The Snare

The cable had cut through the hide all the way around Owen’s right foreleg, and the paw below it was swollen to twice its size.

Rhys knelt in the trampled snow and kept his hands off it. Owen lay on his side at the foot of a fir tree, a rust-red wolf with frost on his whiskers, and his brown eyes followed everything Rhys did. He had dug a ring down to the dirt around that tree. He had been fighting the cable since before sunup.

“I’m here,” Rhys said. “Immy’s here. You did right to stay a wolf. Hold on to it a while longer.”

Owen’s tail moved in the snow.

He had done right. The loop had locked down to the width of a wolf’s leg, and a man’s forearm coming into being inside it would have lost the hand. Owen was twenty-two, and he had kept his head for six hours in the cold. Rhys was prouder of him than he could say, and sick besides.

The boy had asked him last night, on Billie’s porch. Somebody had to look at the saddle every morning until the twenty-third, and Rhys could not change shape with forty-three stitches in him. Owen had wanted the dawn run. Rhys had said yes.

“It’s set right in the trail,” Immy said behind him. She had found Owen at noon as a wolf and come back as a woman on the snowmobile, and her voice was shaking with anger. “The trail we all use. It’s a mile below the saddle and two feet off the ground.”

“It’s Forest Service ground up here, and the wolf season opened Monday.”

“There’s been a truck at the Hendry place since Monday. Madison County plates and a dog box.”

Rhys followed the cable to the fir. A brass tag was wired to the anchor loop, stamped with a trapper’s license number, all in order. He cut the cable at the tree with the bolt cutters and put the tag in his shirt pocket. Then he worked the lock back along the cable with his thumbnail, a quarter inch at a time, until the loop let go of the leg. Owen made a thin sound through his nose.

“Aren’t you taking it off?”

“It’s buried in him. She’ll want to see how it lies before anybody pulls on it.”

They got the blanket under him and lifted him onto the freight sled. Rhys used both arms, and his side told him about it. He had left Billie’s sling on her kitchen table at noon, and she had watched him do it and said nothing. That told him how frightened she was.

He rode the sled down on his knees with Owen’s head in his lap and the bad leg held clear in his two hands. Immy took the five miles of creek trail as gently as a snowmobile could be made to take them. The tug under his breastbone, which he had been living with since Saturday, eased with every bend.

Nora was standing in her yard when they came out of the timber. She had heard them long before, he was sure. She looked once at the wolf and once at the leg.

“Clinic,” she said. “On the table, on his left side. Who is he?”

“Owen.”

Her face changed. “He apologized to me for not waving,” she said, and ran ahead to get the door.
***
She had the green ledger open on the counter before they had him settled.

“‘Doyle, O.,’” she read. “Last seen two years ago, for a barbed-wire cut. A hundred and fifty-eight pounds. What is he now?”

“One sixty-five.”

She wrote the sum on a notepad, tore the sheet off and did it again on a clean one. Rhys watched her put the two sheets side by side, as she had done for him on Thanksgiving. She drew up a small syringe, a quarter of the size he remembered on the end of her pole.

Then she bent down until her face was level with the wolf’s.

“Owen, it’s Dr. Pruett. I’m doing this Doc’s way. You’ll get a shot that makes you sleepy and makes you stop minding. You’ll stay awake, and you’ll stay exactly what you are. After that I’m going to numb the whole leg from the shoulder down. If you feel anything sharp after that, you let me know however you like, except with your teeth.”

Owen licked her wrist.

“Good man,” she said, and gave him the shot in the hip.

Immy went down the road to tell Maeve. Nora washed to the elbows, clipped a patch high inside Owen’s foreleg and felt along the bone with her fingertips. She was a long while about it. Then she slid a needle in deep by the armpit and put the block in at three places.

“The arm on that surgery light is broken,” she said. “It droops. I was going to fix it when I had sixty dollars. Can you hold it with your left hand for a long time?”

“Yes.”

“Your right hand can go on his neck. Keep it low. And keep him talking, or keep talking to him. I want to know he’s with us.”

She pinched the swollen toes with a forceps. Owen did not twitch. She nodded and began.

Rhys had been on the table for her work twice, and once he had been unconscious. He had never yet been in a position to watch it.

She found how the cable lay first, turning the leg in her hands under the light. It had cut in deepest across the front. She lifted it out of the groove with a blunt hook, a little at a time, and laid the whole bloody loop in a steel bowl. Then she flushed the wound with warm saline for so long that he thought she had forgotten there was a next step.

“Tell me what you see,” he said.

“The bone’s scored and not broken. The big vessels at the back were spared, I think, because the lock sat there. He’s cut two tendons on the front. Those are the ones that lift his toes.” She did not look up. “The tendons I can sew. What I can’t sew is a dead foot. That paw’s been strangled since dawn. If the blood doesn’t come back into it, nothing else I do here matters, and he loses the leg at the elbow.”

Owen’s ear turned toward her.

“He heard that,” Rhys said.

“He ought to hear it. It’s his leg.” She wrapped the paw in a towel wrung out in warm water. “Owen, I’m going to wait now. I know it looks like I’m doing nothing.”

She waited twenty minutes by the clock above the drug cabinet. She changed the warm towel four times. She rubbed the leg above the wound, always upward, with the heel of her hand. Rhys held the lamp and talked to Owen about the heifers. He told him that number forty was bagging up early and would likely go in January to spite them, and that somebody else was going to have to run the chute for a while.

At the end of the twenty minutes Nora unwrapped the paw and pricked the middle pad with the point of a blade.

A bead of blood came up, and it was dark. She wiped it off and watched. The second bead came slowly, and it was red.

She let her breath go. “There it is. Hello. I’m very glad to see you.”

“He keeps the leg?”

“He keeps a chance at the leg, which is more than he had an hour ago. Lamp a little left.”

After that she sewed, and he learned what her hands could do.

The cut ends of the tendons had drawn back into the leg like snapped fence wire. She went in after each one with a fine forceps and coaxed it down, and held it there with a needle laid crosswise while she worked. The suture was as fine as a hair, and she set it in a pattern he could not follow, in and across and back, so that each strand locked on the one before. Then she drew the two ends together until they met without a gap, and the knot went down so softly that the tendon did not pucker. She did all of that twice. Her fingers never shook and never hurried. When she needed something she put her hand on it without looking, because she had laid everything out in order before she started.

He had shod horses for twenty years, and he knew good hands. He thought now that he had only believed he knew.

Once, an hour in, Owen whined and his hind feet scrabbled on the steel.

Nora stopped at once. “Was that pain or a dream? Owen. Look at me.”

The brown eyes found her.

“Pain?” She touched the toes with the forceps. Nothing happened. “Dreaming, then. Rhys, he’s drifting. Bring him back.”

Rhys put his mouth near the wolf’s ear and told him that Billie had a pie cooling, and that it would be gone by the time he got home if he slept through this. Owen huffed.

She trimmed what was dead and spared what might live, and she was stingy about the trimming. She closed the skin last, and not all of it.

“I’m leaving two gaps and a drain,” she said. “I learned that from your hip. You people heal the top shut before the bottom’s finished.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I wasn’t thanking you.”

She padded the leg and bound a splint to it from the elbow to the toes, with the two middle pads left bare where she could see them. When she straightened up at last she put both fists in the small of her back. The clock said half past six, and the window was black. She had been bent over that table for three hours.

“How fast do those tendons knit, at your speed?”

“I don’t know. Doc never sewed one that I heard of.”

“A dog would be three weeks in a splint before I trusted it. Call it ten days for him.” She looked at the wolf, whose eyes were clearing. “And what happens to my repair if he changes?”

“Every bone in that leg gets longer and everything on it pulls.”

“Then he doesn’t. Owen, are you listening? You’re a wolf until the thirteenth. You’ll live in my kennel run, where I can look at those toes four times a day, and you’ll be bored out of your mind. Those are doctor’s orders.”

Owen put his chin down on the table and sighed like a dog.

“I’ll get straw,” Rhys said.
***
A dusting of snow had come down in the night, a quarter inch of dry powder over the packed yard. He saw the tracks by the light from the clinic window before he was halfway to the barn.

They were wolf tracks, each as broad as his own spread hand, and the stride was short for the size. They came down out of the timber on the creek trail. They went around the barn once, close under the wall, and around it again, wider. They stopped at the gap in the door that dragged. Whoever made them had stood there for some time.

Rhys crouched and put his face down to the snow. The scent was most of a day old, and he had last smelled it with those teeth in his shoulder.

He slid the door open. The cat was on top of the haystack, flat to the bales.

He took the straw back, bedded the run, and carried Owen in with Nora walking beside him holding the splint. He waited until she had shut the kennel gate.

“Jory Pascoe was at your barn last night,” he said. “He went around it twice and stood at the door.”

Nora was quiet a moment. “Bolus wouldn’t come down for his breakfast,” she said. “And there was a smell by the door, that cold smell all of you have, with something rank on top. I thought it was left over from you.”

She could pick the pack out by nose, then. He had wondered.

“What did he want?” she asked.

“To see where I’d gone to ground that night. And to see what’s up here.”

Headlights swung across the window. Maeve came in with snow on her shoulders and went straight through to the kennel run. She crouched there with her hand on Owen’s head for a full minute, saying something too low to carry. When she came out, Rhys laid the brass tag on the counter and told her about the tracks.

Maeve turned the tag over once. “It’s legal,” she said. “Every bit of it is legal. He’ll have a receipt for the license.” She looked at Nora. “Will the boy keep that leg?”

“Ask me in ten days. I think so.”

“Then we owe you again.” Maeve put the tag in her coat. “Rhys, you’re up here from tonight until the twenty-third. Day and night. I don’t care if it’s her barn or her porch.”

“Whose barn?” Nora said.

It was said pleasantly. Maeve stopped with her collar half turned up.

“Mine, I think,” Nora went on. “And my porch. You retain me, Mrs. Mulvaney. You don’t garrison me.”

“That wolf put forty-three stitches in my enforcer.”

“I counted them. I’m not saying no. I’m saying it isn’t yours to say yes to.”

Maeve looked at Rhys, and he knew that look. He had already spoken for this woman once without asking, and he had been told about it.

“It’s her house,” he said. “If she says no, I’ll watch it from the road in my truck. I’d rather she said yes.”

Nora took off her surgical gown and dropped it in the hamper. She took her time.

“There’s a spare room upstairs with a bed in it,” she said. “He can have that. He’s not a guest and he’s not a guard. He works for his board. That barn door comes first, since he’s been wanting to get at it. He stays out of the way of my clients. And it’s my door, so I can put him out of it any day I choose.”

She looked straight at Rhys when she said the last part. He felt it go through him from his collar to his boots. She had built those terms on purpose, and they both knew what for.

“Agreed,” he said.

“I wasn’t asking you either,” said Nora. There was a little color in her face.

Maeve looked from one of them to the other. “I’ll send his things up with Immy,” she said dryly, and went out.
***
There was no kindling in the box after supper, so he took the hatchet and a lantern out to the woodshed.

He split left-handed, with the right elbow tucked against his ribs as ordered. He was no good at it. The first blow glanced off and sent a stick of pine spinning into the dark. The second stuck in the block. He was working the blade loose when he heard her boots.

Nora leaned on the shed post with her hands in her coat pockets and watched him miss twice more.

“Is this the work I’m feeding you for?”

“It gets better.”

“When does it?”

“When the stitches come out.”

She laughed, and then she was quiet. Sticks lay all over the snow, none of them the same size.

“You haven’t said ten words since the tracks,” she said. “You talked to that boy for three hours about heifers and pie, and you’ve said nothing to me since. I can hear you thinking from the kitchen.”

He set a piece of pine on the block and looked at it.

“He asked me last night if he could take the dawn run up to the saddle. I said yes.”

“Somebody had to go. You couldn’t.”

“That’s so.” He brought the hatchet down. It went in crooked. “I had a brother, eight years younger. Tate. After our folks were killed, Billie raised us both, but he followed me around like a pup. He was a good hand, and he laughed at everything.”

Nora stayed where she was.

“He was after me all that winter to take him on the boundary. He was twenty-two and he wanted to learn it. I kept putting him off. Then one clear morning in January, after a week of wind, I said yes.” The hatchet was still in the wood, and he left it there. “We went up as wolves. I was maybe forty yards ahead of him on the saddle, and he cut below me across the lee side to catch up. The whole slope let go under him. It went four hundred yards down into the timber.”

“Rhys.”

“I dug for him for three hours. I found him by scent, under six feet of it. He’d been dead since the first minute. That was the fourteenth of January, 2023. He was twenty-two.” He made himself look at her. “Owen’s twenty-two.”

Her face in the lantern light was very still. She did not tell him it was not his fault, and he was grateful.

“So since then you go alone,” she said.

“Since then I go alone. I don’t say yes. Last night I said it because I was laid up and it needed doing, and the boy was in a snare by daylight.”

“And when you went alone, you came down that creek with your side open and nobody knowing where you were.”

“That was only me.”

“Listen to yourself.” She came in under the shed roof. “I spent three hours tonight on a leg, and I’d spend three more. Owen got caught because a man hung a cable in a trail. You saying yes didn’t put it there. If you had been the one running, you’d have been in it instead, with those stitches. And on the twenty-fourth, if one more wolf had been on that ridge with you, I don’t think Pascoe would have tried it at all.” Her voice was low and even, the one she used for hard news in a corral. “I’m sorry about your brother. I’m sorrier than I know how to say. But going alone doesn’t keep anybody safe. It just means there’s nobody there when it’s your turn. That’s a slow way to die, Rhys. You’re doing it a patrol at a time.”

Nobody had said it to him in four years. Billie had looked it at him, and Maeve had worked around it.

He had no answer. He stood there with his breath smoking.

Nora pulled the hatchet out of the block. She stood the pine up straight and split it in one stroke, and split the halves again, and stacked the four clean pieces in the crook of his left arm.

“Your room’s the door on the left at the top of the stairs,” she said. “There’s a box of books on the floor. Step over it.”

She took the lantern and went in. He stood in the dark with her kindling against his chest for a long time.
***