7
It had become Beth’s habit, when the timing of her work shifts allowed it, to take Hastings out for a ride in the summer evenings. Rather than face her family, she would slip onto the Blazing B from a rear access road, park on the backside of the barn, and fetch Hastings’ saddle before anyone knew she was home.
The first few times Beth did this, she was distracted and delayed in the tack room by the sight of the empty rack that had held the silver saddle, but she soon learned not to look at the accusing vacancy. She became efficient at saddling Hastings quickly and riding off to a creek that separated the ranch from the bordering public lands, where she’d stay until the sun set.
The day Lorena joined the family, Beth discovered Hastings waiting for her, already saddled up, gnawing on a tuft of grass that had poked its green fingers into the dusty corral. He abandoned it at the sight of her and whinnied. Descending sunlight reflected off his chestnut coat, marbling it with gold. Storm clouds gathered behind the foothills. It would be raining hard up in the San Juans.
She wondered who had noticed her habit and made this kind gesture. Even as she asked herself the question, she caught sight of a rider heading southward, away from the stables. By now he was the size of a figurine, an erect cowboy on a snowflake Appaloosa. Both the spotted mare, Gert, and the Indiana Jones hat crammed low over the man’s ears belonged to Jacob Davis.
If he had ever noticed his saddle missing, he hadn’t mentioned it to her.
Beth watched Jacob’s form diminish. “Are you courting Gert without my consent?” she murmured to Hastings while stroking his nose.
The gelding nickered, a polite insistence that butlers did not deserve their reputation as covert agents.
“Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s go.”
She mounted him from the corral rail and felt the stabbing ache in her shoulder where the wolf’s paw had torn it. The skin had healed, but the deep wound remained. Beth didn’t hint to anyone that it had been a wolf’s paw, not the blow of the fall, that crushed her. There simply was no evidence that a wolf had ever set foot on the Kandinskys’ land, or on the Blazing B. As everyone else saw it, with Phil’s help she’d kidnapped Joe, forced him to ride blind into a lather, and turned his leg in a snake hole.
When she reached a high branch of the creek, Beth dismounted and let Hastings wander while she followed the water upstream to her favorite rock, which was squat and flat. The rocks in this area were mostly black and coarse, remnants of a catastrophic super-volcano. The La Garita Caldera, a crater twenty-two miles wide and forty-seven miles long, was not far away from this very spot as the eagle flew. Eons ago, when La Garita had erupted and devastated most of the state of Colorado, it released enough pyroclastic material to have buried California in thirty-nine feet of the stuff. The event was granted a ranking in the upper tiers of Earth’s most destructive volcanic eruptions ever. And then, like a toddler wasted of energy after a tantrum, the cooling caldera had settled into a peaceful sleep.
At the base of Beth’s volcanic rock, clean snowmelt continued to run through the creek even at this time of year. The runoff had come down out of the mountains, racing downhill east of the Continental Divide toward the larger streams and rivers, watering the valley. It was pure water, famed water that poured out of these Rocky Mountains, and to Beth it represented hope. God willing, she too might emerge clean from the volcanic disaster of her own making.
From her perch she was able to lie down on her stomach and scoop a palmful of water from the stream. She drank, then washed her face and neck. After her shift at the feed-and-tack, she smelled like a barn and was covered in oat dust. Her hair, sweaty from her efforts to relocate pallets of feed sacks, had dried in stiff strands at the base of her neck and the tops of her ears.
Beth sensed the wolf before she saw it. The depression behind her collarbone seemed to deepen, and the faintest remnants of the claw tracks along her neck began to itch, way under her skin where she couldn’t have scratched. It came onto the scene like wind, not there when she reached out for the water, there when she lifted her face and felt the cool liquid running off her nose and chin. It stood on the opposite bank, head low, smudges of blood on its white muzzle.
The canine’s eyes were clear and piercing. She didn’t feel fear, not right away, though her nerves sent a low vibration along the surface of her ribs. The beast had passed up the opportunity to kill her at least once.
It was both beautiful and awful. In that instant of realizing she was not alone, before the fear set in, she felt aware that some imbalance in the world was shifting, correcting itself, that something bigger than her own trouble was about to unsettle all of her assumptions about how God worked.
Beth wiped the water off her cheek with her shoulder, eyes wide and locked on the wolf, seeing it in daylight for the first time. A male, tall and strong. It was true that the “common” Canis lupis had been hunted into exile by Colorado’s ranchers and hunters as World War II was dawning. But this animal was no ghost or spirit of the past. The light in his golden eyes was real, and the blood on his jaw glistened like the silver water between them, and his growl warned her that there might be a real, non-ghostly cost to her if she continued to lie there on the rock.
He was much larger than Beth in her limited experience had imagined wolves to be, at least twice the size of Herriot. The wolf’s legs were longer than she expected, and its wide head was almost too big for its slender body.
Beth stood slowly and whistled for Hastings, then sent up a prayer for God’s protection on them both. She hoped the bloody muzzle meant the wolf was no longer hungry. As her spine straightened, the wolf blinked and his shoulders relaxed, the same way Herriot did just before a stretch and a yawn.
Beth stepped off the rock. The wolf matched her step and entered the water. She headed downstream, toward the place she’d last seen Hastings, keeping the wolf in her peripheral vision. The beast crossed swiftly and came up on her side of the bank.
Dark memories of long claws at her throat and hot breath on her eyes quickened her pace. Was this the same animal that had attacked her? The seed of fear in her mind bloomed. Could he detect this emotion, the way predators could sense which targets were easiest to catch? Her airways seemed inflamed. She began to jog, her ankles wobbling on uneven ground. His stride matched hers, an easy trot.
“God have mercy,” she whispered as she ran. Last time, he had.
I will show you mercy.
The voice that answered was not her own, wasn’t audible to her ears, but to her heart, the same as before. This time, though, the words filled her with peace instead of foreboding.
Nothing, nothing about this encounter made sense. Not even her decision to stop running, which wasn’t a decision so much as a reflex. She halted and turned to face her hunter. She had no wisdom that might keep her alive for a minute longer, but she was no longer afraid.
The wolf ran up to her and then stopped and sniffed the ground at her feet, eyes upward on her face. Seconds passed loudly in Beth’s ears like a roaring prairie wind that might be followed with equal chances by a sudden calm or a life-threatening tornado. He circled her, and she remained as still as the eye of a storm, taking deep, sweet breaths, watching him. Behind his shoulders, his lightweight fur coat stood on end and revealed long scars that ran the length of his back, four parallel stripes running all the way to his hindquarters, as if he’d narrowly escaped a predator of his own.
His orbit finished, he stopped sniffing but remained in a hostile posture, the fur on his back electrified, his muzzle low, his eyes high. And then the wolf bared his teeth and growled.
Beth scrabbled backward. Her heel met a stone and took her legs out from under her. She landed on her seat in the stream. Water soaked through her jeans in the two or three seconds it took her to get vertical again. The wolf didn’t attack but continued to press in, the way Herriot might goad a stubborn cow.
Now the ears flattened back against his head; his nose dropped another inch and his head leveled out with his neck; the lip riding high on his teeth flickered.
They understood each other then, wolf and woman. Silently, Beth agreed to follow the canine’s direction. Yielding to his push, she began a cautious backward walk in a weaving line along the bank of the creek. The sun was west of her, glaring on the ridgeline in a way that made it difficult to see. She strained her eyes to their limits, demanding they include the wolf and stumbling hazards at all times.
A scrubby stand of thinleaf alder trees had taken root near the stream. Beth reached out for one when she was close enough to touch it. The growth was sprawling and might provide a place for predator and prey to circle until she could make a plan.
She lifted her left arm behind her, into her blind spot, reaching out for leaves and branches. Her hand hit the shrub, and the foliage rustled. At the same moment, the wolf stopped. Beth froze too, and waited to see what he would do.
The air was still and the earth, dampened by the moving water, smelled like it was less than a day old.
A panting reached Beth’s ears, the quick and short breaths of someone in pain. It was the sound of her ten-year-old self the time she slipped off a boulder and caught her ankle in the marmot hole beneath it. The hurt had been so bad that long minutes passed before her body remembered where to find its tears.
But this sound wasn’t coming out of her memory. The sound wasn’t even human, and it was rising from the backside of the alder. Beth took her eyes off the wolf and looked for the source of the heaving lungs.
She immediately realized her mistake and whipped her head back around, expecting claws and snarling teeth bared under a bloody gray muzzle.
The wolf was gone.
Beth spun, searching and backing into the protection of the tree’s shelter at the same time. The slender branches of the tree-shrub snagged her hair. She had never imagined a wolf could vanish like that. The only thing worse than a wolf on the hunt, she thought, was an invisible wolf on the hunt.
Branches scratched at her cheeks and neck and hands as she circled, watchful.
At the place where the alder roots reached for the water, she stumbled over an animal lying at her feet, and the shock of the encounter pulled a yelp out of her throat. It wasn’t the wolf, though. The heaving shape of its rounded belly was smooth and shorthaired, the golden color of winter grass. Its pure white underside and matching short tail looked soft as angora, and three matching stripes circled the creature’s throat like the wide necklaces of an African beauty.
It was a pronghorn antelope. A bloody bite placed high and in front of the shoulder seemed positioned to rip these stripes right off the animal’s neck.
Perhaps Beth’s perceptions were running unnaturally high, but when she saw the wounds her hand went first to the claw scars at her own neck.
His breathing faltered when she squatted to touch the buck’s flank. When it resumed, she could hear a gurgle under the effort. Her heart broke for the animal’s suffering.
Beth’s first thought was that the wolf should have forced her away from his trophy. It was possible that she didn’t understand one thing at all about wolf behavior, but his pressing her this way, here, trumped all expectation.
The antelope’s head was on his side in the creek. Crimson ribbons of life floated away on the current. Water teased one of the animal’s eyes and fully submerged the animal’s horns, which reminded Beth of something better suited for a prehistoric beetle: dark brown and with pincer-sharp points, they rose above the head and arced together as if trying to form a heart shape. Shorter prongs, pointing forward, branched off the main antlers.
At the water’s edge, silky mud gave way under her shoes. The creek rushed the antelope’s nostrils and then fell back. He snorted but didn’t try to lift his head. Another ripple rose all the way over his jaw. The animal didn’t flinch. If the beast didn’t drown in his own blood, he would succumb to this pristine water.
He allowed her to place her hand on his throat and try to stop the bleeding. Or was too far gone to realize what she was doing. But the gash was too great for her fingers to cover. She took off the long-sleeved work shirt she wore over a tank top and pressed the fabric into the wound, feeling that her efforts were futile.
If she’d come in her truck instead of on Hastings, she could have fetched the rifle in it and ended this creature’s misery. The weapon would help her to hold the wolf at bay too. She tried to think of a way to end the antelope’s suffering without a gun or knife.
The sun fell behind the ridge before her clothes were dry. She was shivering, but the antelope was warm.
The wolf remained in hiding. A part of Beth sensed the animal lurking, waiting—for what? Nothing prevented him from demanding this feast.
It was as if the wolf had offered it to her.
Her peaceful stroking lengthened out across the antelope’s ribs and flank, heating her hands as she calmed him. She could feel the weak pulse in his veins and the gentle rise and fall of his shallow breath as she borrowed what warmth remained in him.
A breeze stirred and rattled the leaves of the alder. The animal’s suffering seemed eerily prolonged.
The antelope groaned and began to tremble.
The wind pushed hard enough to bow the tree branches at Beth’s back and disrupt the rippling creek. The air moved upstream, against its natural course, and Beth felt it like a cold breath sneaking up the legs of her jeans. In seconds, the chill cut all the way down to her bones.
The joints of Beth’s legs and hips grew heavy with a throbbing ache. She pressed against the weak antelope and buried her face into its coat while the frigid air raced up her spine and over her tense shoulders. The atmosphere sat on her, an icy weight that bent her neck and made it impossible to move.
Really impossible. When Beth realized that the sounds of the wind would prevent her ears, sharp as they were, from hearing the wolf’s stealthy approach, her mind told her body to straighten up before he tore her to shreds and got two meals for the effort of one. But when Beth tried to move her limbs and they didn’t budge, images of a wolf crouching over the back of her neck brought tears to her eyes.
A song bubbled up in her memory about a soul being thirsty for God the way a deer was thirsty for a brook. She began to hum, and the fear hung back. The muscles of her arms twitched. The muscles over the antelope’s rib cage also flickered.
And then the icy weight that seemed to sit on her head began to melt. It came apart the way an ice cube does in the sun, pooling at the base and spreading out. A sensation of liquid warmth ran down every strand of her hair and dribbled onto her back and spilled across her shoulders onto the antelope’s coat.
Beth’s mental command to her body to sit up finally connected with her muscles. She jerked up, expecting to see that the rain had started. She was entirely dry.
The animal jerked too, as if he shared Beth’s surprise, and then his whole body was rolling toward her, nearly pinning her knees. He threw his weight forward toward the creek, and Beth feared he would crush her. Though she wasn’t paralyzed any longer, her hips and legs felt heavy and thick, and the ache in her joints had spread out into a stabbing pain that followed the lines of her skeleton. She couldn’t rise.
But the antelope’s two-toed hooves missed her, and when she looked up at him again he was standing on all fours in the middle of the water. He dipped his head to take a drink.
The gash in his neck had vanished like the wolf. No dangling flaps of flesh exposing bloody muscle, no gurgling breaths. Only a pale pink inky spot stained the water where he’d been lying a moment earlier. The current erased that evidence in seconds. But her cotton shirt lay on the rocks by her knees, soaked in blood.
All sensation and function returned to her limbs, and she jumped up, her mind making gazelle-like leaps across the plains of common sense. She didn’t understand what she was seeing.
The antelope lifted his head and flicked his ears toward a movement behind Beth. She turned. Levi stood several yards behind her.
He held his rifle, which at first seemed only natural and then seemed entirely unnecessary. Unless he’d also seen the wolf. The antelope behaved as if being in the presence of an armed man was no cause for alarm.
“Where did he go?” she asked.
“Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?” There was anger in Levi’s tone. For all of Beth’s life, as she remembered it, Levi had stooped in a posture of resentment as if his spine were a frown. He seemed to regard his little sister’s birth as a conspiracy to thrust him into the demanding role of firstborn son and assassinate his privileged life as an only child. None of this had ever made sense to her. But she checked her tone.
“The wolf,” Beth said. “There was a wolf.”
“You were supposed to be home an hour ago, and we’ve all been out all day on the fences. We could use your help with all the stuff that had to be put off for that. I don’t have time to chase you down.”
“Sorry.”
“Your apologies aren’t worth much these days.” He was eyeing the pronghorn.
“That antelope was injured. I was trying to figure out . . .” She didn’t know how to explain.
Levi turned away. His truck was likely parked in the narrow flat around the creek’s bend. Beth took a sweeping look around once more for the wolf. For Hastings.
“Levi, there was a wolf here,” she called out. “I saw it. It attacked the antelope.”
“The buck looks fine to me.”
“We should keep an eye out.”
“You go ahead. I’ve got the rifle.” He turned away and headed back to wherever he’d parked.
“Seriously, Levi—”
“Seriously, you might think you can redeem your sins by meditating with the wildlife, but I don’t have time. C’mon now, or I’ll let the wolf hunt you.”
She took a couple of leaping steps after him, her bloody shirt wadded in her hands, trying to get off the slick bank and onto drier ground. “I’m doing everything I can to get the family off this hook,” she said.
Levi spun back to her and raised both hands in the air the way their easily exasperated mother was prone to do lately. But the rifle in his hand made him look more like an inflamed insurgent than a cattle rancher.
“It’s your hook!” he shouted. “You ought to be dangling there all alone!”
She stood up under his accusations and just nodded.
“When that judgment comes down, you’re the one who’s going to pay. I’ll make sure of it.”
“If I could take back everything, I would. I’m so sorry.”
“You’ll need a miracle.”
“Maybe God will—”
“Shut up. It was a figure of speech. There are no miracles, Beth. There’s only sweat and blood.”
“But hear me out. I’m not lying to you.” She pointed to the antelope. “I don’t know what it means, but that animal was dying, and I . . . and I . . .”
On this side of the spectacular moment, the scene looked unremarkable. Her story sounded outrageous. She was trying to find a way to put it into words that Levi could hear when he lifted the rifle to his shoulder.
“No. Levi.”
He leveled the sight at the antelope’s shoulder. Air caught in Beth’s throat.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t.”
Her brother took the shot even while Beth was moving toward him and lifting her hands. She recoiled at the rifle’s great kick. She heard bones shatter and sensed the buck collapse before she could cover her ears. Under the ringing in her head she heard the body splash down. Her mouth was open to gasp or scream, but she didn’t hear herself do either.
“No miracles. See? End of story.”
She dropped to her knees, and her brother stalked off.
A rumble of thunder rolled overhead, and she felt the first raindrops on her bare arms.
As her brother’s footsteps faded, the wolf returned. The canine trotted so close to Beth that its tall shoulders brushed hers when he passed, but she hardly registered the sensation. He padded directly for the fallen pronghorn.
Shaking, frightened of what Levi might do if he saw the wolf too, Beth rose and followed her brother. And she didn’t look back when she heard the wolf finally help himself to his meal.