Part 3
Somewhere safe. Walter heard the phrase all night from the bedroom while Caleb kept watch from the couch, a dining chair braced beneath the knob of the back door. Safety, in Caleb’s version, had locks Walter did not control.
Before dawn, Walter found his grandson awake, elbows on his knees. “I’m feeding Gray,” he said.
“I’m coming with you.”
They crossed the yard without speaking. Inside the shed, Gray rose and limped toward Walter, then stopped when Caleb entered. Walter set down the bowl. Gray waited for Walter to step back before eating.
“He isn’t tame,” Walter said. “I’m not claiming he is.”
“Then you agree he can’t stay.”
“I agree he deserves a choice that isn’t a bullet.”
Caleb watched the wolf eat, fear held rigidly in his shoulders. For one second compassion softened his expression. Then Gray glanced up, and Caleb retreated through the door.
He left after breakfast. At the gate he said he was trying to protect the only grandparent he had left. Walter said nothing, because an answer kind enough to be true did not come in time.
Walter found Caleb’s untouched coffee on the kitchen table and the chair still angled toward the back door. He set the chair straight before carrying the cup to the sink. In the shed, Gray’s dressing had darkened where the animal had stood too long during the argument, so Walter cleaned the wound again and wrote the change in his notebook instead of telling himself it meant nothing.
When the blue crossover vanished, Walter opened the back gate and stood beside it with Gray. Beyond the fence, lodgepole pines climbed toward Miller Creek and the broken country north of town.
“Go,” Walter said. “Before they come.”
Gray stepped into the road ditch. He sniffed the wind, tested the injured paw, and looked toward the trees. Then he turned, passed Walter, and limped back to the shed.
The choice did not prove gratitude, love, or anything else Walter wanted to believe. It proved only that a hurt animal preferred the shelter he knew to winter ground where he could not yet hunt.
It was enough to close the gate.
Walter’s father had built a cabin thirty-one miles into the Blacktail country, on an old mining track that disappeared beneath snow each winter. Walter had not slept there since they buried his father twenty years earlier, but the walls had been sound the last time he checked. His old utility snowmobile could cover the first stretch. A tow sled would carry supplies—and Gray, if the leg failed.
He packed food, a sleeping bag, tools, and the hand radio from his truck. He planned to leave at three the next morning, when Ruth’s bedroom light usually went dark.
The work steadied him until he reached Ellen’s red thermos. She had carried it on their last trip to Blacktail and complained that Walter made coffee strong enough to remove paint. He put it in the pack, took it out, then packed it again. Running from the county was foolish; leaving behind the one thing that still made him useful felt worse.
At two, engines entered the drive.
Two pickups stopped without emergency lights. Simon Wolfe got out with three men. One carried a collapsible cage, another a crossbow, and Wolfe kept a short gun low beside his thigh.
“Open up, Mercer,” he called. “That animal belongs to the county.”
Walter stepped onto the porch with his rifle pointed at the boards. “County business doesn’t come at two in the morning.”
Wolfe smiled. “That trap on his leg was mine. I tracked that male for six months. You took property that was already caught.”
“You just admitted to an untagged set.”
“Prove it.” Wolfe nodded toward the shed. “I’ll give you eight thousand dollars and we forget the rest. There’s a buyer overseas who pays for a hide that size.”
The amount was the rough American equivalent of the fortune Wolfe believed he was naming. To Walter, it sounded smaller than the bowl Gray drank from.
“Leave.”
Max Doyle walked toward the shed with a pry bar. Walter fired one warning shot into the packed dirt beyond the empty woodpile, well away from the house and road. The men flinched, but Max kept moving.
“Next call is the sheriff,” Walter said.
“You’d have made it already if you had a phone on you.” Wolfe motioned to a second man. “Reed, keep the old man out of the way.”
The accomplice struck Walter’s rifle aside and shoved him into the snow. Pain ran from Walter’s hip to his shoulder. Max broke the shed latch. From inside came a growl deeper than any sound Gray had made since arriving.
The door opened inward. Max entered with the cage and came out backward almost at once, Gray attached to the sleeve of his heavy coat. Max screamed and fell. Gray released him, stumbled on the damaged foreleg, and moved straight to Walter.
He stood over the man who had carried him four nights earlier.
Wolfe raised his weapon. Gray launched before Walter could move, knocking Wolfe sideways into the drift and closing his jaws on the padded shoulder of Wolfe’s coat. Reed Tucker reached for the fallen crossbow.
Walter drove the stock of his rifle down across the crossbow, pinning it in the snow. “Gray!”
The wolf’s ears turned.
“Here.”
Gray released Wolfe and backed toward Walter, chest heaving. He did not chase when the men dragged themselves away. He remained planted beside Walter on three useful legs.
Fresh headlights filled the drive. Noah Reed’s sheriff’s SUV came through the gate, followed by a second patrol vehicle. Ruth stood across the lane in her nightgown and winter coat, one hand still pressed to her phone.
Noah took in the broken latch, the cage, the weapons, and Wolfe’s bleeding shoulder. “Simon,” he said, “tell me there’s an explanation that doesn’t insult both of us.”
Max clutched his torn sleeve. “The wolf attacked.”
“After you broke into the shed?”
No one answered. Noah collected the weapons, separated the men, and recorded Walter’s account. When he asked why they had brought a cage, Max looked to Wolfe before saying he had been hired to recover county property. Wolfe said nothing. Noah looked toward the trap already secured in his vehicle.
By sunrise, Wolfe and his accomplices were gone in patrol cars. Gray lay on the shed coat, shaking from exhaustion while Walter checked the bandage he had torn in the fight.
At eight-thirty, a white wildlife-service truck turned into the same rutted drive.
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