Page 12 of She, Wolf, Him.

— PARISH REGISTER OF SAINT-GERVAIS-DU-PUY, 1752

Whatever killed him didn't eat.

That's the first wrong thing, and I have it while I'm over him, with the morning hardly off the stones. The throat's torn out, the chest opened, the man otherwise whole. Both arms on him. The belly shut. A wolf that kills a man this size in a hard season eats what it can hold, drags off what it can't. This one tore the life out of him and walked away from the meat.

I crouch in the trampled straw at the edge of the lower pens and do the reading while the village does the shouting.

Five men stood the watch here. They tell me so over each other, the words coming in pieces.

"A lantern," one of them says. "A gun apiece. The sheep in close against the hurdles. It wasn't an easy night."

"The dogs wouldn't settle," another says. "An hour and more, working at the rope's end, growling at the black past the firelight."

"Then they stopped." A younger one, and his voice thins on the word. "All at once, like a hand come down on them. And the sheep." He has to start it over. "Every one of them up and rigid. Heads up, turned the one way. Not a sound on the whole hill. Not one."

"We saw nothing," the first man says. "We heard nothing worth telling." They're the words they used on each other in the dark, I can hear it. Men sitting in that silence, telling themselves it was nothing.

"Which of you heard it last," I ask them. "The dogs, the sheep. Which thing was last."

"The sheep," the young one says. "Standing there all turned the one way, like they were watching it go."

"We'd have heard a man cry out," the first man says. "A man taken would cry out. There was nothing."

"He walked the far fold," another says. "Like always. He'd been the whole night at it." And the young one, "Two of us started up to go with him. He said stay by the fire." He swallows the rest of it.

"I keep hearing it," the young one says, after a moment, to his own hands. "Not hearing it." He gives it up.

"The sheep never scattered," the first man says. "I keep coming back to that. A wolf comes into a pen, the sheep go mad. Ours stood like stones, the whole night, quiet as the grave." He hears what he's said, and stops.

"How many men," I ask them, "would you need out there tonight, to feel easy."

"Ten," the first man says, at once.

"No number," says Bertrand, quiet, from behind his dead lantern. "There's no number."

"I dropped off," the young one says, shame-faced. "An hour, maybe. Against the hurdle. I woke and it was done by then."

"You keep your mouth shut about that," the first man says, not unkind. "We all slept. Every one of us slept, and it made no difference."

"Did anyone see it go," I ask. "Any of you. The leaving."

Heads shake. "It went the way it came," the first man says. "Between one blink and the next."

At the greying of the sky one of them went to find Thibault Lavergne, who'd stepped off to walk the far fold an hour past and not come back. They found him here. Bertrand has the lantern in his fist, burned out, the horn smoked black. He's the farrier, built to his own anvil's pattern, the forearms dark with old soot even out here, and he holds the dead lantern like he's forgotten it or daren't set it down. He's the one who found him. "Gone an hour," he keeps telling me. "An hour, no more. He was past my help. Past anyone's. The lantern burned itself out and I never saw it go." As though the hour is a charge he can be tried for. And later, when the others have run out. "He was my friend," he says. "I want that written somewhere." I let him talk. The other choice is the quiet, and the quiet is full of the rest of the night.

The dead man was young and strong. Thick through the shoulders, a labourer's build, the broad features gone slack and grey now the blood's drained down into the stones beneath him. Not a man you'd pick to find taken among four others with guns. The sheep are jammed to the far rail in a knot, climbing one another, still trying to get clear of a killer that left hours ago. They won't settle, and I can't blame them.

I make the case I always make. A wolf, a big one, old and driven, gone strange in good killing country. But the case won't button at the front. It killed as though the killing was the whole of the errand, and left a fed man's worth of meat cooling in the straw.

"Five men," a woman says, behind me, over and over, to nobody. "Five men with guns, and it took him between them, and none of them the wiser."

There's an answer to that, the easy one. The men were close by. The lantern, the noise of them, the dogs on their ropes, it was on him and into him. Then the watch stirred, and it broke away before it could feed. Likely enough. Sound, even. I get off my knees.

There's print in the soft ground where the grass gives out, the same one I've cut all week, four toes, too deep, too wide, the stride wrong. Three strides toward the trees and the ground hardens and it's gone. I weigh where it dies, and leave it for the proper reading, later, alone.

By then the priest has come.

He doesn't hurry. He never does. He comes down through the parting crowd in his black and goes to one knee in the wet a careful foot back from the blood, and starts the Latin, pitched to carry. He prays at the body as another man would address a magistrate, sure of his standing. When he's done with God he addresses the living.