Chapter 24: Beside Him

The long table ran across the pass road, right through the white post.

Maisy had come up with it.

She said if the two packs were going to eat together, they should do it on the line.

That way neither could say the other had come to them.

Torben's wolves had carried it down in sections on their shoulders.

Ridgemoor's cooks had covered it from end to end.

By noon the plates stood in a row for five hundred people.

I walked the length of it with a dish towel over my shoulder.

I told a woman her gravy was too thin, and a boy where to put the bread.

Nobody called me Luna while I did it, and I found I liked that.

At one o'clock a delivery truck came up the pass road from the Ridgemoor side and stopped at the post.

Heath got down from the cab.

He wore a plain canvas coat and work gloves.

He had lost weight, and he did not meet anyone's eyes.

Behind him, in the bed, stood a row of red fuel drums, strapped down.

"For the Blackfern gate," he said to nobody. "First of the winter."

Torben's beta crossed the road and took the clipboard out of his hand.

She inspected the drums.

She signed.

Heath got back in the cab and drove away down the mountain.

A hundred and fifty wolves watched him go, and then they turned back to the food.

"That's a start," Maisy said, at my elbow.

"It's a start."

"Are you going to let me finish my pie?"

"It's on the table," I said. "Go."

She went.

I stood alone at the white post for a moment.

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