Three dead. Shot in the den. Or maybe outside of it, and they crawled in. Were pursued. Two years of dirt layered over them. It would have happened soon after I left.
My family. My only true family.
I collapse in the gloom of the enclosure feeling as dead as the dirt. These wolves weren’t just my family, they were my anchor, my sanity. Bright spirits in a dark world.
I lie there drifting, lost in a sea of misery, pulled under by it, unable to breathe, to see, to think beyond this moment.
I’m only dimly aware of Ann’s hand on my back.
When did she come in?
She stretches out next to me, rubbing my back.
I’m not sure how much time passes. It’s possible that I sleep. Maybe I pass out. That has happened since I hit my head. The next thing I hear is Ann’s voice. “Tell me about them, Kiro. Tell me another story about Red.”
I turn to her, there in the den, in the bed of dry leaves next to the half-buried bones. Something wells up in my chest, like a bubble made of stone, filling me, choking me. I can’t speak. I don’t want to speak. I rise up and heave myself against the side of the enclosure. Years of debris falls onto our faces. I kick open the side.
“Hey!” She scrambles out as I smash the den apart, pushing the accumulated branches and leaves and debris this way and that. I go up on the top and stomp on it, smashing it. The years of stuff trapped and cemented in by snow and moisture and sun breaks apart. I destroy it all, flattening it, crushing it into a heap.
When it’s utterly destroyed, I collapse on top of the rock outcrop next to it, face wet in the sunshine.
Again Ann is there.
She doesn’t fool me. I’m her captor. She’d leave if she thought she could. She only truly wants to be with me when I make her beg, or when there’s danger.
My pulse races. The world seems to spin. “He was family. They were my family. Even at the darkest in the Fancher Institute, they were there with me.”
“You loved them,” she says.
I reach up and touch her cheek.
She searches my eyes like she does when she’s trying to understand things about me.
And right then I think,I love you. It fills me with even more despair. She, too, will leave.
“Tell me about him.”
I tell her one thing, simple and small. About how upset Red would get when I’d climb a tree. He’d be at the bottom, jumping.
She soaks up the story. It’s always stories with her. I’m a story. It seems dangerous to love her when I remember that.
“The other,” she says. “Tell me about the other one. The female. What was her name?”
“Snowy.”
She makes me tell stories. She urges me to move away from the den and up onto the sunny part of the bluff. We sit in the sunshine in the tall grass. She has some sort of dried meat that she shares with me. “What about the rest of the pack? Are you so sure they won’t come back?”
“The three strongest, oldest wolves were shot,” I say. “It would have left the younger members vulnerable, in disarray. They would’ve scattered. They could be dead. They’re probably dead. If the hunters got the older wolves, they would gotten the pups. Red’s pup…” I close my eyes, remembering him, a nipping ball of fur. “Those pups would’ve been too vulnerable to survive being hunted after something like this.”
I imagine the pups out there alone without the elder wolves. A few were almost a year old, but still. “If we looked hard enough, we’d find the bones of the younger ones.”
The idea fills me with despair.
“Hey,” she says softly, sliding a finger over my beard the way she likes to.
The sun has been climbing. It’s afternoon.
“I imagined them so fiercely when I was lying there in bed. They felt alive. I can’t believe they were dead all that time.”