Part 5
Walt’s truck was idling at the end of her drive by eight. Ruth had already been dressed for an hour.
“Get in if you’re coming,” he said through the window. He didn’t look at her.
Gene’s calving pasture lay along the south edge of the bog, half a mile from Ruth’s house as the crow flew and four miles by road. The calves had been born early, the two of them, out in the open before Gene could get the heifers moved into the shed. What was left of them lay in the trampled snow near the fence line. Gene stood off by his truck, smoking, and didn’t come over.
Ruth had seen worse on the highway, but not much. She made herself look, then made herself look at the ground instead, because that was what she’d come for.
The snow had melted in the afternoon and refrozen overnight, and the crust held tracks like plaster. They circled the kill and crossed back on themselves. She found a clear hind print near the fence and crouched over it, and then another, and another.
“Walt,” she said. “Come look at this.”
He was at the fence, swearing quietly; a loose strand of barbed wire had opened the back of his finger. He took a flat tin first-aid kit from the inside of his coat, wrapped the cut in two turns of gauze without looking at it, and came and stood over her.
“Four toes,” Ruth said. “Every one of them. Four toes and a narrow foot. That’s a young animal, isn’t it? Not him.”
Walt squatted down beside her with a grunt. He looked at the print for a long time, then walked a slow circle around the carcasses, bent over, stopping every few steps. Ruth watched him read the ground the way she used to read a cardiac monitor: fast where it was ordinary, slow where it wasn’t.
“There’s two sets here,” he said finally. “You’re right that the killer’s four-toed. One of the young ones from the old pack, maybe. Didn’t leave the country when they broke up.” He pointed with his chin at a line of prints coming in from the bog side, older and half-blurred by the melt. “That’s your three-toed one. Came in after. Probably smelled it from a mile out.”
“So he didn’t do it.”
“He didn’t kill them.” Walt stood up and dusted his knees. “He’s been feeding on them. I’ve got a camera on that post.” He nodded at a gray box strapped to a fence post twenty feet off. “Checked it before I picked you up. He was here at three in the morning, chewing on the hindquarter of that one.”
“He’s hungry, Walt. He’s got a mate. She’ll be denning by April.”
“I know it.” Walt’s voice was tired. “And that’s how they learn, Ruth. That’s how it starts. A wolf finds a dead calf, finds out calves are easy, and Gene’s got forty more heifers due by the end of April.” He looked at the carcasses and not at her. “I gave you my word. He touches stock.”
“He didn’t touch them. You just said it.”
“He’s eating them.”
“That’s not the same and you know it.”
Walt didn’t answer. He went back to his truck and began unloading. Ruth stood and watched him carry out the traps, the stakes, the canvas bag of tools. He worked slowly and carefully, as he’d worked his whole life. He set them in a wide ring around the carcasses, bedding each one in the frozen ground and dusting it with snow until she couldn’t see where they’d gone.
“I set for what comes,” he said, when she followed him to the last one. “If it’s the four-toed one, good. If it’s yours, I’m sorry. I mean that.”
“What happens to a wolf in that trap?”
He looked at her then. “You know what happens.”
He drove her home without saying anything else. At her door, she got out and held on to the top of the truck door for a moment, looking for the thing to say that would change it. There wasn’t one. Walt had kept his word all winter, every inch of it, and now he was keeping the other half.
That night she sat up in the kitchen with the lights off. Twice she got as far as putting on her coat. Gene’s pasture was a half-mile walk across the frozen bog edge, and she knew where every trap was because she’d watched him set them. A stick shoved into the pan would spring them. Six traps, maybe twenty minutes.
She thought about Walt finding them sprung in the morning and knowing exactly who’d done it. She thought about Gene’s forty heifers and the four-toed wolf that would walk right through the ring she’d broken. Then she took off the coat and hung it on its peg, and sat back down, and didn’t sleep.
The sky was just going gray when she heard it. It came from the south, across the bog, thin and broken in the middle, sliding down into something hoarse. It was the sound from November. It sounded exactly like a child who has stopped expecting anyone to come…
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