Page 28 of She, Wolf, Him.

"Show me," I said, and watched three grown men argue with themselves about which of them would walk back down there with me. "It's bad," the youngest said, from the door, not moving. "It's the worst one yet, they say." In the end I spared them it. I sent them back to the village to keep the others off the ground before it was trampled to mud. Then I went down to him by myself, as I like it, with no one breathing over my shoulder and telling me how to read it.

Jean, they said his name was. A salt-drover, passing through on his way to Saugues with an empty string of mules he'd left penned at the inn. Nobody's man. He came into this valley a stranger, and he'll leave it in the ground. Somewhere between the road in and the road out, he met the Beast I'm paid to kill. The throat's gone, taken in one pull, the whole of it in a single grip and wrench, the spine bared white at the back of it. His eyes are open on the sky he was walking under when it had him. The belly's opened but not emptied. He died fast and wasn't fed on, and I'd think on that longer if it were the strangest of what the hollow had to show me, but it isn't, not by a long way.

I crouch and read the ground as I always have, one mark giving up the next. Here's where he went down, the heels dug in, the bracken flattened where he kicked. Here's the spray off the throat, dark and already going to rust in the cold. The drag-marks run a few feet toward cover and stop with him still in the open. Here's a print in the soft mud at the lip of the hollow, four toes, the pad too broad, the span wider than my spread hand. That print is no stranger.

The strength is harder to explain away. What took this man's throat took it as a strong man pulls a root, once, and I've had seventeen wolves open under my knife, and not one of them carried that in its jaws. A wolf the size of that print might. I notice the neatness of it, how the impossible track and the impossible strength account for each other so long as I don't ask them both questions at once, and I go on reading the ground.

And here is where the reading stops.

The print is the last of it. There's no second to follow the first, no stride paid out across the soft earth a heavy body must cross to leave the hollow. One print, deep, and then ground that should have taken a dozen more and took none. I cast a wide circle, slow, twice, on my knees where I have to be. The bracken stands unbroken past the one crushed patch. It killed a man in the open, set one foot down at the rim, and was nowhere after that.

No crows have come. A dead man in the open should have called down every crow on the hill by now, and the sky stays empty, the hollow quiet in a way I've no use for. Halfway round the second circle I catch myself listening, and find the rifle sling under my hand with no memory of reaching for it. Fifteen years at the trade, and this is the first ground that's ever had me working a kill with one eye on the trees.

I've read sign the way a clerk reads a page, the sense building as you go. This page tears off mid-word, and a man can't read a tear. So I read what's above it, the part that's there and makes sense, the down, the spray, the print. I let myself believe the rest washed out in the night, or that the earth went hard where I can't see it went hard. I do not stand in an empty hollow and say aloud the only truth the ground actually has for me, which is that whatever did this did not walk away on feet.

There's a scrap of wool caught on a thorn at the rim, near the one print. Not off the drover, whose coat's whole. Grey, coarse, the kind of homespun half the valley wears. I work it loose and put it in my pocket with the rest of what I've collected and can't yet spend, and I don't look at it.

I lay my coat over him, because no man should be stared at like that, stranger or no. I leave the hollow with the cold of the mud still in both knees and call it a wolf. Wolves leave trails. I keep saying it the whole way up out of the hollow, and it holds less each time I say it.

I work the high country above the hollow for the better part of the morning, because the alternative is going down to the village and I'm not ready to be looked at.

The drover came this way. I find where he came, the mule-less prints of a tired man walking the high track at dusk because that road's shorter and he didn't yet know what every soul in Saint-Élie knows, to be under a roof by dark. I follow him backward to where the easy walking ends and the killing begins, and there it's plain enough, the scuffle, the fall.

Above the hollow I find one more of the broad four-toed prints, clean this time, pressed in a patch of wet clay that holds it like a seal in wax. I cut a thong from my kit and knot it to the width of it, a measure a man can carry and doesn't have to believe. The toes point down toward the hollow.

I go back to the last print at the rim. The earth might have crusted hard in the night and softened since. I set my heel beside it, lean my weight on, and lift it. Every nail is there. A pace farther out, the mud takes my boot as cleanly. I scrape beneath the surface with two fingers. Wet clay, the same all the way down.

The sun could have thawed it. I look up at the firs that have kept the hollow in shade all morning.

I stay on my knees a while longer, listening. The rifle lies across them now. I keep it there while I work the mud off my fingers.

Then I put the thong away and climb back up to the high track to do the rest of the day's lying.

The body's already been carried in when I reach the square, and the priest has got to it before me.

They've laid the drover on a board outside the church. Reynaud stands over him in his black with half the village ringed around, well into it by the time I'm near enough to hear. "A people that has let sin in among them," he's saying, "now pays the wage of it. The wages of sin are not paid in coin, my children. They're paid in blood, in the dark, one soul at a time." He doesn't preach it. He says it low and certain, which is worse, the voice of a man reading out a verdict already passed. The faces around him are doing what he wants them to do, going from terror to a kind of terrible relief, because a death that's God's judgment is a death that has a reason, and a reason is the one comfort he's got to sell.

He sees me and lifts his head, and the ring of villagers opens to make a lane between us, as crowds do when they smell a fight coming.

"And the King's hunter," he says. "Come down at last. Tell them, monsieur. Tell these good people what manner of creature leaves a man like this and no trail to follow. Another wolf? They shot a wolf at Chazes, and the court swore it was the Beast. The dying went on all the same."

It's a good stroke and he knows it. I keep my face easy. It costs more this morning than it has ever cost, and I pay it, and give the crowd the showman and not the man who spent his morning on his knees in an empty hollow.

"I'll tell you what I told them," I say. "The Beast bleeds. I've yet to meet the thing that doesn't, devil or wolf or whatever name the fear's wearing this week. It'll die by a ball out of this barrel, not by being prayed at. The Beast gets killed, Father. It doesn't get talked to death."

That gets a low sound out of some of the men, the sound of people who'd rather be promised a carcass than a cause, and Reynaud's eyes go to slits and hold there.

"Spend your ball, monsieur," he says, quiet as frost. "Lead cannot answer God. The parish will pay for the burying, after."

"We'll see who's paid, and for what," I say, and turn from him, because the last word is only worth having when the crowd's already given it to you.

"He's right," a man says, reluctant, meaning me. "Prayers haven't stopped it."

"Nor has he," another says, and the ring laughs, uneasy, on both sides of itself. I've made enemies enough. They're a cheaper coin than most.

Then the crowd shifts, and I see her.

Agnès, come through to the board where the drover lies, with the two old women who do the work of the dead in this place. "Steady the board," the black-shawled one says, to the men nearest, and none of them moves to. Agnès steadies it herself. "Careful with him," she says, to the men at the other end of the board. "He was somebody's, somewhere." She doesn't turn to me. Her attention stays on the stranger she's about to make decent, and her face gives the dead what it always gives them, which is nothing. She kneels by a man she never knew and sets her chapped hands to the work, steady, unhurried, while strong men stand back from the board and won't look.