Part 2
Kate moved between Nell and the open car door. Daniel stayed where he was, holding the line; the wolf’s nose would sink if he let go. Rachel spoke to Jonah in a low voice, identifying a collared female her team had been trying to locate since the heavy rain.
“She has pups?” Ellis asked.
“Four, when we last checked. About five weeks old.” Rachel set down her case. “Right now I need to get their mother out of this ditch.”
Nell looked past her mother at the muddy head. The wolf had shut its eyes again, but its ears still moved. Somewhere inside the drowned-looking woods was a place this animal had been trying to reach.
After consulting the veterinarian, Rachel and Jonah secured support for the wolf’s head and laid out the mats they would use to reach it. The animal flinched when the dart struck, then gradually relaxed against the line. Nell gripped the seat beneath her knees until Rachel signaled that they could move in.
The team replaced Nell’s improvised loop with proper support and eased a stretcher beneath the wolf. Kate stayed beside the car, letting Nell lean around her to see the trapped foot lifted clear of the water.
The trap came free, and Jonah worked its chain out from beneath the platform, where a broken anchor stake had lodged. On the stretcher the wolf looked smaller, its body ending where Nell had imagined more of it beneath the water. Its foot was swollen, but Rachel covered the injury before Nell could make out much else.
Four adults carried the stretcher over the mats. Daniel walked backward at the bank end, placing his heels carefully where Jonah told him. When they set it down on dry ground, he remained bent over for a few seconds with his hands on his knees.
Nell’s red leash lay beside the empty trap. She watched it while Rachel checked the collar’s identification against her records and examined the wolf. Jonah retrieved the leash as he prepared the transport crate.
“Does she have a name?” Nell asked.
“We use her number.”
“What do you call her when you’re talking to her?”
“I try not to talk to her much.” Rachel glanced up from her work. “I want her to keep avoiding people.”
Nell had already named her Fern. She did not say it, because the name suddenly seemed like something she might be asked to hand over along with the leash.
Ellis approached Jonah with his cap tucked under his arm. “That trap came off my north line,” he said. “I set it for coyotes.”
Jonah stopped packing long enough to write down his name and phone number. Ellis gave both in the loud, exact voice he used when ordering a part he suspected the supplier would get wrong. Daniel stood beside him, wiping the same spot on his hands with a rag.
“Last time it was checked?” Jonah asked.
“Monday, early.” Ellis glanced at Daniel. “Before things got bad.”
“We’ll need the location where it was set. Someone will follow up with you.”
“I didn’t set out to catch a wolf.”
“I heard you.” Jonah closed his notebook. “We still need to know what happened.”
Daniel folded the rag twice and put it away without speaking. Mud remained in the lines around his fingernails.
Before they loaded the wolf, Rachel came to the car. “We’re leaving now. She’s still sedated, and the veterinarian’s waiting for her.”
“Can we follow?”
“She won’t have visitors today. Give Jonah a number, and we’ll get an update to your family when we can.”
Nell looked at Daniel’s pocket, then wrote her mother’s number on the offered page. Rachel saw the glance but did not ask about it.
Before the truck left, Jonah brought the leash over in a plastic bag. Nell took it without opening it. The handle was still looped around a piece of the rescue line, and she could see the place near the clasp where Benny had chewed the leather years before she was old enough to walk him alone.
The wildlife truck pulled away down the east lane. Almost at once, the ordinary sounds came back: a loose door banging on the pump house, Kate’s phone vibrating, Ellis coughing as he bent to collect Nell’s lunch sack. The apple had been crushed beneath someone’s boot.
Daniel came to the car. His lips were pale, and there was a red scrape along his forearm that Nell had not noticed before.
“You could have drowned,” he said.
“I didn’t.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“She was going under.”
“You get an adult. You keep calling.”
“Your phone was in the truck.”
He looked as though she had put a hand on a bruise. Nell knew she had, and she kept going.
“You weren’t answering. She couldn’t wait for you to decide I was allowed to help.”
“Enough,” Kate said.
Nell turned away, but her mother did not let the word end there. She told Daniel to get his arm cleaned, told Nell they were stopping at the clinic to have the dirty scrapes checked, and put the bicycle in her car after folding down the back seats. She made both of them useful before either could say anything worse.
By late afternoon, Nell was home with clean dressings on her palms and damp hair sticking to her neck. The county schools were still closed because of flooded roads. Her math worksheet lay on the kitchen table beneath the plastic bag containing the leash.
Their rented house stood at the edge of Ellis’s property, close enough that the grain dryer could shake the kitchen window. Daniel had fixed that window in February, when they first moved in. Ellis had charged them less rent because Daniel would be maintaining the farm’s pumps and equipment; Nell had heard her mother call the arrangement a chance to catch their breath.
Now Kate tried to open a jar of spaghetti sauce and passed it to Daniel because her hands were slippery. He took it automatically. For a minute they looked so much like an ordinary family getting dinner ready that Nell wanted to let them continue.
Then her mother’s phone rang.
Rachel had preliminary news from the veterinarian: no fracture on the images, no obvious tendon damage, and circulation in the injured foot. The wolf needed treatment, rest, and observation. Rachel would not promise when she could go back.
“What about the babies?” Nell asked, leaning toward the phone.
“A field worker checked a camera on the trail this afternoon. Their father has been bringing food. The den site is above the floodwater.”
“So they’re okay?”
“They’re alive, and he’s caring for them. That buys us time. It doesn’t mean we can forget about their mother.”
Kate asked whether the foot would stay damaged. Rachel said they would learn more after the swelling went down, then ended the call to speak with the veterinary team. Nell had wanted to hear that the wolf would walk again; she repeated the words about circulation to herself while her mother put down the phone.
At dinner, Daniel cut his spaghetti into short lengths without eating it. Nell watched the dressing on his arm shift whenever he turned his wrist. The bandage was much larger than hers.
“Did you know about the trap?” she asked.
He put down his fork. Kate looked at him, and something in her expression told Nell this was not a conversation her parents had already finished without her.
“I knew Ellis had one set along the north ditch.”
“Why didn’t you tell the man?”
“Ellis told him whose it was.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Daniel reached for his water, then left it where it stood. Outside, a pickup went past the house, rattling over the washboard stretch of lane. They all waited until its sound had faded.
“He asked me Monday morning to take it up before the water got any higher,” Daniel said. “I told him I would…”
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