They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Skull Room

Home with elk stew and her sister's labeled shelves, Calla hears her stolen wolf howl across the river at midnight and howls back.

I woke up in the bed I grew up in, under the quilt with the pine trees on it.

For a second I didn't know why my chest felt so big and empty.

Then I reached for Rue the way I'd reached for her every morning of my life.

Nothing reached back.

I lay there with my hand on my belly until the pup moved.

It was a small movement. Lazy. Like turning over in sleep.

Yesterday she'd been kicking my ribs so hard I couldn't sit through a pack meeting.

I got up.

The midwife had left a list on the nightstand in shaky pencil. Stay warm. Eat red meat. Sleep near people. No stairs.

I took the stairs.

The kitchen smelled like elk stew and woodsmoke and gun oil, which is to say it smelled like home.

My father was at the stove in an apron that said KISS THE COOK.

Dagny gave it to him as a joke when she was twelve. He'd worn it every day since.

"Sit," he said, without turning around.

I sat.

He put a bowl in front of me big enough to bathe the pup in.

"Eat that, and then eat another one."

"Dad, it's nine in the morning."

"Elk doesn't know what time it is."

Dagny came in from the back with her reading glasses on her nose and a mug of black coffee.

She looked at my wrists, which the midwife had wrapped in white gauze, and wrote something in her notebook.

"You're writing down my wrists?"

"I'm writing down everything," Dagny said. "Eat your stew."

I ate my stew.

My father sat down across from me with his own bowl.

"Why did the werewolf quit his job at the bakery?" he asked.

"Dad."

"He kept loafing around at the full moon."

Dagny closed her eyes.

"He's been saving that one for six years," she said. "He wouldn't tell it in front of Ransom."

"Ransom didn't laugh at my jokes," my father said.

"Nobody laughs at your jokes."

"Calla laughs."

I laughed. It came out wrong, half a sob, and I put my spoon down.

My father reached across the table and covered my hand with his.

He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.

After breakfast Dagny took me into the back room.

I'd been in it a hundred times as a kid. Never without a wolf.

The skulls sat on pine shelves from the floor to the ceiling, each one on a little wooden stand, each one with a typed card.

Date. Place. Pack, if it had one. What it did.

Killed two hikers on the Lolo trail. Killed a ranch hand. Killed a child.

Dagny alphabetized them by the place they died.

"You okay in here?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"You can say if you're not."

"I always thought they were monsters," I said. "Now I'm thinking how close I came to being up there."

Dagny pushed her glasses up her nose.

"You were never going on a shelf."

"Dad was sent to that den to clear it."

"Dad was sent to that den," she agreed. "And he came back with you in his coat."

She'd told me the story so many times when I was little that I could see it.

A rogue she-wolf who'd killed a hunter. A den under a cutbank on the river.

Josiah Shrike went in alone with a lantern, the way the Hunt did then.

The mother was dead. The pack she'd run with was gone.

Under her body, in the dirt, there was a baby. A human baby, a girl, an hour old, still slick, still breathing.

Dad stood there with his rifle for a long time.

Then he unbuttoned his coat.

"You were so small," Dagny said. "I was five. He came in the kitchen door and opened his coat and said, Dag, we've got to name her."

"And you picked Calla."

"There were calla lilies on the windowsill. I was five. I named the dog Dog."

I laughed again, and this time it came out right.

Dagny turned to the workbench under the window.

The bone knife lay on its white handkerchief with its little tag.

She picked it up with a pair of tweezers and turned it over under the lamp.

I watched her look at the edge.

There was a chip in the blade, near the tip, a tiny notch in the yellow bone.

Dagny looked at it for a long time.

Then she looked up at the shelves.

She went very quiet.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing yet."

"Dag."

"I don't say things until they're true," she said. "Go take a nap. That's the midwife's orders and mine."

I didn't sleep.

I lay in my old bed and listened to the house.

My father checking the locks. Dagny's typewriter, clacking until eleven. The hunters on the porch changing shifts.

At midnight the moon came over the ridge, fat and almost three-quarters full.

And across the river, from the Blackfen side, something howled.

I knew that voice.

I'd have known it anywhere, in any dark, out of a thousand wolves.

It was Rue.

She wasn't howling at the moon. She was howling the way a pup howls when it's lost its mother.

She was howling for me.

The pup kicked, hard, for the first time since the stone.

I got out of bed. I went to the window and pushed it open on the cold.

I didn't have a wolf.

I put my head back and howled anyway.

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