The Man in the Straw

Rhys Brannock knew he was human before he opened his eyes, because his feet were cold.

A wolf’s feet did not get cold. He lay still and took stock, the way he had been taught to when he woke up somewhere he had not planned on. There was straw under him and heavy canvas over him that smelled of old horse. A propane heater was hissing somewhere near his head. Wind was working at the boards of a building, and behind the wind there was the thick quiet of deep snow.

His right side felt as if somebody had laid a hot rasp along it from the shoulder to the last rib. His left hip had its own opinion, lower and duller. His palms and the soles of his feet were raw.

He opened his eyes. He saw pen rails, a low orange glow, and the dark shape of a haystack beyond. He was in the calving pen in Doc Teague’s barn.

It came back to him in order then, and he let it come.

He had gone up to Sawmill Saddle yesterday at dusk, ahead of the storm, because it was a full moon and the enforcer ran the boundary on a full moon. He had done it every month for seven years. He did not like that ridge and had not liked it for nearly four years, since the January it took his brother, but the job was the job and he did it.

There were three wolves at the boundary larch when he came over the last rise. He knew the big one before he was close enough to see him well. Jory Pascoe went thick through the chest as a wolf, the same as he did on two legs, and his coat was near black. He was Vaughn Tierney’s enforcer, and he belonged with the Madison pack at Ennis, a long way east of this creek. The two younger wolves with him were strangers.

Pascoe was up on his hind legs against the larch with his claws in the bark. He had already stripped a patch down to the white wood, as high as a man’s chest, and cut three long lines through it. The whole tree stank of him. It was a claim-mark, cut on a full moon on Mulvaney ground, and every wolf alive knew what that meant. A mark cut at one full moon was a claim laid at the next.

Rhys had gone and stood under it, between the tree and the three of them. That was the challenge, and by law it was one wolf’s to answer, one on one, until somebody yielded.

Pascoe had not bothered with the law. All three came at once.

He had gotten his teeth into the foreleg of one of the young ones and heard it yelp. Then Pascoe had him by the shoulder. Rhys twisted, and the twist was what opened him up, all the way back along the ribs. The third wolf was on his hip by then. He tore loose and went off the saddle on the steep side, straight down through the timber, into the dark and the first of the snow. They followed him a quarter mile and quit. Their work was done by then, and they had no reason to follow a wolf who was bleeding like that.

After that there was only the creek. He had six miles of it to cover, downhill. Headquarters was two and a half miles farther on, and he had known somewhere around the third mile that he did not have the blood for it. So he had gone where a hurt wolf on Mulvaney Creek always went. He had been going to this barn since he was nine years old. The door dragged, and the calving pen was always bedded.

He had not remembered until he was lying in the straw that Doc was in a retirement home in Hamilton, and that the place belonged to a woman from Wyoming whose truck he had watched go by the shoeing shed for twelve weeks.

Then there had been a light in his eyes and a voice.

He remembered the voice better than anything else. It was low and steady and a little dry, and she had talked to him the whole time as if he had a say in things. She had laid out his chances for him like a hand of cards. She had said, I’d like it on the record that I asked you not to, and walked into a pen with a wolf twice the size of any she had ever heard of. He had been so near laughing that it hurt.

He had let her put the needle in. He had not known why. His nose had been full of his own blood, and he had been a long way gone, and he had put it down to that.

Rhys turned his head on the straw, carefully.

She was six feet away on the other side of the rails, asleep on a row of bales with a saddle blanket pulled up over her coat. He could see a wool cap, a thick braid hanging off the edge of the bale, and one hand in a fingerless glove. Doc’s big grey cat was sitting on her stomach. The cat was wide awake, and it was looking at Rhys with no friendliness at all.

The heater pushed the air toward him across the pen, and her scent came with it.

His body knew it before he did. The breath he was taking went deeper than he meant it to, and the pain in his side seemed to step back a pace. The hair stood up along his arms. His heart gave one hard knock against his ribs, and then it slowed, the way it slowed when he came through his grandmother’s kitchen door after a week in cow camp.

She smelled of clover hay and warm skin, with surgical scrub and wood smoke laid over the top. He had never smelled her before in his life. He would have known her in the dark, in a crowd, in fifty years.

Mate.

Billie had told him when he was a boy that there would be no mistaking it. She had said he would know it the way he knew his own name. He had half believed her at twelve and stopped expecting it by thirty. He was thirty-four years old, naked in a barn with his side sewn shut, and it had walked in out of a blizzard carrying a pole syringe.

He was still taking that in when he found the other thing.

It ran underneath her scent, so faint that he lost it and had to wait for the next breath to find it again. It was a cold iron smell, like a pump handle in January. He had smelled it on every wolf he had ever met, his own family included. It was the smell of the blood.

It should have come with the rest of a wolf’s scent, the fur and the weather and the pack she ran with, and none of that was there. On the surface she smelled as human as Earl Pettibone.

He had heard of that, the way he had heard of two-headed calves. A child with one wolf parent, raised away from any pack, might never shift at all. People called them latents. The old ones said such a child kept the nose and the ears and carried no wolf scent that anyone could find, except for one person. Her mate would smell the iron in her.

So he was looking at his mate, and she was a latent, and he was as sure as he could be that she had no idea. A woman who knew what she was would have known what he was. She would not have threatened him with Fish, Wildlife and Parks. She certainly would not have put him all the way under and then lain down to sleep six feet away.

Rhys looked at the rafters for a while.

The bond obliged nobody. It was the first thing anybody was taught about it. A scent was a fact about his own body, and she owed him nothing on account of it. She did not know there was such a thing as a wolf who was also a man. In the next few minutes she was going to find that out in about the worst way possible. He could not see himself adding, on top of it, that she was his mate and that her own blood was not what she thought.

He decided that she would hear about the wolf this morning because she had to. The rest could wait until she had some reason to believe a word he said. And he would tell nobody else at all. It was hers before it was anyone’s.

That was as far as he had gotten when he tried to push himself up on his left elbow.

The right side pulled, and something near his shoulder gave with a small wet tug. Warmth ran down over his ribs. He lowered himself again and breathed through his teeth. The change had done that. It always strained a wound, and it had pulled against her stitches all along his side while he lay there out cold and turned back into a man.

He thought about leaving anyway and gave it up. He had no clothes and no boots. He could not shift without opening the whole side, and there was deep snow between here and anywhere. She would wake up to an empty pen and a man’s bare footprints leading out of it, and she was no fool.

So he waited. The cat kept watching him.

She woke a few minutes later, and he saw the latent in her then, plain as daylight. Her nose woke up first. Her nostrils flared and her head turned toward the pen while her eyes were still closed. Then she opened them and looked straight at him.

She went very still. She looked at his face, and at the canvas blanket she had tucked around a wolf, and at the bare shoulder and arm sticking out of it.

Then the cat was flying off the bales, and she was on her feet with a hay fork in both hands. She must have had it leaning within reach all night. That pleased him, somewhere under everything else.

“Don’t get up,” she said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Where is he?” Her voice was rough with sleep, and it shook a little. The tines of the fork did not shake. “There was a wolf in that pen. I put him under at a quarter past ten and I finished sewing him at a quarter to one. It’s twenty to seven. Where is my wolf, and who are you, and what are you doing in my barn with no clothes on?”

“My name’s Rhys Brannock. I work for the Mulvaneys, down the road. I’m cow boss there, and I shoe their horses.” He kept his hands flat on top of the blanket, where the heater’s light showed them. “I’m staying right here on the ground. You keep hold of that fork as long as you like.”

“That’s one of three questions.”

“I know it.” He had been handed some hard things to say in his life, and this beat most of them. “Doc Teague should have told you. He should have told you before you ever signed the papers.”

“Told me what?”

“What comes to this barn when it’s hurt.”

She stared at him. He watched her eyes go to his left eyebrow, to the white line through it, and stay there. They were hazel eyes, and they were very sharp, and they were adding him up.

“No,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“No. I am awake. I had a grilled cheese sandwich for supper and nothing to drink.” She shifted her grip on the fork. “Take the blanket down. To the waist, and slowly.”

He did it with his left hand. Cold air hit his side, and he felt the blood on it start to chill.

She took the headlamp off the bale beside her and switched it on. She came to the rail with the fork still in her right hand, low, and put the light on his ribs. He kept his eyes on the far wall and let her look. He could hear her heart. It was going like a horse on a hard road.

She was close enough now that every breath he took was full of her, and he found out how much work it was going to be to keep that off his face.

The light moved along him from the last rib toward the shoulder, slowly. He knew what she was seeing. There would be a long line of black nylon knots, each one tied by itself and laid flat to the same side. The skin around it was stained yellow-brown with scrub.

“Those are my knots,” she said, mostly to herself. “I throw the first one double. Nobody else in this county does that.” The light went back to the bottom of the wound, and she began to count under her breath. He could hear every number. She got to thirty-seven and stopped, and the light held on the place near his shoulder where the warmth was running from.

“Thirty-seven holding,” she said. “Six pulled through, at the top. That’s forty-three.”

“That’s what you said last night. You counted them out loud.”

Her eyes came up to his. “You heard that?”

“No. I heard up to the needle. You must have told me again after, because I woke up knowing it.”

She did not answer. She put the light on his face, and he made himself hold still under it while she looked at his eyes, first one and then the other. He remembered, dimly, a thumb lifting his eyelid.

The fork came down by slow inches until the tines rested in the straw. She leaned on the handle as if she needed it.

“I sewed up a wolf,” she said.

“You did.” A fresh line of blood let go and ran down toward his hip, and he looked at it and then back at her. “Six of them let go. I’d be obliged.”
***