Page 51 of She, Wolf, Him.

"Tomorrow, then."

"Tomorrow," he says, and neither of us makes a question of any of it.

The fire goes low, and we let it. He finishes with the rifle at last, stands it against the wall where he can find it in the dark, and lowers himself back on the pallet, heavy, spent. Neither of us says a word about after, about how long a man stays healing once he's healed. That an after should exist at all, with me anywhere in it, is riches. I leave its shape unasked.

While the last of the light works itself down into the embers, I sit up with what I hold now.

Everything else I've ever kept, I kept because there was nowhere on this earth to set it down. The rage that had no leave to be. The wanting that had less. A name I've never said aloud. Nobody handed me those. They came up in me like granite coming up through thin soil, and I learned to walk my own ground around them.

His secret is different. He put it into my hands himself and asked nothing back but the holding.

If a secret is a chain, I've worn chains all my days, forged on me one link at a time while I stood and said thank you. This one I held my hands out for.

His breathing has gone long and slow. Up at the wood's edge the frost will be settling over the blind and over the small crying life staked beside it, and tomorrow night the lie we built together goes to work. I heap ash over the coals and lie down where I've slept these nights past, near enough to hear him breathe. Before sleep, I hold the chain, my own two hands closed on my end of it.

27

THE GREAT WOLF

GASPARD

The Wolf of Chazes was killed, and we rejoiced. Then the killings resumed. We are told this wolf is different.

— LETTER FROM MENDE, OCTOBER 1766, PROVENANCE UNCERTAIN

The wether stops crying an hour before first light.

Three nights it's cried, thin and even, winding out over the black pasture, and I've long since stopped hearing it. The stopping I hear. I come up out of my half-doze with the rifle already sliding onto the rest she wove into the blind, and I put my eye to the gap and see nothing. No moon to speak of tonight. Till the sky pales, the dark owns everything from here to the treeline, and I sit in the middle of it, a half-mended man with one ball loaded, listening.

This is the piece of the plan I never said aloud at her hearth. A bait calls. It doesn't choose what answers. I've staked hurt meat and a crying voice in open country that holds the loner whose sign we found and the pack that opened my shoulder. What else it holds, I don't spend the dark hours naming. Twice already this night something crossed the lower ground, and twice it was sheep-scatter, a fox, wind working the bracken. A man alone in a blind learns what his own dread weighs. Mine weighs more than it did before this autumn.

The cold has found every seam in me, the new ones first. The forearm's gone past ache to a kind of iron. The side only speaks when I twist, so I don't twist. I flex my trigger hand inside my coat, over and over, to keep the use in it.

The sky goes from black to slate above the firs. The wether cries once more, higher, and he's there.

No sound brought him. One breath the cleared line is empty and grey, and the next he's standing in it, as if the light had made him along with everything else. A wolf, grey gone nearly white at the guard hairs, heavy through the shoulder as a yearling calf, a head on him broad as a spade. Old, a king of his kind, pushed off some pack's ground as old kings are, come down the country alone, and hungry enough at the end of it to walk up on a staked wether in open ground with the light rising.

What moves in me first is relief, plain as water. A wolf. Whatever else this morning stood ready to show me, it's shown me a wolf. I put the relief away unexamined, alongside the reason for it, and settle my cheek to the stock.

He's the biggest I've ever put eyes on, and seventeen dead ones say so. Through the sights he fills the morning. He tests the wind off the bait, unhurried, a beast that has outlived every trap and every winter this country could set for him, and my breath comes down to nothing on its own. The shot of a working life. And I'm spending it on a fraud.

He commits at last, one long low stride toward the wether, and I take him.

The arm she sewed buckles under the recoil, the smallest fraction, and I know it before the smoke clears. Low. The ball's gone in low, behind the shoulder and down, deep enough to kill him by dusk and nowhere near quick enough for the next minute of my life.

He doesn't run. He turns on the powder-smoke and comes, low, fast, dying, and there's no second ball in this trade. There never is.

I come up out of the blind because I'll not take him crouched. The gun-butt turns his first spring, barely, a blow that runs up my bad arm like an axe into knotted wood. Then his jaws find my shoulder, the torn one. Her stitching goes. We go down together into the frost, his weight a man's weight full on me, the wether screaming somewhere above the both of us. I get the knife in under his brisket, then again, higher, and hold it there while the heat comes out of him over my fist. His jaws work once more, slower. Then the morning is quiet, only the two of us breathing. Then only me.

When I can stand, I don't. Not yet. I kneel beside him in the reddening frost and take the accounting I'd take over any kill, and it comes up the same from every side. The finest animal I've ever brought down. Feet broad as my palm. Fangs a thumb's length. The pale mask scarred with old winters and the teeth of other kings. Sound on all four legs, not an unhealed hurt on him anywhere. An honest wolf, the honest king of every wolf in this country.

And not the Beast. I've known that since the light made him. There's one measure I could lay him against to prove it, and I don't lay it. I've had practice.

This is what I came up here for.

"Eighteen," I tell him, and my voice comes out a stranger's. "Not one of you a devil. You least of all, and you're the one they'll make into it."

The wether is still at its stake, hoarse and alive. I cut two poles while the blood on me is warm enough to work in, lash him on, take up the ends, and start down. He drags like a plough. Behind me the treeline stands over the empty pasture, the black under the firs giving back nothing at all, and it watches me the whole way to the first wall.