Part 2
“I did,” Eli said.
Hannah pulled off one wet glove and held out her hand. “Show Ben the message.”
“I remember what it said.”
“This isn’t about your memory.”
Ben held out his hand. Eli unlocked his cell phone and gave it to him.
The exchange with Wade was short: the photograph, Wade’s question, and the map pin. It contained no mention of a cable or what Wade meant to do. Ben read it twice, forwarded the thread to his work account with Eli’s permission, and set the cell phone facedown on the bench.
“Do not call him yet,” he said. “If he set one cable, there may be others between here and the den. I want the road scene documented before he knows what we found.”
Eli looked through the barrier at the female. Her sedation had worn off enough for her to hold her head up, though the effort made the muscles along her back tremble. Three pups had latched. The lightest one rooted in the wrong direction until its nose found her foreleg, then went still from exhaustion.
“He may already know,” Eli said. “There was a machine above the creek.”
Ben used his department radio to reach the deputy stationed near the closed highway. He arranged for the spur to be watched from the county road, then stepped outside to photograph the vehicles and the workshop before new snow covered everything. There was no dramatic order to lock the doors, no suggestion that Eli guard a wounded wolf as evidence. Ben simply reduced the number of ways the night could go wrong.
Hannah worked without speaking to her father. She logged the pups’ condition, checked the mother from beyond the interior barrier, and set up a camera so she could observe nursing from the house. Every movement had a reason. Eli had always loved that about her, even when she was nine and took apart his fishing reel because the drag “sounded dishonest.”
He brought a dented kettle from the house and made coffee on the shop stove. Hannah accepted a mug but left it untouched beside her case.
“You could have asked me,” he said.
“You could have asked Wade.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It is from where I’m standing.”
The words were quiet. That made them harder to dismiss.
At midnight the snow turned to sleet. It tapped the metal roof and glazed the yard, sealing tire tracks beneath a transparent skin. The county deputy reported no traffic beyond the south closure, but Wade’s ranch lane joined the lake road two miles inside it. The mother nursed in brief intervals, lifting her head at every groan from the building. Once, when the stove shifted and a length of firewood fell inside the box, she hit the front of the enclosure so fast that Hannah dropped the clipboard.
Eli took one step forward.
Hannah raised her palm. “Don’t.”
He stopped. The wolf stood rigid, her injured leg barely touching the floor. After a minute she returned to the pups on her own.
“She doesn’t need you to settle her,” Hannah said. “She needs us to stop giving her reasons not to settle.”
Eli carried his coffee to the far end of the shop.
Headlights moved across the frozen window a few minutes before two. Ben reached the door before Eli did. A diesel pickup rolled into the yard with a fuel tank in the bed and a plow riding low on the front. Wade Pritchard climbed out in an old canvas coat, holding a red thermos in one hand and a portable fuel can in the other.
The visit itself fit the habit. The way Wade slowed when he saw Ben’s state truck did not.
“Power’s out at the south end,” Wade said when Ben opened the door. “Figured Eli’s generator might be thirsty.”
His beard was iced white along the chin. His face had the creased, burned look of a man who spent more time in wind than under a roof. He handed Eli the thermos before Ben could stop him.
“Coffee. The kind you complain about.”
Then one of the pups cried.
Wade’s eyes moved past Eli to the screened section of the workshop. The mother had raised her head. In the low amber light, the notch in her left ear made a clean black mark.
Wade did not look surprised to see a wolf. He looked tired.
Ben stepped between him and the barrier. “Let’s go back outside.”
“At two in the morning?”
“Now is fine.”
Wade set the fuel can beside the door. Hannah came from behind the privacy screen, pulling off her gloves. Wade had known her since she was nineteen. He had once taught her to back a stock trailer using only the side mirrors, while Eli stood in the pasture pretending not to watch.
“Hannah,” he said.
“Did you set a cable at Miller Creek?”
Ben glanced at her, but he did not interrupt. Wade looked at the floor, then at Eli.
“A restraint,” he said. “With a stop. It wasn’t meant to choke anything.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“Yes.”
The stove fan clicked off, leaving Wade’s answer exposed in the quiet.
Wade rubbed sleet from his beard. He said the heifer had been three weeks from calving and worth more than his truck. By the time anyone came to inspect, coyotes and thaw had made the carcass inconclusive. No confirmed wolf loss meant no compensation and no agency action beyond advice he had already followed.
“I put three loops where the pack crossed,” he said. “I wanted one held alive. Then maybe somebody would have to admit what was taking stock up there.”
Hannah stared at him. “A lactating female was held in runoff while her den flooded.”
Wade’s eyes went to the sound behind the screen. “I didn’t know there was a den when I set them.”
“There were six pups. Two died.”
Wade shut his eyes briefly. When he looked again, the defensive calculation had left his face.
“You saw her with the litter?” Ben asked.
Wade took off his cap and pressed the wet crown between both hands. He had checked the cables before noon, he said. The female was not there then. Near dusk, on his way back from moving cows, he had seen her carrying a pup uphill from the culvert. He realized the den was flooding and turned his snowmobile toward the road to find help.
“Then the snow came down hard. I saw Eli’s headlights and heard the female hit the cable. I shut off above the creek.”
“Why didn’t you come down?”
Wade’s jaw shifted. “Because Ben’s truck would’ve been the next set of lights.”
There it was. Not confusion. Not a mistake he had intended to report. A choice made in the dark, followed by another.
Eli unscrewed the thermos cap and smelled Wade’s burned coffee. He remembered Wade sitting in the hospital parking lot after his knee replacement, refusing to leave until Eli could get into the passenger seat without swearing. He remembered the two of them repairing fence in sleet and Wade’s hands shaking the year his older brother died. Those memories crowded the workshop now, making it harder to see the cable on the bench without also seeing the man who had set it.
Ben asked for the other two locations.
“I’ll pull them at daylight.”
“You will not touch them. You’ll take me to them.”
Wade looked toward the window. “One’s on my deeded ground.”
“The wolf doesn’t become lawful to snare because she crossed a survey line.”
“Easy to say when a loss doesn’t come out of your winter feed.”
Ben did not take the bait. “Locations.”
Wade gave him the ridge and the lower fence line, but his answers grew less precise as he spoke. Ben wrote without arguing. Nothing had been decided yet about charges. Visibility was too poor for a night search that might miss the cables and put the removal team at risk, so deputies closed both access points until equipped crews could enter at first light.
When Ben stepped outside to make the arrangements, Wade turned to Eli.
“You know what one missing cow does to a place my size.”
“I know.”
“You sent me that crossing because you knew I couldn’t lose another.”
“I thought you’d move the herd.”
Wade’s expression barely changed. “Move the herd? You sent me the pin and washed your hands of it. Don’t stand there now and make me the only man who knew what that meant.”
Hannah stood beside the barrier, listening. The mother wolf had lowered her head again, but her eyes remained open.
Wade picked up his cap. “Tell Ben I never told you what I meant to do…”
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