CHAPTER SIX
The southern access road was established as neutral ground for Cascade Valley work, gated both ends, paved the first mile and gravel the next two, terminating at the turnout that had staged the Phase I survey.
His truck was parked at the head of it. Monitoring tablet on the passenger seat. Gear sorted. Coffee half drunk.
He drank his coffee.
He knew the moment her truck turned onto the access road two minutes before the engine reached him. There was a small change in the woods, the woods answering an arriving vehicle a half mile off. He didn't track it consciously. The wolf tracked. Jackson drank his coffee and waited.
The truck came up the gravel and pulled in beside his.
She got out.
Green field jacket, work boots with mileage on them, the same worn-leather watch. She stood beside the truck half a second longer than the average woman would have, gathering herself. He saw the gathering. He didn't let himself name it.
He set the coffee on the hood and walked over.
"Dr. Dunn."
"Mr. Hale."
The handshake was brief. Single pump. He let go before the wolf could decide otherwise.
She was the same. She was also not. Four months ago she'd been a consultant on the first day of a contract whose politics she didn't know.
Today she was a woman who'd read every Cascade Valley filing of the last four months and come back anyway, with court-approved access, on her own terms. Auburn hair pinned up out of her way, a few strands already loose at her temples from the drive.
Closed face. Green eyes, very direct. She didn't look at him longer than the situation required.
He'd been carrying three possibilities since the email. She hadn't known what Cascade Valley was doing with her name. She'd known and been pressured. She'd known and decided.
The woman in front of him wasn't the first one. The first one would have arrived with the puzzled professional cheer of a consultant who believed her client wanted her work. This woman had read every filing for four months and still walked across the gravel.
He wanted to know which of the other two she was.
He wasn't going to ask. Not at the trailhead at 0703 on day one of a sixty-day window.
It was not a question Jackson Hale of pack security had standing to put to a contractor, on her client's access road, in front of a security building.
It was also the exact question Jackson Hale of his own cabin had waited four months to ask, and was going to have to keep behind his teeth until the situation made room for it.
Mine, the wolf said. Once. Then nothing. It had been watching her mouth move and made no other demand of him this morning.
It was waiting for him to do the work.
"I have the protocol," she said.
"Walk through it with me."
They walked through it. He read the angle of her jaw as he talked, the small set of muscles at the corner of her eye, the way her hand opened and closed at her side like it was testing some sensation she didn't want to acknowledge.
He logged all of it without looking like he was looking.
The protocol was the same as Phase I, plus three court-mandated allowances, minus nothing.
She listened. Nodded at the right intervals. Didn't interrupt.
When he finished, she said: "What's the topographic feature on the far ridge?"
He followed her line of sight. The eastern boundary, three miles off, where a cliff broke the tree line in a long horizontal seam.
"Columnar basalt outcrop. Late Miocene. About fourteen million years."
"Hm."
She stepped off the gravel onto the trail.
Her hand opened. Closed.
A very small motion. He saw it. He filed it. He didn't, yet, have a structure for what it meant.
The wolf, who had a structure, said nothing. The wolf was being very disciplined this morning, and Jackson didn't trust his discipline.
"I'll be at site three for the morning," she said. "Your protocol says you'll be monitoring rotation along the perimeter. I'll log coordinates every thirty minutes. If I move outside the approved zones, I'll radio."
"Acceptable."
"Mr. Hale."
She turned and looked at him.
"I appreciate the professional posture. Last time it was clear between us. I'd like it that way again."
He didn't answer immediately. He weighed what she'd said against what she hadn't. She hadn't said I want this to be easy. She hadn't said let's pretend nothing happened. She'd said I want it clear, which was a different sentence, and the difference was a distinction he noticed.
"Understood," he said.
She nodded.
She walked up the trail with her instruments on her back and her tablet in her hand and her boots making the particular sound boots made on dry pine duff at the end of a dry summer, and he watched her go for the time it took her to cover thirty yards.
Then he turned and walked the perimeter parallel to her route, on two legs, hands in his jacket pockets, doing everything in his power to look like a man performing his job.
Mine, the wolf said.
He didn't respond.
Mine.
He let it stand. He didn't, in any meaningful sense, disagree.
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