Part 5
In February, Jack began finding Ash on the porch after supper. The wolf would lift the lever latch, nose the door wide enough to pass, and sit on the top step. Jack followed to pull the door almost closed, leaving room for him to come back.
At nine months, Ash stood nearly as high as June. His winter coat made him look heavier than he was, but the strength beneath it was no illusion. He could clear a fallen trunk that June went around, and he no longer waited for Jack to choose their direction at every crossing.
From the porch he listened toward the bluffs. When a howl carried down, he leaned forward with his ears high and his weight over his front feet. June usually came out before Jack did. She would sit against him, sometimes lay a paw across his shoulders, and remain until he turned from the woods.
Jack caught himself watching her instead of the wolf. Her visits to the porch had become quicker; the moment the latch clicked, her head came up. If Ash stayed outside, she went to fetch him, touching his cheek and waiting for him to follow.
One night he didn’t.
He sat through her first nudge and her second. June lowered herself beside him, and the two of them faced the clearing while Jack stood in the doorway with cold air working around his ankles. He stayed there until his feet hurt rather than ask Ash to come inside.
He knew the feeling of holding a doorway open longer than it needed to be. At the hospital, before Ellen’s last treatment, he had kept one hand on the sleeve of her gown while she talked. She had been trying to make a small promise about coming home, something they could both look toward. He remembered nodding and continuing to hold the sleeve.
He had released it eventually. For years, some unreasonable part of him had returned to that small surrender as though his fingers might have prevented what came after.
Ash turned his head. Jack stepped back, giving him room, and the wolf came in with June behind him. That was all it took that night. Jack lay awake anyway.
A few days later they walked into a distant clearing where the snow had softened beneath the trees. Ash ranged ahead, disappearing among the young spruce. Jack stopped to adjust a loose strap on his snowshoe while June waited beside him.
She lifted her muzzle before he heard anything. Ash emerged carrying a snowshoe hare, its pale winter coat stark against his dark mouth. He crossed the clearing without looking at Jack.
June stood. The wolf lowered the hare at her feet and stepped back, watching her examine it. She sniffed along its flank, raised her head, and licked the edge of his muzzle.
Jack remained crouched over the strap. He had enough field sense not to make a ceremony out of every animal’s movement, yet he could not stop seeing what the hare meant here. Ash had gone beyond their games and the small prey beneath the snow. He had brought food back to the dog who once carried food to his bed.
“Got that yourself, did you?”
Ash came over, nose working along Jack’s mitten. Jack rested a hand against his neck. The bones no longer stood out beneath the fur, and the youngster leaned against him hard enough to rock him onto his other knee.
For a moment he wanted to take the wolf’s face between his hands and keep him there. Instead he finished fastening the strap. June picked up the hare, adjusted her grip, and carried it along the homeward trail, with Ash circling ahead to wait at each bend.
At the cabin Jack wrote the hare into the journal. He started to add that Ash would be able to feed himself now, then paused with the pen over the page. He had seen one successful hunt. That was something solid; the rest was what he hoped, or feared, it would mean.
He put down the pen. June was resting near the stove, and Ash had stretched along her back with one hind foot extending into the walkway. Jack stepped over it on his way to bed.
The following dawn, the house felt unusually still. Jack woke to find June sitting below the window. Ash stood with his forefeet on the sill, his breath clouding a patch of glass.
Seven wolves waited at the edge of the clearing.
They were about a hundred yards away, between the last spruce and the open snow. A large male with a dark stripe along his back stood ahead of the others. Behind him, one wolf sat; another moved sideways and stopped. Their attention kept returning to the cabin.
Jack reached the window without turning on a light. The open distance between porch and trees looked shorter with animals standing at both ends. He rested a hand on the back of a chair, keeping his weight there.
The dark-backed wolf raised his muzzle and howled. The others joined, their voices overlapping until Jack could no longer pick out the first. Ash trembled against the sill.
He had imagined this sound as a summons often enough. Hearing it with seven wolves in sight, he could not tell whether it was an invitation, a warning, or simply a declaration that they were there. Ash listened as if every part of him had been pulled toward the trees.
June touched his ear with her tongue. Then she lowered her head and stood beside him without nudging him away. Jack watched her, his fingers tightening around the chair rail.
“It’s up to you,” he said, though his voice was too low to travel far.
Ash lifted his muzzle. His answer began unsteadily, a thin note that rose and held until Jack felt it in his own chest. It was the first full howl he had heard from the youngster inside this house.
Outside, the pack went quiet. The large male turned toward the trees, and the others followed him through the breaks between the trunks. Within a minute the clearing was empty again.
Ash stayed at the window, watching the place where they had disappeared. Jack moved to the door, drew back the bolt, and left his hand there. This time, the wolf did not turn when he heard it.
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