Page 2 of Fated, Allegedly

Nothing in North America is that size. Nothing. I laugh out loud, alone on a porch in the dark. It must be a scale error, camera's tipped down a bank, animal's close to the lens, my brain is doing what brains do.

I click to enlarge, and the file terminates. Not corrupted, terminated, mid-frame, and the station status flips to NO SIGNAL and stays there.

I'm out the door at 6 a.m the next day with a spare camera and a thermos, and Nash's truck is already parked at the trailhead pullout, engine ticking as it cools.

He's leaning against the tailgate with my camera. It's cracked clean through, lens ring peeled back, strap cut rather than torn.

"Morning," he says.

I stop walking. The gravel crunches and then it's just the creek breathing behind the trees.

"That's station seven."

"Found it on the trail at first light." He holds it out, I take it, and the plastic is cold in a night-long way. "Bear, probably. They'll destroy anything."

"Bears don't cut nylon." I turn the strap over. The edge is clean enough to shave with. "And station seven is two miles in off an unmarked spur. I didn't file those coordinates with anybody. I set that camera at four in the afternoon and nobody was on that trail but me."

Nash's expression doesn't change at all, which is somehow the loudest thing about him.

2

NASH

She takes the broken camera out of my hands and I make myself let go of it, because holding on one second longer would tell her everything.

When she stepped out of that truck with coffee on her sleeve and a binder under her arm, my wolf came up out of the basement of me like a house fire. Thirty-five years I've heard my father describe it. Thirty-five years I assumed he was being sentimental. He wasn't, it's not a feeling. It's a fact that arrives fully grown, the same as gravity, and it says her in a voice that isn't even mine.

So I stand in the pullout with my hands empty and I let her be angry at me about a nylon strap.

"Bears and nylon, it's not possible," she says, quieter, and her chin comes up. Freckles across her nose, hair yanked back hard enough to hurt. She's decided I'm lying, and she'd be right.

"Take pictures of it before you file the loss report," I tell her. "Both sides of the break. Insurance people like sides."

"That's your professional guidance."

"That's the best I've got."

She snorts, and it's not a laugh, but it's the raw material for one. I get in my truck before I do something stupid, like tell her the truth, or ask her what she takes in her coffee.

Caleb's waiting at the station with two cups and an expression I've hated since we were nine.

"Don't," I say.

"I haven't said anything."

"You're radiating."

He follows me into the office and drops into the chair he's worn a permanent dent into. "Wyatt ran the north ridge last night. Rotors again, low, no lights, running the shoreline about a mile out. Third time in eleven days. He clocked them going southeast toward the old Fisk cuts and then nothing."

"Altitude?"

"Under a thousand. Below the county radar shelf." He turns his cup in his hands. "He also says the water's changed out past the drop-off. No otters, no mink. The heron rookery's empty and it's April, Nash. Those birds have used that stand since my grandfather was alive."

Six months ago I'd have called it a bad cycle. Now I've got two wolves unaccounted for since March and a biologist with a state contract and a camera that got cut off a tree with a blade.

"Put Wyatt on her," I say.

Caleb goes quiet. "On the biologist."