Fated, Allegedly

1. Erin

ERIN

The road into Stillwater is eleven miles of washboard gravel, and by the time I coast into town my back teeth feel loose and my coffee has redistributed itself across the passenger seat.

The lake shows up all at once through a gap in the pines, flat and gray-green under a sky that can't decide about rain.

It's beautiful. It's also, according to six months of state survey data crammed into the binder riding shotgun, dying quietly while nobody watches.

It's the first week of April, and the basin still hasn't quite decided winter is over.

I park by the boat launch and start hauling gear out of the truck bed because moving is easier than thinking about how much rides on this.

Trail cameras, collar receivers, water sampling kits, the good waders.

Six months, one contract, and one chance to put my name back on something that doesn't end in a retraction.

"You're the biologist."

I turn with a Pelican case in each hand and have to look up, which almost never happens to me. Game warden uniform, shoulders like a doorframe, dark hair cut close, and eyes a shade of blue that seems rude on a man this big.

"Erin Lawson." I set down a case and offer my hand. "Department of Environmental Conservation, contracted. You're local enforcement?"

"Nash Hanson." His grip is warm and careful, like he's rationing pressure. "Warden for the whole basin."

"Perfect. Then you can save me two days of paperwork.

I need lake access, permission to run cameras on state land, and whatever you've got on the wolf collars that went dark in March.

The state transferred both missing wolves' collar frequencies to my receiver before I arrived, with instructions to investigate if either signal came back online. "

Something shifts behind his face. Not much. It's the flicker you see on a deer before it decides which direction to bolt.

"Which sectors are you starting in?"

I pull the topo map off the tailgate and spread it over the case, weighting one corner with my thermos. "North shoreline first, then the wetlands here, then the drainage that runs up toward the old mine cuts. Twelve camera stations to start, expanding to thirty by June. "

He studies the map far longer than the question deserves. His finger comes down on the eastern wetlands, and it doesn't move.

"Not that one."

"Excuse me?"

"Ground's bad through there. Peat over old shaft collapse. You'll go in to your hips and there's nobody within four miles to pull you out." He taps twice, gently, like he's closing a door. "Start west. Better sightlines, and the fish counts are worse anyway. You'll get your data faster."

"I'm not looking for faster. I'm looking for accurate." I fold my arms. "And I've surveyed peat bog in three states, Warden. I know what my hips are for."

That gets me the corner of a smile, there and gone. "Never said you didn't."

"Then say what you actually mean."

"I mean," he says, unhurried, "that people go into the east wetlands and come back wrong. Turned around. Missing hours. I've pulled four out in six years." He rolls my map up and hands it back, and his voice drops into something almost gentle. "Go west, Dr. Lawson. Please."

Nobody's ever said please to me like it cost them money. West it is, for now, because I'm stubborn, but not stupid.

I spend the afternoon working a transect along the north shore, strapping cameras to trunks at thigh height, angling them across game trails that should be churned to mud this time of year and instead look swept.

No scat, no browse lines, not even deer beds pressed into the ferns.

I've walked dead forests before, clear-cut, burned, poisoned, and they still smell like something is trying. This one smells like a hallway.

I'm cinching the strap on a red pine when my knuckle catches on a burr in the bark, and I swear and look, expecting a nail or a fence staple from some hundred-year-old property line.

In the trunk is a sliver of metal the length of my thumb, pale gray, matte, sunk deep enough that the tree has grown a lip of scar tissue around it.

I dig it out with my multitool and roll it in my palm.

It has no rust, but it has a machined edge on one side and a bright fracture on the other, like it snapped off something moving fast.

I find two more in the next forty yards. Different trees, all at roughly the same height, all pointing back toward the water.

There's no road within a mile. No logging in this area since 1962. I bag the fragments, and mark the coordinates. Suddenly, I get a strange cold feeling on the back of my neck, but when I turn around, nothing or no one is there. I ignore it and carry on.

The cabin the state rented me smells like woodsmoke and mildew and has exactly one bar of signal on the porch rail if I hold the laptop at shoulder height. I make eggs for dinner because I forgot to shop, drink a beer, and settle in to watch the cameras trickle in their first transmissions.

Station one: nothing. Station two: nothing, then a raccoon at 8:14 p.m., which is genuinely the highlight of my week.

Station seven pings at 9:41. The thumbnail loads in slices. Infrared wash, ferns silvered, the trail cutting diagonally through the frame. Then movement at the left edge, and I lean so close my nose nearly touches the screen.

It's an animal filling the frame from bottom to top, and the trail behind it is thirty inches wide. It moves through the shot without hurry, and near the end it stops and rotates its head directly toward the housing. Eyes flare white in the IR bounce, and the chest keeps going up out of frame.

Nothing in North America is that size. Nothing. I laugh out loud, alone on a porch in the dark. It must be a scale error, camera's tipped down a bank, animal's close to the lens, my brain is doing what brains do.

I click to enlarge, and the file terminates. Not corrupted, terminated, mid-frame, and the station status flips to NO SIGNAL and stays there.

I'm out the door at 6 a.m the next day with a spare camera and a thermos, and Nash's truck is already parked at the trailhead pullout, engine ticking as it cools.

He's leaning against the tailgate with my camera. It's cracked clean through, lens ring peeled back, strap cut rather than torn.

"Morning," he says.

I stop walking. The gravel crunches and then it's just the creek breathing behind the trees.

"That's station seven."

"Found it on the trail at first light." He holds it out, I take it, and the plastic is cold in a night-long way. "Bear, probably. They'll destroy anything."

"Bears don't cut nylon." I turn the strap over. The edge is clean enough to shave with. "And station seven is two miles in off an unmarked spur. I didn't file those coordinates with anybody. I set that camera at four in the afternoon and nobody was on that trail but me."

Nash's expression doesn't change at all, which is somehow the loudest thing about him.