Part 6
Nell kept watching the space between the trees. A branch moved after the wolf had passed, then stopped. When Rachel finally signaled that they could step out, Nell stayed in the pickup a little longer.
Kate opened the back door. Nell unfastened her seat belt and handed her mother the backpack before climbing down. Daniel stood aside to give her room, and she stopped beside him with her shoulder against his arm.
Outside, the morning air smelled of wet leaves and the warm metal of Ellis’s tractor. Jonah checked the empty crate and secured its door for the trip back. Rachel stood a little way off, speaking quietly with the colleague who would continue tracking the wolf.
From beside the pickup, Nell could see the shallow mark where the injured foot had touched down in the sand. She wanted to walk closer but kept her feet beside the tire.
Rachel came over before they left. The signal was moving away through cover, she said; they would keep following it from a distance and check for evidence that the female had reached the family area. She would send news when they had something reliable to share.
“Even if it isn’t good?” Nell asked.
Rachel looked at her parents before answering, and Kate nodded.
“We’ll tell you what we can,” she said.
Ellis waited at the farm gate on the way back. Rachel returned his key, thanked him, and drove on. Nell watched him put it on his ring before she stepped out of the pickup.
“Thank you for opening it,” she said.
Ellis nodded. Daniel came around the pickup and asked about replacing the barrier at the pump-house ditch. Ellis asked for a written estimate, and Daniel said he would bring one.
Six weeks later, Nell stood beside him at the new pump-house rail, holding a box of washers against her hip. The broken platform was gone. Behind the posts, thick mesh kept anyone on the road from stepping onto the soft bank by mistake.
Daniel had picked up work at two other farms, enough to keep them in the house but not enough to stop Kate using the calculator at the kitchen table. He still had questions to answer about the trap. Ellis paid for the barrier as a separate repair job, and Daniel kept a copy of the agreement folded inside his notebook.
Nell had a photograph folded inside hers. Rachel had sent it after the field team confirmed the female was back with her mate and pups. In the black-and-white image, four young wolves followed their mother past a fallen branch; one was blurred because it had turned while the others kept moving. The fold had begun to whiten across the blank margin.
Her notebook lay in the pickup with her backpack. Benny’s leash was at home, on the lower peg beside the door, where she had hung it after the release.
Daniel asked her for a washer. Nell found the right size, handed it over, and noticed a line of prints in the damp ground beyond the mesh. Some were broad and deep; others overlapped them or vanished where the mud turned to leaf litter.
She leaned forward without putting weight on the rail. At her feet, Daniel was fitting the washer onto a bolt, his attention narrowed to the small space between the bracket and the post.
“Dad,” she said. “Come look at this.”
He set the wrench on the dry side of the rail and stood up. Nell shifted the box of washers to her other hip and made room beside her.