10. Nash
NASH
Sunday morning I take her out on the boat, because there's no explaining what we actually do here from a kitchen table.
The pack boat is an old aluminum sixteen-footer my father repowered twice, and Erin steps into it with the automatic weight-shift of somebody raised around boats. She's got her hair pulled back, a borrowed jacket of Isla's, and a notebook already open on her knee before I've untied the bowline.
"North first," I tell her. "There's a colony I want you to see."
"A colony of what?"
"I can't say and have you believe me without showing you."
We sail twenty minutes up the shore to the drowned timber, where a bay full of dead standing spruce turns the water raven colored and the sound goes strange. I cut the engine and let us drift.
"Watch the third snag from the left," I say. "Don't point. Don't stand up."
She waits. She's good at waiting, which surprises me every time.
It takes a few minutes. Then a head breaks the surface fifty feet out, small, otter-shaped from the neck up, and entirely odd from the neck down, with a fold of dark webbing running from wrist to ribs.
It glances at us with an assessment behind the eyes, and then slides under without a ripple.
"Say something," I request.
"I won't say what I'm thinking, because it's a genus name and it's wrong." Her voice is careful. "How many?"
"Nine families in the drowned timber. There were fourteen in November.
" I let that sit. "That's the work, Erin.
That's what this pack has actually done for four generations.
We're not hiding a secret. We're a fence around everything else that lives here and can't hide itself.
The wolves are only the part that can pass for human at a gas station. "
"And the fish counts…"
"Are the fences coming down?"
She writes for a while. When she glances up her eyes are wet and furious, and neither has anything to do with me.
We spend the afternoon at the shed with an injured yearling deer Wyatt found in the alder line, and this is where I stop being able to lie to myself about what she is to this pack, never mind to me.
The deer has a leg broken in a snare, not a poacher's snare, industrial cable, cut off at the loop. Grace has it sedated on a tarp. My mother has doctored every wolf in this valley for years and she's looking at this animal without a clue, because a wolf sets its own bones and deer do not.
Erin takes over, not by announcing anything. She simply crouches, runs the leg with two fingers, and starts talking.
"Comminuted, mid-tibia, but the skin's intact. Grace, I need a splint with a molded shell, is there fiberglass casting tape in that kit? Perfect. Wyatt, go find me two lengths of half-inch PVC and a heat gun, and don't run, she'll feel you through the floor."
Wyatt runs anyway. He comes back with the PVC and stands there holding it like a dog with a stick until she tells him what to do with it, and then he does exactly that, and something in my chest turns over.
Hazel's come down to watch, which she never does. Isla's got two kids on the shed step with strict instructions about quiet. Caleb leans on the doorframe with his arms crossed and says nothing at all, and I know precisely how much silence out of Caleb is worth.
"You've done this before," Grace says.
"With different species, but it's the same physics." Erin doesn't look up. "The trick with wild ungulates isn't the bone. It's that they'll kill themselves in the recovery pen out of pure panic. She needs a small dark space and someone who checks on her without being seen for about nine days."
"That's Wyatt," I say.
"Absolutely it's Wyatt."
Wyatt goes red to the ears and looks like somebody's handed him a medal.
Afterward, when the deer's in the shed and the light's dimming, Hazel stops beside me at the woodpile and taps my shin with her cane.
"Old Riddell wouldn't have let a human touch a snared animal on pack ground," she says. "He'd have said it wasn't ours to give away."
"Old Riddell's been dead nineteen years."
"I know. I'm saying I've watched four Alphas and not one of them brought us anything we didn't already have.
" She turns toward the shed. "That girl fixed a leg none of us could fix, without once asking what she was owed for it.
You can't buy that. Don't stand around admiring it, Nash. Do something."
My mother corners me at eight p.m. with the same theme and less mercy. We're doing the dishes. She washes, I dry, the same arrangement since I was six years old and it's the only place either of us tells the truth.
"You haven't touched her once," Grace says.
"She's had a week where the world came apart."
"That isn't why." She hands me a plate. "You're waiting for something.
Some proof she won't leave, or a day when she's safe, or a version of yourself with fewer holes in it.
Nash, love, the bond told you in about a second and a half.
You've spent every day since building a case for why you shouldn't be allowed. "
"Because it isn't a choice for me," I say, and it comes out harder than I want.
"That's the thing nobody says out loud. I got no vote.
I saw her get out of a truck and that was it, done, forever.
If I go to her with that, what am I offering?
A woman who's already had her whole reality rearranged gets told that biology's picked her out.
That's not a courtship. That's a trap with flowers on it. "
My mother turns off the tap. She dries her hands, slowly, and then she puts one of them flat on my chest.
"You've got that backwards, and you've had it backwards since you were nineteen and afraid of your own instincts," she says.
"The bond didn't choose for you. It recognized.
There's a difference, and if you don't believe me, look at what it recognized.
She spent four hours today on a deer that will never thank her.
She asked your father for a cheek swab and then asked what he'd want her to do with the result.
Fate didn't build that. She did. Long before she ever came here. "
I stand with a dish towel in my hand and I can't find one word.
"Tell her," my mother says. "Not tonight, not while she's still bruised. But soon, and honestly, and with the door left open. That's all any of us get."
Erin is on the dock that evening with a headlamp and a plastic tray, running a hand lens over the last core.
"The sheen's gone," she says without turning around. "Days out of the ground and it's just siltstone now. Which means it was a labile property, which means it was probably active, and I have absolutely nowhere to file that."
"You'll get there."
"I will." She shuts off the lamp. The reservoir is obsidian colored and gigantic and the sky's doing its full ridiculous business overhead.
"Nash. I've been trying all day to work out why this place doesn't scare me and I think I've got it.
Nobody here has asked me for a single thing.
Not one. Not silence, not data, not gratitude.
" Her voice thins out. "Everywhere I have ever worked, came with an invoice. I keep waiting for yours."
"There isn't one."
"There's always one."
"Not here." I sit beside her, close enough that our shoulders touch, and I leave it at that. "There are some things I owe you an explanation for. About why I've been the person turning up ten seconds early since you arrived."
Erin doesn't move away. "Then tell me. When you're ready."
"Soon," I say. "I promise you soon."