Part 2
Mara set the pen down. “No.”
Wade glanced toward the open hospital door before pulling it nearly shut. Then he pointed to the statement with one clean fingernail. “You were found with illegal bait in a company pack, beside a cable you set on my lease. If you tell the truth about one thing, they’ll ask about the rest.”
The paper did more than put a bear in a rifle sight. Refusing it put Mara, Wade, and the company that contributed to Evie’s field stipend in view as well.
“He didn’t attack me,” Mara said.
“He put his teeth on your gear. You’re lucky he didn’t open you from hip to shoulder.”
“He pulled me out.”
Wade sat in the vinyl chair and rubbed both hands over his face. For a moment he looked less like her employer than the man who had once stayed with Evie through an asthma attack while Mara was six hours away.
“I sent every guide and volunteer I could reach into that swamp for you,” he said. “I had the sheriff’s rescue team moving before your own daughter finished the missed-check call. Don’t turn me into the enemy because an animal did something neither of us understands.”
“Then don’t ask me to lie about it.”
His gaze dropped to her boot. “You think you’re standing on clean ground now?”
Mara had no answer that would not insult them both.
Wade picked up the statement and folded it once. “The study agreement comes up for renewal in January. Evie’s cameras are on my access roads, her crew sleeps in my bunkhouse, and half her data comes from land I can close tomorrow. I don’t want to do that.”
He said it without menace. That was Wade’s gift: he could make a threat sound like a weather report, regrettable and beyond anyone’s control.
“If the bear comes near the lodge,” he continued, “somebody will shoot it. Your signature won’t change the ending. It might keep the rest of us from going down with it.”
“You don’t know the ending.”
Wade stood, tucked the paper into his jacket, and looked at the old thermos between them. “I know what it costs to keep people working in Morrow County. You’ve known too.”
Evie returned with one coffee and a cup of ice chips after he left. She watched the closing door, then handed the ice to Mara.
“What did Wade want?”
“To make sure the bill was covered.”
Mara heard herself answer before she had decided to lie. Evie pulled the chair closer. At thirty-two she had Mara’s narrow shoulders and her grandfather’s habit of pressing her lips together before saying something unwelcome.
She unlocked her phone and brought up a night image from a field camera.
The bear filled half the frame. Infrared light silvered its muzzle and showed the enormous lift of its shoulders. Its right forefoot was turning inward as it crossed the logging road.
“This was three weeks ago,” Evie said. “He’s been using the same corridor since May. I’ve got him in eleven locations. No charges, no camp break-ins, no livestock calls. He leaves when people show up.”
Mara studied the crooked paw.
“You knew him at the cut,” Evie said. “Not from my cameras. From before.”
“Knowing a track isn’t knowing an animal.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Pain medication moved slowly behind Mara’s eyes. She could give Evie another half-truth, something about an old sighting or a rumor from the hound men. Instead she saw a yearling’s breath darkening the canvas over its face.
“Six summers ago, I found him in a cable on the Juniper block,” she said. “He’d fought until the wire cut in. I covered his head, opened the set, and got away before he could get up.”
Evie’s expression changed from wonder to concentration. “Was it a research snare?”
“No.”
“Who set it?”
Mara looked at her own hands above the blanket. The left thumb carried a white ridge from the day the cable cutter slipped.
“I did.”
Evie leaned back. The coffee cup crackled in her grip.
“Wade said we had a calf killer coming through a farm on the county line,” Mara continued. “There was no calf. There wasn’t even a herd on that parcel. By the time I understood what he wanted, I’d already put the line in.”
“And after you understood?”
“I cut that one.”
“That one.”
Mara looked at the white ridge on her thumb.
“I should have reported it,” she said.
Evie stood and shoved the untouched coffee into the trash. “Yes.” She did not leave the hospital, but she did not sit down again.
Wade brought groceries after Mara was discharged and left her paycheck beneath the ceramic bear bowl Evie had made in middle school.
He also returned Mara’s unloaded rifle and the torn, molasses-stained pack. When she asked about the fresh cable at Cypress Cut, Wade said his men had found no set there. She understood that it had already been removed.
He was halfway to his truck when Mara came out on crutches.
“I’m not signing,” she called.
Wade turned. Beyond him, kennel hands moved between the runs with feed buckets. Calder Blackwater was still one of the few steady employers left after the paper mill closed.
“You’re sore and scared,” he said. “I’ll give you time.”
“Time won’t change what happened.”
“No. It’ll change how much pain you’re in when you think about it.”
He opened the truck door, then paused. “You always wait, Mara. You let somebody else take the risk, then tell yourself you were against it.”
Mara’s crutch sank half an inch into the wet yard. The remark found Danny’s yellow hood and the report she had not made six summers ago. Wade could not have known where it landed, but he knew her well enough to aim close.
“Close Evie’s roads if you have to,” Mara said. “Take the cottage back when the lease is up. I’m still not signing.”
For the first time, Wade looked hurt rather than angry. “I didn’t put your name on those forms.” He drove away before she could answer.
Six weeks passed. Mara graduated from crutches to one cane and from the cottage steps to slow laps around the yard. The doctor cleared her for cautious walking on uneven ground in the boot, but not for driving.
Evie moved her field equipment from Wade’s bunkhouse to a borrowed church storeroom and spoke to her mother about meals, appointments, and weather. Nothing else.
In the second week, one of Evie’s Alder Road cameras transmitted a single frame of the old steel bear trailer being towed into Male Eighteen’s corridor. Then the camera went dark. Evie saved the image, but it did not show whether the trap had actually been set.
One evening Mara found the dining table covered with copies of company removal reports and Evie’s camera sheets. Under the research agreement, Wade’s company had to place every reported bear removal from the study land in a shared compliance folder; Evie had downloaded the folder before losing access.
Each report carried a date, a location, a description of property damage, and a signature certifying that the animal had been taken under the stated circumstances. Mara’s name appeared again and again.
Evie sat opposite her with red-rimmed eyes. “Two damage sites are your own camera stations. There’s no farm, hive, or livestock at either coordinate. This report says a female with a white chest crescent was killed, but she was photographed two days later with both cubs.”
“Evie—” “How many of these did you sign after you knew there’d been no complaint at all…”
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