Open Word

The moon came clear of the Sapphires at a quarter past five. Leona Stroud watched its lower edge leave the ridge and then turned to the hearthstone.

“Truce holds from now until the sun’s up,” she said. “It holds for everyone but the two the law-keepers call to the ground, and for them only on the ground. It’s the same forfeit as before.”

Rhys stood at Maeve’s right hand with Immy at his own right, close enough that her sleeve touched his. They each wore a long coat and unlaced boots, and nothing under the coat. Those were Nora’s terms, and Maeve had named them both.

The whole Madison pack had come this time. Forty of them stood three deep along the south wall and outside it, on two legs and four. Tierney was at their front in the camel coat. The place at his right was empty.

Nora stood by herself at the west end, between the two packs, where Billie had put her. She wore her barn coat and the wool cap. The surgery tote was at her feet, and a flat black case hung under her arm, inside the coat, where her body would keep it warm. She had not looked at Rhys since she walked in. He had not expected her to. The drag under his breastbone had eased at the sight of her all the same.

It was six above and still. The moon made every log throw a shadow.

Jory Pascoe came through the gap in the wall four or five minutes after Leona had spoken. He came from the road side, on foot, and he was breathing harder than the walk from the trucks called for. He took his place by Tierney and put his hands in the pockets of the brown canvas coat.

Rhys saw Nora’s head come up. Her nostrils moved. She looked at Pascoe a moment, and then she faced the stone again.

“A claim was laid here at the last full moon under the Water Law,” Leona said. “Maeve Mulvaney. Show the water, or sell at the price named, or put your second on the ground.”

“The holder of the headgate will speak,” said Maeve.

There was a stir along the south wall. Tierney did not join it. He looked at Nora as a man looks at a hand he has already counted.

Nora took the cap off and put it in her pocket. Her braid was copper in the lantern light. She walked up to the hearthstone and stood at the end of it, with a law-keeper on either side.

“My name is Nora Pruett,” she said. It was her low corral voice, and it carried to the back row. “I was born on the fourteenth of August, 1996, in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. My father was Calvin Dunmore, of Dubois, Wyoming, son of Harlan and Jean, of the Wind River pack. He was killed on Interstate 80 on the ninth of March that year, five months before I came. My mother is human. She never knew what he was, and she isn’t to be asked. I was raised outside any pack. I’ve never changed and I never will. Mrs. Brannock tells me the word is latent.”

The stir became a murmur. Somebody in the Madison ranks laughed, and stopped.

“I bought the head of Mulvaney Creek on the first of September. I held it on the night of the twenty-third of December, when I stood at that wall and heard this claim. I hold it tonight.” She laid her bare hand flat on the stone. “I give its water to the Mulvaneys by open word, before both of you, for ninety-nine years at a dollar a year. That’s how it’s written in the courthouse in Hamilton, and I’m saying it here. I give it as their neighbor and their vet. I’m sworn to nobody on this Bench. That’s the water.”

Rhys had known for two days what she would say. He was not ready for hearing it, in that voice, in front of them all. She had waited thirty years for the name, and she had come by it the worst way there was. She was saying it now as plainly as she would have read a weight off a scale.

“Wilhelmina?” said Leona.

“There’s a Calvin Dunmore in the Wind River roll, born 1970, died on the day she says.” Billie opened the oilcloth book at its ribbon and held it up to the taller woman. “It says no issue known. That’s five months short of knowing.”

“A roll proves him. It doesn’t prove her.”

“No, ma’am,” Nora said. She had the photocopy ready, and the buckle. She laid both on the stone. “That’s his obituary. That’s him at Cody in 1995, holding this. He left it with my mother. His initials are cut in the back.” She turned it over under the lantern. “And there’s a man here who looked into it before I did. Mr. Tierney asked the Wind River alpha about my father three weeks ago. He told me the answer in my clinic.”

Leona’s spectacles swung round. “Vaughn. Did you ask?”

It was very quiet. Tierney’s face did not change.

“I asked,” he said.

“What were you told?”

“That Calvin Dunmore was born of that pack and ran with it until he was nineteen.”

“And the woman is his?”

“I believe she is. I offered her one million six hundred thousand dollars on the strength of it.” He said it evenly. “I’d have thought that showed what I believed.”

A sound went through his own people. The brindled young wolf at the front flattened his ears. The Madison pack had not been told, Rhys saw. They had been brought up the creek to watch a fight.

Leona stood thinking. Then she took off her spectacles and turned her back on Nora. She said something toward the east wall, under her breath, with her hand in front of her mouth. Rhys caught it from fifteen feet. A human at the west end of the cabin would have heard only a creak of sheepskin.

“‘Hugh Tierney’s people laid this stone in 1889,’” Nora said. “‘And you’d have liked him.’ I think I would have. He finished the field first.”

Tierney looked at the top log of the wall.

Leona put her spectacles back on.

“I’m satisfied of the blood,” she said. “The holding’s of record, and nobody disputes it. The word was given openly, and I heard it.”

“I heard it,” said Billie.

“Then the water is shown. The claim is answered and it falls. Nobody goes to the ground tonight.” Leona looked across at the camel coat. “It was a good law when Dermot used it on your grandfather, Vaughn, and it’s the same law now.”

The breath went out of the north wall all at once. Owen’s mother put both hands over her face. Maeve stood as straight as a post, and Rhys saw her throat move. He felt Immy’s shoulder shaking against his arm. Nobody said a word of thanks. Maeve had seen to that, and they kept to it.

Nora had not stepped back from the stone.

“I’m not finished,” she said. “Mrs. Stroud, on the twenty-third you said that if something were brought to tie nine dead cows to anyone, you’d hear it.”

“I did.”

“Then hear it.” She turned and looked straight at Pascoe. “He has yew on him. It’s on his hands and down the front of that coat. It’s the same resin that came up out of the first cow I opened on this Bench. I’d know it in my sleep. It isn’t six weeks old, either. That sap’s wet. He was handling cut yew inside this hour.”

Pascoe smiled his soft smile. “There’s a hedge of it at the Hendry gate. I walked past it.”

“You’d have had to walk through it,” Nora said. “And you came in from the road after the moon was up, breathing like a man who’d been carrying something.” She swung round to the north wall. For the first time that night she looked at Rhys, and it was a vet’s look. “Where are the heifers?”

His stomach went cold. Every wolf of the pack was on the Bench but the children, one aunt, and a boy with a mended arm.

“Back pen, since four. The bunks are filled for morning. Owen was to look at them when the moon came up.”

“Immy,” said Maeve.

Immy was already running for the ranch truck. The radio crackled. They all heard her, forty wolves and seventeen, because none of them could help hearing.

“Owen. Owen, pick up. Go to the calving lot. Don’t let a heifer out. Look in the bunks.”

There was a long hiss of static, and then the boy’s voice came, thin and out of breath. They heard a gate chain, and boots on frozen ground. Then nothing.

“It’s in the hay.” His voice had cracked upward. “It’s all down the north bunk and half the south, forked in under the top. It’s flat needles and red berries, the same as before. I looked at five and there wasn’t a green thing in them. I swear it, Immy, I ran my hands through every one. The heifers haven’t been at it. They’re shut in the back pen.”

“That’s after moonrise,” Billie said quietly.

Leona walked across the cabin. She was a big woman, and she did not hurry. She stopped in front of Pascoe.

“Give me your hands, Jory.”

He kept them in his pockets a second too long. Then he held them out. She bent her white head over them and breathed in, and she did the same at the breast of his coat.

“Yew,” she said. “It’s fresh.”

“There’s this as well.” Nora had taken a paper envelope from the tote. “Those are three threads of brown canvas. I took them with forceps off the top wire of this pasture on the eighth of December, where a man leaned to pitch. They’ve been sealed since. There’s a letter from the state laboratory on what killed those nine cows. And his right cuff has a pull in it at the wrist.”

Leona opened the envelope under her nose. It took her a moment. Then she lifted Pascoe’s right arm by the sleeve and looked at the cuff.

“You were told what truce is when you were six,” she said. “I told you myself.”

Pascoe’s eyes went to Tierney. The soft voice had lost its ease. “You said if she opened her mouth we’d want another way. You said to have it ready.”

“I said to wait for my word.”

“You’d have given it.”

Tierney did not answer him.

“It makes no difference which,” said Leona. She turned to the stone, and her voice went out over both packs. “A Madison wolf set poison for Mulvaney stock after moonrise on a truce night, and his alpha had him hold it ready. I rule the truce broken by the Madison pack. What they came for is forfeit. No wolf of that pack may mark, claim or buy against this creek for twenty-five years. For the nine cows and the boy’s leg, I’ll sit with Wilhelmina when it’s light.”

“Heard,” Billie said.

“Twenty-five years,” said Tierney.

He said it to nobody. He was forty-seven. Rhys watched him do the sum, and watched what it did to his lean brown face. Tierney looked at the hearthstone his grandfather had been born beside. Then he looked at the woman standing at the end of it with her hand on a rodeo buckle.

He shrugged the camel coat off his shoulders, and that was all the warning he gave.

The change went through him inside his clothes. A tawny wolf came out of the collar of a white shirt, with one sleeve dragging from a foreleg, and went straight down the length of the cabin at Nora.

Rhys had no time to change. It took a breath, and he did not have one. He went off the wall as he was and met the wolf two strides short of the stone, chest to chest, with both arms out.

A hundred and eighty-odd pounds hit him at a dead run. He went over backward, and he took the wolf with him. He had his left hand locked in the ruff under the jaw and his right arm clamped around the neck. The teeth came for his face. He gave them his left forearm, and they went in to the bone, and he held on. Hot breath and snow filled his eyes. The hind claws raked his thighs through the coat.

He heard Leona’s voice crack like a rifle. “Madison stands! The first one off that wall answers to me!” He heard Maeve say, “Jory, don’t,” and a scuffle of boots.

The wolf heaved and twisted right. All its weight came on his right arm. He set his teeth and held it. He held it for one more heave, and for another. Then the thing deep in his shoulder parted like wet rope, as it had under Immy. The strength ran out of the arm, and his hand opened by itself.

The tawny head tore free of his elbow. Past its shoulder he could see Nora’s boots, ten yards off, planted in the snow. She had not run.

He had kept his mouth shut on that saddle for three hours, digging by himself. He had been keeping it shut for four years.

“Immy!” It came up out of his chest, raw, and it was the loudest sound he had ever made. “I can’t hold him! Help me! Somebody help me!”

A long coat hit the snow. The pale wolf came across the cabin low and struck Tierney in the right flank with her whole weight. The jaws let go of Rhys’s arm. The two wolves went over together in a spray of white. Immy came up first with her teeth in the hide behind his ribs, and hung there.

Rhys got to one knee. His right arm hung like a rope. He grabbed the trailing shirt sleeve with his bleeding left hand and wrapped it twice around his fist and leaned back on it. The foreleg came out from under the tawny wolf. Others were coming off the north wall now. Owen’s father was there, and the man with the coughing gelding. Maeve had her coat half off.

“Hold him just like that,” Nora said. “Nobody get behind him.”

She had the flat case open on the hearthstone and the pistol in both hands. Her voice was the one that had talked a wolf through a needle in a blizzard.

“Little sting,” she said, and fired.

The dart went into the big muscle of the haunch with a sound like a slapped saddle. Tierney screamed and spun on it, and Immy went with him and would not come off. Nora looked at her watch.

“One eighty-five, at the full dose out of the ledger,” she said. “Four minutes, maybe five. Immy, let go of him and keep him turning. Rhys, drop that sleeve and get back.”

He dropped it on the first telling.

They were the longest four minutes he had lived through since Tate. The tawny wolf went for Nora twice more. Both times the pale one cut across his nose and turned him, and both times there was a line of Mulvaneys between him and the stone. Rhys stood in that line, with his left arm running blood onto his boots. Along the south wall the Madison pack held where Leona had put them. Pascoe was on his knees in the snow with Maeve’s hand on the back of his neck.

At two minutes the hind legs began to cross. At three the wolf stood swaying, with his head low, looking at the logs of the east wall as if he were trying to count them. Immy backed off and sat down, with her sides heaving.

He folded at the hocks first. Then his chest went down, and his chin, on the trampled snow a yard from his grandfather’s hearth.

“Four minutes ten,” Nora said.

She walked up to him before anyone could stop her. She crouched, touched the corner of his eye with a fingertip and laid her palm on his ribs. She pulled the dart and looked at it.

“He’s breathing well. I want a blanket under him. I don’t freeze patients, whoever they are.”

“Under him,” Leona said. “Not over. He stays where he fell, and so does every one of us. His pack will see what it’s been following.”

Nora looked at her for a second and did not argue. Owen’s mother brought a horse blanket from the truck, and they rolled the wolf onto it. Nora turned his head so that the tongue lay clear.

Then she came to Rhys.

She took his left arm in both hands and turned it to the lantern. She looked at the holes, and she put two fingers on the pulse at his wrist and made him close his fist. She took a pressure bandage out of the tote and wound it on tight. She did not say anything. Her hands were perfectly steady, and her heart was going like a mill race.

“That’s clinic work. I’m not sewing by moonlight.” She tied it off. Then she laid her hand flat on his right shoulder, through the coat. “It went again.”

“When he turned on it.”

“I saw it go.” Her eyes came up to his. They were bright in the cold. “I heard you, too. They heard you in Darby.”

“I expect they did.”

“Sit down on that stone before you fall on it.”

He sat. Immy came and leaned against his knee in her coat, shivering, with blood on her chin that was not hers. He put his good hand on the top of her head and left it there.

Nobody went home. They stood on the Bench under the moon, both packs, and watched a wolf sleep. Nora checked his breathing every ten minutes by her watch and said the count aloud. Billie and Leona stood together at the head of the blanket, one small and one tall, and did not speak.

At one hour to the minute, the tawny coat seemed to draw down into the skin.

It took as long as one deep breath. There was the sound of knuckles cracking. Then a lean man with silver at his temples was lying on a horse blanket in the snow, bare from head to foot. He had a white shirt sleeve knotted round one wrist and a dart mark on his hip. His good coat lay ten feet away.

Vaughn Tierney opened his eyes. He saw the moon first. He turned his head on the blanket and saw forty of his own people looking down at him from the wall of his grandfather’s house, and not one of them moved to cover him.
***