The buck had gone forty yards on a heart shot, which was about average, and by the time Wade Kittleson pushed through the gold tamaracks the wolf was already standing over it.
He stopped with his thumb hooked under the rifle sling.
She was gray going white at the muzzle, long in the leg, thinner than he’d have guessed for late October. Her tracks came down off the ridge in one clean line, each hind foot set into the print of the front, the gait of an animal saving everything she had. A disperser, probably, run off from some pack up toward the Canadian line and working the Yaak on her own. She had both front feet on the buck’s ribs. She hadn’t opened him yet. Blood from the exit wound had frozen to a rind on the bunchgrass.
Her nose worked at him. Gun oil, coffee, the diesel of the truck still in his jacket.
There was a wolf tag in his wallet, bought in August along with his deer tag on the theory that he might as well. He thought about it for the length of one breath. Then he slid the sling off his shoulder and brought the rifle across his body, slow, muzzle low, the way a man picks up a shovel he knows he’ll need. He didn’t shoulder it. He didn’t have to.
Her ears went flat. She took her feet off the deer.
“Go on,” Wade said. “Go on, now.”
She went the way wolves go, without hurry. A few steps back, a quarter turn, a look over her shoulder to see whether he meant it. He meant it. She stopped at the edge of the timber, maybe sixty yards out, and sat in the old snow with her tail wrapped over her feet, and she watched him work.
He gutted the buck where it lay, bagged the heart and liver, and left the rest steaming on the frost. She’d have it ten minutes after he was gone. She seemed willing to wait the ten minutes.
There is no dignified way to get a hundred and thirty pounds of whitetail onto your back. Wade sat down against the carcass, pulled the forelegs over his shoulders, rolled onto his knees and came up swearing. He hung his orange vest over the buck’s back so no one from Spokane would take the whole arrangement for a deer. Then he slung the rifle across his chest and started down toward the road. A mile and a half, downhill most of it.
From the first switchback he looked back. She was already at the pile.
The Forest Service road came out on Highway 2 at a stop sign somebody had shot full of holes before Wade was old enough to drive. He sat at it with the blinker going and the heater blowing on his hands.
The convoy came out of the east, from Kalispell, headed for Idaho or wherever. White freight pods with no cabs, no windows, a wheel at each corner and a lidar dome on every roof turning like a slow drill bit. They ran nose to tail, close enough to touch, every set of tires in the wet tracks of the pod ahead. He’d seen them on the news. Platooning, the anchorman had called it. Drafting off each other to save power, talking to each other over some network so that when the lead pod braked, the last one braked in the same instant.
He waited for a gap. A gap did not come.
He let the truck creep past the stop line until his front bumper hung over the shoulder. The nearest pod kept its speed and drifted a foot toward the center line, and the one behind it drifted the same foot, and the one behind that, all the way back around the bend, the whole line bending to go around him without slowing down.
He leaned on the horn. Nothing turned. There was nothing in there to turn.
His thumb went looking for the rifle sling and found it on the seat beside him, the .270 cased and unloaded. He took the hand back and put it on the wheel.
He stopped counting pods somewhere past forty. The sun went off the top of the Cabinets. In the bed behind him the buck had gone stiff under the orange vest, and the cab smelled like it, and like wet dog from a dog that had been dead three years. The pods hissed past on the wet asphalt, every one of them the same distance from the one before.
The last pod came around the bend with a red light blinking on its back. It went by. The road was empty in both directions, black and shining, and quiet enough that he could hear the river below it.
Wade let it get a good way ahead. Then he pulled out and followed it toward town, keeping well back.