After

Immy had him by the throat before he understood that his leg had gone.

He had turned to meet her on his right side, as he had turned ten thousand times, and put his weight on the right foreleg to pivot. The leg held for half a second and then folded at the elbow like a wet board. His chest hit the snow. Her teeth closed in the loose hide under his jaw. She did not bear down, and she did not need to.

Rhys lay still and let his tail drop. That was the yield.

She let go and backed off. Her pale coat was nearly the color of the Bench at first light, and her breath stood up in the cold. He got his feet under him and shook the snow out of his ruff. The shoulder ached deep in the muscle, well under the scar. Nothing in it had torn. It had simply quit on him.

He circled left and came at her again.

This time he kept the bad side away from her and worked off his hind legs. He was fifty pounds heavier than she was, and for a minute that counted. He drove her back toward the cabin wall and got his shoulder into her ribs. Then she went low and to his right, quick as water, and hit him just behind the point of the shoulder with her whole weight. The leg folded the same way. He went down on his chin, and she stood over him with her teeth resting on the back of his neck.

He yielded again. It was the second time in a quarter of an hour.

The ranch pickup stood by the cabin with the engine running and the heater on. They changed on either side of it, with their backs turned, and dressed fast. It was six above zero. His right arm shook while he did up his buttons, and he was glad the truck stood between them.

Immy came around the tailgate, pulling her braid out of her collar. She was not smiling.

“That’s twice,” she said.

“I can count.”

“It’s the same place both times. It lets go when you land on it turning right.”

“I know where it lets go.”

“So will Pascoe, in about a minute and a half.” She leaned on the truck bed beside him. Down the Bench the cows had begun to drift toward the feed ground, expecting her. “I asked Billie something on Sunday. I asked her if the second in the law has to be the enforcer.”

He had known what was coming since she said Billie’s name.

“It doesn’t,” Immy said. “The word is second. The alpha names who stands, and it can be any wolf of the pack. You were named and you took it, but Mom can name again right up until Leona calls them to the ground. Billie said so.”

“I expect she did.”

“I could stand, Rhys.” She said it quickly. “I’m faster than you are right now. I’ve just proved it twice before breakfast. I’ve got four good legs. And he’ll take me lightly, because I’m Maeve’s girl and I drive the tractor.”

“No.”

“You haven’t heard me out.”

“I heard you. You beat me because I’m lame and because you stop when I drop my tail. He’s heavier than I am, and he had two helpers the last time, because he doesn’t like a fight he could lose. He won’t take you lightly. He’ll take you by the foreleg and break it, and call that a yield.”

“It’s my home too. You’re not the only one who gets to bleed for it.”

“No, Immy.”

He did not raise his voice. He used the one he had used on Earl’s heifer in the straw, the one that went into the chest and stayed there. He had not often turned it on a person.

Immy’s mouth closed. Color came up in her wind-burned face, and for a moment she looked about fourteen.

“That’s your cow voice,” she said.

“It works on cows.”

“It’s a rotten thing to use on me.” She pushed off the truck. “You sound just like you did the winter after Tate. You wouldn’t let any of us on that ridge. You know what the vet would say.”

“The vet’s said it.”

“And?”

“And she was right, and it’s still no.” He opened the driver’s door for her, because she had four hundred and twenty cows waiting. “Same time tomorrow. Come at the right side again. I want to find out how much it’s got.”

She got in. She sat with her hands on the wheel and looked through the windshield at the cabin.

“I’ll come at it every morning until the twenty-second,” she said. “I’m telling you now that I’m also going to keep asking.”

“Ask all you like.”

She drove off down the Bench toward the stack yard. He walked the mile and a half up the road to Nora’s, swinging the right arm to keep it warm. It shook the whole way.
***
Her truck was gone from the yard. There was a note on the kitchen table in her square hand, held down by the pepper mill.

Colic at Conner. Somebody’s horse always colics. Eggs in the pan. Don’t lift anything stupid.

He ate the eggs standing at the stove. The cat watched him from the pine shelf, where it had taken to sleeping on top of the Herriot books. He washed and put on a clean shirt, and he took down the bottle he had bought in Darby the week before Christmas. It was Irish, the kind with the green label. Doc Teague had kept one like it in his vet box for forty-one years and called it disinfectant.

It was twenty-nine miles to Hamilton. The pull started under his breastbone before he reached the Bench, and he let it pull. He had learned in a month that it could be driven through, like a headwind.

He slowed at the Hendry gate without meaning to. The yews stood in their two square rows with snow on their tops, a hundred to a side. He looked at them and drove on.

Sapphire View was a long one-story building on the east edge of town, with a covered entrance and a plastic tree still lit in the lobby. A girl at the desk told him the doctor was in the day room and had been taking money off Mr. Hobart since lunch.

Doc sat at a card table by the window with a cribbage board in front of him and nobody across it. He had been a tall man once. Now his shoulders had come forward and down, so that he looked at the world from under his eyebrows. His white moustache was as thick as ever. He was squaring a deck of cards, and he did not look up.

“Hobart quit,” he said. “He claims I count too fast. Sit down, Rhys. You walk heavier on the right than you did.”

“You can’t hear that.”

“I can see your reflection in the glass. I’m old, I’m not blind.” He looked up then. His eyes were pale blue and quick. “Is that what I think it is in the sack?”

Rhys set the bottle on the table. Doc turned the label to the light and put the bottle under his chair, behind his heels.

“They search the rooms,” he said. “They never search the day room. Cut for deal.”

Rhys cut a nine. Doc cut a three and dealt. He smelled the way he always had, of pipe tobacco and wintergreen liniment and plain human skin. Rhys had been smelling that since he was nine years old, and it had always meant that whatever hurt was about to be seen to.

“How’s the leg on young Doyle?” Doc asked. “Maeve called me at Christmas. She said the new vet sewed two tendons and he kept it.”

“He’s back on the chute. He squeezes a ball in church.”

“I’d have taken it off.” Doc said it flatly, as Owen had. “I never had the hands for tendons. She’s got them. I watched her tie a knot in April on a piece of string, just fooling, while we talked. And yours?”

“Forty-three. She put me all the way under.”

“I heard. Fifteen two, and a pair is four.” He pegged it. “And woke up to a naked cow boss. I’d have paid money to see her face.”

“She had a hay fork.”

Doc laughed, a dry wheeze under the moustache. Rhys let him finish.

“She’s still angry at you,” he said. “I told her in that barn that you should have told her, and I told her I’d say so to you. So I’m saying it. She dosed me by guess, Doc. The right numbers were on a nail in the grain bin, and you’d let her think the key was lost.”

“I wasn’t free to tell her. That’s Maeve’s to give, and Maeve hadn’t made up her mind.”

“Nora says then you weren’t free to sell it to her.”

“Does she?” The old man looked pleased. “That’s a good answer. I’ve been expecting her through that door for a month with something like it. Why hasn’t she come?”

“She’s been busy sewing us up. And she wants to know what she’s going to say before she says it. She does her sums twice.”

“She does. I noticed that as well.” Doc laid his cards face down. “I hung that key where the first hurt wolf through the door would tell her about it. I figured it’d be the Doyle boy with a cut foot. I didn’t figure on you, or on forty-three. I’ll apologize to her for that part when she comes. I won’t for the rest.”

“What’s the rest?”

Doc looked at him for a while from under his eyebrows.

“Vaughn turned down by me in the spring at one million one hundred thousand. Then I sold the same forty to a girl from Wyoming for three eighty-five. You’ve wondered about it. Maeve’s wondered. Nobody’s asked me straight, because I’ve got a reputation for not answering.”

“I’m asking.”

“She came up the last weekend in April. I showed her the clinic on the Saturday. There was a cow of Pettibone’s in the pen for me to look at, and she picked a bad quarter on it from the doorway, by the smell. I thought, well, a good vet can smell mastitis. I’ve done it myself at three feet.” He turned the deck over in his hands. “On the Sunday I took her on a call. It was a fresh milk cow at the Alderson place, out by Corvallis, off her feed four days. I was still getting my stethoscope out of the truck. That girl was standing across the corral from the cow, thirty feet if it was an inch. The cow shifted her weight. And the girl says, ‘Dr. Teague, she’s got a twisted stomach, on the left. You can hear it tinkling.’”

Rhys said nothing.

“I couldn’t hear a thing. I walked over and put the scope on and flicked the ribs, and it rang like a dime in a bucket. She’d heard gas in a cow’s stomach from across a corral, with a tractor running in the yard.” Doc tapped the deck on the table. “And she tilted her head when she did it, a little to the left. I’ve watched Billie Brannock tilt her head like that for forty years.”

“You didn’t say anything to her.”

“I asked about her people. Mother in Nebraska. Father dead before she was born, a bronc rider out of Wyoming, and the mother won’t talk about him. There are packs in Wyoming, and some of their boys rodeo.” He shrugged his bent shoulders. “Your grandfather told me about latents in about 1990, over a calf we were waiting on. One wolf parent, raised outside. Never shifts. Keeps the nose and the ears. No scent on her that any wolf can find, except the one.”

“Except her mate.”

“So what was I to do with it? Tell Maeve? Maeve would have had Billie shake the girl’s hand, and Billie would have smelled a nice young woman from Scottsbluff. It was a human’s guess, and I’ve no nose to back it. Tell the girl? I’d have had to tell her what a wolf was first, and that wasn’t mine.” He leaned forward. “I’ve known what Vaughn would reach for since the day he bought Hendry’s. Billie recited that law to me in 1985, the night Dermot handed me the deed, and told us we were a pair of fools. I offered the forty back to Maeve last winter. She said the pack doesn’t take back what it paid a debt with, and she’d sooner fight Vaughn than turn into Dermot. Mulvaneys. So I was looking for a vet. And in April one walks into my corral who can hear a cow’s stomach at thirty feet.”

“You put wolf blood on the headgate.”

“I put it there, and I priced it so a girl with a loan could reach it. Then I left the telling to her mate, if she had one living. I thought, put her up a creek with twenty-three of you, and if he’s anywhere he’ll likely be there. If he wasn’t, somebody would see her tilt her head in time. I was going to give it till spring and then tell Billie what I guessed, nose or no nose.”

He stopped. His eyes had not left Rhys’s face.

“You haven’t asked me what a latent is,” he said. “I’ve been talking five minutes about a thing most wolves under sixty take for a fairy tale, and you sat there like I was reading you the hay price. You said her name nine times since you sat down. And Maeve tells me you’ve been living in my spare room since the third of December.”

Rhys looked at the cribbage board.

“You’ve smelled it since the barn,” Doc said.

“Since I woke up in the straw.”

“Five weeks.” The old man sat back. “And Vaughn laid his claim on the twenty-third, and you’re to fight his man on the twenty-second. Maeve told me that too. Rhys. She held that water on claim night. She’s all the answer the law asks for.”

“I know what she is.”

“Then why in God’s name are you training to get your throat opened?”

“Because it’s my nose and nothing else.” He kept his voice down. Two old women were doing a jigsaw at the next table. “Nobody alive can smell it but me. I’m the Mulvaney second. I’d be standing up to say that the woman I’m sleeping beside happens to be exactly what saves our hay. Tierney would ask for proof, and proof means her mother and her father and her whole life laid out on that hearthstone. And from the minute it’s said, she’s the only thing between him and the creek. She lives six miles up a dead-end road. Pascoe’s walked around her barn in the dark. Somebody forked yew to cows at a fence.” He put his hands flat on the table. “I’ll tell her. I’ve meant to since the first morning. I’ll tell her after the twenty-second, when it can’t make a target of her.”

“After,” Doc said.

“After.”

“That’s a word men use when they’ve already decided for someone.” He said it mildly. “I ought to know. I used it on her myself. I told myself I’d explain after she’d settled in, and she ended up guessing at a dose over a dying animal by headlamp. You were on the receiving end of my after. How did you like it?”

Rhys did not answer.

“What does she want with the thing? Has she ever said?”

She had said it in the dark four nights ago, with her head on his shoulder. I still don’t know what’s wrong with me.

“She’s wanted the name of it for thirty years,” he said.

“And you’ve got it in your pocket.” Doc picked up his cards again and looked at them without interest. “You say nobody can smell it but you. I didn’t smell it. I got there with two ears and a question about her father. Vaughn Tierney reads paper the way you read tracks, and a dead man leaves paper. Tell her before somebody else does.”

“Nobody’s looking.”

“Nobody was looking in April either.” He laid down a card. “Your play.”

They finished the hand. Doc pegged out with a run of three. At the door of the day room Rhys looked back. The old man had the bottle out from under his chair and was reading the label fondly.

“She paid your lollipop,” Rhys said. “Christmas Day, in front of everybody. Root beer.”

“Out of the practice?” The moustache lifted. “Then she’s kept my books better than I did. Tell her to come and shout at me. I’d enjoy it.”
***
It was dark by the time he turned east off the highway. He drove the creek road too fast and knew it.

He was angry, and he went looking for where to put it. He tried putting it on a stooped old man who had sat on a guess for eight months and now lectured other people about telling. That would not hold. Doc had been wrong and had said so across a card table without being asked.

He went through his reasons again, one at a time, as far as the Bench. They were good reasons. Every one of them was about keeping her safe, and every one had been settled without her in the room. He had done to her water what Maeve had tried to do with her barn. She had told Maeve, pleasantly, that it wasn’t hers to say yes to.

And his shoulder had folded twice that morning under a wolf fifty pounds lighter than he was.

The lamp was lit in her kitchen window. Her truck was in the yard, and he could smell horse and mineral oil on the air before he had his door open. The pull under his ribs went quiet all at once, as it did every night when he came into the lane.

She opened the kitchen door with a dish towel on her shoulder.

“The horse lived,” she said. “It was an impaction, and I’ve got oil to the elbows. How’s Doc?”

“Sharp. He took a game off me. He says to come and shout at him.”

“I’ll bet he does. I’m going when I’ve got it worded.” She looked at him more closely, and her head tilted a very little to the left. “What’s the matter? Your heart’s going.”

It was the same question she had asked him with her eyes on the Bench, six nights ago.

“He told me a few things I didn’t care to hear,” Rhys said. That much was true. “I drove home mad at him.”

“Was he right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the worst kind,” Nora said, and held the door wide for him. “Come in. There’s stew.”

He went in past her, under the buckle on its nail. The old man’s word was still in his mouth. He hung up his coat and sat down to her table, and he did not say it.
***