Part 4
Walt stayed on his knees on the cold stone, and for a while the storm outside stopped existing for him.
He saw that March morning again, the woods just beginning to wake. He saw Ellen sitting up nights beside the hurt wolf, humming the old lullabies her mother used to sing. He saw the last thing the wolf did before she left them: she stopped at the edge of the trees, turned, and looked back at the cabin, and then she was gone.
She had come back now, but not for herself.
He could see the night as it must have been. Somewhere deep in the timber she’d run into the grizzly, huge and starving and out of its mind with hunger. She’d thrown herself at it to give her pup time to run, and she’d taken its claws for it. Any other animal would have crawled into the nearest hole to die. She had a pup and a long memory, and she had set out through the storm toward the house where people healed wounds, bleeding with every step, following old scents. When her legs gave out, she had made her pup go on alone.
Walt swallowed against the knot in his throat. He opened the kit and took out fresh bandages. He had to try. He owed Ellen that much.
He reached for the torn flank. The she-wolf didn’t growl, and she didn’t snap. She only sighed, low and rough.
The moment his fingers touched her fur, he knew. She was going cold. The warmth was leaving her body for the stone with every weak beat of her heart, and the blood had stopped running hot. Nothing in his pack could close wounds like these or call back a life already halfway gone.
He lowered his hands. The roll of bandage slipped from his fingers into the bloody snow. He bowed his head.
The pup cried out and pushed its nose against its mother’s throat, again and again. It had brought the man, the way she’d told it to. Now the man was supposed to make everything right.
At the sound of her pup, the she-wolf gathered whatever she had left. Slowly, against pain Walt could only imagine, she lifted her head off the stone. Her breathing went quick and shallow. She looked at her pup one last time.
Then she pushed it with her nose, straight toward Walt’s knees. The pup stumbled on its bloody paws and pressed against his sheepskin coat.
She lifted her eyes to Walt’s. They were clear now, and calm, and there was no pain left in them. She was giving him the only thing she had.
Walt met her eyes. Tears ran down into his beard. He hadn’t cried since the day they buried Ellen.
“I promise,” he whispered, barely loud enough to hear. “I’ll keep him safe. I swear it to you on everything holy.”
Her torn ear twitched once. She let out a long, soft breath. Her head sank back onto the stone, and her yellow eyes stayed open, fixed on the dark above her. Her breathing stopped.
The cave went silent except for the pup, whimpering against the leg of the weeping man.
Walt wouldn’t leave her for the scavengers. He set the shotgun aside and began gathering flat stones from the floor of the shelter. His back throbbed and his knees burned, but he kept going, carrying them one by one and laying them over her until she lay under a solid cairn. It took hours. The pup sat beside him through all of it and never got in his way. It just watched the stones go up and cried softly.
When the last stone was on top, Walt wiped the sweat from his forehead with his mitten and knelt by the cairn. He picked up the pup, which was shaking hard, opened his coat, and held it against his chest, then wrapped the sheepskin around them both. The heat of his body began to warm it. It pushed its nose into his shirt.
Then it wriggled its head free, pointed its muzzle at the stone ceiling, and howled.
It was a thin, unfinished howl, a young wolf’s first real one, and it was full of grief. It was saying goodbye. The sound rang off the walls of the cave.
Walt shut his eyes and held the pup tighter, and the tears came again. That small howl knocked down the last of the ice in him. He wept for the wolf. He wept for Ellen. He wept for the empty years he’d let go by. Somewhere in that cave he stopped being an old man waiting for the end.
The night was giving out. The wind dropped little by little until the roar of the storm turned into a soft, deep quiet. When Walt opened his eyes, the mouth of the cave had gone from black to gray.
“Time to go home,” he said.
He buttoned his coat with the pup’s head poking out of the collar, picked up the shotgun and the flashlight, and walked out into the morning.
The sun was coming up cold and bright in the east, and its first light turned the tops of the pines gold. The forest that had tried to kill him all night stood white and still. It had taken one life in the dark and handed him another.
He started down, stepping in his own deep tracks. The going was easier now. His breathing evened out, and against his chest he could feel the quick beat of a small heart. That life depended on him and nobody else, and knowing it made him strong. He stopped noticing his knees.
Two hours later the roof of his cabin showed through the trees. Snow had drifted high against the walls, but a thin thread of smoke still rose from the chimney. The old stove had held on to its fire.
He knocked the snow off his boots on the porch and went in. The room was cool but safe. He opened his coat and set the pup on the floor, and it went straight to the stove and curled up in a ball. Walt hung his wet hat, coat, and mittens on the nails by the door, laid dry logs on the red coals, and watched the fire catch.
Then he turned and looked at the boxes standing in neat rows in the middle of the room. Last night he had packed his whole life into them and taped them shut. In a few days the county van would pull up outside, and strangers would drive him off to Kalispell.
He looked at the pup asleep by the stove. It had lost everything, and it hadn’t quit.
Walt took the short kitchen knife off the counter, went to the first box, and slit the tape. He put his books back on the shelf and hung the binoculars on their nail. He opened the second box, draped Ellen’s shawl over the back of his chair, and set Danny’s photograph where he could see it from anywhere in the room. One box after another, he put the cabin back together, and with each thing he set in its place the room came a little more alive.
He wasn’t going to town. He was going to raise this pup. He had no right to sit down and die of loneliness now.
He kicked the last empty box into the corner and looked over at the phone on the table. He’d have to call the county. But that wasn’t the call he was thinking about…
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