Part 2
“I didn’t say the trap was there,” Wolfe answered. “I said the wolf probably came from there.” He spoke quickly, but his eyes went to the steel on the floor, and everyone in the shed had heard the certainty in his first words. With six inches of new snow outside, there was no trail for him to have followed.
Noah crouched without moving closer to Gray. “Walter, is that the trap you took off him?”
“It is. Homemade modification on an old commercial frame. No tag.”
Wolfe’s jaw tightened. “Possessing that wolf is the problem in front of us. You don’t have a rehabilitation permit.”
“I didn’t possess him yesterday morning. I had a dying animal at my door.”
Aaron raised his phone again, holding it low. “For the record, did you ask anyone for help?”
Walter nearly told him to leave. Then he saw Wolfe watching, eager for anger to become the story. “No. I gave emergency first aid. If I’d called the wrong person, he might have been shot before anyone saw the leg.”
“That’s not an unreasonable fear,” Noah said. “It’s also not a plan.”
Gray shifted at the sound of Walter’s voice and tried to rise. His injured foreleg folded, and Walter was beside him before anyone else moved. He kept one hand on the blanket rather than the wolf and waited until the animal settled.
“He cannot be transported safely tonight without sedation and a proper crate,” Walter said. “You know that.”
Wolfe did know.
The reluctant pause was enough to show it.
Noah stood. “I’ll call the regional wildlife office in the morning. Until then, no visitors, locked shed, and you call me if his breathing changes or he becomes mobile. Aaron, no address in whatever you write. Simon, leave the trap.”
“It could be evidence,” Wolfe said.
“Exactly.” Noah picked it up by the chain with a feed sack and carried it to his SUV.
Aaron took one photograph from the doorway after Walter agreed: Gray under the blanket, the bandaged leg visible, no blood and no spectacle. “I’ll write that you kept him alive,” the reporter said. “I’ll also write that the county needs to explain an illegal trap.”
When the vehicles left, Walter sat beside Gray and listened to the quiet return. “That man knew your creek,” he said. “I wish I knew why.”
Over the next three days, Gray’s feverish heat diminished and his appetite returned in careful increments. He managed to stand on three legs, then crossed the width of the shed with the injured paw hovering above the floor. Walter changed the dressing, kept notes on food and water, and never mistook improvement for recovery.
On the fourth evening, Gray rested his muzzle against Walter’s knee while Walter measured another small portion of meat. The contact was new, deliberate enough that Walter stopped moving.
“Ellen told me not to stay alone,” he said. “She didn’t specify species.”
He had married Ellen when he was twenty-three and she was twenty-one. She taught third grade at the little school until it closed; he worked out of the rural animal clinic. When lung cancer reduced their life to pill times, broth, and borrowed oxygen equipment, Walter had used competence as if it were a bargain he could make with death.
It had not been.
On her last clear afternoon, Ellen had tapped the back of his hand and told him to find somebody who still needed him. Walter had resented the sentence because it sounded like permission to survive her. Now Gray’s weight against his knee made it feel less like permission than unfinished work.
Headlights moved across the shed wall. Walter expected Noah. Instead, a blue crossover with Missoula plates pulled beside the house, and Caleb Mercer stepped out wearing city boots that filled with snow on his third stride.
His grandson hugged him hard enough to press the air from his chest. At thirty-five, Caleb had Walter’s height, Ellen’s quick frown, and a software job Walter understood only as “fixing what other people had fixed badly.”
“You stopped answering after nine last night,” Caleb said. “I called Ruth. She told me you’d taken in a monster.”
“Ruth’s measurements run large.”
Caleb smiled, then heard Gray move inside the shed. The smile disappeared. “What was that?”
Walter could have lied for another minute. Instead, he opened the door and made Caleb stand behind him.
Gray raised his head.
Caleb stumbled backward into the snow.
“That is a wolf.”
“Correct.”
“In your shed.”
“Also correct.”
Caleb grabbed Walter’s sleeve. “Come away from the door.”
“He can barely stand.”
“He has teeth whether he can stand or not.” Caleb pulled out his phone. “I’m calling the sheriff.”
Walter took the phone before Caleb finished unlocking it. The move shocked them both. “The sheriff has been here.”
“And left you with it?”
“With him.”
“No. Don’t do that.” Caleb’s fear sharpened into anger. “Don’t give a wild predator a name and pretend that changes what it is.”
Gray got to his feet at the raised voices. He did not approach Caleb. He placed himself beside Walter, favoring the bandaged leg, his attention fixed on the unfamiliar man.
Caleb went pale. “You think that means he loves you. It means he’s guarding a resource.”
“Maybe. Right now the resource is the man feeding him.”
“You’re making jokes because you know this is insane.”
Walter felt the old impulse to end an argument by becoming harder than the other person. Ellen used to lay two fingers on his wrist when she saw it coming. No fingers stopped him now.
“You drove three hours without calling,” he said. “You haven’t been here since October, and now you’re qualified to decide what keeps me alive?”
Caleb’s face changed. “I know what losing Grandma did to you.”
“You know what it did from Missoula.”
The words landed exactly where Walter had aimed them. Caleb looked toward the dark house, then back at the wolf. “Tomorrow I’m calling the county and Dr. Bell. If you force me, I’ll ask a judge to put you somewhere safe.”
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