Part 2
He came three steps and stopped, close enough that Ruth could smell him: bog water, wet fur, and underneath, something coppery.
She held still. She’d once stood exactly this still in a trailer house while a drunk man decided whether to put down the knife, and she remembered that the trick was to breathe through your nose. The wolf looked at her for a long time. His eyes had lost the drowning look. What was in them now she couldn’t have named, but it felt like being measured.
Then he shook himself, starting at the head and rolling the shake down to his tail, and a fan of black water spattered her jacket and her face. Ruth flinched and laughed at the same time, a short, stupid sound she didn’t recognize.
He turned and walked away along the edge of the spruce, and that was when she saw the leg.
He was holding his left hind foot off the ground every other step. Above the paw, the fur was gone in a raw ring, and the paw itself looked wrong, narrower than it should be. One toe was missing. It hadn’t been gone long; the stub was dark and wet. Ruth had seen enough farm dogs come home from fence lines and neighbors’ traps to know what made a ring like that.
He looked back once from the edge of the trees. Then he was gone into the gray trunks without a sound.
Ruth sat down on the moss because her legs had decided it for her. She stayed there until the cold in her soaked boot made her think about frostbite, and then she gathered the rifle and the pail, which had a little over a quart of berries in it, and walked home. Her right hip had started a deep, grinding ache somewhere around the second push on the pole. By the time she reached the road she was limping almost as badly as he had.
That night the wolves howled north of the house, closer than she’d heard them in years. Ruth lay under three quilts and caught herself listening for one voice in particular, trying to pick out the deep one, wondering if he’d made it back to them or lay somewhere in the spruce, too spent to answer. When she understood what she was doing, she said “You old fool” out loud to the dark ceiling.
Walt’s truck pulled into her yard the next day a little before noon. He came in this time and stood dripping in the kitchen while she poured him coffee. He looked, for Walt, nearly cheerful.
“Got one,” he said. “The female. Set on Gene’s back forty.”
Ruth set the pot back on the stove.
“Male was in my set Thursday night too,” Walt went on. “Big one. Pulled out. Left a toe in the jaws and a blood trail straight into the bog.” He blew on his coffee. “Wouldn’t be surprised if the bog finished him. If it didn’t, he’ll be easy to follow. Three toes on the left hind now.”
Ruth sat down across from him. Her hip made her do it slowly.
“Pack without its female won’t hold,” Walt said. “Young ones’ll scatter, find their own country. Should get quiet around here.”
“And if he lived?”
Walt looked at her over the mug. He had a long, weathered face that had never been good at hiding what he thought, and right now it said he found the question peculiar. “Then he’s a crippled wolf with no family in November. He’ll go for whatever’s easiest. Chickens. Calves. Somebody’s dog.” He shrugged. “Then I’ll take him too.”
After Walt left, Ruth stood at the window over the sink for a long time, looking at the dark line of the bog. She had done that. She’d pulled out of the mud the one animal everyone around here wanted dead, and he was out there now with a torn foot and no mate, and if he took Gene’s calves in the spring, that would be on her too. She waited all afternoon to feel sorry. By supper she was only wondering whether he’d eaten.
She had planned to drive the fifty miles into Bemidji on Monday for groceries and her prescriptions. By Sunday afternoon the sky had gone the flat white of a sheet, and the radio was talking about the storm everyone up north eventually gets: the one that shows up a day early and twice as strong as promised.
It started as dry, stinging grains that hissed against the windows. By dark it was a blizzard. The power went out a little after eight. Ruth found the flashlight, then found that the cordless phone was useless without power, and the cell phone showed no bars. It rarely did out here, even in good weather.
She’d meant to bring in a full week of wood before the trip to town. She’d managed two days’ worth, an armload at a time, with her hip catching on every step. The pantry held soda crackers, two cans of tomato soup, a jar of peanut butter, and the cranberries. Dale was more than two thousand miles away on the North Slope, five days into a fourteen-day rotation, with no idea the power was out. The neighbors, the few who stayed through winter, were shut up in their own houses, hoping their own pipes held.
The second night was the worst. The wind found every gap Arne had promised to caulk. Ruth fed the stove sparingly and it barely kept up, and by dusk she could see her breath in the kitchen. Her head throbbed behind her eyes, the old pounding she knew meant her pressure was up. She ate crackers and peanut butter and a spoonful of berries and lay down in her coat.
It was full dark when she heard something scrape the front door.
She thought it was the wind. It came again, a slow drag, like a hand testing the wood.
Walt, she thought. Walt on his snow machine, come to check on her. The thought got her up. She held the wall all the way down the hall. The bolt was frozen and she had to lean her shoulder into it, and when it gave, the wind ripped the door out of her hand and slammed it against the wall and filled the hallway with snow.
Ruth threw her arm over her eyes. When she lowered it, there was no snow machine and no Walt. He was standing on her porch…
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