Page 77 of She, Wolf, Him.

I stay on the lip of the granite with the sights still on it. A downed beast gets a hundred count before a wise man stirs, and I give it the hundred, and fifty more. Nothing. The bulk of it lies half in the tree-shadow. Around it the snow goes slowly dark. The dark spreads, then stops spreading.

Nineteen.

Somewhere below me is a village that wanted words said over my shot. I've just put a ball through the biggest beast this country has ever grown, at eighty paces, by moonlight, with no more blessing on the lead than the oil on my own hands. Let the parish argue with that. Let the diocese. The autumn goes off my back in one breath, and only now, with it gone, do I feel how it sat. Come sunrise I'll bring them up the hill to see what plain powder does, and before any of them are awake to follow me, there's a door at the bottom of a lane I mean to knock at with news worth the waking.

The trade has a rule about walking up on a downed beast with an empty gun. I half keep it. Powder down the barrel, and no more. The wanting to see it up close gets its hand on me, and I go down the slope with the rifle half-dressed and the ball still in the pouch.

The wood says nothing about any of it. No owl, no fox. Every limb on the hill holds its snow. I've stood in plenty of night woods just after a shot, and they start talking again before the smoke's done rising. This one holds its tongue, all the hill of it.

Halfway to it I stop.

The size of it. At eighty paces I had it for a big wolf gone wrong. At forty, in the full of the moon, it has stopped being any wolf at all. The blood is out of it in a sheet, black on the white, more blood than a beast keeps. Around the dark patch of it the snow has gone on melting. Whatever lies in that stain is putting out heat like a forge.

Then the flank fills. Holds. Falls, and fills again.

And it gathers its legs beneath itself, unhurried, the blood coming off it in strings, and stands up out of its own death like a man getting up from prayer.

It turns.

The head comes round first and the rest follows. I'm given the whole front of it at last. Mist, dark, and my own good sense have spared me the sight all autumn. The jaw runs too deep. The brow stands too high over the long bones of the muzzle. It's a wolf's face by the parts and no wolf at all by the sum. It hangs in its own shadow with the moon at its back. Whatever its eyes hold, the dark keeps from me, and I'm glad.

The ball went in where I sent it, high at the chest, under the join of the shoulder. I can see the black of the hole from here. The wound is doing everything a wound does, and the dying is not in it.

The ground was read right and the wind was read right. The ball flew true and struck where it was sent. All the rules are kept, and the thing they were made to govern is coming across the snow to me with my lead in its chest.

My hands go to finish the load. They know this work blind. They held the knife under the rocks with a pack all round me. The beasts that night were only wolves. The patch is in my fingers. The ball waits at the muzzle and my thumb can't start it. I look down at my own thumb as at a stranger's. The horn swings loose on its cord, the ramrod sits in its pipes a mile from my hand, and the arithmetic stands up in me, cold and clear, the same arithmetic I've read off other men afterward, in pieces. A load wants half a minute. I have ten breaths.

It comes at a walk. Of everything the night has shown me, the walk is the worst. A wolf charges or a wolf circles. This crosses the open ground toward me at the pace of a beast that has already eaten, letting the width of the clearing spend my half-minute for me, and there is nothing in its gait of the ball it carries. The village found its words for this back in the autumn, and I wrote them off with everything else. A thing that chooses. The last of my writing-off goes where the rifle smoke went.

I get the ball started at last. My hand is going down for the ramrod when the last of the distance disappears.

I don't see it cross. One instant it's ten paces out and coming, and then the sky is where the ground was, the ground has struck the whole length of my back, and the rifle is gone out of my hands. I never hear it land. The knife stays in its sheath.

The teeth find the arm I give them, because giving the arm is older in me than thought, the same arm the pack schooled. The weight comes down after, and the shaking with it. Somewhere in it a sound goes up, high and plain, past all pride, the same sound I heard off my own mouth the night in the mist. I lived to be ashamed of it once.

Then the shaking stops. The weight holds me, and the night goes very tall and very quiet.

This close, under the slaughter-reek I followed up the mountain, there's another smell. Woodsmoke. Tallow, and wet wool. And under all of it, cold green air off the high ground, the smell a stolen morning had in a rented bed, in the grey, before the village woke. It has no business on this hill, and there's one place in the world it belongs.

I've stopped being able to turn my face from anything. I look up past the jaws, and I find the eyes.

The moon stands full on them at last. Every animal eye I've ever met by night has thrown the light back, green or gold, flat as coin. These take the moon in and keep it. Dark and level, waiting on nothing.

I've met these eyes across a low fire while my wounds were sewn. I've met them over the heads of a whole parish, the one face in the square that wasn't hunting me. I've met them on a pillow at first light, closer than this, softer than this, and I told them nothing of what they were to me. There was never going to be a later where I did.

I know them. That's the whole of it. The print no wolf could wear. The reek with no carcass ever to answer it. Mud dried along a hem at first light, a dog that wouldn't come to her hand, the ring of graves drawn all autumn round one door and the woman behind it never touched. I had it in pieces on my own table by one candle. The pieces asked one thing of me, and I would have sooner died than give it.

I've got my sooner.

One animal, the whole autumn long. And under the hide of it, looking down at me with the moon in her eyes and my lead in her chest, the woman I climbed this hill to keep.

There should be horror in me. I feel for it in the little time I have, and it isn't anywhere. What stands in its place I've been refusing to name since a woman looked at a stranger over a well-rope and didn't look away. There's no time left to refuse it in, no breath to say it with. It doesn't need the saying. It never did.

In a ruined byre I made her a promise, and I've kept it the only way it was ever going to be kept. It would never come near enough to touch her.

My arm is still up between us, keeping what it's been trained to keep. I put it down. It's the last thing left in the night that's mine to choose, and I choose to spend what I have looking.

The teeth take what the arm was keeping.