Chapter 32: Spring

It was the old trucker.

He'd run all night as pack for the first time in his life, at sixty-one.

At dawn he'd gone off a rock ledge after a rabbit and broken his foreleg in two places.

The hunters carried him down the ridge in a blanket, still a wolf, grinning with his tongue out.

He shifted back on my table, swearing.

I set the leg.

By noon he was sitting up in the stray wing in a cast to the knee, telling the night nurses the Amarillo story.

It had a new ending now, with a rabbit in it.

That was November.

By April the snow was gone off the valley floor, and the creek ran high and brown with melt, and clean.

I worked nights.

I still do.

Ten at night to four in the morning, four nights a week, in the basement with the CLINIC sign over the side door.

Lucille ran the floor.

She'd bought new reading glasses with her first paycheck and lost them in her hair inside a week.

The stray wing saw nine hundred people that winter.

Wolves with no pack.

Wolves with a pack and a grudge against the upstairs ER.

Humans from the county road, who still didn't know what the rest of us were and didn't care.

Every chart had a line at the top that used to be blank for strays.

PACK, it said.

Under it, on every one, the nurses typed RUTLEDGE.

Stellan brought coffee at one in the morning.

Every night I worked.

He came down the inside stairs from the hospital lobby with two paper cups.

He sat on the bottom step and waited until I had a minute.

Sometimes I didn't have a minute for two hours.

He waited anyway.

"Doesn't the Alpha have a pack to run?" Lucille said once.

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