Page 36 of She, Wolf, Him.

There's only one road off the steps he's stood me on, and it's the one it's always been, only now I've to take it fast. A body. Dead wolf on a hurdle in the square, the villagers' fingers in the fur of it so they can know it for an animal. Blood and bone, nothing holy, killed by a man with lead and not delivered by a sin repented. Give fear a carcass to bury and it forgets the hunter it was sharpening itself on. I've let the hunt run slow because slow is how you take a careful pack clean. I've no more room for slow. The one wolf I've put a ball in this season went off in its pack's jaws and left me nothing to show for it. I'll take them rough and I'll take them now, and the big one whose print I keep finding I'll hang on the church wall myself.

Somewhere in the last of the wine I've stopped asking whether the one I bring down is truly behind it. I set the cup down and leave a coin beside it, more than the wine's worth, because the keeper has a family and a frightened man's silence shouldn't cost him.

I spend the rest of the short day up where the work is, and the work, at least, doesn't lie.

I begin at the Berthou wall, where the night's scores show pale against the shutter's grey grain. Four to the set, clean-drawn, no splintering, a thing sure of its strength. I reach my arm up the wood and the topmost sits a full hand above my best stretch. I set that fact down where I set everything the trade can't use, and go up. I cut for sign from the Crouzet farm, down to the drover's hollow, up the long flank of pasture to the wall of firs. I've walked it a dozen times. I walk it again. The cold helps. The moving helps. What doesn't help is the new habit my back's picked up since the night on the rocks, the crawl between the shoulders whenever the ground rises behind me. Twice I catch myself turned full round, rifle half-lifted, reading my own back-trail as though it were the front. There's nothing on it. There never is. I've hunted alone half my life and never minded my own company on a hill. I mind it now. One more debt from the rocks, and one I mean to collect. By the time the light's gone amber off the high ground I've found what I came up for. Scat two days old but plain, packed with hair and bone-grit, a wolf's, past mistaking. A scoring on a stump where a big animal's marked its claim. And in the soft black ground at the head of a sheep-run, where the seep keeps it wet, a clean fore-print with the hind set down true behind it, stride after stride, a heavy beast moving at its ease and going somewhere, the prints carrying on into the bracken as prints should, on and on, not stopping.

The relief is almost shameful. Here's the work the trade was built to handle. A real pack on real ground, leaving the marks God and nature meant a wolf to leave. I can trap this. I can take this.

There's the other print too. I find it where I always find it, off at the margin, the broad four-toed one too large for any wolf that's walked these hills in my lifetime, set down once at the lip of the run and gone again, alone as it's always alone. The big one. The old heavy male a pack throws up to lead it, grown past the size of the rest. I tell myself that, standing over it in the failing light. I've told myself worse this past month and half-believed it. That's the one for the church wall, taken last, the bigger the better, the village measuring its terror against the length of it.

When I come down the light's near gone. The firs go black behind me, that wall of them the whole country shelters under and feeds off. I put my back to it and don't look round.

The village is shut tight when I reach it, every shutter drawn, lamplight bleeding thin at the edges. I pass the church without giving it my face. Reynaud's accusation is still in the air over the square where he laid it, and I feel it as plain as weather coming, attention finding me through the gaps in the shutters, marking the stranger home late again on a night the Beast might walk.

My father's in ground like this somewhere. I'll not lie down in it after him. Not for this priest, not for the blessed ball I'd sooner die than load. I'll kill their wolf and walk out down the road I rode in on, on my own two feet.

20

CHOSEN

AGNÈS

And she went willingly into the dark. That was the whole of her sin, and she never once called it one.

— FRAGMENT, ORAL TRADITION, AUVERGNE DISTRICT

Icross the village in the dark, and for once no one has sent me.

I could walk this lane blind. Tonight every familiar stone feels new under my clogs. I've gone where I was put, from my father's house to the church door, from the church door toward a marriage somebody else had settled. The lane feels wider than the whole valley.

The houses have drawn themselves shut against the night. Lamplight shows in thin lines at the shutters, then goes out as I pass. Margot's window is dark already. I keep to the black between the cottages because Saint-Élie can turn one woman at a man's door into a winter's worth of talk. Since the priest named Gaspard before the parish, it could make worse than talk out of it.

I go on.

His lodging stands where the last roofs give way to pasture. A widow lets him one cold room at the back of her house. One poor square of light shows behind its shutter. The firs rise beyond it. He'll have spent the day among them after the village looked at him as Reynaud taught them to look.

I knock.

The sound carries farther than I expect. Silence answers first, the narrow pause of a man deciding whether the knock wants his gun. Then a board gives under his weight. The latch lifts.

Gaspard opens the door in shirtsleeves, his collar loose and his dark hair pushed back badly from his face. The rifle stands behind him, near enough for one reach. He sees me and loses every answer he might have prepared.

Surprise opens his face. Then hope.

He wanted it to be me.

The knowledge has no hurt in it. That's new enough to make me quiet.

"Agnès." He says my name like he's making sure of it. "It's late for a call." He's watching me the way he watches ground. "Is someone⁠—"

"No one's dead," I say. "No one's dying."

"Come in, then, before the cold does."

I step across the threshold. He steps back to give me room. I turn and close the door myself.

His room holds only what he needs. A tallow lamp turned low, a small fire under its ash, the rifle beside a narrow bed. His coat hangs from a peg with his shot-pouch and knife-belt. A cup, a basin, one stool.