7. Erin
ERIN
Collar four-one-seven wakes up again at six-fifteen on Friday morning, and this time it doesn't stop.
I'm eating toast over the sink when the receiver starts chirping on the counter, and I stand there with butter on my thumb listening to a dead wolf's transmitter announce itself every twelve seconds.
Steady bearing, northeast. It isn't drifting like something in a truck bed.
It's sitting still, half a mile inside the sector Nash drew a box around on my map in pencil and told me was a collapse hazard.
I know what he'd say. I know it so well I can hear the cadence, the no negotiation on the last one, the hand out for my pack straps.
I also know he's four hours away in Deerlick County giving a deposition on a poaching case, because he said so last night while he sat here pretending to understand core stratigraphy and mostly watching my hands.
I write him a note. Following 417 NE of the alder line. Back by two. Bearing 041. If I'm not back, start there. I stick it to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a walleye, which feels like due diligence and turns out to be the smartest thing I do all day.
The country past the alders is strange before I've gone a mile.
The alders themselves have been cut and laid back over the stumps to disguise a track, done well, done by somebody who'd thought about aerial photos.
Under the mat there's crushed rock and a wheel rut deep enough to hold my forearm.
No engine noise, no birds either, and by now I've stopped expecting birds.
The signal walks me up a bench of ground, through a stand of spruce, and into a swale where the moss has been rolled back like carpet.
There's a door in the hillside. Not a mine timber, not a caved tunnel.
A steel bulkhead set into poured concrete, powder-coated the exact green-gray of wet granite, with a card reader on a stalk and a camera dome above the frame and a bead of fresh caulk still tacky at the seam.
There's a ventilation cowl thirty feet uphill in a bracken patch, humming.
Warm air comes off it and smells like diesel and cold rock and, underneath, something briny that has no business existing four hundred miles from an ocean.
Collar four-one-seven is hanging on a nail beside the door at chest height. Hung,. displayed.
My hands are shaking so hard I have to brace the camera against a trunk.
Coordinates, wide shot. Detail of the reader, the cowl, the caulk seam, the tire tracks.
I'm narrating into my recorder like a lunatic, concealed portal, forty-one degrees, mechanical ventilation indicates occupied subsurface volume, because if I stop talking I'm going to have to feel something.
The pack strap tears out of my hand. There's an arm around my chest and a boot behind my ankle and I'm face-down in the moss with a knee between my shoulder blades before I've processed the sound of anyone breathing.
Somebody yanks my wrists together. Somebody else says, absolutely calmly, "That's her.
Bag the camera, bag the recorder. He wants her intact. "
Intact. They have a word for what condition to deliver me in.
I get an elbow loose and I use it. I've cut myself out of gill nets and wrestled a two-hundred-pound sedated bear onto a sling, and terror is doing something useful with my arms. I hear a nose break, and a man swear in genuine astonishment.
Then I'm up and running downhill through spruce with zip ties dangling off one wrist, and behind me a voice is calling contacts into a radio in that flat, disciplined cadence I heard on the shoreline.
Nash comes out of the trees at a dead sprint.
He shouldn't even be here yet, I thought he was two counties away in a courthouse.
He hits me at the shoulder and turns us both like we're on rails, off the fall line, into the creek cut, and we go down into the alders in a tangle of packs and elbows and cold dark water.
"You got my note," I gasp.
"I didn't need the note." He drags me under the undercut bank where the roots make a cave, folds himself in after me, and puts his hand flat over my lips. His mouth is at my ear. "Twelve of them. Don't breathe through your nose, they've got dogs."
We are in an opening in the earth about as large as a bathtub.
I am against his chest with my back to him and his forearm banded across my collarbones, and there is not one inch between us anywhere.
I can feel every breath he takes move my whole body.
His heart isn't slow, not level, hammering against my spine like something trying to get out and reach me.
Boots come along the bank above us. Four sets, then six.
A dog whines and pulls and gets hauled back.
A light comes down through the roots and lays a stripe across my knee, and Nash's arm tightens and his other hand splays open over my stomach, holding me still, holding me together, and I am so far past frightened that I've come out the other side into something with a lot of heat in it.
He turns his head. His jaw grazes my temple. When he speaks it's less than a whisper, barely shaped air.
"Whatever happens next, you keep running west. You don't stop. You don't come back for me."
"That's not a deal I'm making."
"Erin…"
"You've had three weeks to be truthful, but you keep hiding it." I turn my face toward his and our mouths are an inch apart and I just stare at his lips. "I don't take orders from you. I take evidence."
Something in him gives. I feel it go, all through his chest.
"Then you're about to get some," he says.
The dogs lose their minds. Not barking, screaming, the sound animals make when the world violates a rule.
Up on the bank there's shouting, boots scattering, a man yelling a range that is far too short.
Nash's arm comes off me and he's gone out of the undercut in one motion, and I lunge up after him with mud in my mouth.
Through the alder screen there's a gray wolf in the clearing.
It is no bigger than a Shetland pony. Its shoulder is higher, and I see the standing man drive into the ground.
It's not fast, it's tactical, cutting the line between the shooters and the trail.
Nash is ten feet from it with a man's rifle in his hands, wrenching it away by the barrel, and neither so much as glance at the others.
They move like they've done this a thousand times. They move as though they know.
Every measurement I have ever taken in my life stands up and walks out of the room. Then Nash has my arm and we're going, hard, west into the deep timber with the light gone flat and something with a rotor beating up behind us over the ridge.
"Don't," he says, when I open my mouth.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to say a number."
"Ninety kilos," I pant. "Minimum. There is no wolf…"
"I know." He hauls me over a deadfall without breaking stride, and there's a helicopter turning behind us, and his face is grim and strangely, terribly relieved. "Run now. Ask me at the top of the ridge. I'll answer. I'm done lying to you."