Chapter 15
MAGS
What I said last night, standing in the rodeo parking lot with the empty equipment case between us, was: I'm backpacking into the upper drainage tomorrow. First light. I need eyes on that pack.
I didn't ask him to come. He looked at the boot print one more time. Then: I'll bring horses. Meet me at the lower trailhead at six.
I didn't argue. Horses are faster, they cover more ground, and I am not too proud to know when someone is handing me a better option.
That's what I told myself. Then I drove home, took out the only precision instrument in my life that never requires a permit, and lay on my bed in the dark thinking about his mouth and the way he says my name when we're alone. Low, unhurried, gravel-dark.
He is already at the trailhead when I get there.
Two horses saddled. Thermos on the fence post. His field pack on the ground, and he is checking the near stirrup on his black bay quarter horse with the seriousness of a man who has been awake for two hours and is not going to mention it.
I pull in beside his trailer, cut the engine and grab my daypack from the passenger seat.
"You actually came," I say.
"Said I would."
"I thought you might think better of it."
He looks up at that. Something moves at the corner of his mouth. "I thought about it."
"And?"
"Still came."
I look at him for one beat. He looks back. The morning is very quiet around us and we both know what that sentence is doing and neither of us is going to say so.
"Which one's mine?"
"Bay." He nods toward her. Dark red coat, white sock on the left rear, the calm eye of an animal that has made this climb a hundred times. She turns her head and takes my measure without apparent urgency. "Her name's Rue."
"Hello, Rue."
I check my own girth because I always check my own girth, and Luke watches me do it without commenting, which means he was expecting it. I take the thermos off the fence post. Coffee, still hot.
"Griddle?" I say.
"My kitchen."
I open it and drink. It's better than the Griddle.
I don't tell him that. I also don't tell him it's the second time he's made me coffee I won't admit is the best I've had, and that I notice these things, and that noticing them is becoming a problem.
The trail climbs fast through the lower timber, lodgepole and fir pressing close on both sides.
The forest is already fully awake: a Steller's jay making its opinions known above us, squirrels burning through the understory, the creak and rub of fir trunks in the morning wind.
Luke rides ahead where the track narrows, his horse's footfalls easy on packed dirt, and I fall into the rhythm of it, watching the set of his shoulders, the easy way he moves with the horse.
By the first switchback I have the topo map up and the last known collar coordinates pulled. Two fixed points, both eastern ridge, both from before the receiver went missing.
The gap between what I know and what might be true is approximately a thousand feet of elevation and the length of one very long night.
"How long to the upper meadow?"
"Hour and a half if we move,” he says.
"The signal before it went dark had them working northeast. Wind corridor off the upper bowl funnels prey scent down the east face drainage.
" I'm thinking out loud. He doesn't interrupt.
This is something I have learned about Luke McAllister in six weeks: he is comfortable in the presence of someone else's working mind, and that unique quality is doing things to me I have not given it permission to do.
"Old elk trail runs that drainage," he says. "Cuts across the top of the south pasture timber. Dad used to find wolf sign there every June."
"Every June."
"Clockwork." He doesn't expand. Neither do I. But I file it, the same way I file everything he lets slip about the land his father walked: carefully, without pressure, the way you'd handle something that might still be warm.
We move.
The upper meadow opens like a held breath releasing: granite walls on three sides, a bowl of grass and wildflowers, and a wind moving through it in long slow waves. The elk trail cuts along the eastern tree line exactly where he said it would be.
I'm off Rue and reading ground before the horses are fully stopped.
Scat, recent. Elk-heavy diet, no berries.
They're not working the western slope patches yet.
I photograph it and move northeast. Luke ties the horses and follows at a distance that lets me work, which I have also filed, because a man who knows when to stay back is rarer than he should be and I am apparently now cataloguing Luke McAllister's better qualities in a running document in my head, which is a thing that is happening.
At the tree line I find the first track. Then four more. A trail, distinct and purposeful, running northeast up the drainage.
"They're heading for the upper bowl," I say.
"That's not in the data."
"No." I crouch over a clear print, press my thumb to the toe pad to gauge freshness. "Eighteen hours. Maybe less."
"How can you tell?"
"Edge definition. Moisture level in the soil." I look up at him. "It's not magic. It's just attention."
"I know what it is." Something in his voice. "I've been watching you do it all morning."
I look back down at the track before my face does something I'll regret. "Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Whatever that sentence was about to become."
"It was a compliment, Mags."
"I know what it was." I stand and take the shot. "That's the problem."
I take a wide shot capturing the directional run of the trail, then turn because I want to watch his face when I say the next part.
"The last collar data had them west. Lower elevation.
The western meadow." I look at the slope above me, the way the terrain funnels north and east. "This is the wrong direction from the wrong elevation for any data point I have.
And the western meadow is on the far side of the ridge from the south pasture. "
He holds my gaze. I watch him sit with it: not surprise exactly, more like confirmation of something he has been carrying at arm's length.
I look at the drainage above us, the granite line at the top of the slope. "What's on that ridge?"
The wind moves through the meadow. Rue shifts her weight. A Clark's nutcracker hammers at a dead snag without any interest in our business.
"Old boundary post," he says. "My father's."
I wait.
He looks at the ridge. Then back at me, and what's in his face now is one layer down from the stillness: something unfinished and kept and not yet ready to be handed over.
"Okay," I say.
He looks at me.
"When you're ready."
His jaw works once. Not anger. The expression of a man setting something down in a place where he can find it again.
"Come on," he says. "Let's run the rest of the drainage before the weather moves."
We work another half mile northeast through standing timber, documenting track and scat, the wind reading well off the upper bowl, until I find the kill site: a mule deer, taken clean, maybe four days old.
The pack is healthy and hunting well and absolutely, precisely not where anyone's data says they should be.
I fill two more pages of field notes. Luke reads the terrain above us with the background attention of a man who grew up in it: the cloud margin, the wind shift, the way the grass lies on the north-facing slope.
"We need to think about camp," he says.
I look northwest. The cloud mass building over the western ridge is white at the top and grey at the base and moving steadily toward us.
"One more." I'm at the soft ground at the seep edge of the kill site, and there in the mud is a boot print that has nothing to do with deer or wolves. Work boot, wide sole, aggressive lug tread. I photograph it three times before I stand.
"Luke."
He's already crouched beside me, his eyes on the tread pattern, and I watch him put it together the same way I did: east ridge, rodeo parking lot, Viv's cattle guard, and now here, above nine thousand feet, between the pack's actual territory and the ridge with the post he won't talk about yet.
Same person. Moving uphill. Getting closer to whatever he's protecting.
"There's a flat bench right at tree line," he says. "Protected on the north. Good camp."
I close my notebook.
"Lead out," I say.
I get back on Rue and we push up toward the bench as the first low rumble rolls off the western peaks.
The trees thin as the elevation climbs, the meadow opening out into tundra grass and exposed granite, the sky enormous up here and doing what Montana skies do in July, which is remind you that you are very small and the weather is not negotiating.
Luke rides ahead. I follow. The boot print is in my field notes and in my head and now I am thinking about it laid against everything else: the collar tamper, the receiver, the fence cut pre-dating my arrival, the Delaware entity opened three months after his father died.
There is a shape forming at the edge of all of it that I cannot quite see straight on.
The wolves are not where the data says.
The data is wrong in a specific direction, toward a specific ridge, away from a specific piece of ground his father walked, and his father's enemy has been circling for years.
The wolves know something.
And if the only way to get there is through whatever Luke McAllister has been keeping about that boundary post, I will earn that too.
The thunder cracks closer, sharp off the granite, and Rue flicks an ear back.
Ahead of me Luke pulls up at the bench: flat ground, good rock windbreak on the north face, the sky going green-grey and enormous above us.
He swings down from his horse in one motion, already reading the ground for tent stakes, already thinking three steps ahead the way he always is, the way I have stopped pretending I don't notice.
The first drops of rain hit my jacket as I dismount.
Tonight, then.
He told me I'd have to earn it.
I mean it more now.