Part 7
On the second morning, June sniffed her bowl and left it. Jack sat on the floor with a few pieces in his hand, offering one at a time. She accepted two, then rested her chin on his wrist, making it impossible to offer the third without moving her.
He stayed that way until his fingers went numb. Outside, a breeze pushed loose snow across the tracks in the clearing. The route Ash had taken was disappearing without anything happening to the house around it.
Jack had expected to be busy with worry. Instead he found himself unable to decide ordinary things: whether to make coffee, which shirt to put on, whether the stove needed another log. He knew those empty intervals. After Ellen died, he had filled them with work until there was no unassigned hour left.
June’s chin grew heavy on his arm. He slid closer and rested his cheek against the fur above her ear. She smelled of the blanket, of warm dog, faintly of the wolf who had slept beside her.
“I missed her,” he said. The words came out oddly, as though Ellen had only been away for a few days.
He tried to say something else and couldn’t. His chest tightened; he put his hand over his face, embarrassed even here, then lowered it because June had shifted and he didn’t want her to move away. The tears came while he was trying to hold her still.
She settled across his legs. He cried against her neck, stopping and starting, until the ache in his jaw eased. When he looked up, a rectangle of sunlight had traveled from the table onto the floor beside them.
He had not planned to spend that hour there. There was nothing he could put in a logbook to explain it. He brought June fresh water afterward, and when she rose to drink, he sat back down and waited for her.
That evening he opened the field journal. Between the mouse and the hare were the November notes he had written from memory, all the things he might have forgotten if nothing had survived to make them matter. He found a line about June finally eating, then looked at the pieces still left in her bowl.
He carried it over. This time she took another mouthful. Jack put the journal on the floor and stayed beside her until she was finished.
By the third day, he had stopped jumping up at every noise. He hated that a little. In the evening he sat with June near the door, his back against the wall, and reached for the blanket without expecting another animal to object when he moved it.
“I’d open it again,” he told her.
June laid her head on his leg. Jack rubbed the groove between her ears and kept his eyes on the dark glass. After a while he moved to the chair by the stove, where he dozed without taking off his boots.
Her nails woke him. She was scrambling against the door, making a sharp, urgent sound that brought him out of the chair before he understood it. Then he saw the shape beyond the lower pane.
Ash stood on the porch.
He held one hind leg lightly, barely setting it down. Dark marks crossed his muzzle, and a patch of fur at his left shoulder lay wet and clotted. When Jack reached the door, the wolf shifted closer instead of retreating.
Jack opened it. June pushed through to sniff his face and neck, moving quickly from one place to another. Ash stood under her attention until she stepped aside, then walked into the cabin and lowered himself onto the bedding beside the stove.
He did not look around as though it were unfamiliar. That was what caught Jack: the directness of the trip across the room, the small turn before he lay down. Jack closed the door and knelt at the edge of the blanket.
“All right. Let me see.”
The scratches on his muzzle had stopped bleeding. There were punctures along the back of his neck, a torn place at the shoulder, another mark above the hind leg he favored. Jack brought the lamp closer and changed position whenever Ash tensed. June lay against his uninjured side.
These were bites. Jack had spent enough years examining animals to recognize that much. The particular fight, the place it had happened, which wolf had moved first—none of that could be read from the torn coat.
He cleaned the visible wounds as gently as he could and gave Ash water. The wolf drank, rested, then took a little food with an awkward movement of his jaw. Jack set the bowl down rather than ask him to work at it again.
He had gone toward the wild wolves and come back like this. To Jack, the wounds looked like the answer to an attempted approach: driven off, forced away from animals he had wanted to follow. Perhaps the smell of the cabin had mattered; perhaps any unfamiliar youngster would have met the same response. Jack couldn’t know.
He looked at June’s body curved against Ash. She was nosing the clean fur below his ear, stopping whenever he flinched. He allowed the contact, then closed his eyes, his breathing gradually slowing.
Jack had told himself the wolf would find a place out there. He had wanted that certainty because it made opening the door easier. Now the shoulder beneath his hand reminded him how little he had been able to promise.
“You can stay,” he said. “We’ll work it out.”
Ash opened his eyes and lifted his head. After a moment he pushed himself upright, moved the short distance to Jack, and rested his muzzle across Jack’s knee. June rose with him and settled on the other side.
Jack bent over the rough gray head. He held it without tightening his arms, feeling the warmth of Ash’s breath through his pants. When the wolf was ready to lie down again, Jack moved with him instead of making him cross the floor alone.
He stayed beside the blanket through the rest of the night. Once Ash woke abruptly and turned toward the door; June touched him, and he lowered his head again. Jack watched until the light at the window began to change.
The empty chest stood against the far wall, where he had left it after Pete’s visit. Jack looked at it, then at the radio. He would not put them under the floor again.
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