Page 17 of She, Wolf, Him.

Bertrand the farrier watches me from the door of his forge as I pass, the big man who found Thibault Lavergne dead at the pens and has been quiet since, his arms soot-black to the elbow, the hammer idle in his fist. He doesn't spit like the drover or look away like the rest. He only weighs me, judging whether I'll hold, and goes back to his fire.

She's among the stalls when I see her.

Agnès. The still one, alone, a basket on her arm and her shawl drawn close against more than the wind. The square has half its back to her too. I marked it yesterday over the grave and I mark it again now, the pity gone sidelong, the glances that touch her and slide off. We're the two cold spots in the square, she and I, for our different reasons, and against my better sense I feel the kinship of it.

She lifts her head and catches me at it. For a breath she holds it, dark eyes level, giving me nothing and taking her own quiet measure of me at the same time. Then she returns to the stall and the moment shuts. She's only a woman buying for her father's house. I'm only a stranger she does right not to know in front of the rest.

I move on before the standing there can cost her anything. What it costs to be seen near me is hers to pay, and she's paid out enough this week.

I go up after the noon meal, glad to put the village at my back and the open ground in front of me, where nothing reads me but the wind.

This is the country I trust, and it deals with me honestly where the square wouldn't. The high pasture runs up to the treeline in long brown folds, granite breaking grey and lichened through the turf, the firs standing black above it under a sky the colour of a wet knife. The cold is cleaner up here. I work the slope as I've worked it all week, slow, into the wind, and inside the hour it gives me what I climbed for.

A pack's come through, and lately. Scat by a thorn, pale and twisted with hair, a day old at most. A stretch of soft ground under the firs printed all over with the honest spread of grown wolves, four of them running together, maybe five, the strides easy and ordinary, no two prints the same beast. And up under the trees, the kill. A ewe dragged off her grazing, opened and eaten, the ribs sprung, the good meat gone and the rest well attended by the crows. I crouch over it, and for the first time this week the signs agree. This is a wolf's work, plain and whole. The carcass stinks of ordinary death, iron, rot, the green of a sheep's opened gut, and the stink is a mercy, because it's no more than itself.

I read the ground a long while, and what comforts me most I find by its absence.

The other isn't here today. The big lone track that's dogged every slope I've cut since the first morning isn't laid anywhere in this soft ground. Today the hill is only a hill with wolves on it, and I take it as a man takes solid footing after a week on bog. I put my weight down where it holds. I don't go testing what drops away off the edge.

So I build the hunt where I stand, the thorn, the seep, the kill, the runs they favour coming down off the high firs. A pack keeps to its habits. I'll take them over two or three nights once the moon's down and the dark is mine to use.

I come down off the high ground with the light going, the cold rising out of the valley to meet the cold coming down to it, and the village shut tight against the both. Shutters over, lanes empty, a thread of smoke off every roof and not a soul beneath any of them out of doors. They've learned that much. The dark belongs to the killer in the trees now, and they've handed it over without a fight.

Her father's house sits where the lane bends up toward the pasture, the last of a candle showing yellow through the chink in the shutter. I've no call to slow as I pass. I slow as I pass.

There's a dog in the yard, a rough grey herd-dog off its work for the night. As I draw level with the gate, the door opens. She comes out with a pail for the slops, and the dog comes up off its haunches and backs to the wall, low, the hackles standing in a ridge the length of its spine, its eyes running from the gate to the yard to the black past the roofs and fixing on none of us. She says a low word to it and sets the pail down. It won't come.

Every beast in this valley's gone uneasy this week, the dogs the worst of them. There's a pack on the hills and the wind's carried it down to every nose in Saint-Élie, and a dog with sense in its skull spends a wolf-season at the end of its rope begging in. I set the dog's fright where the rest of the day's sign went, with the scat, the kill, the clean print under the firs. One more animal that's caught the smell of what's working the high ground.

She straightens, and sees me at the gate.

We've no business with one another in a shut lane at dark, and we both know the size of it. There's no worse turn either of us could do the other than to be found standing close after sundown. A man with sense gives her the road and goes on.

"Bar your door tonight," I say instead. Low, rough, a hunter's word and nothing a listening shutter could make more of. "There's a pack on the high ground, and close. Keep the dog in, if it'll come to you."

"It won't," she says. She studies the dog flat against the wall, then me, and there's no fear anywhere in her face, only the composure this village mistakes for emptiness. "But I'll bar the door."

That's all. No more passes between us than passes between any two souls in a killing season, and there's not a word in it I could carry off as warmth. Even so, I hold a beat too long at her gate, then make myself move.

I go on up the lane to my cold borrowed room. The wolf is the work. It's on the hill, and I'll have it under the ground inside the fortnight and be quit of this place, its priest, its frightened eyes. The woman isn't part of that. I turn back toward her lit window anyway.

There's no one on this lane to hear me, so I admit the plain truth once. Back at that gate I wanted to set my palm to her cold cheek and feel it warm under me. I leave her window yellow behind me. Keeping my own feet pointed up this lane is the hardest tracking I've done all week.

10

WHAT'S MINE

AGNÈS

She stood at the wood's edge at dusk, the good wife, the obedient daughter, and looked too long at the dark under the trees. What she waited for there, no one thought to ask.

— FRAGMENT, AUVERGNAT FOLK SONG, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

I've taken to coming up here in the last of the light, when the work is done and the village has given itself to its own hearths and forgotten me for an hour.

The high pasture runs out brown and bare above the last cottage, climbing past the last of the chestnuts to where the firs begin. At the top of it, the trees stand black against a sky gone the deep red-gold of a banked coal, dying. That's where I stop. At the edge, where the grass ends and the dark begins under the boughs. I don't go in. I've never gone in. I only stand at the line of it and let the wood be near.

Everyone in Saint-Élie has barred a door against the night by now. The hunter himself told me three nights past to keep mine shut and the dog in, his eyes hard with the warning of it. The Beast is in these trees, or in trees like them, and a woman with any sense is home behind her shutters with the fire built high. I climb up to the wood's edge at dusk anyway, because it's the one stretch of the world no one has ever laid a claim to.