Page 6 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

I hold it up. The tape across the hawk bite has peeled back, the skin underneath bruised purple and swollen around the puncture.

"Hawk bit me Monday during a feeding. He's got opinions about the tube."

"Change that today. Steel's got gauze and antiseptic in the garage. Don't want it getting infected and you lose a hand."

"Yes, ma'am."

She shifts the baby to her other hip as he grabs a fistful of her hair. She nods at the plate. "Enjoy breakfast and welcome." And then she's gone, door closing behind her.

I finish the eggs and let Morgan take the last slice without a word.

Tom finds me after breakfast.

"The guest rooms don't lock from the inside." He stands in the doorway. "My apartment has a deadbolt and a chain. You take the bedroom. I'll take the couch."

I stare at him.

"It also has a coffee maker," he says.

I'll take it. Not because of the coffee maker, though the coffee maker doesn't hurt. Because fighting about sleeping arrangements while someone out there knows my routine, my camera placements, and the dead zones on my property seems like a waste of energy I don't have.

"Fine, you sold me at the coffee machine."

His apartment sits at the end of the hall past the guest rooms. It has a kitchenette, a small lounge with a couch, and a bedroom through the far door. Medical texts sit on a shelf along one wall, field guides along another, a handful of novels in German and something with Cyrillic characters. A spare pair of wire-rimmed glasses sit on the nightstand.

On the bookshelf, between a field surgical manual and a German paperback: a framed photograph, face-down. I can see the cardboard backing and the stand folded flat.

I don't turn it over. Everybody's got a photograph they can't look at and can't throw away. That's not mine to touch.

That afternoon, Tom drives me back to the property. My truck sits by the intake building on four new tires. Garrett trailered it back that morning, new rubber on the club's tab.

"I'm paying for those," I tell Tom.

"Take it up with Knox."

I already know how that conversation will end.

The animals that need constant care come with us: the juvenile hawk in his travel cage screaming the entire drive, the barred owl sedated and wrapped for transport, the fox kit born too late in the season with a respiratory infection that needs nebulizer treatments every day. He lifts the hawk cage into the truck bed, and the hawk strikes at the wire hard enough to rattle the latch. A quick pull back before its beak connects. He's done this before.

"Red-tailed hawk, juvenile male, approximate age fourteen weeks," he says, reading the intake card I taped to the cage.

The fawns and the second-year raptors in outdoor flight cages are moved to a property near Garrett's cabin. A place with acreage and someone who knows how to keep water bowls filled and fences checked.

The fox family denning under the old-growth stump stays. The sick kit in the truck is one of theirs—the runt I pulled three weeks ago when she stopped gaining weight. Her littermates are still in there, four of them, healthy and wild. If I send a crew in with crates, the vixen bolts before anyone gets within ten feet. The kits scatter into the woods. And relocated vixens abandon dens—every study I've read says the same thing. You move a wild fox and she stops being a mother. I already took the one I could save. The rest stay wild. That's the job.

My property looks wrong without animals in it. Like a house with no furniture. The mews sit empty. The fawn pen holds clean straw and nothing else. The intake building lock holds firm when I test it but the building behind it feels hollow.

The fox family is still under the stump. The only living things left on this property, and the ones I can't put in a crate and carry.

I get in the truck. Tom starts the engine and I don't look back because if I look back I'll want to stay, and staying means sleeping alone on property where someone cut my tires and left dead coyotes at my gate.

The hawk screams all the way back to the compound. I tell him to knock it off, but he just ignores me.

Wednesday morning. A motorcycle pulls into the compound lot while I'm standing at the apartment window with a mug from Tom's French press, which I will never tell him is better than the pot downstairs.

The rider swings off and pulls his helmet, and I recognize Hunter from the compound photos on the hallway wall. Orc, tall, sun-worn, a backpack slung over one shoulder. He drops the bag by the door, scans the lot, and heads straight for his bike again within ten minutes.

Knox leans against the garage bay. I hear him say, "You just got here."