“You don’t exaggerate. It’s one of your most annoying qualities.”
I laugh despite myself. “Thanks, Willow.”
“I’m serious. If you need me, I’m a phone call away. If you see it again, take photographs. And for god’s sake, don’t touch it. Large unidentified canines are not cuddly.”
“I didn’t cuddle it.”
“You absolutely touched it. I can hear it in your voice. You found a mystery animal and you treated it, didn’t you?”
“Hypothetically.”
“You’re going to get yourself killed.”
We talk for another ten minutes about nothing important. Willow’s new project at the zoo. The lynx kittens that were born last month. The slow, relentless politics of wildlife conservation funding. Normal things. Professional things. By the time I hang up, I feel marginally more grounded and significantly less certain that I’m handling this well.
I go back to the kitchen table and open my notebook again.
The notes stare at me. Factual, precise, utterly inadequate.
I pick up my pen and add a line at the bottom.
Patient displayed behaviour inconsistent with wildor feral animal. No fear response to human contact. Eye contact sustained, purposeful. On rising, performed a distinct downward head movement before departing. Possible significance unknown.
Possible significance unknown. That’s one way to put it.
Another way would be: a wild animal the size of a small pony looked at me like it knew who I was and bowed its head before it walked away, and I felt something shift in my chest that hasn’t shifted back.
But I don’t write that. I don’t know how to write that. I don’t have clinical language for the feeling of something falling into place inside you, something you didn’t know was out of alignment until it wasn’t anymore.
It’s past midnight. The cottage is silent except for the tick of the kitchen clock and the faint sound of wind against the windows. I should go to bed. I have patients booked tomorrow. Maggie’s tabby. A spaniel with an ear infection. The ordinary business of being a rural vet in a small village where nothing unusual happens.
I stand at the kitchen window and look out at the dark. The treeline is invisible, swallowed by the night, but I know it’s there. A quarter mile up the hill, the forest begins, and somewhere inside it, an animal iseither dying of those wounds or recovering from them in a way that breaks every rule I know.
My gut says recovering. My gut says that animal is alive, and close, and not finished with me.
“Get a grip, Clarke,” I say out loud.
The kitchen doesn’t answer. The wind picks up. I wash my mug, dry it, put it away, and go to bed.
I don’t sleep. Not for hours. I lie in the dark and listen to the silence and try very hard not to think about golden eyes and the steady thump of a heartbeat under my palm.
At some point, I must drift off, because when I open my eyes, grey light is pushing through the curtains and the birds are starting up in the hedgerow outside. I lie still for a moment, staring at the ceiling.
The feeling in my chest is still there. Whatever it is, it survived the night.
I get up, put the kettle on, and open the surgery for the day. Patients to see. Work to do. A life to build in this odd little village with its careful silences and its hills full of sounds I can’t explain.
The wolf doesn’t come back.
I tell myself I’m glad about that.
Chapter 7
The Aftermath
Roan
I waketo the sound of my own breathing and the copper taste of blood at the back of my throat.
