Page 9 of She, Wolf, Him.

Tonight I don't. In the loft, the boards warm under me from the animals below, I let the wanting stay. I let it burn. I mean to smother it by morning.

I don't believe me. I'm good at nearly true, and tonight even that won't come.

5

TRACKS

GASPARD

The huntsman sought the Beast in the high places. He found only wolves, or so he claimed.

— PARISH RECORD NOTATION, SAINT-ÉLIE, 1766

The mud at the wood's edge has kept the print clean, and the print is wrong.

I crouch over it with the cold of the high ground coming up through my knees and read it the way I read all of them, refusing yet to wish it into a wolf. Four toes, sunk deep. The pad spread wide under more weight than any wolf I've put in the ground ever carried. And the stride. That's the one I keep coming back to. Too long where the track walks out of the trees, then turning on itself and going back into the dark under the firs, as if whatever made it stepped out to test the open country and thought better of it.

I reach for what I told myself over the body three mornings back. A wolf grown old and strange gets big. Sickness does odd work on a beast. So does hunger. I've stood over wolves that made grown men cross themselves, and every one of them was only a wolf once I had it open. I make the whole case there in the bracken, and the trouble is the same trouble as before. If it isn't a wolf, I don't know what I'm hunting. And I've never been willing not to know.

So I do the work that quiets a man like me, which is the counting. I've been on the slope since before the light, and the slope has been generous. There's a pack working these hills, and it has left me the honest signs of itself all morning. Scat gone pale and twisted with hair, here, then at the next bend, then the one past that. Prints by the spring, ordinary ones, the spread of a grown wolf and no more, four animals or five running together. A scratched-up patch under a beech where they've worried a roe-deer down to the splintered ends of its legs. The musk of them hangs in the cool of the hollows, rank, alive, entirely familiar. I could tell their week from it.

This is what I climbed up here to find, and it should be the end of my morning. A pack, in killing country, in a season with the herds out and the dogs too few. Wolves do this. I've built a life on wolves doing this. A cold clear week and a man or two who won't faint, and I'll have the most of them hanging off the church wall by the feast of Saint Michel.

The comfort holds until the birds stop.

It goes quiet quicker than my own passing should account for. I've walked these slopes carefully, into the wind. The small busy noise of a wood at morning has stayed with me the whole way, the finches and the rest of it. Then a stretch with none of it, no song, only the drip off the firs and my boots in the wet leaf-rot. My hand settles on the rifle without waiting for a reason.

The scent comes in that same stretch. The wolf-musk thins out of the air and under it lies another, heavier. It's the smell of the inside of a kill, iron and the gut-warmth of a beast opened up. But there's no kill here, no carcass. It sits at the back of the throat and won't be placed. I angle up the slope, into the green dark where the track went back, following the smell to whatever wears it. Bracken. The black between the trunks. The cold. There's a lie-up, a flattened place in the bracken the size of a bedded animal, the stems not yet sprung back. I crouch and set my hand to it to judge its age by the cold. It isn't cold. A warmth clings to it, faint and going, as though whatever lay here rose and went while I was climbing to it. No hair caught in the stems, and none of the reek and droppings a wolf leaves where it lies. It's clean, and a wolf is never clean. I make it a wolf disturbed, one that beds light and leaves sudden, the warmth no more than any creature's lately gone, and I get off my knee before I've finished not believing it.

I'm a grown man who has slept alone in worse woods than this, and I've just checked over my shoulder like a boy sent out for kindling. I don't care for it. I set it where it belongs, under nerves and an empty belly, and I make myself go on.

The slope keeps handing me the bad mark alongside the good. The pack's honest sign, and threaded through it, here and again there, the other. The same deep prints, never running with the rest. Always alone. Always turning back before they clear the trees. A wolf walks with its fellows, or it walks at the edge of them, driven off, hanging back for the scraps. This one walks like it owns the hill and answers to nothing on it.

Three or four days in this place, and I have two scraps of sign I can't use. At the last of the prints, where the mud gives out onto bare granite and the trail dies with it, I give the wrongness the only word I'll spend on it. Big wolf. It's a true word. It's even likely. I lay it over the rest like a board over a well, and it covers the hole, and I go on telling myself I can't hear the water.

What I can do, I do. I fix the places in my head, the spring, the beech, the scratched ground, the spur of granite where the wrong trail dies, and I build the map a hunt will need, the one part of this morning I trust all the way down. The pack is real. The pack can be killed. I start back toward the village with the day warming around me and the most of me satisfied.

The most of me. The heavier scent comes down off the high ground with me. The print comes with it. I go on down.

By the time the trees thin and the pastures open below me, the sun has burned the mist out of the hollows and the day's gone honest and gold.

Here are the facts, and facts are the trade. There's a pack on the high ground. Wolves come down hard in a bad season, and somewhere not far from here there have been hunts and noise enough to scatter a wolf out of its own country into a stranger's. That's all this needs to be. Beasts don't come up out of Hell. They come over the next ridge, hungry, when men with guns have made their own woods too loud to live in.

And the village wants a devil, which is the other half of the trade, and the better-paying half. I've been over this before and it doesn't change. A plain wolf hung on the wall won't quiet them. It's been tried in this country, not so long ago and not so far off. A wolf killed and named the Beast, paraded for the people who needed it named, only for the dying to start again inside the season and make a liar of the man who shot it. They remember that here. The fear's been fed too long and too well to settle now for fur and teeth.

So I'll give them more than fur and teeth. I'll find the pack and kill it, the whole of it if I can. Then I'll take the heaviest of them and make it their Beast. That great wolf, dressed in the word loup-garou and laid out in the square, will do the work a dozen ordinary carcasses won't. I'll take what a saved parish pays a man, and I'll be two valleys gone.

It's a good plan. I've run worse to a clean end. I walk on it and wait for it to sit easy. A good plan should.

It doesn't, quite. I stop on the open pasture with the village under me, the church tower catching the light, and face back up at the black line of the trees. I make myself go down.

The hunt in my head already has a place for the woman who lays out the dead. She knows the ground, the paths, which men walked out alone and where. That's the reason, and it's reason enough. I let it be the reason. That the thought of her comes warmer than the thought of a tool ought to, I don't set aside as fast as I should. The steady hands that didn't falter over the worst of him. The face that gave the morning's blood nothing back, and the dark eyes that took my own measure and didn't drop, the only pair in this valley that hasn't. Then I put it where I keep what I'm not ready to spend time on, with the print and the smell.

Sheep complain on the high pasture behind me as I come down, the stupid ordinary noise of them, because sheep that smell a wolf don't stand about complaining. I hold to that.

"Monsieur." A man dares it from his doorway as I pass. "Up there. Is it safe to go up for the chestnuts."

"Not alone," I tell him. He nods and takes it back indoors with him.