Part 2
“Dad—”
He shook his head once, small, and she shut her mouth. She had never seen him do that to her before.
Royce ended the call and stood holding the phone against his leg. “Program’s sending a biologist and their vet tech. Hour and a half, maybe two. They want her head up and nobody else touching her.” He looked down the bank at Wade. Then he said, so low that Josie caught it only because the wind dropped, “Let me carry this one, son.”
Wade didn’t answer him.
It took twenty minutes to get her father out of the water. Royce passed down a blue tarp from behind his seat, and Wade worked it under the wolf’s chest and tied the corners to the rebar loop and the truck hitch, so the tarp took the weight his arms had been taking. Then he climbed out, streaming, and sat on the headwall beside Josie with his boots hanging over the ditch.
Royce set the spotlight on the concrete beside them, went back to his truck, and sat sideways in the driver’s seat with the door open and his bad leg stretched out straight. Every so often he called out to ask how she was breathing. The rest of the time he left them in the dark with the flashlight between them.
For a long while nobody spoke. The wolf breathed. When it struggled, the tarp creaked against the hitch, and Josie heard herself say “hush” again without meaning to. Each time, the animal went still, though she knew that had nothing to do with her.
“That vest was smart,” her father said at last. “I wouldn’t have thought of the vest.”
“I called you four times.”
“I saw. After.”
“It was in the truck.”
“It was in the truck.”
She waited for the rest of it, the pump’s too loud, you know how it is in there. He didn’t say any of that. He sat with his wet hands between his knees, and she noticed that the right one was turned palm up.
“Mr. Royce asked you to pull them,” she said. “Monday.”
“He did.”
“And you didn’t.”
“No.”
“And now he’s saying he forgot.”
Wade looked across at the truck, where Royce’s face glowed faintly blue in the light of his phone. “Josie, this isn’t the time.”
“When is?”
He didn’t have an answer. She was glad, in a mean way that made her stomach hurt.
Gray came up behind the tree line a little after five, and with it a white pickup with a camper shell and a whip antenna. A heavyset man in his fifties climbed out and introduced himself as Luis Ortega with the red wolf program. The young woman with him had her braid stuffed under a ball cap and was already pulling on gloves. Her name was Bree.
Luis listened to Royce for less than a minute, then went to the ditch and looked for a long time without talking. “She’s the Pungo pair’s female,” he told Bree. “We’ve had her signal parked in one spot since Tuesday morning. Figured she’d tucked up somewhere dry with the pups.” He rubbed his face with his whole hand. “She was tucked up, all right.”
“Pups?” Royce said.
“Five. Six weeks old. The den’s up on a pine ridge, above the water. The male’s been hunting for them; we caught him on a camera yesterday. He’s young, but he’ll do what he can.” Luis turned to Josie. “You the one with the vest?”
She nodded.
“Good. Real good. Now go on up to the road with your daddy, because she’s about to wake up mad and scared both, and I’d rather she didn’t see you first.”
Bree used a pole syringe, a jab and a step back, quick as swatting a fly. When the wolf’s head went heavy on the vest, Luis and Bree went down the bank in waders, and Wade went with them on the rope without being asked. Josie stood on the road beside Royce, whose hand had settled on her shoulder in a way that might have been to steady her or himself.
The trap came off with a tool from a canvas roll in Bree’s vest. The current had knotted the chain, the stake, the leash, and one corner of the tarp into a fist, and Bree didn’t waste time picking at it. She took out a pair of shears and cut.
Josie heard the leather part. She made a sound, and everyone looked up.
“I’m sorry,” Bree said. “Was that yours?”
“It’s fine,” Josie said, and when Bree handed up the piece with the handle, she closed her fist around it until the cut edge bit into her palm.
Three of them carried the wolf up on a canvas stretcher and laid her on the road. Out of the water she was longer and thinner than Josie had pictured, all ribs and leg, her coat a muddy cinnamon going gray along the back. Bree knelt over the hind foot and blocked it with her own body, not unkindly. Luis checked the collar against a tablet and sat back on his heels.
“How long’s she been in it?” he asked. “Best guess.”
“Since Monday night or Tuesday morning,” Royce said. “Weather came in, and I couldn’t get down this side. Last time I checked that line was Saturday.” He said it looking straight into Luis’s face, and he didn’t blink. “Should’ve come out Sunday. I let it go.”
Luis wrote it down. “A federal agent’s going to want to talk with you. Woman named Pruitt. She’s fair.”
“I expect she is.”
Wade stood a few feet away in his soaked jeans, the rope still around his waist, and said nothing. Josie watched him not say it. She watched him start once, a breath going in, and watched Royce look at him, and watched the breath go back out unused.
Bree brought her the other piece of the leash, wiped clean on the tarp. The cut was neat, two inches below the handle. Josie held one piece in each hand like halves of something she’d been told to keep apart.
“The vest too,” Bree said, and handed it over sopping. “That vest is probably why she’s alive.”
The program truck pulled out with the wolf in a crate in the back. Royce said he’d be by later and limped to his own truck and left. The farm road went quiet except for the culvert, still swallowing the ditch at the same steady rate.
Her father coiled the rope, folded the tarp, and picked Royce’s spotlight up off the headwall where the old man had forgotten it, and he put all of it in his truck bed to return. In the cab, he turned the key, then didn’t put it in gear. He licked his thumb and began rubbing the back of his right hand, hard, the way you’d scrub at a stain on a shirt you still meant to wear.
“That’s not going to come off,” Josie said…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇