Chapter 13

The day of the first waxing crescent of fall is when all of the wolves who live on the Homelands traditionally run the perimeter and make sure that our land is properly marked before the ground freezes and damaged posts become hard to replace.

The entire Pack is wild. Barking and wagging tails, they lick each other and jump around each other, their ferocious jaws open and gentle. They chase mice through windrows, their hind legs scratching leaves into a brightly colored explosion high in the air, so that the pups can twist and turn and catch them in snapping teeth as they spiral down.

Not me. I have to pull on heavy muck boots over thick socks with jeans shoved inside. And I won’t mark our territory the way wolves are supposed to. I will mark it on an iPhone 6 Plus, crammed into the big pocket of a thick orange vest. All because Ti refuses to phase and John doesn’t like it.

“He tells himself he’s human,” John says. “But if he lies to himself, what makes you think he’s not going to lie to us?”

So because I am Ti’s schildere, I have to stay in skin too. Keep an eye on him.

“I mean, what were you thinking?” I ask as Ti fits the Outlast cap over his clipped skull. “When you came to a bunch of wolves asking for protection. That you’d just keep on being a human? Was that your grand plan?”

“I didn’t have a grand plan. What I had was a hole in my stomach, a vague set of directions to my mother’s pack, and a need to survive. I changed long enough to fight; I never thought you’d be asking me to give up my humanity.”

“No one’s asking you to give up your humanity, but if you refuse to admit what you are, it is going to rise up and bite you in the ass.”

“Well, how about you?”

“Me? I love changing. I—”

“I know you love changing. You do it all the time. The second Sten doesn’t need your thumbs, you evaporate, and there’s nothing left but clothes hanging from a branch. I may be a crappy wolf. But you… You’re a crappy human.”

I cringe, because he’s right. I’ve never been happy in skin, but then those stupid fire fairies burrowed into my body all those days ago, and that spark has caught fire and burns so fierce that now when I walk beside him and hear his quiet, low voice or look into those gold-flecked black eyes, my tendons strain and my muscles coil and my lungs open up and my blood beats hot and fast. The only way I know how to deal with need is to run hard and far until I collapse, unable to feel anything at all.

A brindle pup barks worriedly at my feet. All of the other wolves have disappeared, fading like a whisper in the woods.

“I know, Leelee. We’re coming.”

“She’s going with us?” Ti asks.

“We’re supposed to take her along. Help her learn the farther reaches of the Homelands.” Leelee scampers on ahead, leaping awkwardly over a huge downed log and sliding down the other side, her fur covered in the sooty brown decay.

Ti clears it in one stride and stands close, not helping me exactly, but I know if I falter, his big shoulder is there for me to grab on to. I make it by myself, but I appreciate his silent gesture.

Leelee watches, her head cocked to the side, as I take a running jump over one of the numerous small, mucky streams that crisscross our land. I slip down the other side, my foot sinking into a soft bruise in the moss. She yips and worries, waiting for me to pull my boot out with a dull sucking sound.

I lift her up and give her an open-jawed kiss on her ear, but she sees a squirrel and won’t stop squirming until I set her down.

“No farther than the Stones, Leelee.”

When we finally catch up, she’s clambering over the variously sized rocks that form rough circles around the ancient central stones. Over the years, the circle has encroached farther and farther into the forest, surrounding the trees.

Leelee marks one of the stones.

“What is this?” Ti asks.

“It’s, um…the Gemyndstow? The memory place? But we just call it the Stones.”

“Like a graveyard?”

“Graveyards are for bodies, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“So, no. Coyotes eat our dead. That’s why we call them wulfbyrgenna. Wolf tombs. The stones are only for wolf names and the date of their last hunt so that we can remember.”

When Ti crouches down and looks at one near the front, Leelee runs up to him and looks too, trying to figure out why it is so interesting.

As soon as he stands, she marks that one too.

An ill-advised squirrel runs across the outer rim of the Stones, and Leelee turns quickly to run after it, the wind tickling her fur and the scent in her nose. I know that feeling of taking it all in—moldering pine needles, owl pellets, borer beetle, tree sap, two-year-old porcupine den, sassafras bush—until the scent of prey hits you right in the back of the throat and everything tenses and you chase, even if your tummy’s little and full and all you really want is for the thing, whatever it is, to escape so you don’t have to eat it, but still you can’t help but hunt.

She peels off after her squirrel, looking behind to make sure we’re watching.

The squirrel chitters at her from the safety of a maple. Ti stares, his hands fisted by his sides, as Leelee scampers and bounds and falls on her back and twists her little legs in the air, her belly dotted with leaf litter. A tiny furrow cuts through his usually impassive brow, and his mouth, while still tightly closed, turns down a little at the corners. His wild—that seductive scent of crushed bone and evergreen—radiates thicker now, and when I touch his arm, he jolts as if from a waking dream and blinks down at me, looking in this moment like a lost boy.

But then he turns and walks on.

At the perimeter, we check the barbed wire that serves as our boundary fence, making sure that it’s secure and continuous. We check that the posts are firm in their foundations and don’t smell of termites or dry rot. Leelee races around, chasing another fat autumn squirrel.

We check that the signs are 660 feet apart, that we mark those that have been defaced by shot or spray paint. In short, we do all the things our lawyers say that we need to do to protect what the law calls “unimproved” land.

“Leelee?” I realize that I can no longer hear her claws skittering across the forest floor. “Leelee?” There is no response.

“Leelee!”

I veer off the path, racing to where I saw her last, but Ti signals for me to stop. “Call her again,” he whispers.

As soon as I do, he turns abruptly, back the way we came. My hearing as a human is not what it is as a wolf, but I hear migrating geese passing over the high pines. I hear a mouse shuffling through the matted leaves. I hear the water tumble in the stream a hundred yards away, I hear a hickory nut drop to the ground, I hear a bird searching for a worm in the bark. I do not hear a pup.

I follow Ti’s silent tread, keeping as quiet as I can. We’ve gone nearly fifty yards when I finally hear scrabbling and whimpering, and I run toward the sound, shouting to Leelee that we’re coming.

We stop short at a sign that reads:

TRESPASSERS

WILL BE SHOT

The Pack never goes in, not because the sign would hold up in any court, but because beyond it is a dump. Over the past centuries, the Pack has bought parcel after parcel of land, but not this one. At first it was owned by a stubborn homesteader with a vegetable garden. Then a stubborn farmer with twenty acres. Now by a stubborn landlord with a junkyard and an access road. We bought fifteen acres from the current owner’s older brother, but these five acres have eluded us every time.

The owner claims it’s a thriving business, hauling people’s broken-down refrigerators and air conditioners and car parts and dumping them in this spot. He claims it makes more than what we’ve offered him, but I know that John sees this as a wound in our land and would pay almost anything to get it.

John says it’s not about the money. It’s about four generations of spite. “Leonora always says humans are motivated by either love or greed,” he said once, “but I think she underestimates what they are willing to do just for spite.”

With my boot and gloved hands, I hold the barbed wire open for Ti.

“Leelee?”

The whimpering is close at hand. Ti points to a busted-up car chassis with a broken Frialator thrown precariously on top. I lie on the ground, looking under the chassis. Leelee is trapped in a hole, her paws and chest wedged tight, so her head is bent backward, her snout high in the air. She can’t do more than whimper.

“Leeeeleee.” I croon to the terrified pup. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.” I try to reach her, but she’s too far under. Even when I lie on my back and shimmy my shoulder under the busted chassis, she’s still out of reach.

Ti’s body is too thick to fit under the chassis, but he crouches down anyway, breathing deeply. He stills for a moment, a distracted look in his eyes, before standing again and pulling me to the side. “We can’t get to her without moving the fryer, but we have to be careful not to move the chassis,” he whispers quickly. “If it falls or shifts, it will break her neck.”

“Any idea how much that thing weighs?”

“Four hundred pounds? A little more?”

He doesn’t ask Do you think you can handle it? He doesn’t pretend that he can do it on his own. He just says that we have to move it, end of discussion. And we will, because I’ll be damned if any pup of ours is going to be crushed by a trashed fish fryer.

Gingerly we step over the side rails of the chassis, trying to find spots that give us the best leverage we can, but even so, Ti will have to lift with his arms nearly straight out.

My hands are sweating inside my work gloves, but Ti’s already gotten hold on his side. “Make sure that you’re not holding something that will open or fall off. At the count of three, throw it. Then grab Leelee. I want to be ready if the thing shifts.”

“Which way?”

“What?”

“Which way do we throw it?”

“Yeah, of course, to the back.”

I feel around, grasping the front wall and a rear corner, and plant my feet firm, making sure that the dirt won’t shift under me.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, count of three.”

And he counts to three. Four hundred pounds isn’t that much, but it’s a lot when you have to stand with your legs in an awkward position and a pup’s life depends on it. And when your glove tears and the fryer starts to fall and you know that it will break her back. Ti grunts from the effort of not losing his grip, his legs straining to stabilize his big body. I catch it just before it hits the chassis.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“Count of three, to the back.”

This time he counts to three, and we heave it a little—not far, but far enough. Reaching through the skeletal chassis, I grab Leelee by snout and tail. It’s horribly undignified and probably more than a little painful.

With her out of the way, Ti steps on the chassis and pushes hard with his shoulder until the fryer tumbles over the back of a washing machine.

I cuddle Leelee close to me, whispering that we love her, but her ass is grass once John finds out that she went into the junkyard. She knows it’s true and whimpers, pulling closer under my hair, already trying to hide from John’s fury. Only then does it register that her chest and forelegs smell like oil.

“Hold her for a second?”

Ti takes her and holds her tight. “What are you doing?”

“I want to see what this is.” I lift the surprisingly light chassis.

“Sil, no. She’s shivering. We need to go.”

Leelee’s struggling scraped the top edges of the hole, but farther on in, I can see that it is perfectly circular and very deep. Water glistens in the bottom, but beyond the fetid water is a clear smell like a million tiny deaths that have not gone into making new life.

“Sil! It’s a long walk back. Will you just leave it alone?”

When I scrabble out, Ti has wrapped Leelee in his T-shirt next to his bare skin. “I’ll keep her. She’s cold, and you don’t know from cold.”

We move quickly toward home, taking Leelee immediately to the medic’s station. Someone must have gotten John, because he was running toward the back before Ti had even finished extracting the pup from the impromptu sling of his T-shirt.

As soon as Tristan determines that she’s just bruised and shaken, I tell John everything. He calls for Tara—who is not only his Beta, but also an engineer—and makes me repeat the story to her.

“Describe the hole exactly.”

“This wide.” I hold my hands to circumscribe a hole about four inches wide. “I couldn’t tell how deep it was because there was water in the bottom but had to be over ten feet.”

“And it smelled like oil?”

“Yes. If you check Leelee, you can’t help but smell it.”

As John sniffs the air around Leelee, she wakes up. She looks at him and begins to shiver once more. He puts his big hand on her tiny head, sweeping his thumb across her muzzle until her eyes drift closed again.

This is the time for love. Discipline will come later.

“Tiberius?”

“It’s a dump, and the whole place smells of antifreeze and Freon and diesel. I didn’t see the hole. Probably from some old fence post.”

“Yes, there were other smells around, but this wasn’t Freon or diesel,” I maintain steadily. “And it wasn’t a fence post either. It was a perfectly round hole. Perfectly. Like it was drilled.”

“Tara, I think we better take a look at this and also find the original of the DEC report from—” Ti and I are at the door when John stops.

“Tiberius,” he says. “Every child is a wuscbearn, a wish child, beloved and adopted by the Pack. A symbol of its future strength. The Pack will appreciate that you take that future seriously too.”

Ti stands facing the open door, his hand on the knob. “Just so we’re clear here. I don’t give a shit about symbols, but I didn’t want Leelee to die.”

As we head back to the Boathouse, Ti stops, looking at the sky. Then he turns, pulling at my arm. “There are blueberry muffins at the Meeting House,” he says.

Later, as I lick blueberry and butter from my fingers, I wonder how it is that a man who can smell blueberry muffins in an enclosed structure one hundred yards away couldn’t distinguish the stench of oil at his feet.