Part 2
“They’re wolverines,” Rowan said, keeping one hand against the carrier door as Ellie backed away. “Kits, probably about three weeks old. And those claws can cut through a thin exam glove.”
Ellie withdrew her hand. Inside the carrier, Daisy resumed washing a broad little face as if the alarm had been a criticism of her housekeeping.
Maribel stared through the grate. “Wolverines don’t live in barns.”
“A female wouldn’t den this low beside an occupied ranch, not with newborn kits.” Rowan’s voice stayed level, but his hands moved fast. He asked Ellie to call Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “She should be in deep snow, in a den well above us. These two didn’t walk into your barn and climb into a cat’s nest.”
One kit sneezed. The other pressed closer to Daisy’s belly.
Within ten minutes, the room became quieter rather than busier. Ellie posted a sign on the outside door and brought in a second lock for the carrier. Rowan took Maribel’s photographs, the time she had found the animals, and a description of every contact she had made. No one reached inside.
“They’re protected,” he explained. “That limits who can handle them and how. It also means we need to find out whether their mother is alive.”
“Could she have abandoned them?”
“A mother doesn’t carry two kits down from denning country and leave them with a barn cat. Someone moved them.”
Tessa Reed arrived forty-five minutes later in mud-spattered field pants and a state truck that looked as though it had slept outdoors all winter. She was a wildlife biologist, a compact woman in her early forties whose gray-streaked braid had half escaped its elastic. She did not waste time being astonished.
She watched the kits through the grate, compared Maribel’s photographs with reference images on a tablet, and nodded once to Rowan. After arranging a temporary emergency hold and federal coordination, she helped move the carrier into a secure room. A small camera allowed them to watch without opening the door.
“They’ve been fed,” Tessa said, studying the monitor. “That cat may have bought us time.”
Maribel looked at Daisy’s thin sides. “She lost her own litter last week.”
Tessa’s expression softened, but only for a moment. “Then she heard these two and answered.”
Under Tessa’s authorization, Rowan and Ellie used a divider and a second crate to separate Daisy without reaching among the kits. The cat went to a quiet exam room. The kits remained under low light with controlled warmth, room to crawl away from the heated area, and continuous monitoring while Rowan followed instructions from a wildlife veterinarian in Helena.
Warm and responsive did not mean safe. The kits could be dehydrated or carrying injuries hidden by their fur. Their mother, if she was caught somewhere, had less time. Tessa called game warden Lena Ortiz and requested a small search team.
When Ellie returned Huck to Maribel in the side hall, he turned toward the holding-room door and sat facing it, his nose lifted toward the gap beneath the frame.
“Has he worked scent?” Tessa asked.
“Not officially.” Maribel told her about Eli and the winter survey routes, how Huck had learned to sit at hair catches and scat before Eli could spot them. “I thought he’d forgotten.”
Tessa watched him a little longer. “He may have forgotten the commands, but not that scent. It could be wolverine; it could be survey lure. Either way, he isn’t evidence, and I’m not running a twelve-year-old hound through denning terrain. But it explains the vigil.”
Vigil. To Maribel, the word fit better than warning. Huck’s body had held no forward lunge in the stall, only that fixed, waiting posture. Whatever scent he recognized, he had watched until she followed.
Lena Ortiz arrived while Tessa was examining the towel Maribel had put in the carrier. Under the warm animal smell was the same waxed-canvas odor Maribel had noticed in the truck, mixed with spruce resin and the bitter musk of commercial trapping lure.
“This towel was clean,” Maribel said. “It came from Daisy’s crate.”
“Then the smell transferred from the kits,” Lena said. “Show us exactly where you found them.”
They left Rowan and Ellie with Daisy and the kits in separate rooms. Huck rode back with Maribel, but he did not settle into his usual place. He stood braced against the turns, nose pressed to the window crack.
At the ranch, fresh afternoon wind had scoured the aisle clean of loose hay. Tessa photographed the foaling stall before anyone entered. Daisy’s nest contained no blood, no afterbirth, and no sign that the kits had been born there. Faint drag marks crossed the dust between the apple crate and a stack of mineral tubs.
“The cat carried them one at a time,” Tessa said. “She must have heard them when she came back to the stall.”
Maribel kept Huck at the stall gate while Lena and Tessa went in first. Behind the tubs, they found a waxed-canvas pack collapsed on its side.
Its leather flap had been chewed. The lining held pale hairs and a dark patch where two small bodies had lain together. Daisy’s prints marked the dust around it.
Maribel did not need Lena to bring the pack into the light. She recognized the uneven orange stitches at one corner. She had sewn them herself at the kitchen table while Eli complained that new equipment lacked character.
“This was my husband’s,” she said.
For an instant, every sound in the barn seemed separate: Huck’s breathing, Tessa’s camera shutter, meltwater tapping a bucket beneath a roof leak.
“Was it kept here?” Lena asked.
“No. In his field room at the house.”
“Who had access to Eli’s gear after he died?”
Maribel saw Burke Salinger on the porch three days after the funeral, his hat crushed between both hands. She saw him loading Eli’s survey gear into his truck because Maribel had said she could not bear to sort it. Burke had returned the snowshoes, the sample tubes, and the orange field vest weeks later. She had not checked the pack.
He had repaired her north waterline without sending a bill. He had sat with her through the first meeting at the bank. He had known Eli since they were boys.
She heard herself say, “I don’t know…”
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