It isn’t fear. It isn’t the glazed confusion of a wounded animal surfacing from unconsciousness. A pulse of heat moves low through my body, intimate and irrational enough to steal my breath. The wolf looks at me with something I can only describe as recognition. As if it knows me. As if it’s been waiting.
For a long moment, neither of us moves. My hand rests on its flank, and I can feel the warmth of it through the gauze, the steady thump of its heart. Itshould be racing. A wild animal waking to find a human touching it should be in full fight-or-flight. Instead, the wolf’s pulse is calm, almost relaxed, and those golden eyes hold mine without a trace of aggression.
Something settles in my chest. Warm and strange, like a held breath finally released. Every anxious thought in my head goes quiet. The feeling runs too deep, too instinctive, to belong to logic.
Then the wolf moves.
It lifts its head, testing, and I snatch my hand back and scramble to my feet. The animal is even bigger than I estimated. Lying down, it was enormous. Getting up, muscles bunching and shifting beneath that dark coat, it’s terrifying. Its shoulder comes to my waist. If it stood on its hind legs, it would tower over me.
I take three quick steps backwards, my kit forgotten on the ground. Every survival instinct I possess screams at me to run.
The wolf doesn’t follow. It stands there, slightly unsteady, and watches me retreat. Then it dips its head. Not to sniff the ground, not to track a scent. A deliberate downward motion, held for a beat, before it lifts its gaze back to mine. The look that passes between us feels far too knowing for anything wild.
I stand there with my mouth open, blood on myhands, and watch it turn and walk into the trees. Its gait is stiff at first but smooths out within a few strides, and within seconds, the forest has swallowed it whole. No sound. No trail. Just the bloodstained grass, my abandoned kit, and the hammering of my heart.
I don’t remember the walk back to my car. I must make it, because the next clear thing I’m aware of is sitting behind the wheel of my Volvo with the engine running and my hands trembling against the steering wheel.
The rational part of my brain has already begun its work, filing the experience into categories it can manage. An escaped exotic pet. A wolf-dog hybrid, perhaps, from one of those irresponsible breeders who cross huskies with actual wolves and sell the pups to people who have no business keeping them. That would explain the size, the colouring, and the overall build. It wouldn’t explain the behaviour, or the intelligence in those eyes, or the way the wounds were healing, but I can’t sit with any of that right now.
I drive back to the cottage and shower until the water runs cold, scrubbing blood from beneath my fingernails. I make tea and sit at the kitchen table and write clinical notes on what I’ve observed, because that’s what I do when the world stops making sense. I document. I categorise. I look for the rational explanation.
Canine, likely hybrid. Approximately 70-80 kg. Three parallel lacerations, left lateral thorax. Accelerated wound healing noted (mechanism unknown). Temperament: calm, non-aggressive. No attempt to bite or flee when approached. Pupils reactive, mucous membranes pink. Departed under own power.
I stare at my notes, and they stare back, perfectly factual and utterly inadequate.
I don’t write down the part about its eyes. I don’t write down that for one irrational moment, kneeling in the blood-soaked grass with my hand on its fur, I feel like I’ve found something I didn’t know I was missing.
I close my notebook, wash my mug, and go to open the surgery for the day. There are appointments booked. Maggie’s overweight tabby. A springer spaniel with an ear infection. Normal things. Manageable things.
But all morning, between consultations, I find myself standing at the window, looking towards the treeline.
Chapter 6
What I Can’t Explain
Phoebe
I don’t sleep.
I try. I shower until the water runs cold, trying to make sense of everything. I make tea. I sit at the kitchen table, stare at the wall and wait for my heart rate to come down.
It doesn’t.
The clinical part of my brain is already working, the way it always does after something goes sideways. Cataloguing. Organising. Sorting the experience into boxes that it can manage. I’ve done this before. Not with wolves, obviously, but with emergencies. The greyhound that came in seizing at three in the morning during my first week as a qualified vet. The foal born breach on a farm in Essex, while the owner screamed,and I talked myself through the procedure out loud because there was no one else to talk to.
You process. You file. You move on.
I open my laptop and type “wolf sightings England” into the search bar.
The results are what I expect. Occasional tabloid stories about livestock kills attributed to big cats or feral dogs. A few conspiracy forums where people claim to have seen wolves in Dartmoor or the Lake District, supported by blurry photographs that could be anything. The last wild wolf in England was killed sometime in the fifteenth century. The rewilding programmes are in Scotland, and even those are behind fences.
I refine my search. “Large canine North East England.” “Wolf-dog hybrid breeders UK.” “Escaped exotic animals Northumberland.”
Nothing. No reports. No missing animals. No breeders within a hundred miles who deal in anything larger than a husky cross.
I sit back and look at my notes from this morning. I wrote them in the car, hands still shaking, blood still under my nails. I wrote them in clinical language because clinical language is a fence I can hide behind.
Canine, likely hybrid. Approximately 70-80 kg. Three parallel lacerations, left lateral thorax.
