Chapter 6
What I Can’t Explain
Phoebe
I don’t sleep.
I try. I shower until the water runs cold, trying to make sense of everything. I make tea. I sit at the kitchen table, stare at the wall and wait for my heart rate to come down.
It doesn’t.
The clinical part of my brain is already working, the way it always does after something goes sideways.
Cataloguing. Organising. Sorting the experience into boxes that it can manage.
I’ve done this before. Not with wolves, obviously, but with emergencies.
The greyhound that came in seizing at three in the morning during my first week as a qualified vet.
The foal born breach on a farm in Essex, while the owner screamed, and I talked myself through the procedure out loud because there was no one else to talk to.
You process. You file. You move on.
I open my laptop and type “wolf sightings England” into the search bar.
The results are what I expect. Occasional tabloid stories about livestock kills attributed to big cats or feral dogs.
A few conspiracy forums where people claim to have seen wolves in Dartmoor or the Lake District, supported by blurry photographs that could be anything.
The last wild wolf in England was killed sometime in the fifteenth century.
The rewilding programmes are in Scotland, and even those are behind fences.
I refine my search. “Large canine North East England.” “Wolf-dog hybrid breeders UK.” “Escaped exotic animals Northumberland.”
Nothing. No reports. No missing animals. No breeders within a hundred miles who deal in anything larger than a husky cross.
I sit back and look at my notes from this morning. I wrote them in the car, hands still shaking, blood still under my nails. I wrote them in clinical language because clinical language is a fence I can hide behind.
Canine, likely hybrid. Approximately 70-80 kg. Three parallel lacerations, left lateral thorax.
Seventy to eighty kilograms. I’m being conservative. That animal was easily the size of a large man. No wolf-dog hybrid reaches that weight. Not even close. The biggest on record top out at fifty, maybe fifty-five, and those are outliers. What I treated this morning was something else entirely.
Accelerated wound healing noted (mechanism unknown).
This is the part that won’t fit in any box.
I’ve seen fast healers. Young, healthy animals with strong immune systems can surprise you with how quickly tissue repairs.
But what I saw this morning wasn’t fast healing.
It was impossible healing. Those wounds were deep enough to expose muscle.
The blood was still wet. The tissue was already knitting, the edges pulling together as I watched, progressing through hours of recovery in minutes.
There is no mechanism for that. Not in any species I’ve studied. Not in any veterinary literature I’ve read. Not in anything that belongs in the real world.
I close my laptop and pick up my phone.
Willow Cliffe picks up on the third ring. “Phoebe Clarke. You’re alive. I was starting to wonder.”
Willow was my best friend at the Royal Veterinary College. She’s a wildlife vet now, based at Edinburgh Zoo, and she’s the only person I know who might take what I’m about to say seriously. Or at least not laugh.
“Quick question,” I say. “Hypothetically.”
“I love hypotheticals. They always mean something’s happened that you can’t explain and you’re pretending it hasn’t.”
“Hypothetically,” I repeat. “If a vet encountered a canine species she couldn’t identify. Significantly larger than any domestic breed or known hybrid. Displaying wound-healing capabilities that are, for want of a better term, physiologically inexplicable. What would you tell her?”
A pause. I can hear background noise on Willow’s end. The clink of cutlery. She’s probably eating dinner. “How large are we talking?”
“Shoulder height at my waist. Skull breadth inconsistent with any Canis lupus familiaris phenotype. Paws the size of my open hand.”
Another pause. Longer. “That’s not a dog, Phoebe.”
“No.”
“And it’s not a wolf-dog cross. Not at that size.”
“No.”
“Where did you see this animal?”
“Hypothetically.”
“Right. Hypothetically.” Willow’s voice has shifted into the register she uses for professional consultations.
Measured. Precise. “If your hypothetical vet encountered this hypothetical animal, I’d tell her to contact DEFRA.
An unidentified large canine in the wild is a reportable event. There are protocols.”
I know there are protocols. I thought about the protocols while I was kneeling in wet grass with my hand on an animal that shouldn’t exist. “And if she didn’t want to report it?”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
Because the animal looked at me. Because when it opened its eyes, I felt something I can’t describe and don’t want to examine. Because it dipped its head before it left, and that gesture was not instinct. That was deliberate. That was communication.
“She might feel that the situation was more complicated than a standard report would capture.”
Willow is quiet for a moment. “Phoebe. Are you all right? You sound off.”
“I’m fine. Just settling in. New village, new job. You know how it is.”
“I know how you are when you’re deflecting.” Another pause. “Look, if you’ve genuinely seen something unusual, I can come down and take a look. Edinburgh’s not that far. I could drive down at the weekend.”
“No. No, it’s fine. It was probably a hybrid. Someone’s escaped pet. It’ll turn up on a missing animal report eventually.”
“A hybrid with accelerated wound healing?”
“I might have exaggerated that part.”
“You don’t exaggerate. It’s one of your most annoying qualities.”
I laugh despite myself. “Thanks, Willow.”
“I’m serious. If you need me, I’m a phone call away. If you see it again, take photographs. And for god’s sake, don’t touch it. Large unidentified canines are not cuddly.”
“I didn’t cuddle it.”
“You absolutely touched it. I can hear it in your voice. You found a mystery animal and you treated it, didn’t you?”
“Hypothetically.”
“You’re going to get yourself killed.”
We talk for another ten minutes about nothing important.
Willow’s new project at the zoo. The lynx kittens that were born last month.
The slow, relentless politics of wildlife conservation funding.
Normal things. Professional things. By the time I hang up, I feel marginally more grounded and significantly less certain that I’m handling this well.
I go back to the kitchen table and open my notebook again.
The notes stare at me. Factual, precise, utterly inadequate.
I pick up my pen and add a line at the bottom.
Patient displayed behaviour inconsistent with wild or feral animal. No fear response to human contact. Eye contact sustained, purposeful. On rising, performed a distinct downward head movement before departing. Possible significance unknown.
Possible significance unknown. That’s one way to put it.
Another way would be: a wild animal the size of a small pony looked at me like it knew who I was and bowed its head before it walked away, and I felt something shift in my chest that hasn’t shifted back.
But I don’t write that. I don’t know how to write that. I don’t have clinical language for the feeling of something falling into place inside you, something you didn’t know was out of alignment until it wasn’t anymore.
It’s past midnight. The cottage is silent except for the tick of the kitchen clock and the faint sound of wind against the windows.
I should go to bed. I have patients booked tomorrow.
Maggie’s tabby. A spaniel with an ear infection.
The ordinary business of being a rural vet in a small village where nothing unusual happens.
I stand at the kitchen window and look out at the dark.
The treeline is invisible, swallowed by the night, but I know it’s there.
A quarter mile up the hill, the forest begins, and somewhere inside it, an animal is either dying of those wounds or recovering from them in a way that breaks every rule I know.
My gut says recovering. My gut says that animal is alive, and close, and not finished with me.
“Get a grip, Clarke,” I say out loud.
The kitchen doesn’t answer. The wind picks up. I wash my mug, dry it, put it away, and go to bed.
I don’t sleep. Not for hours. I lie in the dark and listen to the silence and try very hard not to think about golden eyes and the steady thump of a heartbeat under my palm.
At some point, I must drift off, because when I open my eyes, grey light is pushing through the curtains and the birds are starting up in the hedgerow outside. I lie still for a moment, staring at the ceiling.
The feeling in my chest is still there. Whatever it is, it survived the night.
I get up, put the kettle on, and open the surgery for the day. Patients to see. Work to do. A life to build in this odd little village with its careful silences and its hills full of sounds I can’t explain.
The wolf doesn’t come back.
I tell myself I’m glad about that.