They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Nine Names

"Dag," I said from the doorway.

"They're going home," she said. "All nine. I've got the towns from her book and the names from Dad's."

She didn't turn around.

"I built them boxes," she said. "Cedar. I measured."

It took her the rest of January to find every family.

On the first of February my father put nine cedar boxes in the bed of the truck, wrapped in a quilt, and we drove.

Dagny had typed new cards for every one.

A real name.

A real town.

And under it, one line: Did not kill by choice.

The first house was a ranch outside Darby.

A woman in a barn coat opened the door.

She looked at my father, and at the box in his arms, and she knew before he said a word.

"I'm Josiah Shrike," he said. "I'm the one who shot your son. On the Bass Creek road, nine years ago. I'm here to tell you I was wrong, and to bring him home."

She took the box.

Then she slapped him, hard, across the face.

He didn't move. He stood on her porch and let her.

"Thank you," she said, crying. "Thank you for bringing him."

The second family wouldn't open the door.

My father set the box on their step and stood in the snow with his hat off for ten minutes.

Then the door opened a crack, and an old man reached out and took it in.

The fourth was the one from the Lolo trail.

The she-wolf who cried.

Her father was a small man with a gray mustache who ran a hardware store.

He held the box in both hands on the shop counter.

"She cried?" he said.

"She was crying when I found her," my father said. "I thought wolves did that. I should have asked her why."

The man nodded for a long time.

"She always cried when she was lost," he said. "Since she was little."

My father had to go wait in the truck after that one.

The last stop was the one that just said Pup, wouldn't say.

It was a trailer at the end of a long road above Stevensville, with two old people and a very fat dog.

The old woman opened the box and looked inside and put her hand on the skull, gentle, on a head.

"He wouldn't tell you his name?" she said.

"No, ma'am," my father said.

The old man started to laugh.

He laughed until he had to sit down on the step.

"Wouldn't tell anybody anything," he wheezed. "Stubborn as a stump. Wouldn't tell the school his name for a week in first grade."

Dagny laughed too.

It came out of her like a bark. I'd never heard my sister laugh like that in my life.

Then she was crying, still laughing, with her face in my shoulder.

The old woman patted her back.

We drove home in the dark.

Nobody talked. Dagny fell asleep with her head on the window and her notebook open in her lap.

On the last page she'd written nine names in a column, each with a check mark.

Emmett was at the kitchen table when we came in, feeding Josie her bottle.

He looked at my father's face and got up and put a plate in the oven to warm without asking.

My father ate it. Then he went to bed at eight.

He stopped in the hall on the way.

"I'm a very heavy sleeper," he said, to nobody. "Always have been. Dagny, you've got the baby tonight."

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