Chapter 22: Hollow Pine

"Tonight?" I shouted back. "Why tonight?"

Arlene grinned and got in her truck.

"Because I already told them we were coming."

It was past dark when we came over the last rise and saw Hollow Pine.

It isn't much to look at.

A dozen houses in the lodgepole pines, a grange hall with a tin roof, a creek and a lot of snow.

The first snow had come while we were gone.

Every porch light in the place was on.

The whole pack stood at the gate in the snow, forty-one wolves in parkas and work boots.

Somebody had plugged a string of Christmas lights into a truck.

Wylie got out of my truck before it stopped rolling.

Nobody said anything.

The oldest man on our council had taught Wylie to track when he was ten.

He walked out of the crowd and looked him up and down.

"You're taller," he said.

"I was sitting down," Wylie said.

The old man laughed and grabbed him, and then the whole pack was on him.

They hugged him in turns.

They punched his arms.

A girl who'd been eleven when he went silent was sixteen now.

She cried into his coat and called him a jerk for missing five of her birthdays.

He let them all do it.

He stood in the middle of them with his eyes wet and said their names one by one.

Then somebody turned and saw the mark on my neck.

A whoop went up that probably carried to Canada.

The grange hall had been set for supper.

Every pot in Hollow Pine was on the long tables.

Venison chili, fry bread, three kinds of pie, a ham somebody had clearly been saving for Christmas.

Arlene stood on a chair and did all the voices with her mouth full.

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