They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Six Weeks

We drove home with the map on the dashboard under Dagny's good hand.

My father read it at the kitchen table with Josie asleep on his shoulder.

Then he handed her to me and went out to the truck for his rifle.

"Dad."

"It's seven," he said. "Seven people walking around with a hole in them. I'm not waiting."

"It's Blackfen land."

"It's your blood on their stone."

"And Rue's home," I said. "That's what the elders will say. The cause is paid. You go up that draw with rifles, and you're the one who broke the Accord."

He stood in the doorway a long time.

Then he hung the rifle back on its hooks.

The elders called the next morning, very politely.

Blackfen would search the house again. Blackfen needed no help from hunters.

They searched it. They found peaches.

So Dagny lay on the ridge above the north draw every day with binoculars and a thermos and wrote down who came and went.

Nobody came. Nobody went.

And Josie turned six weeks old.

She woke on the twenty-third to the first snow of the year.

I carried her to the kitchen window in the knitted hat with the wolf-ear holes.

Josie looked at the snow with her serious gray-blue eyes.

Then she sneezed.

"That's her review," Dagny said, and wrote it down.

My father took her out on the porch for a moment, bundled.

Now she could say she'd been in it.

He came back with snow in his beard and a look on his face.

Emmett's truck died at the bottom of our road at four.

I watched from the window as my father walked down to it with a toolbox.

They stood side by side in the snow, looking into the engine.

"Fuel pump," my father said.

"Alternator," said Emmett.

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