Part 6
Beside her, her father saw. He didn’t reach for her. His right hand hung at his side, the ink long gone from it, and he wasn’t watching the wolf. He was watching her.
Josie lowered her hand. She wound the leash once around her wrist instead and held on.
The wolf lifted her nose toward the pines. She went at a trot, favoring the foot at first and then less, and at the tree line she lengthened out. The last of the orange light caught her once between two trunks, and then there was nothing there but the pines.
Nobody moved until Luis lifted his hand. Josie found she had been holding her breath, and she let it go.
“You could have,” her father said quietly.
“I know.”
Cole was standing on her other side. He didn’t say anything, but he bumped his shoulder against hers, once, and stepped away again. Royce pushed off his tailgate. “Well,” he said, to nobody in particular, and climbed into his truck.
Luis called the next morning. The signal had gone straight to the ridge. A camera near the den had caught the female at dawn with the pups crowding underneath her, all five of them. He didn’t send the picture, and he didn’t say exactly where. He’d given Royce his word about that.
The agent’s letter came in July: a written warning addressed to Royce and another to Wade, no charges, with storm conditions and a voluntary correction noted in a paragraph near the bottom. Wade read his twice and put it in the kitchen drawer with the lease. In the middle of the month, Royce stopped by and asked whether Wade wanted fall ditch work, by the hour, fewer hours than before. Wade said yes. Dana picked up two weekend shifts, and on Sunday nights the calculator came out again, though it came out to slightly better numbers.
Dot started laying in August. Cole walked the first egg over in a folded paper towel, carrying it like it might go off, and nobody in the Tuttle house could bring themselves to eat it for two days.
The last week of August, a few days before school started, Josie woke in the dark and didn’t know why.
Then she heard it. A long, low note rose from somewhere past the north field and held. Before it finished, other voices broke in under it, thin and wobbly and out of tune, tumbling over each other the way Moose used to fall over his own feet when the noon siren caught him napping.
She got out of bed. Her mother was working that night. Her parents’ door stood half open, and her father lay on his back with one arm over his eyes. Josie didn’t stop in the doorway. She crossed the room and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Dad. You awake?”
He wasn’t. Then he was.
“Listen,” she said.
They went out to the back step, her father barefoot in a T-shirt, Josie in her pajamas. The moon had come up over the corn. The howl rose again from the pines, the deep voice and the young ones scrambling after it, and under them, steadier, one more that Josie thought must be the male.
Her father rested his hand on the porch rail. In the moonlight she could read the day’s list on the back of it: OIL. FILTERS. DENTIST 3:00. And at the bottom, smaller, in his own handwriting, ASK J.
“How many?” he whispered.
“I keep losing count.”
“Start over,” he said, and they stood on the step while she did.