The New Moon Mate

The calf had been dead for maybe an hour when I found it, and the field had already started to drink it.

I smelled it before I saw it. Blood has a thick smell in September heat, especially when it is not fresh and the flies have found it. I had been walking the fence line since four o'clock because Dale had put the new patrol schedule on the co-op bulletin board and given me the north end again, the part with the worst fences and the most rabbit holes and no view of anything except wheat and sky.

The calf was lying half under the back wheel of Harold's combine, which Harold leaves parked in the yard from August to October because he says moving it is a two-man job and he has been a one-man operation since his brother died. I knew the calf. It was the white-faced one with the crooked ear that June had named Biscuit, and I had watched it nurse in the lower pasture two days ago while I ate a sandwich on the tailgate.

I crouched down. The flies lifted and then settled again.

It had been opened along the flank, not eaten, not torn apart the way a hungry animal would. The cuts were long and shallow, four of them, and the edges of the hide had curled back like someone had used a dull knife. There were tracks in the dirt around the calf, and I put my hand beside the biggest one. It was wide. Wider than my palm, and I have big palms for a woman my size.

It was a wolf track. There was no mistaking it.

I stayed crouched for a while, and my eyes went past the calf to the track again and then out to the edge of the wheat, where the stalks moved in the wind and the light was going orange. My wolf, the thing under my skin that I had spent most of my adult life not talking about, pressed forward and made my jaw ache. She did not like the smell of the calf. She did not like the quiet of the yard.

I got up and walked the ground in a wide circle, my boots crunching on the stubble, and I found a second set of tracks leading back toward the fence. These were smaller and neater. A coyote, probably, or a farm dog. The big wolf had come from the north, along the fence, and it had gone back that way. I followed the tracks to the fence and crouched again where the wire had been pushed down, and that was when I caught the other scent.

I had spent twenty-six years in this pack. I knew what all of my packmates smelled like. I knew what the wheat smelled like when it was cut and when it was standing, and I knew what the soil smelled like after rain and what the mill smelled like when the grain dust was thick. I knew my sister's hair and my brother's jacket and the beer on Dale's breath.

This smell was not any of that.

It was warm, and it was close, and it had something in it like pine and something like the inside of a cedar chest, and it hit me so hard I put my hand on the fence post and missed it. My wolf rolled over. She had never rolled over for anyone. She did not roll over for Harlan, who was our Alpha, or for Dale, who thought he was everyone's Alpha. She sat up straight and she turned her head toward the wheat and she made a low, wanting sound that was so far from fear I did not have a name for it.

I stood there with my fingers gripping the wood and my heart going too fast. Then the scent thinned, and the wind changed, and it was gone, and I was just a woman on the wrong side of a fence with a dead calf behind her and the sun going down.

I got home a little after seven. Our house sits at the end of a gravel road, a small place with a sagging porch my father never got around to fixing, and June had left the porch light on for me. She was in the kitchen with the radio on, and she had her feet up on the second chair the way our mother used to yell at her for.

"You are late," she said. "There is stew."

"I found Biscuit dead in Harold's yard."

June took her feet off the chair. Her hair is red and she had it tied back with a piece of blue baling twine, and her freckled face went a shade paler. "Dead how?"

"Wolf. Or something with wolf tracks and a dull knife. It was cut up, June. Not eaten."

She was quiet for a moment, and then she got up and pulled the pot off the stove and set it down hard enough to slosh. "Dale is going to say it is the rogue. He has been saying that for two weeks. Every time a cow loses a calf, it is the rogue, and everyone nods."

"Dale is going to say whatever makes Dale look right."

"Well." June spooned stew into two bowls. "Maybe he is right this time."

I sat down and ate, and I did not tell her about the scent at the fence. I could not have explained it if I had wanted to, and I did not want to. I ate too fast and burned my tongue and June gave me a look over her bowl.

The pack meeting was the next morning in the yard of the pack house, which is a long white building with a porch on one side and an old bell on a post that nobody has rung since before I was born. Harlan stood on the steps with his gray beard trimmed and his hat in his hands, and Dale stood next to him in a clean shirt with his sandy hair combed back, smiling at people as they came in.

I stood at the back with June and a couple of the younger border-wardens. The wind was out of the north.

Dale talked for a long time. He talked about the calves and the torn fences and the rogue that had been seen at the border, and he talked about how the Council was watching, and how the Council did not like packs that could not keep order. He said the word rogue about eleven times. I counted, because I count things when I am angry, and I was angry.

When he was done, Harlan cleared his throat and asked if anyone had anything to say, and I put my hand up.

"Wren," Dale said warmly. "Of course. Our sharpest nose."

"The calf at Harold's place was cut with a blade," I said. "Four long cuts and no eating. A wolf does not do that. A wolf eats what it kills."

The yard went quiet. Dale's smile did not move, and he looked at me the way he looked at a bill he did not want to pay. "And you are a tracker, Wren, not a doctor. The rogue could have been interrupted. It could have been a bad hunter. You know what a hungry wolf is like when the moon is off."

"I know a blade cut when I see one."

"Then you should have brought it to me before you brought it to the whole pack," Dale said, still warm, and a couple of people laughed. "But since you are so sure, I will make it easy for you. The cull goes ahead. A pair of hunters out of Spokane, licensed and quiet. We take the wolf and the calves stop dying. Simple."

"The Council will not like outside hunters on pack land," Harlan said slowly.

"The Council will like a rogue problem less," Dale said, and turned to face the crowd again, and the meeting was over.

People drifted away. I stayed where I was and watched them go, and that was when I noticed the man standing near the corner of the porch with a leather folder under his arm. He had black hair cut short and a gray suit that did not belong in a wheat town, and pale gray eyes, and he was looking at me and not at Dale.

I had never seen him before.

He walked over to me, and June moved in closer to my shoulder, and he held out his hand with a small neat smile. "You must be Wren. Dale has told me about you. I am Silas, from the Council. I am here to look at the grain land."

"Nobody said the Council was sending anyone."

"Nobody likes to announce bad weather, either," he said. "And your grain land is very good weather indeed. The Council is buying, quietly. I would like to talk to you about your family's fields, and about your brother, if you have the time."

My brother. Owen had been dead for four months and no one in that yard had said his name out loud in at least two.

"What about my brother," I said.

Silas closed his folder. "Not here. Come by the trailer tomorrow. I think you will find I am a good listener." He tipped his head at June and walked off across the yard, and the north wind came up again and brought something with it that made my wolf turn in a slow circle under my ribs.

It was the scent from the fence. Pine, and cedar, and something warm underneath.

"Wren," June said. "Your hands are shaking."

I looked down. They were. I put them in my pockets and said, "I am fine," and June gave me the look she always gives me when I say that.

That night I could not sleep. I lay on my bed with the window open and the curtains moving and the wheat making its dry sound in the dark, and the scent kept coming back to me. It was not strong, the way it had been at the fence. It was faint and it was moving, and it was out there along the north border.

Around two in the morning I got up and pulled my boots on and went out.

The moon was not up. The field was black and silver and the wheat went past my waist, and I walked north along the fence with my senses opened all the way and my wolf pressing at my skin. The scent got stronger as I went. It was ahead of me and then beside me and then ahead again, and once I stopped and listened and heard the wheat move where there was no wind.

I followed it to the edge of Harold's second field, where the old mill road runs along the border. The mill has been empty for years, and the fence there is down, and I could see the dark shape of the mill against the sky.

There was something in the wheat behind me. I turned around.

The stalks moved. The smell of pine and cedar and warm skin came over me and my wolf rolled over again and this time she would not get up, and I stood there in the dark with my heart beating in my throat and the wheat parting in front of me.

Then the shape came out of the wheat and it was too low and too fast and much too big. It hit me in the chest and took me down into the dirt, and my head cracked against a stone, and the last thing I saw was a pale face over mine, close enough to feel the heat of it, with eyes that were not a wolf's eyes at all.