Chapter 3
LUKE
The wolves are alive.
I know this because Mags Kelly is not at my gate with a federal emergency.
She's on the permitted section of the south pasture, a hundred and fifty yards out, moving through the early light like she belongs to it.
Notebook open, reading the slope, reading the drainage, reading the ground the way I read it, and I am standing at the fence line with a thermos that stopped being worth drinking twelve minutes ago.
I should be at the barn. It is six-nineteen.
The barn is not getting visited yet.
She drops to one knee at the base of the slope.
Studies the ground. Writes something. Stands, takes three steps left, studies it again, writes something else.
She's reading where the water goes when the snowmelt hits heavy.
She's reading which stretch of fence takes the most cattle pressure in a wet spring.
My father taught me to read this pasture when I was nine years old and I have done it every spring since, and she has walked it twice and she is getting it right.
That is the problem. Not her presence, not the corridor, not the permits.
Not the two collar signals that went stationary and had pulled me out to the east ridge at dusk expecting a scene I didn't want to find.
They were fine. Displaced, bedded together in a draw I've seen deer use since I was a boy.
Signals strong, wolves alive and apparently unbothered by the fact that I'd driven ten miles of dirt road in the dark to confirm it.
I went back to the truck and sat with the radio off for a minute, which is not something I do, and then I drove home and ate dinner standing at the kitchen counter and thought about nothing.
I am currently thinking about something.
She looks up and finds me across the distance. The notebook comes down.
Neither of us moves.
She tips her chin. I tip mine back. We are two professionals having a professional morning on professionally contested land, and the almost-kiss that didn't happen four nights ago under the Rusty Spur lights is not here.
It is not standing in the gap between us.
It is not the reason I've been at this fence line for thirteen minutes without a discernible purpose.
She holds my eyes for one second longer than necessary. Then she goes back to her notebook.
I look at the thermos.
Cal comes around the side of the barn and stops next to me, squinting across the pasture the way he does when he's about to say something that isn't what he's actually saying. We've worked this ranch together since we were twenty and I know every version of that squint.
"Gray's shoe is fine," he says.
"Good."
"Checked it myself."
"Appreciate it."
He watches Mags move north along the slope, following the drainage she mapped on Thursday, which is correct, which I am not going to say out loud. After a moment:
"She's reading the Hendricks draw."
"Looks like."
"That's where your dad always said the fence should've gone."
I look at him. He looks at the mountains. Completely neutral. A man with no opinions whatsoever about anything currently happening.
"Fence post on the south end's been sitting crooked since February," he adds. "Just so you know."
He heads back to the barn. I look at the post in question.
It is, in fact, crooked. I have walked past it forty-one times.
I started counting in March when the ground thawed and I decided to fix it later and then didn't. It was wrong before she got here, wrong because of a survey that didn't account for wet-year hydrology, wrong in a way that cost me three calves in the wash two springs back.
She pointed at the ground Thursday morning with two fingers and said here like she was filing a correction with the universe.
She said: McAllister. The way she says my name. Like she picked it up to examine and hasn't decided what to do with it yet.
I have thought about that zero times.
I move the fence at four in the morning.
Cold comes down off the peaks the way it does in early June, sharp and clean, and the stars are out so thick it feels like showing off. The post driver rings out across the dark. No wind. Just the work and the sound of it and the quiet of land that doesn't know it's contested.
The new post goes in twelve inches northwest of the old one.
I tamp the base, check the line, run the wire to correct tension.
Thirty feet of fence relocated to where the drainage actually runs, where the elk move, where the ground tells you the boundary wants to be if you're paying attention instead of staring at an old survey marker and calling it done.
My father put the fence where the marker said. My father is also the reason I know this pasture well enough to know the marker was wrong. I've been holding both of those facts for five years and tonight seems like a reasonable time to do something about one of them.
I pull the original post and turn it in my hands.
The break at the base is clean. Too clean for weather.
Too clean for a post that rotted through or caught a spooked steer at a bad angle.
I stand in the dark with it and let the thought start to form and then I set it in the truck bed because I'm not ready to finish that sentence yet.
I drive back.
I don't leave a note.
Cal finds me in the equipment shed at seven-thirty.
"She found it," he says.
"Okay."
"Stood there a while."
I torque the bolt I'm working on. "Okay."
"Didn't write anything down." He leans in the doorway. "Thought that was interesting."
He goes back to the horses.
I stay where I am with the wrench in my hand, thinking about a woman standing in a field with her notebook open and her pen still.
The way you go still when something doesn't fit your current theory and you need a new one.
I've been in that exact stillness twice this week, which is two more times than I'm comfortable with, and the wrench in my hand turns out to be the wrong size.
I put it down and find the right one.
My phone buzzes. Unknown number. Eight words.
The drainage runs north. You already knew that.
Four seconds.
I type back: Fence was wrong.
Send it before I think it through. Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Yes.
Then nothing. One word, period, door closed.
She texted me first, she stood in the field and didn't write anything down and then she went home and she texted me, and now she's done, and she is apparently fine with that.
I put the phone away.
Pick up the wrench.
Put it down because it is still the wrong one.
Find the right one.
The thought I keep not finishing: that post didn't fail on its own.
The thought I actually finish: the south pasture is thirty feet wider than it was yesterday, she knows I did it, she said yes with a period and went quiet, and I want to know what she does when she goes quiet, and that is a problem I'm going to address later.
Later comes at eleven forty-two when the phone buzzes again.
One question.
I stop what I'm doing.
The marker post. Your father put it there. Why didn't you move the fence before I got here?
Four seconds. The longest four seconds I've had since she said my name at the gate.
I type: You'll have to earn that one.
Thirty seconds. Then: Fair.
Then, ten seconds after that: I'm going to.
I put the phone in my shirt pocket and go back to work. The afternoon is long. I'm aware of the weight of it the whole time, small and specific, against my chest.