“Not like this. The trailer park where we lived, it was more suburban, I guess. And when I worked in war zones, well, the animals were usually mostly gone by then. This is real wilderness. Deep, wild wilderness.”
I nod, amused she thinks this is deep or wild.
It takes us two hours to reach the river. It’s midday by the time we set the canoe in the water. I take the paddle. She wants to help, but I tell her it’s faster for me to do it alone.
She gets in, sits sideways, and we set off. I paddle upstream—north. The water is low, but not so low that we can’t take the best way. She watches the trees go by. Now and then, Canadian geese fly overhead, honking, heading south for the winter. The opposite direction from us.
She shivers. Is it the geese flying south? Do they make her think of winter?
“You sure you don’t want my help? There’s another paddle. I mean, I’m here to help you.”
“I don’t need your help.”
She furrows her brow. The forest around us grows darker, deeper. “So you have this kind of handled? You don’t really need me?”
“Not at the moment.”
“But you might later? To help carry the things?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Oh. I kind of thought you needed help.”
Maybe she imagined it was all about the supplies. She was helping me bring back supplies. And I would walk her back to the vehicle. Like a date, like on the television at the Fancher Institute.
“Can a wolf pack ever move?”
“The pack moves all the time. Different places for different seasons.”
“Oh. So there’s not just one place…one cave?”
“Wolves are hunters. Hunters always move around.”
“Would the pack ever relocate entirely, like to a whole different wilderness area? Like if there was a better place to live?”
“There is no better place to live.”
“That may have been true before, but you understand, you’re living on federal land, which is illegal.”
“It’s never been a problem.”
“You’ve never had the mob and U.S. law enforcement after you before. A manhunt. They didn’t know you were living up here before,” she continues, looking all around, “but now they do. The police will track you here because they know this is where you’re from.”
“They won’t be able to track me.”
“It’s not like you’re on the moon, Kiro. They’ll get the forest rangers involved. And then there’s the Albanian mob…”
“This is a big place,” I say. “My place.”
“But you don’t own it,” she says. “It’s a park. What if there was a place you owned? What if you had land of your own where nobody could touch you? Even campers couldn’t go there without your okay. All yours—your home. Miles of land.”
“That’s what I have now. I own this in every way that matters. It’s not a park; it’s a world.”
She watches the clouds. “Seriously, don’t you want to know why they’re hunting you?”
This again. “I know why they’re hunting me.”
“Uh. Wrong. Yousodon’t know.”