They Cut Out My Wolf. My Father Hunts Wolves. novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Across the River

Rue answered me.

Her voice rose up over the black water and broke in the middle, and then she howled again, closer to the bank.

I howled back until my throat bled.

Every light in the house came on.

By morning there were eleven trucks in the yard.

Hunters stood around the fire barrel with coffee, men and women I'd known since I was in diapers.

Old men who'd taught me to shoot. Women who'd taught me to skin a deer.

None of them would look at my wrists.

My father had a map of the valley spread across the kitchen table, weighted at the corners with shotgun shells.

Blackfen land was colored in with red pencil.

"The Hollow first," he was saying. "Then the pack house. Then wherever that old woman sleeps."

"Josiah," one of the hunters said carefully, "that's forty wolves."

"Forty-one with the girl."

"Dad," I said from the doorway.

He looked up.

He'd been up all night. I could see it in the gray under his eyes.

"You heard her," he said quietly. "You heard her crying over there."

"I heard her."

"Then you know why."

"I know why." I came in and put my hands flat on the map. "And you're not doing it."

The kitchen got very still.

Nobody tells Josiah Shrike no at his own table.

"Calla."

"It was my blood on that stone," I said. "So it's my word that brought you home. That's how the pact goes. You taught me that on the porch."

"I did."

"Then here's my word. Nobody dies."

One of the old hunters set his coffee down.

"There are pups in that pack house," I said. "There are kids who don't know what their Alpha did last night. There are wolves who held my shoulders because he told them to, and I want their names, not their skulls."

My father's jaw worked under his beard.

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