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“But I thought you hated it there?”
Oakley dismissed that question. It was irrelevant. What mattered was finding the safest place for the wolves. “It’s home. I know the terrain. He doesn’t. So, if it is Samir and he tries to come for me, I’ll make sure he and whoever he brings with him learn how easy it is to get lost in the Wyoming wilderness.”
She thought about her decision and added. “Listen, I know it’s a big ask, but I need you to keep this low key. Tell Grady. I’ll tell Gunner, for sure. But we don’t want Mason to know. We need to find out first, if he knows who Samir is and if he’s being duped.”
“I’ll talk to Grady about it then next time we speak. But when will you be leaving?”
“Today.”
“Today? Just like that?”
“Just like it. I need to say goodbye and thank the people here, and then I’ll load up my rig and hit the road.”
And just like that, life changed again. She left Texas that day and headed back to the place she was born. A reservation in Wyoming. Her family still owned land there, and she had inherited the place, so she had somewhere to live and somewhere to raise and train the wolves.
Oakley didn’t mention what made her leave Texas when she spoke with Gunner. His plate was full enough. He didn’t need to fret over her or the wolves' safety, so she stuck to the positive, which actually helped her see it clearer.
“You can hear your own thoughts here, Gun. When you get out away from everyone, all the noise vanishes, and it’s like relearning to hear. Heck, sometimes I think the pups hear my thoughts. We’ll all be lying on theground, watching the night sky, and suddenly we’re all compelled to look at one another. I wish I could describe the feelings it evokes. It’s—never mind, I get caught up.”
“I like hearing you get caught up,” he responded in a low, almost sleepy voice. “Keep talking. I need a dose of something good.”
“It is good. At least most of it. I wish you could be here, Gun. It’s not all pretty, but it’s not all ugly either. It’s mainly just sad, and damn I hate sad most of all, but there’s always sad in life. So I am learning to accept the sad truth that if my people can’t work together for the good of all, then they’ve lost the way. That’s not the way of our people. We’re a tribe. Or at least we were.”
“Then what are you now?”
“Now? Now I don’t know what we are. Or maybe I have it backwards, and this place is what it has always been. I just didn’t have clarity of vision back then. Now I see all of it in clear detail, and I understand my original comment was just petty. I feel like I want to punish someone for the portion of this population that just doesn’t give a damn.
“How do people degrade to that, Gun? How do we just stop caring or stop trying? How do we not fight for those who can’t fight for themselves? Am I crazy, or isn’t that what it’s supposed to be? Everyone working together for the welfare of all?”
“Careful Major,” he teased, to ease the energy. “You might start to sound like someone who misses active duty.”
She laughed and agreed, but he wondered if that wasn’t just her way of closing a door, she now felt she shouldn’t have opened?
Damn, he hoped not. Oakley fascinated him. Not because she was smokin’ hot, but because he’d never known anyone whose mind worked like hers. She had a unique way of seeing things, and sometimes it was frightening in its simplistic strategy.
He’d search for analogies, of ways to put into words what it felt like. A week ago, the team K9, Slick, gave him the answer. In the field, Slick obeyed commands, but he also had to possess the knowledge of how to operate independently, for the sake of the mission. Gunner paid attention to Slick’s reactions, his expressions and body language.
That was it. He almost scoffed at the idea, but in his gut, he knew he was right. There were times when he watched Oakley scan the landscape. Her eyes took in the environment, moving ever so slowly as her gaze panned across the land. Inevitably, at some point her head would lift slightly and she’d smell the air. She behaved like her ancestors. Ancestors who held an affinity with the wolves, who based their society on their furred co-inhabitants.
She behaved like a canine. No, she behaved like wolf.
“Gun?”
Riggs voice alerted him to his lapse in focus, and he grunted, completely pissed at himself. Here he thought Riggs needed to put thoughts of home behind him until they could escape this hellhole, and he was just as guilty.
For the first time in his life, he had something he wanted to go home to. The problem was, he wasn’t sure he could. So far, he always managed to screw things up with any woman he hooked up with, and he didn’t do roommate with benefits. Color him odd, but he preferredto betheman in someone’s life, notoneof the men. That was way too much competition for a woman who hadn’t chosen you as her man to begin with.
Riggs once told him, “It must be scary to have been born with your brain, because damn, Gun, that’s some sad-ass shit, brother. I mean sad.”
The awful part about the whole thing was, Riggs was right. It was sad, and sad was the worst hell of all.
*****
Oakley opened her eyes. Once her vision acclimated to the low light, she looked toward the window. It wouldn’t be long before dawn. She loved this time of the morning, watching the night give birth to a new day.
She climbed out of the bed, grabbed her jeans from the chair beside the window, and stepped into them as she looked out on the pre-dawn sky. The sun would be up in an hour. That gave her plenty of time to feed and water her horse, feed the wolf pups, and have a cup of coffee.
Two sets of bright eyes watched from the bed when she turned, and the sight brought a smile to her face. She never dreamed they’d end up here, where her journey in life began. Life on the reservation was hard when she was a child. As far as she could tell, it still was. Sure, a few had succeeded in leaving, building careers and lives elsewhere, but those who stayed were, by and large, no better off than they’d been when she was a child.
