Part 4
Ruth could have told them a pack of wolves had come through and she’d kept the door bolted. She had the lie ready. But Dale was holding that feather, and Walt was looking at her, and she was too old and had spent too many years telling families the truth in hallways to start lying in her own kitchen.
“Sit down,” she said. “Both of you.”
She told them. The empty jar. The sound like a child crying. The tamarack and the pole, the boot full of bog water, the way he’d stood with the rifle at his feet and then shaken mud all over her. The hare. The grouse. She told it as she’d once given reports at the hospital doors, in order and without adjectives, and when she was finished the kitchen was quiet except for the stove.
Dale laughed. It wasn’t a mean laugh, just a frightened one. “Mom. Come on. You were sick, you were cold, you had a fever. Wolves don’t—”
“There were feathers in the bucket,” Walt said.
Dale looked at him.
“And the tracks are where she says.” Walt hadn’t sat down after all. He was standing by the window with his hands in his coat pockets, looking out toward the bog. “I followed that male for a week before he went into my set. I know how he walks. He’s been here since Sunday.”
“So he’s stalking her,” Dale said. “That’s what that is. He’s waiting.”
“He had three days,” Ruth said. “If he wanted me, he had three days and a door I couldn’t hold shut.”
Walt was quiet for a long while. Ruth had known him since he was a skinny kid running traplines with his uncle, and she watched his jaw work as though he were chewing something tough.
“Leave him be, Walt,” she said. “That’s all I’m asking.”
“It’s not my call.” He turned around. “You understand that? I don’t do this for fun. Somebody’s stock gets killed, they call, I go. That’s the job.” He rubbed his face. “But I’ll tell you what I can do. I won’t go looking for him. He stays off people’s stock, he’s just a wolf in the woods, and there’s plenty of those. He touches one calf, Ruth, one, and I set for him and I don’t think twice. That’s the best I’ve got.”
“That’s fair,” Ruth said.
“It’s crazy,” Dale said. “Both of you.”
Walt pulled his cap on and went out without saying goodbye, which was how Walt left everywhere.
Dale didn’t leave for two days. He split and stacked enough wood to last until February, refilled her prescriptions in Bemidji and brought back two hundred dollars’ worth of groceries, and spent every spare minute trying to talk her into Duluth. Jenna had the spare room ready. The grandkids were close. There was a clinic down the block. When none of that worked, he sat across the kitchen table from her on the second night and said it straight.
“I can’t keep doing this, Mom. I can’t be up on the Slope wondering every storm if you’re lying on the floor up here. And now there’s a wolf sleeping against your house, and you’re acting like it’s your guardian angel.”
“I’m not acting like anything.”
“If you stay, I’m not flying back every time the power goes out. I mean it. I can’t.”
Ruth looked at him. He had his father’s hands, big and square, wrapped around a coffee mug he hadn’t drunk from in ten minutes. He meant it. She could tell by how tightly he was holding on.
“Then don’t,” she said gently. “I’ll call you every day it works.”
He went back to Prudhoe Bay with his mouth set like Arne’s, and Ruth stood on the porch and watched the truck’s taillights disappear south.
The winter closed down after that. Ruth called Dale on the days the line worked, which was most of them. Some mornings there was a fresh bowl in the snow by the chimney and three-toed tracks going away toward the bog; some weeks there was nothing. She never put food out. She’d thought about it, standing at the counter with the grouse carcass that first week, and then she’d buried it under the spruce instead. Feeding him would make him into something that came to people for food, and Walt would be right about him by spring.
On a blue, windless morning in February she strapped on Arne’s old snowshoes and went out to the bog’s edge, farther than she’d walked since November. The pothole was frozen flat and smooth under a skin of snow, and you’d never have known it had nearly killed anything. She stood there catching her breath, her hip grumbling, and looked out across the open ice.
Two wolves were crossing it a quarter mile off. The bigger one led, dark across the shoulders, and even at that distance she could see the hitch in his back step, a small stutter every other stride. Behind him came a smaller animal, paler, almost silver, trotting with her nose close to his flank.
He stopped. The pale one stopped beside him. He turned his head toward the spruce where Ruth stood, and for a long moment neither of them moved. Then he went on, unhurried, and the pale one followed, and they slipped into the far trees together.
Ruth stood until her toes ached. On the walk home she found she was talking out loud, telling Arne about it.
The phone rang on the second Tuesday in March, at six-fifteen in the morning. It was Gene Hendricks, and his voice was flat. “Lost two calves last night,” he said. “Thought you should hear it from me. Walt’s on his way out…”
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