Tape

The fax machine in the clinic was older than Owen Doyle, and it took four minutes to push out two pages.

Nora stood over it and read them upside down as they came. They carried the letterhead of the state veterinary laboratory in Bozeman and a pathologist’s signature in blue. Her own name was typed on the line for the submitting veterinarian.

Plant material in rumen contents identified as Taxus species (yew), leaves, stems and arils. Taxine alkaloids detected in rumen contents of all three animals submitted. Findings are consistent with yew toxicosis as the cause of death in the nine head reported.

She read it twice right side up. Then she made a copy and wrote the date on it, Friday the eighteenth of December, and put it in the locked drawer with the green ledger.

In the kennel run Owen was standing at the gate with his tail going. The splint had come off on Sunday. Since then she had walked him around the yard on a rope four times a day, feeling like a fool, and watched him put more weight on the leg at every outing. This morning he had trotted.

“This afternoon,” she told him. “I said so, and I’ll keep my word. First I’ve got to show this to your alpha.”

He sat down and sighed.
***
Maeve read the report standing up at her father’s desk. She read it slowly and laid it on the blotter.

“Taxine,” she said.

“That’s the poison. I told you I wanted it on paper to the milligram. The second page has the milligrams.”

“I’ll put a copy with the loss report. The Department of Livestock gets that today. Nine bred cows at thirty-five hundred.”

“Thirty-one thousand five hundred,” Immy said from the door. She had her coat on. “Mom, I’m riding down the road with the doctor. She wants to look at a hedge.”

Maeve’s eyes went from one of them to the other. “From the county road.”

“From the county road,” Nora said.

It was a mile and a half from headquarters to the old Hendry gate. Nora pulled onto the shoulder across from it and left the engine running. She had driven past this entrance twice a day since September and never once counted.

The log gate was shut and chained. The iron letters had snow on their tops. The little dark evergreens ran away from the gate on both sides along the fence, knee-high and clipped as square as loaves of bread.

“I’ll take the left,” Immy said.

They counted through the windshield, each with a finger moving. Nora lost her place at sixty and began again. She got a hundred on the right, and she did it over from the far end and got a hundred again.

“A hundred,” Immy said.

“Two hundred. Earl can count.”

Nora rolled her window down. The air was still, and the smell came across the road to her, green and sharp, like a florist’s cooler. It was the smell that had come up out of the first cow.

“That’s it,” she said. “It’s the same plant. And it’s the same plant in front of half the banks in Missoula. They were trimmed in October. The cuts have greyed over, and the trimmings left in a trailer two months ago. Everything behind that gate is clean.”

“There’ll be a pile somewhere,” Immy said. “Behind the Hendry barn, I’d bet you. He wouldn’t have used it all.”

“Probably. Can you go and look?”

“I can’t.” Immy’s jaw was tight. “That’s Madison ground now. If one of us sets a foot or a paw on it, he’s got a trespass to stand up and talk about, and he’d love that. And you’d be a vet climbing a locked gate.”

Nora looked at the yews a while longer. There were two hundred shrubs in a row, bought and paid for, with a nursery’s receipt somewhere in a file in Bozeman. A deputy could stand where she was sitting and see a nicely kept entrance.

“It proves nothing,” she said.

“No,” Immy said. “But I’m glad I counted them. I want to remember the number.”

Maeve was on the telephone when they got back, and she lifted one finger for them to wait. She said, “No, I’ve nobody in mind,” and “Yes, I’ll call if I do,” and “Thank you, Deputy,” and hung up.

Nora heard it and felt her temper rise. “You’ve got somebody in mind. I took his coat threads off your fence with forceps.”

“Sit down, Doctor.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Then stand and listen.” Maeve did not raise her voice. “Say I give that deputy a name. He’s a decent young man, and he’d do his job. He would drive to the Hendry place and ask Jory Pascoe where he was on the night of the seventh. Pascoe would have an answer, and three men to back it. Then the deputy would come here, because that’s the other half of the job. He’d ask where my people were that night, and who might have a grudge. He’d ask why my cow boss was laid up for two weeks at the vet’s, and what bit him. I have twenty-three people who can’t answer questions about where they go at night.”

Nora said nothing.

“The sheriff gets what a sheriff can use. He’s got nine cows, a toxic plant and an unknown party. The state gets the loss report with your laboratory’s letter pinned to it, and that’s a true record with a date on it. The rest is wolf business. It gets settled under our law, in front of our law-keeper and theirs, or it doesn’t get settled.”

“And under your law, what’s a smell on a wire worth?”

“More than it’s worth in Hamilton. Whether it’s enough, I don’t know yet.” Maeve touched the report with one finger. “This is worth something in both places. So are the jars in your freezer. Keep them.”

“I mean to.”

“I know it sits badly with you.”

“It sits very badly.” Nora took a breath and let it go. She had told this woman once that a patient’s business stayed in her truck. This was the same rule, and it cost more to keep. “It’s your herd and your people. I won’t go around you. But I don’t forget things, Mrs. Mulvaney, and I’ve got it all written down.”

“I’m counting on that,” Maeve said.
***
Immy followed her up the creek in the ranch pickup, with a paper sack of Owen’s clothes on the seat.

Nora took him out of the run and into the surgery, where the stove was. She had him lie down on a horse blanket on the floor, and she went over the leg one last time with her fingers. The scar ran all the way around it, a hand’s width above the paw. The two tendons slid under her thumb like cords in a sash window. She flexed the paw and extended it, and he let her.

“All right,” she said. “I’ve read forty-one years of Doc’s notes, and he never once wrote down what this looks like. So I’m going to watch. I’m watching the leg and nothing else. If anything in it catches or tears, you stop if you can.”

“He can’t stop halfway,” Immy said. She had turned a chair around and was sitting on it backward. “It’s like a sneeze.”

“Then go slowly, as slowly as a sneeze can go.”

Owen laid his head down and shut his eyes.

It took about as long as one deep breath. Nora had thought it would be terrible to watch, and it was only strange. She heard a sound like somebody cracking every knuckle on both hands. The red coat seemed to draw down into the skin. The leg under her eyes grew longer, and the paw opened out like a fist unclenching. She could not have said which second it stopped being one thing and became the other. She tried hard to catch it, and her eyes kept slipping.

Then a red-haired young man was lying on her floor, with freckles on his shoulders and a horse blanket clutched to his middle.

“Ma’am,” he said. He was scarlet to the ears.

“Don’t you ma’am me. Give me the arm.”

The scar had come with him. It ringed his right forearm two inches above the wrist, pink and flat. She took his hand in both of hers.

“Make a fist. Open it. Spread your fingers. Now lift the hand at the wrist, back toward you, as far as it goes. Push up against my palm. Harder than that.”

He pushed. He had the strength of a boy who forked hay for a living, and she had to lean into it.

“Does that hurt?”

“It’s tight. It doesn’t hurt.” He turned the hand over and looked at it, and flexed the fingers one by one. A grin spread over his face until it took up most of it. “It works. I laid in there two weeks thinking I’d be running the chute with a hook. It all works.”

“It’s stiff, and it’ll be stiff for a month. No chains and no fence stretcher until I say. You squeeze a rubber ball a hundred times a day.”

“Yes, ma’am. Doctor.” He looked up at her. “You’re the best vet this pack ever had.”

“Doc Teague had forty-one years.”

“Doc would’ve taken it off at the elbow. He’d have been real sorry about it, and I’d have a sleeve pinned up.” Owen said it without any grudge. “I heard what you said on the table. I heard every word. You said it was my leg and I ought to hear it.”

Her throat had gone tight, and she found she had nothing clever to say. “Get dressed,” she said. “Immy’s got your clothes.”

Immy threw him the sack. He caught it right-handed, without thinking, and laughed out loud at himself.

At the door he stopped, buttoning his cuffs.

“I ought to say one more thing. That radio’s been a real comfort. I’ve kept it up good and loud since Saturday night, in case you wondered.”

Immy made a strangled noise and went out ahead of him.

Nora felt the heat climb her neck. “Go home, Owen.”

“Going.” He was grinning again. “For what it’s worth, everybody’s glad. Billie made a pie.”

When the truck had gone, she sat down at Doc’s desk and opened the green ledger to the third of December. She wrote under her own entry: Dec 18. Changed. Full flexion and extension, right hand. Grip strong. Discharged. In the Paid column she wrote, Retainer. After a moment she added, One radio, on loan.
***
Rhys came up the creek at four, with the last of the light. He had been in the heifer lot all day.

The barn door had been off its track and on it again more than once in two weeks. The new track had gone up on the fifth, and the door had rolled, but the low corner still dragged. He had found that the door itself was out of square. It had sagged on its own frame over the years. He had braced it across the back with a long plank cut to fit, and on Wednesday he had brought new hangers from the hardware store in Hamilton.

She held the lantern, and he set the hangers on the track and tightened them with his right hand. He was working at shoulder height, which she had cleared him for on Monday.

“Try it,” he said.

She put one finger against the handle and pushed. The door ran the length of the track with a low hum and stopped against the post. No light showed at the bottom. She pulled it back, and it came just as easily.

“Since September,” she said. “I put my shoulder to that thing twice a day.”

“I know. I watched you do it for two weeks with one arm in a sling.”

She ran it shut again for the pleasure of it. Then she saw the loop of thick rope hanging from the handle, low down, about level with her knee.

“What’s that for?”

“It closes all the way now. There’s no gap.” He looked a little shy about it. “A thing that’s hurt can take that in its teeth and walk backward, and the door will roll. I tried it Tuesday, when you were in Darby.”

She imagined a two-hundred-pound grey wolf backing across her yard with a rope in his mouth, testing a door. She had to look at the rafters for a moment.

“You went easy?”

“I went easy, Doctor.”

On the top of the haystack Bolus opened one eye, saw that the door was shut, and closed it again.

There was one more thing leaning against the wall by the grain bin, under a feed sack. She had heard him at it on three evenings, sawing and planing, and she had not asked. He took the sack off. It was a bookshelf of clear pine, waist-high, with four shelves. The joints were pegged, and he had sanded the edges round.

“That’s the plank I had left over,” he said. “A house ought to have a shelf. What goes on it is your business. It could be boots.”

He carried it into the front room and stood it against the wall by the stairs. It looked as if it had always been there.

Nora stood looking at it with her arms folded. Then she went up the stairs.

The spare room had been his for nine nights. Since Saturday he had not slept in it, and the bed was made up square. The box sat on the floor by the door, where it had sat since September, with brown tape across the top. He had stepped over it every one of those nine nights without a word. She picked it up. It was heavier than she remembered. She carried it down and set it on the kitchen table.

“You never asked about this,” she said.

“You told me to step over it. I figured it wasn’t mine to ask.”

“It’s books. They’re the ones I’ve had since I was a girl. They were in a box when I left for college, and I never took them out. I didn’t in the dormitory, or in the apartment in Fort Collins, or in any of the three places in Torrington.” She laid her hand on the tape. It had gone yellow at the edges, and there were two older layers under it. “I told myself I hadn’t the shelf space. That wasn’t it. If I kept one box sealed, I was partly packed already. When the thirty days’ notice came, I’d be ahead by a box. I’ve carried it into every place I ever lived so that leaving would be quick.”

He did not say anything foolish. He looked at the box and then at her.

“It’s the same with the buckle,” she said. “I hang it by the door because that’s the last thing you pass on the way out.”

“I wondered about that. I thought it was so he could see who came in.”

She had never thought of it that way in her life. She found that she liked it.

“Nora,” Rhys said. “Nobody on this creek is going to ask you to go. Maeve won’t, and my grandmother won’t, and I won’t. If somebody ever tried, they’d find a good many of us standing in your lane. I can’t speak for what you’ll want. That’s yours. I can speak for that much.”

His heart was going a little hard as he said it, harder than the words called for. She put it down to the same thing that made her own go.

Two weeks ago she had said “not for now” in her clinic and heard thirty years of habit in it. She thought about that. She thought about a door that rolled under one finger, and a rope at the height of a wolf’s mouth, and nine nights of a man stepping over a box.

She took the bandage scissors out of the tote by the door and ran the blade down the middle of the tape.

The flaps came up stiffly. The smell that came out was old paper and the house on Avenue D in Scottsbluff where she had packed it. There were four James Herriot paperbacks with their spines gone white. There was Black Beauty, in a library binding.

“That’s stamped Scottsbluff Public Library,” Rhys said, looking over her shoulder.

“It was due in 2005. Don’t tell Maeve. She’d have to answer for me.”

There was a horse anatomy coloring book, finished in pencil crayon, and her first-year physiology text with a coffee ring on it. There was Lonesome Dove, which she had read to pieces. She carried them to the front room by the armload and stood them on his shelf. They filled two shelves and a third of another. She squared the spines with the side of her hand.

Then she broke the box flat and put it in the kindling bin.

“There,” she said. Her voice was not quite even. “Now if I ever leave, it’ll take me an extra ten minutes.”

“I’ll take ten minutes.”

He kissed her by the shelf, slowly, with his hand in her hair. She was thinking that supper could wait when the telephone rang.

She answered it with his arm still around her waist.

“It’s Maeve,” the dry voice said. “Is he there?”

“He’s here.”

“Then you can both hear it. A man from the Madison pack drove into my yard an hour ago with a letter. Vaughn Tierney asks truce to speak before both packs at the full moon. That’s Wednesday night, the twenty-third, at his grandfather’s cabin on the Bench. He brings his law-keeper and I bring mine.”

Nora felt Rhys’s arm go hard.

“What does truce mean?” she asked.

“It means nobody lays a tooth on anybody from moonrise until the sun comes up. A pack that breaks it loses whatever it came to claim, and for a long time. It’s the oldest courtesy we have. Billie says he’s asked in proper form. I’ve sent back that it’s granted.” Maeve paused. “He’s asked for something else. He wants it noted that the holder of the headgate is welcome to hear what he says. That’s his wording. I’m not asking you tonight. Billie will come up and talk to you before then. I want Rhys in my office at seven.”

“He’ll be there.”

“I’ll say so myself,” Rhys said, toward the receiver.

“So you will. Good night, Doctor.”

The line clicked. Nora set the telephone back in its cradle.

“The holder of the headgate,” she said.

“He means to say his claim in front of you.” Rhys’s eyes had gone pale and flat, as they had gone in the clinic when he stood six feet from a man in a camel coat. “He asked for truce so that he can do it standing up, with forty wolves behind him and nobody able to touch him.”

She looked past his shoulder at the pine shelf by the stairs and the row of white spines on it. They had been out of the box a quarter of an hour.

“That’s five days,” Nora said.
***