And hewaslooking at the wolf.Staring at him.In the world humans had made for themselves, that kind of attention, the lingering gaze, meant different things—sexual interest, a threat, a decision yet to be made.You could feel it.
People made jokes out of it.They tried to laugh it off.Or they dismissed it, pretended it didn’t mean anything.Because it was an animal thing that didn’t have anything to do with the modern world.It came before language.It had nothing to do with apps.You couldn’t swipe left and make it go away.It was something you felt in your gut, that contact with another animal.And even if you made a joke out of it, you couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening.
Through the scrub oak, as the sun broke up the darkness of the rocky slope into the shapes of bitterbrush and sage, the elk had been nothing but another silhouette at first.And Tean hadn’t known until his grandfather’s breathing changed.
Up the hill, the wolf’s head swung back and forth again as he tried to decide.
Tean stopped moving.The snow he’d been trampling spilled back on him, covering his Keens, melting against his socks.The wind slipped a hand under his coat, and Tean shivered and folded his arms.
The wolf’s gaze swung back toward him.
The light had been getting stronger by the minute, splashing color into the world, giving everything depth and dimension.By degrees, the elk came into being: the texture of his fur, the paler patches, almost white, above his eyes, the striated stain of his antlers.Until then, it had beenanelk.It had been a word on a piece of paper.And everyone had been so excited—Tean’s grandfather, his father, his uncles, at the draw.
But now it wasthiselk.Haecceity.Thisness.He was one specific elk.And his grandfather was putting his gun to his shoulder.
Tean felt it the moment their eyes made contact.
The elk.
The wolf.
The moments overlapped, light and dark.
He made a sound.Later, when his grandfather thought Tean was asleep, he had told the other men that Tean had started to cry.But it hadn’t been tears.It had been shock, the realization that the bullet that was about to come out of that rifle was meant forthiselk.Forhiselk.And the knowledge that, in the next moment, it would be gone.
The elk’s head had come up.Dark eyes stared back at Tean.They looked wet in the morning light, and there was something in them that he was too young to read.But it didn’t run.
He had read, later, about this phenomenon.Moments when predator and prey met, and for a moment, time seemed to stop.Logic and biology and precedent all dictated that the caribou or the elk should turn and run.But they didn’t, not always.Sometimes, it was like they knew.And it was like the wolf knew too.They called it the conversation of death.
In the dark, the wolf’s eyes were hidden behind the rubber mask.But Tean felt the moment spark when their gazes met.He was suddenly aware of himself, of how he must look: huddled in the deep drift, his arms wrapped around himself, his feet soaking and half-frozen.And he was aware of the wolf, too.Of how much bigger he seemed up on the hill.Of something that couldn’t be put into words, not entirely—the frenzied energy of an animal about to kill, the pulse of lifeblood, the thrill.
You want it.
At the edge of his perception, the grit and squeak of snow told him Maeve and Milo were still fighting to force a path.
Come on.
The wolf didn’t move.Tean didn’t move.
Come on.Forget about them.You don’t want them.You want me.Remember me?Remember how it felt when you got a face full of bear spray?
And the wolf bounded down the hill.
It happened so quickly that the word—bounded—only registered at the back of Tean’s brain.But it was the right word because the movement wasn’t entirely human; there was something animalistic about how the wolf threw himself down the slope, something that went back to a world before.
Run.You have to run.
He took a step back, but his feet were numb and didn’t respond the way he wanted them to.Hidden by the snow, the uneven ground made him misstep, and Tean lost his balance.He fell, and the snow swallowed him up to the waist.
As he tried to push himself up, the wolf reached him.He threw himself on top of Tean.His weight forced Tean deeper into the snow, and it avalanched in on him, covering his face.Tean flailed his arms, trying to grab the wolf so he could throw him off.But he had no leverage, and the wolf’s weight was unmovable.The air was too cold for much smell to carry, but he caught a whiff of latex and body odor, and then his mouth was full of the taste of snow again.
Through the snow speckling his vision, he saw the knife.It glittered in the moonlight: a wedge of dirty steel like an old tooth.
And then the wolf leaned forward, and the snow buried Tean again, and he waited for the knife.
A gunshot rang out.
And then another.
