Chapter Three
Three weeks after the breakfast at the diner, I drive to the nearest vehicle access point on the northeast edge of Pelican Valley.
I park, shoulder my pack for a three-day solo survey.
My stated research objective is the dispersal of gray wolves.
My actual intent is to walk a twelve-mile loop, have a look, and come back.
The morning is overcast and warm, but the forecast calls for clear skies by afternoon. The wind is light out of the southwest.
Pelican Valley in August is wide and gold. The creek runs unhurried and clear between cutbanks lined with old willows. Bison scatter the meadow in small groups, black against the tawny grass. Red-tailed hawks circle. The far hills are hazy blue.
My first survey point comes by late morning.
A short rise above the creek, near a bend where the bank drops into a sheltered bowl under the willows.
I’ve been here before, several times, on legitimate wolf surveys.
I know the sight lines and the approach angles.
At the top of the rise, my pack comes off.
The clipboard comes out, and I log the date, time, and weather, then start the standard protocol.
About thirty seconds into my notes, the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I don’t move.
A decade around large predators has taught me better than to move. The feeling isn’t vague. It’s the specific feeling of being watched by something with mass and intent. My hand stays where it is, and I listen.
The meadow is quiet around me. Too quiet. The ambient noise I had been half-registering—the birds in the willows, an insect hum, the soft wind—has thinned. Something large has entered the area, and everything else has gone quiet.
I glance to the right. To the left.
There’s a creature standing fifteen yards from me at the edge of the willows.
Not fifteen yards away from where I’d expect an animal to be. Fifteen yards from a human, in broad daylight. It’s looking directly at me from a patch of sun between two old willow trunks.
I’ve watched wolves for a living for a decade.
I know what they look like at every distance, every angle, every posture.
The thing at the edge of the willows isn’t one, even if it shares some similarities.
It’s standing upright. It’s the size of a very large man.
Its shoulders are too broad, its arms are too long, and its face is wrong for a wolf and wrong for a man.
It’s looking at me with eyes the color of amber, and it’s perfectly, impossibly still.
My heart stutters.
Inside that first suspended second, one thought lands: he was right.
The thought isn’t triumphant. It’s terrible.
Because in the same second the realization arrives that Marcus was right, the next arrives that I’m alone with a creature that isn’t supposed to exist. My satellite tracker won’t help me, and my radio won’t help me, and nothing I know is going to help me.
I do not move. My eyes hold across the fifteen yards of open grass, and the creature holds back.
Then, movement registers in my peripheral vision to the left. There’s a second one standing ten yards away, at the edge of the rise.
This one is lighter than the first. Gray, with a patch of brown across his chest and a paler belly. Built leaner than the dark one. Closer to me than the first one. And he’s looking at me.
My heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my temples. I force myself to breathe. In. Out. In.
I swallow. My mouth is completely dry. The bear spray on my hip is there, but it probably won’t help.
The darker one takes a single step forward, and grass crunches under his weight.
The lighter one to my left moves too. He comes up the side of the rise silently, and when he stops, he’s five yards from me.
The gray one makes a sound, a short rising note. A question, I think. Aimed at the dark one. He answers with a low descending growl. Then he takes another step toward me. He’s five yards away now. Four. Three. His scent rolls over me, warm and musky and animal.
My body reacts before my mind catches up. My stomach flips, my thighs clench, and heat gathers low in my belly. It’s sudden and insistent in a way I haven’t felt in a very long time. I should be running, but I’m frozen in place.
His hand lifts slowly and hovers inches from my cheek. Asking. I nod.
The pads of his fingers touch my face. They’re warm and vaguely rough, but the claws don’t so much as graze my skin. He traces the line of my jaw and the curve of my ear, and when he comes to my hair, he makes an interested noise low in his chest and sinks his fingers into it carefully.
My eyes close. I can’t help it. The sensation is so strange and so gentle that something in my chest cracks open.
When my eyes open again, he’s bent his head closer to me. His muzzle is a foot from my face. His breath is warm and sweet and clean in a way that no wild creature’s breath has any business being.
He draws in a deep pull of my scent, and his eyes go half-closed. A shudder starts at his shoulders and travels down to his hips as his chest expands hard and releases a deep groan.