Silver

You follow the silence downhill.

It's stupid. You know it's stupid while you're doing it. But your legs are already moving, skidding on needles, grabbing at branches, and your field kit is banging against your hip, and every part of you that spent six years learning to find hurt animals is pointed one direction.

You hear voices before you see anything. Low, urgent. Then a growl that turns into a word.

"...won't stop, Ro, it won't stop..."

You break through a screen of vine maple into a gully and stop dead.

There's a wolf on the ground. Big, sandy-colored, lying on its side in a spreading dark stain. A short black shaft sticks out of its shoulder. Rowan is on her knees beside it with both hands pressed around the wound, and blood is coming up between her fingers anyway. Two more people crouch nearby, a man and a woman you half recognize from the clearing, both pale.

The wolf's eyes roll toward you. Brown. Familiar.

Jesse. The cook with the guitar pick behind his ear.

"Why isn't he healing?" the woman is saying. "Why isn't he..."

"Silver," Rowan says through her teeth. "The tip's silver."

You're kneeling before you've decided to. "Move your hands."

Rowan looks up. For one second her eyes are pure gold and there's nothing human in them at all, and the hair on your arms stands straight up.

"Ethan," she says. "Go back to the truck."

"I've pulled arrows out of elk. I've stitched wolves hit by cars on I-90." You're already unzipping the kit. Gloves. Gauze. Hemostatic powder. Forceps. "Does silver work like poison or just block healing?"

A beat.

"Both," she says. "Slowly. Then fast."

"Then we don't have time for you to send me to the truck."

She moves her hands.

It's twelve minutes. It feels like a year.

The bolt is barbed, cheap and cruel, the kind of broadhead you can buy at any sporting goods store, except someone has dipped the whole head in something that gleams dull gray. Every time the metal shifts, Jesse's whole body seizes and the gully fills with a sound you'll hear in your sleep.

"Hold him," you say. "Rowan. Hold his head. Talk to him."

She does. She leans down and puts her forehead against his and murmurs to him, too low to hear, steady as a heartbeat. He stops thrashing.

You cut. You work the barbs free. You pull.

The bolt comes out with a wet sound and you throw it as far from him as you can. Then powder, pressure, gauze, pressure, your whole weight on your hands, counting under your breath the way your old mentor taught you.

Under your palms, slowly, something changes. The skin around the wound stops looking gray. The bleeding slows. Stops.

You look up. Rowan is staring at you.

Jesse's tail thumps, once, weakly, against the dirt.

"Oh thank God," the woman beside you whispers, and bursts into tears.

By the time they carry Jesse back to the trucks, half the pack has arrived.

They come out of the trees in ones and twos, some on four legs, some on two, pulling on shirts. Mara roars up in the tow truck. Dot appears from nowhere in an apron. Eli, very much human, hovers at the edge of everything with his hands jammed in his hoodie, looking like he might throw up.

And they look at you.

Not the way they did at the diner. Not curious. Something else. A big man with a beard nods at you, slow and deliberate, one man to another. Dot squeezes your bloody hand without caring about the blood.

"You did good, Ethan," she says. "You did real good."

You're sitting on the tailgate of Rowan's Ford, scrubbing your hands with water from a jug, when the crowd shifts.

Silas walks into the clearing in a quilted vest and spotless boots, like he's been out bird-watching. He takes in Jesse on a blanket in the back of Mara's truck. He takes in the blood. Then he looks at you.

"Well," he says. "Isn't this a coincidence."

"Silas." Rowan's voice is very quiet. Everyone nearby stops talking.

"Forgive me. I'm only saying what others are thinking." He spreads his hands to the crowd. "For two years there hasn't been a hunter on Blackpine land. Not one. Then the Alpha claims a human who works for a wolf tracking program, who has cameras on half our trails, and two days later one of our own gets shot with silver." He turns back to you, mild and sorrowful. "I'm not accusing anyone. I'm just asking the question the pack is going to ask."

The murmur that goes through the crowd isn't loud. It doesn't have to be.

You open your mouth. Rowan steps in front of you.

"The human just saved my brother's life with his bare hands," she says. "In front of all of you. If you've got evidence, Silas, bring it to council. If you've got questions, ask me. Not him."

"Of course," Silas says. "Of course, Rowan. That's all I wanted." He smiles at you over her shoulder. "Thank you for helping Jesse. Truly."

He walks away. The crowd lets him.

Later, when the trucks are pulling out and the light is going amber, you walk back down into the gully alone.

You don't know why. Maybe because Silas's question is crawling around inside your skull. Maybe because the scientist in you wants to know where the shot came from. Angle. Distance. You find the spot where Jesse fell: dark earth, scuffed needles. You turn slowly, tracing a line uphill toward where a shooter would stand.

Something glints on a tree trunk.

You walk up the slope. It's a big cedar, maybe forty yards from where Jesse went down, with a clear sight line straight to the gully.

Strapped to it at chest height, camouflage housing, nylon belt cinched tight, is a trail camera.

You know this camera. You know the scuff on the corner of the housing because you dropped it on a rock your second day here. You know the serial number sticker because you wrote it in your log in your own handwriting.

It's camera nine. The one with the deleted footage.

The one that's supposed to be four miles east.

Its little red light blinks at you. On. Recording.

Someone moved your camera here, to the exact spot a hunter would need to watch for wolves.

Behind you, a twig snaps.