Chapter 31: The Herd

I went over the rail and knelt in the straw behind her.

Two front feet. A nose lying on top of them.

"Is it right?" Rance said from the gate.

"It's right."

"What do I do?"

"Stay there. Keep your wolf down. She's busy."

He stayed there.

The grulla strained, and rested, and strained again.

I didn't pull. I just kept my hand flat on her flank and let my wolf sit beside her in the straw.

My shoulder burned under his shirt every time I moved.

On the third push the foal came all at once, in a long wet slide.

It lay there in the straw in its white sac, not moving.

I tore the sac off its face.

It sneezed.

Rance laughed out loud at the gate, and then put his hand over his mouth.

It was a filly.

Mouse-gray, wet and dark, with a black stripe down her back exactly like her mother's. Legs as long as fence rails.

The grulla swung her head around and nickered, low, a sound I'd never heard out of her.

She started licking the filly from the ears down.

I climbed out of the pen and stood beside Rance with my hands wet and shaking.

"Three weeks early," he said. "Is she all right?"

"She's perfect."

It took the filly forty minutes to stand up.

She fell over four times, and each time the grulla nosed her back up.

The fifth time she stood, splay-legged and wobbling, and looked around at the world.

Then she looked at Rance.

He didn't move.

She took three crooked steps across the straw, put her wet nose right through the gate rails, and smelled his hand.

She didn't spook.

She didn't even blink.

She'd never smelled a world without wolves in it.

"Rance," I said quietly. "Put your hand on her."

He reached through the rails.

He laid his big scarred hand on the filly's wet neck, and she leaned into it.

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