Part 5
The installer mounted the satellite unit beside the mudroom door, where Nora could reach it without climbing or pretending she had forgotten. Rachel programmed a morning check-in and an evening one. Nora hated the bright green confirmation light. She pressed the button anyway.
The first week, Lena reported that the young wolf was eating and the swelling had begun to recede. The second, she said the animal was putting weight on the injured foot when no people were visible. By the third week, the wolf had learned the schedule of the remote feeder and avoided the concealed service gate whenever it heard a human latch.
“Good,” Nora said each time, and meant it.
What she did not say was that she woke before dawn listening for an animal that was forty miles away. Her body still expected warmth against her thigh. Sometimes she found one hand pressed to her chest where the red scarf had covered the wolf’s heartbeat.
Rachel began coming every Saturday. She did not rearrange the house unless asked. Nora, in turn, stopped treating each offered chore as an attempt to evict her.
On the sixth Saturday they sat at the kitchen table with the scarf between them. Rachel had brought red yarn in three shades, none an exact match. Nora chose a muted gray from Cal’s old mending basket.
“It’ll show,” Rachel said.
“So does the cut.”
They worked from opposite ends. Rachel’s stitches were more even now, but she still pulled them too tight when she was thinking about something else.
“You tried to fix every doctor,” she said without looking up.
Nora knew she meant Toby’s last months, when every answer had seemed like an invitation to argue. “I thought if they explained it better, there would be another choice.”
“They explained it.”
“I know that now.”
“You knew it then. You just couldn’t stop.” Rachel set down her needle. “He wanted you to sit with him. You kept going into the hall to make calls.”
Nora’s first impulse was to list what those calls had accomplished: a second opinion, a different medication for nausea, three weeks without the headaches that frightened him. All of that was true. It was also not what Rachel had said.
“I thought stopping meant I had agreed to lose him,” Nora said.
Rachel picked up the scarf. “We were losing him whether you agreed or not.”
The refrigerator motor clicked on. Outside, meltwater ticked from the eaves left by the September storm.
Nora pushed the mending basket aside. “I’m sorry I made you carry that alone while I was busy fighting.”
Rachel threaded the gray yarn through the cut edge. Her face did not soften into instant forgiveness. She nodded once and kept working, which was more honest.
That afternoon Nora opened the door to Toby’s old room. It had become a place where grief stored objects after people stopped entering: a telescope, a stack of comic books, his red rubber boots beneath the window, the binder of treatment notes Nora had kept for seven years.
She carried the binder to the kitchen and placed it in front of Rachel, then waited until her daughter looked up. The cardboard cover had softened at the corners from years of Nora taking it down and putting it back.
“You decide what happens to this,” she said.
Rachel rested both hands on the cover. “Not today.”
“All right.”
Nora did not decide for her. They left it on the table and finished the scarf around it.
Two days later Lena called with the first news Nora had allowed herself to want. The paw had healed with a slight outward turn, but the young wolf could run, pivot, climb, and keep pace in the center’s long enclosure. More important, it fled to cover at the first hint of a person.
“We consider that excellent manners,” Lena said.
Trail cameras and winter tracking had also placed the Willow Draw pack within six miles of the capture site. The silver-muzzled adult appeared in two images. Lena could not say whether he was the young wolf’s father, only that the pack had returned to the draw on at least three nights after the storm.
“We can attempt a return,” she said. “But not with sheep in the upper meadow and not while there is unresolved trapping pressure.”
Tom leased that meadow from Nora each fall. The payment covered most of her property taxes. Cal and Tom had renewed the arrangement with a handshake for twenty-two years.
“How long does it need to stay empty?” Nora asked.
“Through the winter, while she finds the pack again. After that, a range specialist can help you and Tom assess options. I’m not promising the pack will stay away from livestock. I’m telling you the release has a better chance if we don’t put the wolf back between its family and a flock.”
Nora called Tom before she could turn arithmetic into an excuse. He answered from his barn, lambs complaining in the background.
“I need the upper meadow empty,” she said. “Until spring.”
Silence. Then, “You know what that pasture is worth to me.”
“I know what your payment is worth to me.”
“The state put you up to this?”
“They told me what the wolf needs. The land is mine.”
Tom breathed into the phone. “Cal wouldn’t have cut me off in October.”
“Cal isn’t here to make it easier for either of us.”
The words hurt as they left her. Tom did not answer for several seconds.
“I can move the flock by Friday,” he said at last. “After that, I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.”
“You always did like an animal better once it couldn’t disappoint you.”
That one struck where he meant it to. Nora gripped the repaired cane with her free hand.
“Maybe,” she said. “But the wolf didn’t set steel on your land.”
Tom ended the call. Nora sat at the kitchen table until the light changed. Then she opened the property-tax file, took out the figures, and called Rachel—not to ask for money, but to show her the problem before choosing a solution alone.
They found cuts Nora could live with and one she disliked: renting Cal’s old equipment shed to a cabinetmaker from town. It would put another person on the property twice a week. Rachel wisely did not point out the additional safety in that.
On Wednesday evening, the satellite unit flashed green just as Lena called, the two signals arriving within seconds of each other. Nora pressed the check-in before she answered. “The meadow is clear,” Lena said. “A field team found fresh pack tracks above the creek this morning, and the remote recorder picked up their calls before dawn. The weather window looks good. We can bring her home tomorrow…”
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