Unzipping the tent, Drake stood up into the forest. The trees all around him as they’d been the night before. His eyes skipping over the landscape, settling on their packs for only a moment before skittering on. No sign of his father. The question he’d wanted to ask the night before never having come to his lips and the two men simply watching the fire until it died away and they, too, went to sleep.
He stood now with his feet bare on the forest floor, the dry needles like a mat beneath his heels, and the green moss over everything else. The sun was up, slanting in sideways from the east, and where the sun did not touch the shadows felt cold and damp with mountain dew. The only thing to hear was the slight breeze roaming in the branches high above, washing the treetops one way, then another.
He didn’t have an idea where his father had gone and he looked from their packs to the opening of the tent, only a few feet behind him. He sat in the entrance to the tent and pulled his knee brace on, then his socks and boots. He didn’t want to worry Ellie, and in some way he knew, too, he wasn’t ready to admit to her the unease he’d felt all through the night and the guilt he now felt for bringing his father along.
When he checked the packs a minute later he saw that Ellie’s rifle was gone. He looked around the camp, trying to remember if she had stashed it somewhere, or if it was in her tent. No memory of either, and a certainty he’d seen the rifle right here, strapped to the side of her pack when Drake had gone to sleep.
For a moment his eyes scanned the dense forest. The camp made in a little clearing among the trees. Dark soil beneath his boots and nothing but the endless wall of tree trunks in any direction. A slope to the ground about twenty feet east of the camp, where the valley opened up below and the lake sometimes could be seen through the trees.
Taking his eyes off the surrounding forest, he unstrapped his own rifle from his pack and slung it over his shoulder. Driscoll’s words from the day before playing in Drake’s head and not the first idea which way his father had gone, or why he’d wanted to come along with them in the first place.
There was a small stream a tenth of a mile downslope and this is the way Drake went, hoping his father had simply gone for water. He could feel the breeze strengthen as soon as he came off the even ground. The valley floor far below him down the slope, and the rush of air felt rising upward through the trees.
With his boots loosely tied, the land fell away quickly and felt dense and fragile beneath his feet. The deep scent of fungus and turned soil rising from the ground any time he took a step. His heels landed heavily on the downward slope, sinking in as they pushed a mixture of detritus that clumped and fell away before him.
The rifle felt heavy on his back as he walked, the butt bouncing against his waist. No sound in the forest except for his own footsteps and the rush of wind in the trees. Farther on he heard the stream, a slight gurgle of water, endless as the slope he now found himself descending.
As he came down and found the bottomland before the stream, he saw his father a hundred feet on. Crouched with his back to Drake and his arms outstretched over a deadfall. A bright green wall of salmonberry leaves and currant bushes separating the streambed from the dark undergrowth of the forest. Patrick so still that it forced the words to Drake’s mouth before he quite knew he was saying them. Throwing his voice forward as he called to his father.
Only then did Drake catch the movement far down the stream, the brief wheel of fur as something bounded up from the water and moved for the forest. He saw too the quick snap of his father’s arms and the red dart flush out of the gun. The sound loud in the silence of the forest, as the wolf sprang up, visible for a second in the morning sun, yelping in pain. The red dart now hanging from her hindquarter.
THE WOLF LAY on her side fifty yards from the stream. The slight pulse of her lungs as she took air and then gave it back, moving the dirt beneath her snout. She was bigger than Drake had thought. A full six feet from tail to head, standing on her hind legs she would be as big as a man, and looked to weigh between ninety and a hundred pounds. Lying there, drugged, under all that fur it was hard to say. Drake knew just by looking at her that she was older, or perhaps sick, the gray and white fur matted in places where she had ceased to care for herself.
“A hell of a shot,” Drake said. It was the first thing he’d said to his father since he found him at the edge of the stream. A sheen of sweat visible on Patrick’s skin. The wolf leading them up a steep grade before collapsing under the power of the tranquilizer.
With Ellie’s rifle still in Patrick’s hands he pushed the barrel into the side of the wolf, testing her. “You didn’t make it any easier.”
“They keep a rifle range in the prison for you to practice on?” Drake saw his father smile for a moment. His teeth there, then gone again in a flash. “How’d you even know the wolf would be down there?”
“I followed her.”
“Followed her from where?”
“From the camp,” Patrick said, glancing back in the direction they’d come from. “She was out there circling us most of the night.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe whatever you want,” Patrick said. “You get real used to picking up on small sounds when you’re locked up in prison. Especially if you’re an ex-cop.”
“I still don’t believe it,” Drake said, shaking his head.
Ten minutes later he came back with Ellie and the three of them got the wolf weighed. Ellie put a GPS collar around the neck, then started down through the list, taking samples of fur and blood, swabbing the mouth and checking the teeth. To Drake it seemed like there were a million things she had to do, checking them off on a laminated sheet as she came to them. The animal unconscious through it all.
Drake helped Ellie as she worked, pulling the fur away for her as she took the blood, or holding a small penlight to better view the wolf’s dark pupils and yellow corneas. The whole while Patrick squatted close by, keeping to himself as he watched.
Afterward, when Ellie had finished and Patrick had gone back to camp ahead of them, Ellie said, “You have any idea what he was up to?”
“My father?” Drake asked, watching the animal from about fifty feet away, waiting for it to wake up. “He said he heard her outside the tent last night.”
“Could you have made that shot?” Ellie asked.
Drake shook his head. He knew shooting a tranquilizer wasn’t like shooting a bullet. It was slower. The shot had to allow for the lag. If an animal stayed still at that distance, there was a chance of getting the dart in where you wanted it. If the animal was running it was a lot harder, and if the animal was surprised, as this one had been, it was nearly impossible. “It was a hell of a shot,” Drake said.
DRAKE’S FATHER HAD been the one to teach him how to shoot. Nine years old with the rifle raised over the alder fence out behind their house, aiming at apples. The echo of the shots carried far up the valley, bouncing from one slope to the other. Silver Lake much smaller then, simply a few houses, a general store, and one diner. No one to care about the sound of a hunting rifle carried in the air. The yellow-white flesh of the apples spread everywhere in the grass. One shot out of three hitting its mark. And his father telling him how to hold the gun, how to keep it cradled into the meat of his shoulder, where his deltoid met the muscle of his breast.
The skin bruised from one weekend to the next. More apples and more shooting until he missed only one shot out of six, and then one out of seven. The apples bursting up out of the grass with every shot, and the rich warm smell of the dirt beneath coming to him out of the orchard. His own boyhood encompassed in this.