Part 6
She didn’t remember putting on the boots. She remembered the cold, and the crust breaking under her every fourth step, and her hip shrieking, and the hatchet in her coat pocket bumping against her thigh. The bog edge was frozen hard enough to hold her. She went straight across it, as the crow would have.
He was in the second trap from the fence line. His right front foot was caught, the jaws clamped just above the paw, and he’d fought it; the snow around him was churned to slush and streaked pink. When he saw her, he stopped fighting. He crouched low with his ears flat and his lips pulled back, and a growl came out of him that she felt in her breastbone.
Ruth stood ten feet off, breathing hard. Walt checked his traps at seven. It was a little past six.
She knew how foothold traps worked; she’d grown up around them. Two springs, one on each side. Step down on both and the jaws open. A grown man could do it in a few seconds if the animal in the trap would let him get close.
“It’s me,” she said. “You know it’s me.”
His growl didn’t change. She had been punched once by a woman she was trying to save, and bitten by a ten-year-old boy whose arm was broken in two places. Hurt creatures fight the hands that come near the hurt.
She took off her coat. Then she stepped forward and dropped it over his head.
He exploded under it. She put her left boot on the near spring and leaned, and it went down, and she reached across him for the far one, and his head came out from under the coat and his teeth closed on her right forearm.
Ruth heard herself yell. She didn’t pull away. Pulling away was how you lost the arm. She put her full weight, all of it, on the second spring, the way she’d once leaned on a tamarack pole, and felt the jaws give. He tore his foot free. The trap snapped shut on nothing.
He let go of her arm.
For a moment they stayed exactly as they were, her on one knee in the slush with her arm held against her chest, him standing three feet away on three legs with his ruined forefoot held up. His breath smoked. Blood ran off her fingers and dotted the snow between them.
He looked at her as he had at the bog. Then he turned and went away on three legs toward the far trees, toward the pale wolf she had seen on the ice, and he didn’t look back.
Ruth sat down in the snow. She found her coat, wrapped the sleeve tight around her forearm, held it above her heart, and pressed. Her hands knew what to do. She was shaking so hard her teeth clicked.
That was how Walt found her at five past seven. He saw the sprung trap first, then her, and he came across the pasture faster than she’d seen him move in twenty years.
“I let him go,” Ruth said before he could speak. “It was him. I stepped on the springs and let him out. He bit me doing it, and that’s my own fault.”
Walt knelt and took the tin kit out of his coat again. The gauze on his own finger was gray from yesterday’s work. He unwrapped her sleeve, looked at the four deep punctures and the tear between two of them, and his face didn’t change. He began wrapping her arm properly.
“You know you need shots for this,” he said. “Can’t test a wolf that’s not in front of us.”
“I know.”
“I have to report the bite. That’s the law, not me.”
“I know that too.”
He tied off the gauze. Then he sat back on his heels and looked over at the camera on the fence post. “Pulled the card on my way in,” he said. “Four-toed one came up the fence line at ten to two this morning. Went right past the carcasses and straight on toward Gene’s shed before the dog ran him off. Yours didn’t show till after four.” He was quiet a second. “So now I know which one I’m after.”
“And what goes in your report about this one?”
Walt looked at the sprung trap for a long moment. “That you sprang it,” he said. “That’s what happened. I’m not going to write it any other way.” He stood and offered her his good hand. “I won’t tell you it was wrong. But somebody else decides what it costs you. Come on. I’m driving you to Bemidji, and you’re going to let them do whatever they say.”
They did a great deal. The emergency room started the rabies shots that afternoon. By the second day the arm had swollen and gone hot, and the doctor kept her on intravenous antibiotics. Dale flew in two days later, on the first morning of his break, still in his work jacket. He looked at the bandage, sat down beside the bed, and didn’t say anything for a long time. When the hospital let her go, he drove her to Duluth to finish the shots, and she didn’t have the strength to argue.
It was fine. It was warm, and the clinic really was down the block, and Ruth was polite about it for six weeks. Dale went back up for one more rotation and came home again. In the middle of April, Walt called to say he’d taken the four-toed wolf on the far side of Gene’s place, that Gene hadn’t lost another calf, and that he’d seen three-toed tracks crossing the county road twice. He sounded like a man reporting the weather. A week after that, an envelope came from the state with a citation for interfering with a lawful trap. Ruth wrote the check out of her grocery money and mailed it the same afternoon.
Most mornings she stood at the window of Jenna’s spare room with her coffee. The window looked onto a parking lot, a dumpster, and the backs of two other houses.
On the last Sunday in May, Dale came into the spare room with her duffel bag already packed and set it on the bed.
“Jenna says you’ve been at that window since five,” he said.
“I wake up early.”
“There’s nothing out there but the parking lot, Mom.” He zipped the side pocket shut, though it was already shut. “I called Walt. He says the road’s dry and your pipes made it. Truck’s gassed up. If we leave by seven we’ll be at the bog road before dark.”
She looked at him. He wouldn’t look back at her; he was busy with the zipper.
“You said you wouldn’t keep coming up there,” she said.
“I know what I said.” He picked up the bag. “I’ll call you every day it works.”
The house smelled shut up and dusty. Dale opened the windows while she stood in the kitchen, touching the counter, the pot on the back of the stove, Arne’s glasses on the sill. That evening they carried two chairs out to the porch and sat with their coffee while the light went long and gold over the bog.
The howl started just after the sun went down. It came from the far side of the bog, one deep voice, unhurried. A second voice answered, higher. And then, under them, ragged and squeaky and completely out of tune, three or four tiny voices tried to join in and kept losing the note.
Dale set his cup down very carefully on the porch rail.
“That’s him,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“That’s all of them,” Ruth said.
They listened until the voices thinned out and stopped. A whip-poor-will started up in the spruce. Ruth pushed up the sleeve of her sweater without thinking about it and rubbed her thumb along the four shiny pits on her forearm, as Arne used to turn his wedding ring when he was thinking. Dale watched her do it. After a while he reached over and put his big square hand on top of hers, and they sat on the porch together until it was too dark to see the trees.