Part 2
She dropped to all fours when I stood, but she stayed beside the window. Behind me, Beth put a hand on the carrier. “He can’t go out there yet, Jack. Help me move him where she can see him.”
We shifted the table. The mother lifted her head again, drawing air through her nose, while the cub stirred inside the carrier. There was no way to tell how much she could see through the glass, but she stopped moving when he answered her.
Hank stayed clear of the door. After a while, she crossed the yard and settled beneath the trees, close to the tracks we had made coming in.
Beth kept working through the morning. When the cub’s breathing eased, she let herself sit down and called her wildlife contact through Hank. They discussed keeping him temporarily near his mother, with Beth responsible for treatment and the wildlife office deciding when he could go back.
“This isn’t an adoption,” she told me afterward. “We need him strong enough to leave.”
I said I understood. At that point, I would have agreed to almost anything that meant she thought he might survive.
That afternoon Hank took us home on his snowmobile, following the logging road with the carrier secured between us. Beth sent supplies and arranged her next check with Hank. Until the drifts softened, his machine would get her from the station to my cabin.
Hank also left me a handheld radio. “You can reach my set from here,” he said, showing me where to leave it. “If Beth changes something, I’ll relay it. No more surprises in a backpack.”
I made a low bed beside the stove. The cub slept while I brought in wood, then woke and searched weakly along the blanket’s edge. I gave him the feeding Beth had prepared for him and wrote down what he took, ashamed of how pleased I was to have something worth recording.
Late that evening, claws clicked against the porch.
I found his mother standing below the window. When I lifted him, she came toward the door, and the cub strained inside his blanket. I opened it and stood just inside the threshold, with the cold against my ankles.
She reached the porch in two slow steps. Her nose moved over the blanket, then she touched her tongue to his damp muzzle. He pushed toward her with a strength he hadn’t had that morning.
I could smell wet fur and thawing earth. My back was against the doorjamb, and my arms had begun to tremble, but she made no move to take him. She sniffed the bandaged leg, looked up at me, and backed off the porch.
I stood there long after she disappeared. Inside my arms, the cub had settled with his face against the worn lining of my coat.
By the third day, he was trying to stand. His hindquarters sagged, and he sat down hard, offended enough to complain. I put a hand beside him without lifting him; on the next attempt, he braced against my fingers. Once he found his balance, he sniffed my hand and licked my fingers.
Beth examined the leg when she arrived that afternoon. The wound still needed attention, but the swelling had begun to ease. He objected to her touch, then immediately tucked his face against my wrist.
“He’s getting used to you,” she said. “That helps us now. It can make things harder later.”
“He doesn’t like your gloves.”
“It’s possible to dislike my gloves and get attached to you.” She caught my eye over the top of her glasses. “Both can happen.”
She had a daughter waiting back in town, a girl named Molly. Once the check was finished, Beth packed quickly, while I followed her around with questions she had already answered. She made me repeat the plan before she left.
On the fifth day, the cub discovered the water bucket. He hooked his front paws over its rim, investigated his reflection, and managed to tip the whole thing toward himself. I came back from the woodpile to find him standing in a spreading puddle, shaking one wet foot.
I laughed before I could stop myself. The sound startled us both, and he backed under the table.
Hank brought fish that evening. I cooked a small portion for the cub after checking Beth’s feeding notes, and Hank watched him worry at the shallow dish. His pipe remained in his pocket; Beth had objected to the smoke.
“That fellow with the wolf pup,” Hank said. “There was more to it.”
“You remembered?”
“I remembered before. You looked like you could only handle the pup living.” He leaned back. “The mother kept showing up afterward. One day a boar came out of the brush at him. He said the wolf went for it and gave him time to get clear.”
I looked toward the dark window. Hank followed my gaze.
“Yours is still down by the creek. Tracks all around the crossing.”
“Waiting for him.”
“Likely.” Hank watched the cub settle beside the stove. “You’ll have to be ready when he is.”
That night I dreamed of Lily collecting pinecones. She called me over to see a little bear, and I woke reaching toward the pillow. The cub had pulled himself onto the low cot and was asleep against my forearm.
On his first short outing, a week after he arrived, he tested the snow with his nose and sneezed. I sat on the bottom step while he made a careful circuit of my boots. His mother appeared at the trees before we had been outside five minutes.
He called to her. She came close enough to sniff him, then walked a few yards toward the pines and looked back. He started after her, stopped, and returned to lean against my shin.
The leg wasn’t ready. I knew that, and still I was relieved when she finally went away.
Three evenings later, a fist hit my door just after sundown. Wade Garrison stood outside in camouflage, a rifle slung behind his shoulder. I knew the pale seam beside his mouth, and I knew his brother had died in a bear attack ten years earlier.
“Where’s the cub?” he asked.
“Recovering.”
“Then bring it out. I’ll draw the sow off before she gets comfortable coming to people’s doors.”
I stayed in the doorway. “She has a cub. You’re not shooting her.”
Wade glanced past me. “My brother thought he understood them, too.”
“I remember your brother.”
“You weren’t the one they called to identify him.” He stepped closer. “Keep feeding that thing and see what happens when it walks up to somebody else’s kid.”
I couldn’t dismiss that part. I told him the vet and wildlife office were arranging a return to the mother, but he shook his head before I finished.
“You’ve had your say, Mercer. When I come back, I’m taking care of the sow. You put that cub in my way, it goes too.”
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