team may be able to reunite them. It depends on her injury and what she does when she wakes.”
“But they’ll try.”
“They’ll give her the chance.”
Within thirty minutes, Keene had a field plan. A department veterinarian and carnivore biologist were coming from the regional office. Luke’s coordinates lay beyond a locked grazing gate, and the mapped service road had washed out years ago.
“I can take you in through our north allotment,” June said. “There’s a switchback the map doesn’t show.”
Keene studied her. “You can get us to the site?”
“To within half a mile. After that Luke knows it.”
“You guide us through the private gates, then you and Luke stay where I tell you.”
Luke opened his mouth. June touched his sleeve, lightly enough that he could pull away.
“We’ll listen,” she said.
Before they left, June stood near the isolation-room window with Mabel’s carrier. The cat called once. From inside the secure kennel, one of the kits answered with a rough, bubbling chirr.
“She can’t go with them,” Lena said.
“I know.”
They reached the ranch before the field team. When June opened the mudroom, Amos passed the waiting water bowl and went straight into the north yard, his nose close to the narrow tire ruts June had seen that morning.
Luke watched him, then looked at Keene. “The crate’s still here.”
He led them to the old lambing shed and lifted a piece of roofing tin half buried in weeds. Under it lay a dented dog crate lined with a torn moving blanket. Bright orange cord had been tied around the door; one loose fiber clung to the wire.
“I hid it after I moved them,” Luke said. “I thought Dad might come looking.”
Amos sniffed the blanket, then sat beside June. A faded stencil on the crate’s base read MBO-7, the numbering system for Mercer Backcountry Outfitters.
Keene photographed the crate in place. “This supports part of what you’ve told me. It doesn’t prove who put the animals inside.”
With June’s permission, she tagged the crate and locked it in her state truck.
The field vehicles met them at the ranch an hour later. June led in her pickup, with Keene beside her and Luke in the back. Amos tried to climb in, but June made him stay in the mudroom with Mabel and left the radio playing beside their water bowls. He watched through the storm door as they pulled away.
The switchback was worse than June remembered. Snowmelt had cut channels through the road, and twice she got out to move fallen limbs while Keene scanned the timber. No one spoke about Cole. Interviews, warrants, and consequences could wait. The animal in Luke’s photograph had already spent more than a day in a trap.
At the last bend, the department veterinarian raised a hand from the truck behind them. They continued on foot, carrying equipment in hard cases. Keene made June and Luke wait beside a stand of subalpine fir while the trained team moved ahead.
For a long time, all June could hear was water under ice and Luke breathing through his mouth. He kept rubbing the raw place at the base of his thumb.
“Did he hurt you?” she asked.
Luke shook his head. “He grabbed the crate. I wouldn’t let go.”
June took off one glove and held out her hand. He did not take it, but after a moment he stopped rubbing the bruise.
Keene appeared between the trees and beckoned them forward to a marked safe point. “Stay behind me.”
They came over the rise. Below them, in a hollow of old snow, the wolverine lifted her head. She was still alive…
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