2. Nash
NASH
She takes the broken camera out of my hands and I make myself let go of it, because holding on one second longer would tell her everything.
When she stepped out of that truck with coffee on her sleeve and a binder under her arm, my wolf came up out of the basement of me like a house fire.
Thirty-five years I've heard my father describe it.
Thirty-five years I assumed he was being sentimental.
He wasn't, it's not a feeling. It's a fact that arrives fully grown, the same as gravity, and it says her in a voice that isn't even mine.
So I stand in the pullout with my hands empty and I let her be angry at me about a nylon strap.
"Bears and nylon, it's not possible," she says, quieter, and her chin comes up. Freckles across her nose, hair yanked back hard enough to hurt. She's decided I'm lying, and she'd be right.
"Take pictures of it before you file the loss report," I tell her. "Both sides of the break. Insurance people like sides."
"That's your professional guidance."
"That's the best I've got."
She snorts, and it's not a laugh, but it's the raw material for one. I get in my truck before I do something stupid, like tell her the truth, or ask her what she takes in her coffee.
Caleb's waiting at the station with two cups and an expression I've hated since we were nine.
"Don't," I say.
"I haven't said anything."
"You're radiating."
He follows me into the office and drops into the chair he's worn a permanent dent into. "Wyatt ran the north ridge last night. Rotors again, low, no lights, running the shoreline about a mile out. Third time in eleven days. He clocked them going southeast toward the old Fisk cuts and then nothing."
"Altitude?"
"Under a thousand. Below the county radar shelf." He turns his cup in his hands. "He also says the water's changed out past the drop-off. No otters, no mink. The heron rookery's empty and it's April, Nash. Those birds have used that stand since my grandfather was alive."
Six months ago I'd have called it a bad cycle. Now I've got two wolves unaccounted for since March and a biologist with a state contract and a camera that got cut off a tree with a blade.
"Put Wyatt on her," I say.
Caleb goes quiet. "On the biologist."
"Loose. Two hundred yards minimum, downwind, no shifting inside the survey grid. He tracks her routes and reports twice a day. You take nights near the rental cabin."
"You want a rotation on a woman who's been here two days."
"I want to know who else is watching her."
He studies me, he's my Beta and my oldest friend and he can smell a lie through a closed door. After a moment he stands and knocks his knuckles twice on the desk, which is Caleb for I'll ask later.
"Isla's going to have opinions," he says on the way out.
"Isla always has opinions."
"Yeah, but this time she's going to be right."
Two o'clock, Wyatt's voice comes over the radio with the studied calm of a twenty-eight-year-old having the time of his life. She's off the west transect. She's walking the drainage line straight toward the hollow where nine of my wolves are bedded down after a long night.
I cut across the ridge on foot and come down onto the deer path ahead of her, and she's got her head bent over a handheld receiver, following a ping that isn't going to lead anywhere good.
"Dr. Lawson."
She jumps about a foot and then covers it by planting her hands on her hips. "Do you own this forest or do you just haunt it?"
"You're outside your permitted grid."
"I'm two hundred meters outside my permitted grid, and I have a mortality signal from collar four-one-seven, which has been dead since March and just started pinging at eleven-forty this morning.
" She holds up the receiver like a badge.
"Which means either the battery resurrected or somebody moved that collar. Guess which one I believe."
"Give me the frequency. I'll pull it and log it."
"Absolutely not."
"It's my jurisdiction."
"It's part of my survey." She steps around me and I move with her, casual, blocking the drainage without looking like I'm blocking anything, but she notices.
"Okay. Explain something to me. You've got a basin-wide collapse in your predator population and a state biologist standing here with funding and equipment, and our conversations end with you telling me where I can't go. "
"I've told you three places you can't go. There's four hundred square miles you can."
"You've told me the three interesting ones." She pushes a loose piece of hair off her cheek with the back of her wrist. "How do you manage this basin? Actually. Not the brochure."
"Carefully."
"That's not management, that's a personality."
"Fine." I lean against a birch and cross my arms. "I don't move animals unless they're going to die where they are. I don't cull. I don't feed. I don't relocate a bear because somebody left a cooler out. I let the system carry its own weight."
"And when the system is bleeding out? You've lost your apex predators, Warden. That's not equilibrium, that's a wound. Intervention isn't arrogance, it's triage."
"Every intervention I've watched in twenty years was somebody deciding they understood a thing they'd studied for eighteen months."
"Ouch."
"You asked for it straight."
Her mouth curves, reluctant and real, and I feel it under my sternum.
"You're not wrong. I've seen exactly that.
Wolf reintroduction in a valley with no prey base, nine animals starved, everybody got a photo op.
" She shakes her head. "But you're also standing here defending a hands-off philosophy while somebody is very obviously putting their hands all over your lake. "
There's no good answer to that. There's a true one, and she can't have it yet.
"Come on," I say, turning us both back toward the west. "I'll walk you out. I'll even carry something."
"I don't need—"
"I know you don't."
She hands me the spare battery pack anyway. That's a bigger thing than it looks.
I get her to her truck and I go back for the collar myself, because I want to see the ground it came off of.
It's sitting on a stump. Not caught in brush, not chewed off, set down, upright, in a clearing with a sightline to the drainage path.
Twenty feet away the ferns are crushed in a rectangle where something waited, and there's a Nikon lens cap in the leaf litter, and boot prints with a tread I've never seen on any hunter in this county.
They didn't drop that collar. They baited it. And the thing they're fishing for has auburn hair and a state contract and no idea she's the hook.