Page 44 of She, Wolf, Him.

By midafternoon I'm deeper into the high wood than I've been since I came to this country. The beech gives over to fir and the fir closes rank, boles like the pillars of some black church nobody prays in, and the light comes down thinner at every step until what reaches the ground isn't day any longer, only the memory of it. The bracken stands waist-high, dead and wet. Mist gets up out of the hollows and stays, no wind to move it, going nowhere. Down in the village it wants two hours yet to dusk. In here the dark isn't waiting on the sun.

The sounds go next. There's been a thin traffic of birds over me all day, and somewhere past a granite shoulder it stops, all of it, inside a hundred strides. I stand and listen to a wood with nothing moving in it, and I'm not fool enough to be comforted. A wood doesn't hush for nothing.

The crawl comes up my back, and I turn and read my own trail. Bracken. Boles. Mist standing between them like laundry hung in a cold room. Nothing. I turn again a hundred strides on, and again where the ground drops toward a hollow, and it's nothing every time. I keep doing it anyway. A man guards the side of himself he's been bitten on. I'd have done better guarding the sides I hadn't.

The first I see of them is a shoulder of grey sliding between two boles, forty strides out on my left, there and gone without a sound. Then a second, lower on the slope. Ahead of me, a third crosses at its own pace, and the pace is the message. They've been herding me the better part of the afternoon, and they've stopped caring that I know it.

There's a clearing ahead through the firs, a hip of granite breaking the bracken at its far side. Stone at my back and open ground in front, one ball in the barrel and the knife on my belt. A poor plan, but all the trade I have left up here, and I make for it, reading my back at every third stride.

They come out of the mist before I'm halfway to the stone.

Four of them, five, grey and rangy, wet to the hocks, spread across the clearing's rim in a line no captain could better. The one at the middle carries half again the weight of any other, a heavy dog-wolf, dark through the mask, and it comes forward at a walk with its head carried low while the rest hold. I've read this a hundred times in prints and never once stood inside it. The middle one is the question. The line is what answers if I answer wrong.

"Come on, then, old man," I tell it, quiet, because the voice steadies the hands. "Come and see what I cost."

I put the ball into it at twenty strides.

The crack rolls off the granite and dies among the firs. A fair shot, and not fair enough. The old wolf goes over screaming and comes up again on three legs, and the scream doesn't stop.

Then the weight hits me, from both sides at once, out of bracken I'd have sworn held nothing, my face still to the line in front. I understand in the falling that the line was the show and the show was for me, the oldest trick in my own trade, and I bought it whole.

The world goes over sideways. The rifle leaves my hands somewhere in it. Teeth go through coat and shirt into the meat of my left shoulder. The wolf that owns them shakes, the way a terrier breaks a rat, and the shake goes down my arm into the ground under me. There's no pain yet where the teeth are. The pain is everywhere else, my hip on a root, my head on stone, and over all of it a cold clarity that goes on reading the fight like sign even while the fight is me.

A second weight lands across my legs. Jaws take my right forearm when I get it up, and it's the arm keeping the other jaws out of my throat, so I leave it where it is and let it be held. The knife is in my left fist, drawn somewhere in the falling. I put it in behind a foreleg, in to the guard, and drag.

I'm screaming. I hear it from a long way off, no words in it, nothing of the showman in it and nothing of the King's hunter, the plain high sound of an animal that doesn't want to die. A corner of me that never stops keeping count marks how little there is to tell between my scream and theirs.

Teeth find my side below the ribs, a long tear of cold that will be fire later. My boot finds a skull. The knife opens a muzzle to the bone. I kick. I cut. My own blood is hot on my own hands, and it's the only warmth in the world.

Then they're off me. No signal I hear, no cause I see. One heartbeat they're on me, weight, teeth, the wet-dog stink. The next, the clearing holds nothing but grey air and the shot one dragging itself toward the trees, crying as it goes, the others closing round it like an escort. The dark takes them piece by grey piece. The crying goes down the slope, fades, and then even that is gone.

I lie where they put me. The frost is starting, stiffening the bracken a frond at a time. I do the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is what I have. I'd made myself dear. A wolf weighs meat against the price of it, and a man with iron in his fist and a scream in him comes expensive in a season that has easier fare. That's a true account of wolves, and for once I don't have to force it.

The bone of the arm held. That's the margin entire, the width of a man's forearm. I lie in the bracken and breathe.

I get my neckcloth off one-handed, wind it round the forearm, and pull the knot home with my teeth. The shoulder I can do nothing for but press my fist against. The side I don't look at yet.

I'm reaching for the rifle when the clearing changes.

No sound comes. Nothing I could set down in any report. Only the mist at the clearing's upper edge, between the firs, has a shape in it that wasn't there when the pack went down, and every hair on me has risen without asking my leave.

The pack went down the slope. I heard the last of them go. This is up the slope, and it is still.

Stillness is the one sign in a wood that's never honest. Mist moves. Bracken moves. A wolf, above every living thing, moves, circles, tests, shifts its feet, works the ground. This stands in the mist with the patience of the granite at my back, a thing with no cause to move, and it lets me look at it.

There's too much of it. That's all the measuring my eyes can do in what's left of the light. A wolf's shape the way a man's shadow at evening is a man's shape, drawn out wrong, too much of it, the shoulder too high off the ground, the head where no wolf's head sits. Set it beside the one I shot and the one I shot is the year's pup.

The light is nearly done. At the head of the shape there are two points where the last of it goes in and doesn't come back out. Eyes ought to give a man something back, even in this light, the flat coin-shine every night beast I've ever met has paid me. These keep what they're given, and they don't flicker or shift. They rest on me. Rest. That's the word the blood-loss finds. Not the fix of a hunter measuring meat. A look with the measuring already done.

I'm meat on the ground, opened in three places, an empty gun in the bracken beyond my reach. Nothing in this wood is fool enough to leave that lying. It doesn't come. I've never in my life been looked at longer.

Then the mist holds only mist. It doesn't turn or spring away. There's no sound of a heavy body going off through bracken, and a body that size ought to go through bracken like a cart. Between one of my breaths and the next the clearing is empty, and the dark where it stood is only dark.

I lie in the frost, the blood going cold on me, and set about the one work I'm fit for.

I knelt over a man in a farmyard not a fortnight since while he swore the beast stood up like a man. I kept his words out of the account, and I was right to, because a man three parts dead of blood and terror sees whatever the terror paints him. Well, then. Here's a man three parts dead. I've bled enough tonight to paint a parish of devils. The light was going or gone. The mist was thick. A wolf of the pack hung back to watch the dangerous thing die, as wolves will, and a dim eye and a worse hour made it large. I'd strike this testimony out of any report a stranger brought me. So I strike it out of mine. I saw a wolf, late, in bad light. Or I saw nothing at all.

I saw nothing at all.