Page 1 of She, Wolf, Him.

PROLOGUE: THE FLOCK

THE SHEPHERD

Even asleep, a flock has a voice. The shift and grumble of bodies bedded close, a ewe coughing, another answering her in the dark. I've heard it under me every night of my life, so familiar I never have to listen for it.

Tonight there's nothing.

A hundred head and more lie below me on the cold grass and not one of them makes a sound. When I rise on my elbow, every eye is open. Every white-rimmed eye, turned the same way, down toward the black wall of the trees. I know what that silence means. They've seen a thing the night is still hiding from me.

This high pasture has been my bed every summer since I was a boy small enough to ride up the track on my father's shoulders. Its moods are as plain to me as weather. There are night-sounds that mean nothing and ones that mean a ewe has wandered past the edge of the light. I know every one of them. This is a quiet with its ears up.

So I do what there is to do. I get to my feet and I walk the edge of the firelight with my crook in my hand, slow, the way my father walked it, searching for the green coin-shine of eyes in the dark below. The trees give me back no eyes, no sound. Only that wall of black where the pasture meets the forest, the grass silver with the cold, my breath going up white and small.

I tell myself it's wolves.

The fire's good and high. I built it that way at dusk because a wolf fears the light and the smoke more than it wants the meat. I've sat out a hundred nights with wolves moving somewhere below the treeline. The fire's always been enough. I feed it another branch and let the sparks climb toward the sky, and the stars are very hard and very close, as they only come on the cold clear nights, the ones that promise the easiest sleep.

The two big dogs won't come past my feet.

That's what I can't tell myself away from. They're pale, heavy beasts, bred up in these mountains longer than anyone can reckon, for one work only, to stand between the flock and the wolf and give no ground. I've seen the old one open a wolf's throat and go back to his supper as if he'd stepped on a snail. Tonight he lies against my leg, his hackles up, a sound coming out of him I've never heard, low and unbroken. When I move toward the dark he leans his whole weight on my shin to keep me by the fire.

"Faro," I say, soft. "What's it, then?"

He doesn't answer me. His whole attention is where the flock's is.

I think, though I'd rather not, of the other parishes. Of herders taken two valleys over and three, the thing the curés call God's judgment and the old women won't name twice, the thing the King sent armed men to kill, men who came home with their hands empty. But that's far. That's other men's grief in other men's high pastures, and I've prayed for them as you'd pray over a bad harvest in a country you'll never see. Saint Roch. Holy Mary, mother of God. The words come out thin and the cold takes them before they go anywhere.

I think of Jeanne and the byre door I meant to mend at the week's end. I've left it too long.

The wind shifts.

It brings me the smell before it brings me anything else, and it's not the wet rank of wolf, a smell more familiar than the inside of my own hands. This is musk and iron, heavy and near, the smell of the killing floor when a beast is opened up and steaming, and there's nothing on this mountain that's been opened tonight.

Not yet.

The fire seems all at once very small.

Then the sound comes up out of the shadow, and it's no howl. A howl I could bear. This is lower, and it's closer than anything has any right to come with my two dogs at my feet, close enough that I feel it stir the air against my face, and the old dog breaks.

He breaks the way a dam gives. One breath his weight is warm against my leg and the next he is gone, both of them gone, two pale shapes pouring away downhill into the black, away, away, and a dog bred a thousand winters to die on his feet in front of the flock does not run from any wolf that walks.

I stand up. I take the crook in my two hands.

Behind me the flock comes apart in one scream out of a hundred throats, the woven hurdles cracking as they throw themselves against the fold, over it, downhill where the dogs have gone. I can't see the thing. The fire's at my back and the night in front of me is whole, and I'm an old fool with a stick, turning, turning, trying to keep the light between my body and the dark.

It's already inside the light.

It comes low and fast, too large, a piece of the dark come loose and moving wrong. The crook is struck from my grip before the swing has time to finish. Then the cold granite against my back. Then the weight, far more weight than a living creature that size should carry, pressing the breath out of me, and a heat opens all down my front that I feel before I feel any pain of it, my own blood running out of me into the night.

I think of the low red light under my own door. I think of Jeanne's name and can't reach my mouth to say it.

For a whisper the pain is everything. Then it lets go of me all at once, and there's no pain left anywhere, only the stone at my back, the dark thing taking me apart, the sky beyond it. The stars are still there. Hard, close, past all counting. They're the last of it, the cold white stars over the high Margeride, and then not even they remain.

LA BREBIS ÉGARÉE

La cloche appelle les brebis au bercail.

Le berger les compte, puis ferme la porte.