They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. novel · Chapter 7 of 24
Chapter 7: Twelve
I drove home with that word in my ears.
Twelve.
Halfway across the upper bridge I met three Shrike trucks coming the other way, fast.
Emmett was driving the first one. He'd come out in his socks.
He pulled over, walked to my window and didn't say one word about the note.
He just put his hand flat on my belly through the open window and closed his eyes until the pup settled.
Then he said, "Lunch, you said."
"It's not lunch yet."
"It's lunch somewhere," he said, and followed me home.
I told them in the kitchen. All of it. The scratches, the shirt, the laugh.
When I got to the number, Dagny put down her pen.
She doesn't put down her pen.
She got up and went into the back room without a word, and we heard her moving things on the shelves for a long time.
She was in there all night.
In the morning she called us into the kitchen before the coffee was made.
She'd cleared the table. She'd laid down a white sheet.
On the sheet, in a row, were nine skulls.
Wolf skulls, long and gray, each one on its little wooden stand with its typed card propped beside it.
My father stopped in the doorway.
Emmett stopped behind him.
"Sit down," Dagny said. "Please."
Nobody sat.
Dagny put on her reading glasses and picked up the bone knife in its handkerchief.
"This has a chip in the blade," she said. "Near the tip. It's old. Whoever uses it has had it a long time."
She turned the first skull gently in her hands.
Behind the left ear, in the bone, there was a tiny notch. A little curved nick.
She laid the knife's tip against it.
It fit.
She did the second skull. It fit.
She did all nine.
It fit every time.
"I noticed the marks years ago," Dagny said. Her voice was very flat. "I wrote 'old injury' on the cards. I thought it was a fight. Pack wolves bite each other behind the ear."
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