Page 31 of She, Wolf, Him.

They came for me at first light, a boy from the Crouzet farm an hour out, running the whole way. "Monsieur." He's bent double, hands on his knees. "Monsieur, the farm. It's took a man in the night. And he's not." He has to stop and get his breath. "He's not dead. It's had him and he's not dead." I've buried three since I came to this valley and crouched over the cooling work of whatever does this, and not one of them was breathing when I got there. So I come fast, because a man who lived through the night is worth more to me than all four graves together.

He's in the yard where they found him, by the doorstone, and they've had the sense not to move him. Middle-aged, broad, a farmhand by the work-wear on him. The left arm is opened to the bone, the shoulder past it, one side of his face gone to red ruin. By every reckoning of my trade he should have bled white into the mud hours back. He hasn't. The blood that soaks the ground under him is old, gone brown and tacky at the edges, and the wounds have stopped their running on their own, closed over dark, as though his own body had decided he'd given enough.

I crouch by him. His good eye rolls and finds me and there's a man still in there, under the fever, hanging on by his fingernails.

"I'm the King's hunter," I tell him. "What came at you?"

His mouth works. What comes out is broken, half of it lost in the wreck of his face. "The privy," he says. "I was only gone to the privy." A long pull of breath that whistles where it shouldn't. "Dark. Out the dark. By the byre. The dogs wouldn't come out. They knew." His hand closes on nothing. "Big. Stood up. Stood up like a man, and I thought—" A shudder goes through him, whole-body. "Then down. On its feet, four feet, fast. It had me down and it didn't." His good eye rolls and fixes. "The eyes. The eyes were⁠—"

He doesn't finish. The eye that's left rolls back, and he's gone again into wherever the fever keeps him, his breath sawing on. Even under, his good hand keeps working at the dirt, slow and steady, like a man clawing at a weight still on top of him. His people stand off from him in a loose ring, the stance you keep from a man you can't be sure is done. His wife holds his boots and comes no nearer.

"Will he live." His wife says it to his boots, not to me. "You've seen enough of dying to know. Tell me plain."

"He's stopped his own bleeding, and I've never seen its like." It's the strangest thing I've ever said over a wound. "Get him into the warm. Broth in him when he wakes. He's stronger than the harm."

"He keeps saying it," she says, her eyes down at last. "Stood up like a man. Over and over." She gathers the boots closer. "He won't work again. Not with that arm. Will he."

"He'll work," I say. "Men do. I've seen worse mended."

"How will he work," she says. "With that arm. Who'll keep him."

"The parish will. Or the parish answers why it paid a hunter instead. Your man took the wound for the whole of you. Feed him."

"What's he saying," the wife's brother asks me, drawing me a step aside. "About the standing up. Is that the fever."

"That's the fever," I say. "He'll keep saying it. They do. Let him sleep, and don't repeat it in the village."

"And if the village asks."

"The village will ask. Tell them a wolf. That's the answer that keeps them sleeping."

The farm's two dogs are nowhere in any of it. "The dogs," I say. "Where are they."

"In under the barn," the wife's brother says, and points me there, and spits. "Worthless brutes. Since it was here they won't be called out, not for meat, not for their own man's voice. They heard it. Whatever it was, they heard it, and they dug under the barn like the earth could hide them." The pair of them are in under the low cribbing. Dogs that live in a yard defend the yard. These dug themselves a den to be away from it. A bad enough night will break any dog. It's true, and I've seen it, and I mark how much work the word true is doing for me this morning.

I sit on my heels and I make myself not write down what he just said, because what he just said isn't allowed in the kind of report a man can hand a parish for money. Stood up like a man. A wolf does not stand. A bear might rear, but there's not been a bear in these hills in living memory, and a bear doesn't leave the print I've been finding. So it's the fever. A man three-quarters dead of shock and blood-loss, with a beast tearing his arm off, sees what terror paints for him. I've heard dying men swear to angels, devils, their own dead mothers at the foot of the bed. You do not put a fevered man's eyes in a hunter's report.

And the words aren't the worst of it. A man can rave. What I can't explain away so easy is that he's alive at all. I've seen what wolves leave. One that gets a man down finishes him, or is driven off by dogs, by fire, by other men, and there was none of that here. No dogs were loosed. No neighbour came till dawn. Nothing drove it off. It had him under its feet with no soul to stop it, his arm already ruined, his throat a finger's width from its jaws, and it opened him and then it left him alive. A wolf doesn't leave. A wolf finishes. Whatever stood over this man in the night decided not to, and there's no line anywhere in my trade for a beast that decides.

I send the boy for the women and what passes here for a surgeon. "Run," I tell him, when he stands there gaping. "The women of the village, and the bone-setter if you've got one. Run." I leave the man to whatever mercy's coming and go to read the ground while the light's still low enough to read it by.

The yard tells the start of it plain enough. "He went out for the privy," the brother says, following me around his own yard like a dog that wants feeding. "Or a noise among the stock, maybe. We none of us heard a thing, and the dogs no more than us. My sister found him by the byre wall when she came down to the milking. All of that, in our own yard, and never a sound to wake us." There's the scrape of his heels where he was dragged a yard and dropped. There's the spray up the limewash. And there in the soft muck by the trough is the print. The same foot that's walked through every morning I've worked in this place.

I follow it out of the yard as I've followed it before, and this time I stop before the field makes its fool of me. It crosses the near ground clean, a heavy body moving without hurry toward the black edge of the wood. A stride short of the trees, the line ends. I don't go kneeling at the treeline to be given the same silence twice.

I stand in the field and look at the whole of it instead, the farm, the byre, the one clean trail running out to nothing, and I try to build the picture my trade requires.

A pack. It has to be a pack. One wolf came down off the high ground and took the man at the wall. It was disturbed before it finished, then went back to the trees by a line I've missed. The others kept to the high firs. Wolves hunt in company and feed in company. A wolf disturbed will leave a kill half-done and bolt. That is a true account of wolves. It covers near everything I'm looking at.

I keep a coffer at the back of my skull for what the trade can't use, shut and out of sight until I've time for it. Since I came to this valley it's filled with the print, the scent that has no carcass under it, the trail that ends, the kill that didn't feed, and now a man who lived who had no business living. It's getting hard to shut. I shut it anyway and turn back toward the village to go and sell these people the only beast a man can promise to kill.

By the time I come down the news is ahead of me, as news of a death always is, only this news is stranger, because the man isn't dead.

They're in the square waiting on me, more of them than a market draws, and under the fear there's a hunger I haven't seen here before. Hope. Ugly and grasping. If a man lived, then it can be lived through. If it can be lived through, it can be fought. If it can be fought, it can be killed. I watch the arithmetic run through the crowd ahead of a word out of me, and I understand that the living man has done more for this valley's nerve than a dead Beast on the church wall would have.

So I give them what the hope wants fed. "A man's alive who shouldn't be," I say. "Which tells you what I've told you from the first. It bleeds. And I've never met a thing that bled that couldn't be killed. The sign runs to the high firs, same as before. It's a pack, and I'll have it before the snow shuts the passes."

It goes into them like bread into hungry men. Heads come up. A man near the front actually grips his neighbour's shoulder. "One lived," a woman keeps saying, to anyone who'll hear. "There's one lived through it."