Page 48 of She, Wolf, Him.

"I believe in wolves. I believe in what teeth do, I've a shoulder full of the proof. The rest is a story frightened people tell so the dying will have a shape." My hands lie empty on my knees. "I'll tell you why I know."

And I tell her about my father.

I've carried it fifteen years without setting it down whole in front of anyone, and it comes out plain. A hard winter in the hills where I was born. Sheep dying, then a child. My father was a woodsman who kept to himself and to me, which was crime enough for men who needed a crime. They said a beast walked the parish in a man's shape. They counted their dead aloud in the square until the count turned into a verdict. They put him to the question, and a man under the question will confess to anything with enough patience applied, and he did. They hanged him with torches lit though it was full daylight. No Mass said over him, no stone raised. A rope, a tree, a village going home to its supper telling itself it was safe now. I was twelve. Men held me back, which was the one kindness anybody managed that day. The dying didn't stop, of course. It was wolves. It was always wolves. They'd hanged a man for a winter's hunger.

"Fifteen years at the trade," she says, and lays the two numbers side by side. "You went to it the year they hanged him."

"The same year. A boy who watched a man sold as a beast, gone off to sell beasts for his bread. I've had the whole trade since to decide whether that was revenge or apprenticeship, and I've never settled it."

"So no," I say. "I don't believe in the loup-garou. I've seen what believing in it does. I've made my bread off that believing all my working days, which is a sin a confessor would have a name for, and the arrangement suited me right up until this valley." I make myself look at her. "You told me once I didn't believe a word of my own show, and I didn't deny it, and that was the first true thing I ever gave you. Here's the rest of it. I mean to trap the biggest wolf in this country, kill it, and hang it on your church wall as the Beast, slain. It will be a lie. It will also end this, the fear, the count, the rope they're plaiting for me, all of it, the way the truth never will. And I can't set that trap one-handed, and I won't have your help under false colours. So now you know what I am."

The fire ticks between us. She's quiet so long I hear the kettle move.

"The marks on the church door," she says at last, because she would, because she's dressed what this valley's dead leave behind and earned her questions. "No man born made those. I said so before the parish."

"No man did. A big wolf against oak, rearing, stands taller than a man wants to think about. I've measured such marks from the Pyrenees to here." I have measured them, and never once that high. I lay that thought down where I lay everything the trade can't use. "It's flesh, whatever it is. Flesh can be killed. That's my faith entire."

"You're saying there is no werewolf."

"There is no werewolf."

I say it steady, and it stays said. Whatever the blood-loss painted for me on the hill stays struck from the account, the same as I struck it, out among the firs where fevered testimony belongs.

She holds my eyes a long while, and what's in her face is not the judgment I braced for. It's older than judgment, sadder too, kinder than I deserve, the look of a woman told the monster is men after all, and men she already knew. Then she nods, once, the nod she gives over work that's been decided.

"Then we'd best find you a large wolf," she says.

"You understand it's a fraud. You'd be helping me sell it."

"I understand what the count's doing to us," she says, and stands, and ties her shawl. "A carcass ends it. Show me where to build."

By afternoon we're at the forest edge above the high pasture, where the runs come down out of the firs, and I'm learning what it is to hunt sitting down.

She does the work. I'd sooner it were otherwise, and my forearm settles the argument before it starts. She stakes the bait where I show her, a wether gone lame that the Vidals were glad enough to sell her at a widow's price, and she drives the stake with a mallet in even strokes and never glances over her shoulder at the trees. She builds the blind where I mark it, downwind, granite at its back, cut branches woven low, her hands quick at it, and I sit on a stone like a lord at a harvest and direct. I hate it. I watch her. That part I don't hate.

"You'll freeze," she says, looking at the blind. "Sitting in that all night."

"I've frozen before."

"Not with one arm you haven't," she says, and pulls the weave tighter.

"Sign's a week old along here," I tell her. "A heavy dog-wolf, ranging alone. Old males get pushed off a pack and go solitary, and they go big before they go under. That's my Beast, if the country's kind. Any great wolf serves. It only has to be bigger than their fear when I lay it in the square."

She asks as she works. "How long does a bait keep."

"A day or two. The frost helps. It stinks fresh longer in the cold."

"And if the pack comes instead of your loner."

"Then we keep still and let them have him. They're shy of a bait they've watched being set. The loner's the hungry one."

When the blind is done she crouches beside me to sight through the gap in the weave, her shoulder against my good one, and we sight down the cleared line to the staked wether together.

At the last I break two hazel twigs and set them with the torn ends pointing toward the run. She notices, because she notices everything.

"So you can find it again?"

"So the dark or the blood can't make a liar of me."