The sound came out of the bog just as Ruth Halvorsen bent for the last cluster of cranberries she meant to pick. For one wild second she thought a child was out there. It was thin and cracked in the middle, the way a small boy cries after trying hard not to. Ruth straightened slowly, the pail hooked over her wrist and her knees complaining, and listened to the tamaracks tick in the wind. The sound came again, longer this time, and slid down into something hoarse and ragged.
No child was within eleven miles of the Big Bog on the eighth of November. Ruth knew that. She also knew the sound. In thirty-one years on the county ambulance she had heard grown men make it in ditches beside rolled trucks, and once a farmer’s wife on a kitchen floor in January, after the furnace quit and her hip broke. It was the noise people made when they’d stopped expecting anyone to come.
Her training had always sent her toward that noise. She went now, though more slowly than she would have at forty.
She had not meant to come out here at all. Walt Kessler, who trapped problem wolves for the government, had stood on her porch step on Tuesday and told her to stay out of the bog. Gene Hendricks’s old shepherd had gone missing off its chain. “Five of them running together,” Walt said. “Big male leading. Track on him like a saucer.” Ruth had promised. Then the cranberry jar went empty, and the good berries grew out past the old ditch, where nobody went anymore.
Dale had called from the North Slope the night before, the connection hissing. “Mom, just for the winter. Jenna’s got the spare room made up. You’d be ten minutes from a clinic.” She’d told him the pipes would freeze without her, which was true and also not the reason, and he’d let it go with the long breath he’d learned from his father.
So she had come, with Arne’s lever-action rifle across her shoulder. She hadn’t fired it since the year before he died and wasn’t sure it would fire now. In the winter of 1965, when she was ten, wolves had gotten into her father’s pen and killed the bred heifer he’d been counting on to carry them to spring. Ruth remembered very little about that morning except her mother at the window, one hand pressed flat over her mouth, and the color of the snow. For sixty years that color had meant wolf.
She pushed through a stand of black spruce and stopped.
The bog opened in front of her, brown and quaking, laced with skim ice. Fifteen feet out, in a pothole of black water and torn sphagnum, a gray wolf was sunk to the chest. He was enormous. Even half-swallowed, his shoulders were wider than any dog’s she’d ever lifted onto a gurney.
He didn’t snarl. He turned his head toward her and looked at her, and his eyes were the pale gold of old honey. There was no threat in them at all. He looked like a man on a riverbank who had been waving for an hour and had just seen a car slow down.
Ruth took one step back.
He thrashed, reaching with his forelegs, and the bog sucked at him and gave nothing. When he stopped, he was shaking in long, hard waves. His breath came short. Ruth watched the slow, heavy way his eyelids closed and opened, and the part of her that had triaged a thousand roadsides spoke up without her permission. Hypothermic. Exhausted. Still shivering, which was good, because when he stopped shivering he’d be closer to dead.
She thought: walk away. Let the bog do Walt’s work for him. Gene’s shepherd had been a gentle old dog who barked at mail trucks and nothing else. She thought of the heifer and the snow.
She took another step back, and the wolf made that sound again, quieter now, as though he’d run out of air for it.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Ruth said.
She set the pail at the foot of a tamarack and leaned the rifle beside it. Arne had never gone anywhere without a hatchet in his pack, and she’d inherited the habit with the pack. There was a young tamarack at the edge of the firm ground, twelve feet tall and straight as a broom handle. It took her eleven swings, and her shoulder burned on every one. She limbed it on the moss and dragged it to the edge.
“You hold still,” she told him. “You bite this and you’re on your own.”
He bit it anyway. He lunged when the tip came near him and closed his teeth on the bark, but there was no strength left in his jaw, and he let go. Ruth worked the pole down into the muck, feeling for the angle, until the tip slid under his chest. She set the near end across a hummock of hard ground and leaned on it.
Nothing happened except that her arms shook.
She shifted her grip and put her whole body on the pole, all hundred and forty pounds of her, and the tamarack bowed. The bog made a wet, unwilling noise. The wolf’s chest lifted an inch.
He felt it. She saw the moment he understood, if that was the word. He went still and quiet, and then something under the surface heaved, his hind legs finding purchase on a root or a sunken log, and he pushed while she pressed. They worked like that for what felt like most of an hour and was probably ten minutes: an old woman grunting on one end of a stick and a wolf straining on the other. Her left boot slid off the hummock and plunged into the bog to the knee, and the cold went straight to the bone. She hauled it out and leaned again.
Inch by inch, he came. His forelegs broke through onto the mat of moss at the edge. He dragged himself forward with a sound like a sob, and then the bog let go of him all at once and he slid out and lay in a heap, steaming, his ribs heaving.
Ruth stood bent over the pole, gasping. Her hands wouldn’t open.
Then she saw where he’d come out. He’d crawled up beside the tamarack, right beside her pail. Arne’s rifle lay at his feet.
The wolf lifted his head. Mud ran off his ruff in thick ropes. He gathered his legs under him, the front ones first, then the back, swaying, and stood. Standing, he came nearly to her hip. He lowered his head and walked toward her…
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