Part 3
Willow braced her front paws when the handlers guided her toward the transport crate. Her muzzle turned past them, toward Beth. The sound she made brought both pups upright in their carrier.
Beth moved before she had decided what to do. Elena caught her attention with an open hand and pointed to a place beside the crate, clear of the door. Beth stopped there while the handlers waited.
“Let her see you,” Elena said. “Keep your hands outside.”
Willow entered reluctantly, turning as soon as the door closed. Beth rested her fingers against the outer bars, without pushing them through. The wolf brought her nose to the other side and drew in her scent.
The metal was cold enough to hurt. Beth remembered Wren’s head against the same hand and had to swallow before she could speak.
“Go on with them,” she whispered. “Get those boys big. You’ll have your woods back.”
She had no authority to promise it. Still, she stayed while Willow’s breathing slowed, then took her hand away when Elena touched her shoulder. The handlers covered part of the crate and wheeled it toward the van.
Beth followed into the parking lot. Flint protested from the smaller carrier; Wren answered once, a thinner sound that she listened for until the doors closed. Elena checked the latches herself before climbing into the front seat.
The van disappeared around the turn toward the highway. Beth remained beside the empty parking space, her motel bag slipping down her arm. She had been careful to remember everything in the room, even the phone charger behind the nightstand.
Keller came out without a coat. “I’m off in an hour. I was going to offer you a beer, but I’m not sure one covers this.”
“I was thinking considerably more.”
He rubbed his hands together. “Then we’ll start with a sandwich.”
She stayed at the motel another night. Over dinner Keller told her about a terrier that had eaten the same child’s mitten twice, and Beth managed a laugh that surprised them both. He let it pass without pointing it out.
Home was exactly as she had left it. A grocery-store receipt lay curled beside the sink, and the hallway ended at Danny’s closed bedroom door. She put her bag on her own bed and went back to the kitchen rather than stand looking down that hall.
The next morning she returned to the hardware store. Nine years there had taught her to find things by the direction a customer pointed. She could hear “the little metal thing” and ask the right questions until a washer, hinge pin, or shelf bracket emerged from the description.
She still could. That was what unsettled her: how much of a day she could perform while feeling almost absent from it. She ordered stock, counted the register, and remembered to tell the afternoon clerk about a special delivery.
At the grocery store she bought noodles and apples, then left the apples untouched. She went back to the gym and watched the treadmill count down. Sleep came in short stretches, broken by the remembered movement of Willow’s nose against the crate.
Dr. Ellen Shaw asked about the anniversary at their Thursday appointment. Beth started to give the usual answer, but she had told that answer to too many people at the store already. She looked at the box of tissues beside her chair and said, “I keep thinking I’ve lost them.”
“The wolves?”
“I know where they are. I know they’re being fed.” Beth pulled at a loose thread on her cuff. “I didn’t have them a week. This seems like a ridiculous amount of missing.”
Shaw didn’t reach for a reassuring phrase. “What do you miss most?”
Beth thought of the smell of warm towels, the feeding notes, the way Keller would glance at her when something needed doing. Then she thought of Wren falling asleep before she had managed to put him down.
“Knowing what to do for somebody,” she said.
They spent the rest of the appointment there. Beth didn’t tell Shaw about every dream, but when she left, she had used more of the hour than she usually did. In the parking lot she sat with the keys in her lap until she could drive without rushing.
Five weeks after the van left, an unfamiliar number lit her phone during dinner. Elena gave her name, and Beth knocked her fork against the bowl getting the phone closer to her ear.
“The little one,” she said. “Is he—”
“He’s doing well. All three are physically much better.” Elena paused. “This isn’t a medical call.”
Beth stopped looking for somewhere to put the fork. She laid it on the table.
North Fork had two other adult wolves whose histories made a carefully managed introduction worth attempting. It hadn’t worked. Willow rushed the dividing fence whenever they approached her pups, and every effort to expand the family’s space near them ended with her driving the youngsters back into a corner.
“She’s protecting them,” Beth said.
“Yes. And we stopped the introductions before anyone got hurt.” Elena sounded tired. “But we can’t release this family as they are. The pups need to develop, and she needs to range and hunt without being fixed on every person or animal near their pen.”
Beth pictured Willow standing over the blankets in the clinic. “So what happens?”
“If we can’t change the conditions, they stay in permanent care. Safe housing, food, veterinary treatment. That’s the fallback.”
The refrigerator started behind Beth with a clunk. She had intended to replace it for years, but it continued to work if she shut the freezer door firmly. She pressed her bare foot against the cabinet and waited for Elena to explain why she had called.
“There’s a field placement we may be able to authorize,” Elena said. “An assisted release. A family this small would need a long preparation, and the center can’t staff that location around the clock.”
“You have other people who know about wolves.”
“And they’d supervise it. I’m asking about someone who can stay there and do the daily work.”
Beth looked down at her bowl. “Why me?”
“At the clinic, she settled when you came to the crate. I’ve watched her for five weeks here. That response to you may give us a way to change her surroundings without another fight at every door.”
“You told me I couldn’t see them.”
“I did. This would be work toward release, with rules about contact. It wouldn’t be visiting.” Elena let Beth sit with that. “And I don’t know that it will succeed.”
Beth drew the bowl toward her, then pushed it away again. On the refrigerator, beneath a magnet Paul had brought home from a work trip, was next week’s schedule from the store.
“How long?” she asked.
“Four to six months to start. Longer if the assessment calls for it. There’s a cabin at our remote site in the Bitterroots.” Elena’s voice became more deliberate. “Can you leave home for that?”
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