Part 5
Her father looked at the envelope and at Nana’s slanting handwriting. “For a pen that size? More than that.”
“Then it pays for some.”
“Josie, that’s for—”
“I know what it says.”
He waited, and she could see him doing it, could see him choosing not to decide for her. “Okay,” he said. “You want me to drive you over?”
“I want you to come.”
At the Gaskins place the next morning, Wade stayed by the truck. Josie went around the equipment shed alone. Cole was refilling Dot’s water from a hose, and he didn’t turn off the tap when he saw her.
“What I said yesterday,” Josie said. “About a new batch. People said that to me about my dog, and I wanted to throw something at all of them. Then I turned around and said it to you.”
Cole shut off the hose. He didn’t tell her it was fine. He looked at her for a while, considering, the same way he’d looked at the hole under the wire.
“What was his name?”
“Moose.”
“What’d he do?”
“Howled at the noon siren. Every day for eleven years.”
Something moved at the corner of Cole’s mouth. “That’s dumb.”
“So dumb.”
She held out the envelope. “This is for the pen. Hardware cloth, not chicken wire.”
“I’m not taking your money.”
“It’s not for you. It’s for Dot.”
“Dot doesn’t take cash.” But he took the envelope. Before he put it in his pocket, he unwired the clipboard and wrote at the bottom, under the feed costs: Donation — J. Tuttle — $200. He tilted it toward her before he hung it back up. “It has to go a foot down,” he said, “then a foot out, like an L. Mink dig. Granddad can’t dig anymore.”
Royce was sitting on the back steps when Wade walked up. “I can’t pay you,” he said.
“Didn’t ask you to.”
“The Spencer boy’s got the excavator.”
“I’ve got a shovel.”
It took two days. Wade dug the trench around the whole pen by hand, a foot deep and a foot out, his shirt dark down the spine by nine in the morning. Cole had drawn the plan on the back of a feed bag. Josie unrolled the hardware cloth and cut it with tin snips, her rope-burned palms tender inside a pair of Royce’s old gloves. The galvanized edges caught at everything. Nobody told her she was doing great.
Royce brought sweet tea out in a gallon jug and sat on a feed bucket in the shade of the shed. He didn’t say much the first day. On the second afternoon, while Wade was down in the trench bending wire around a corner post, Royce started talking to Josie as if her father weren’t there.
“First time I saw your daddy, he was nineteen, running a county dozer through my ditches. He stopped that whole machine to carry a box turtle off the bank. Took him twenty minutes to do a five-minute ditch. I hired him the next season.” He drank his tea. “Never did get any faster around turtles.”
Wade kept his head down. The back of his neck had turned a color that wasn’t sunburn.
When the last clip was crimped, Cole carried Dot inside. Royce got up off the bucket in stages and walked the whole fence line. He toed the bottom edge, bent to tug at the buried wire, and couldn’t move it.
“Granddad,” Cole said. “Pull the traps.”
“Coyotes can’t read a fence.”
“Then I’ll check it every night. I’ll sleep out here if I have to.” Cole’s voice cracked and he pushed straight through it. “Dot sat in there all night with a hole dug under her and nobody came. I don’t want to be the reason something else waits like that.”
Royce didn’t answer. He took off his cap and looked into it, as if there might be something written inside, and put it back on. He looked at the trench, square at every corner, and at Dot standing in the doorway of the new pen. When he spoke, it was to Wade.
“Six sets on four lines. They’re circled on the calendar in the shop. You pull every one of them. Today.”
“Today,” Wade said.
“And your wolf man keeps where she lives to himself,” Royce added. “Nobody comes looking.”
Wade glanced at the back of his hand. The letters had worn off on Saturday; there was nothing there now but a little gray in the creases. He turned to Josie anyway. “You want to come?”
They took Royce’s four-wheeler, with the feed-store calendar folded in Wade’s shirt pocket. At the first two red circles her father found the stake, sprang the trap with a stick before he lifted it, and dropped it into the milk crate wired to the rack. Neither had caught anything.
At the third he stopped the engine and held the stick out to her instead.
“You do this one.”
Josie knelt at the edge of the turnrow. The trap sat in a shallow bed of dirt with leaves scattered over it, so ordinary she would have walked right past it. She pushed the stick into the pan. The jaws slammed shut so hard the shock went up through Royce’s gloves into her wrists, and she sat back on her heels, looking at the bitten wood.
“Two days,” she said.
“Two days,” her father said. He didn’t look away from it either.
The last circle was on the north ditch, a hundred yards above the culvert. There was no trap there anymore, only a ragged notch in the mud where the flood had torn the stake loose and dragged it down to the pipe. They stood over it for a while anyway. Then her father took the calendar from his pocket and drew a line through the circle with the pencil stub he kept behind his ear, straight, the way Cole ruled out names.
The release was two evenings later, at the edge of the north woods, where the field ran up against the pines. Luis set the rules out in the yard beforehand. Everyone would stay at the trucks, a hundred yards back. No talking. No calling out. No sudden moves. Royce and Cole had come too, and Royce leaned against his tailgate with his arms folded over his chest. Dana had swapped a shift to be there.
Bree opened the crate with a rope from behind it. Then nothing happened for a long time.
The sun went down behind them and lit the pines orange. Josie had the mended leash rolled in her right hand, the copper rivets pressing into her palm. Inside the crate, a shape shifted and went still.
Then the wolf stepped out. Dry, her coat was a different animal: red along the muzzle and ears and down the legs, a grizzled gray saddle over her back. One hind foot had been shaved to pink skin. She held it up off the ground, and then she set it down and let it take her weight an ounce at a time.
She turned her head and looked straight at the trucks.
Josie knew one sound that had always brought an animal running. Low, then high, through two fingers; Moose had come at a dead run every time, ears inside out. Her fingers rose toward her mouth before she knew they were moving…
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