The Wolf I Killed

Three snares left, two knives, and a hare in the third one that had been dead long enough to freeze through. Alva worked the wire off it and did the arithmetic she did every evening of her life. Forty miles to the town. Eleven hours of real daylight, less if the weather came down out of the north, which the sky said it would. She would sleep in the line shack and eat the hare and walk in tomorrow, and there was nothing wrong with that plan.

She was shouldering the bag when she saw the tracks.

Big. Too big for a fox, too clean for a dog. They came up out of the birch scrub, crossed her own outgoing trail, and kept going east, and the left hind dragged. A shallow groove in the snow where the foot came down wrong and stayed down. A hurt animal. A hurt animal walking in a straight line instead of curling up under a root somewhere to die.

She looked east a while. Wind moved the tops of the birches and nothing else did.

A winter wolf was eleven silver in town. She had four in a crock under the floorboards and a roof that wanted six.

She followed it.

The trail held the ridge for a mile and then dropped off into the low ground, and she smelled it before she saw it. Blood. Wet fur. Under both of those the rank dog smell that got in behind the eyes and stayed there, the one you could still find on your hands a week later.

The wolf was in one of her snares.

An old wire, from three winters back, one she had forgotten she still had out this far. It had taken the hind leg twice around, and the animal had chewed it half through and then pulled until the loop cut to the bone. After that it had stopped pulling and waited, which was worse. It lay in a black circle of its own blood and it watched her come.

She knew what to do with a snared animal. That was butcher's work, not hunting. You came up behind it, you put your knee on the ribs, you opened the throat and held it, and it was over inside the time it took to count four.

She took out the long knife and stepped in.

The wolf got up.

It had no business doing that. The leg was ruined, the wire was still biting into it, and it came up out of the snow with its shoulders bunched and the whole length of it shaking, and it did not snarl and it did not show her its teeth. It looked at her face.

She would think about that later, in the shack, with the stove going. It had looked at her face the way a thing looks at a person it has been waiting for.

Then it came.

She got the knife in under the jaw and it opened her arm from the wrist to the elbow coming down. The two of them went into the red snow together and rolled, and she got her weight on top of it, and the hind foot kicked twice and went still.

The wind. Her own breathing. Nothing else.

Alva lay where she was for a while with her mouth full of hair and her arm singing, and did not move, and listened, because something had changed.

They were howling.

Not close. Four voices, spread wide, working the low ground in a line, running something down and knowing where it went. Then a fifth, higher and further off. Then nothing, which was worse than the howling.

There was no version of the next hour where she outran them. Not with the arm, not with forty miles of dark in front of her. Everyone in the valley knew what the packs did to people who took their animals. Her mother had known it. Her brother had known it. Knowing it had not helped either of them.

Her mother had worked skins. Not for the town. For the packs. There was a way of taking a hide so the smell stayed in it, and a reason the old families knew how, and her mother had told her about it once without any particular drama.

A dead wolf buys you the walk home.

Wolves do not hunt by eye in bad country. They hunt by smell, and a fresh hide still smells like the family it came off.

Alva looked at the animal in the snow.

Then she took out the short knife as well.

You cannot do it fast. That is the part nobody ever says out loud. You can do it fast with a small animal and a sharp blade and a flat rock. This was two hundred pounds of wolf, and her good arm was open to the bone, and the cold had taken the feeling out of her fingers somewhere back on the ridge. She worked by the shape of it and by memory. Her mother used to say the knife goes where the seam already is, you only have to find it, and she found it, and she did not look at the animal's face.

The blood came off it hot. It went onto her knees and into the snow and up her sleeves, and the smell of it watered her eyes, and she kept going.

When she had it she put it on.

The wet side went against her back and her shoulders and her neck. It was heavier than anything, and the weight pushed her down onto her hands in the snow. It stank. It was warm. Somewhere under her ribs, near the bottom of her breath, something turned over twice and settled.

She stood up.

The pack came out of the birches on the low side. Nine of them, in a loose line, exactly what the howl had said.

One broke away and came at her.

It was smaller than the one in the snow. It came in low and fast and stopped a body's length away and stood there breathing, and Alva stood in the hide and did not move, because there was nothing left to do that was not dying. The wolf put its nose up. It worked the air over her, steady and unhurried, and took its time about it. Then it walked past her. It went by close enough that its shoulder brushed her thigh, and it did not look at her again.

After that they all came past, four of them, the way water goes around a stone in a stream.

Then one of them stood up.

He had a coat on. Boots. No hat, and the snow was going into his hair and he did not seem to notice. He came up the slope and the rest of them came with him and stopped when he stopped, and he looked at the carcass in the snow for a long moment before he looked at her.

"You are on my line," he said. "I want that said first, before anything else happens out here. I am not going to hurt you."

His breath came out white and slow. He was not out of breath at all.

"Did it come at you," he said, "or did you set for it?"

She did not answer. Her jaw was busy staying shut against the cold.

"Because those are different things," he said, "and I would rather know which one I am looking at before I decide anything. So think about your answer."

Then he walked closer, and the smell of him came off the wool of his coat, woodsmoke and wet and something under it that she had no name for, and under her ribs the thing that had settled turned over again.

He stopped. Close enough that she could watch the snow melt on his collar.

He looked at the space in front of her face and nothing else. Whatever was in it had done something to him. He had stopped breathing, and he had stopped walking.

He said a name.

It was not her name. She had never heard it before in her life.

The hinge of her jaw moved. It wanted to open. It wanted to say yes, and it wanted it so badly that she had to set her teeth against it and hold it there, standing in the snow in a dead animal's skin, bleeding into it.

The man watched her fight it.

He did not look surprised at all.