Chapter 2 The Wolf I Buried

I did not go back to the evacuation center.

There is a protocol for what happened to me on that slope. I know it by heart because I helped write the county's version of it. You get checked by a paramedic. You get a bottle of water and a lecture about smoke inhalation. You fill out a form that goes to a file cabinet nobody opens. I did none of it. I walked away from the ambulance and got into my truck and drove north until the road turned to gravel and the gravel turned to a track that only county vehicles and lost hunters ever used.

The lookout had not changed since the last time I climbed those stairs. It was a green wooden box on stilts at the top of a ridge, with a map table and a cot and a woodstove with a crack in its door. It had been decommissioned in the nineties, and nobody had bothered to take it down. The stairs complained under my boots the way they always had.

I shut the door behind me and sat down on the floor with my back against the cot frame, and I let it come.

I want to explain what a shift is like when you have spent fifteen years refusing to have one. It is not a matter of deciding. It is like a sneeze that has been building behind your eyes since you were twelve, and you have been holding your breath, and you have been pressing the back of your hand to your nose, and you have been telling yourself that if you just keep very still, it will go away. And then something presses a muzzle to your hand in the middle of a burning forest, and your whole body forgets every lie you ever told it.

My spine went first. It always went first. There was a slow grinding along the vertebrae as though someone were running a thumb down a bead necklace, and I felt my shoulders roll forward and my hips shift and my jaw begin to lengthen, and I made a sound that was not a human sound, and then I stopped.

I stopped because I was afraid.

That is the ugly truth of it. I had a fire burning a mile wide outside and a wolf howling behind my ribs and I could not get past the picture in my head: the night my sister died, the door of the clinic swinging on its hinge, and me on the floor with my hands still human and my sister's blood seeping between them. I had told myself for fifteen years that if I ever let it out again, someone else would end up on that floor.

So I held it. I held it while my muscles cramped and my skin crawled and something behind my eyes clawed to get out. I held it until my vision went grey at the edges and I had to put my forehead on my knees, and then I vomited into a bucket by the stove that had been there since before I was born.

The sun went down while I sat there. The smoke outside thinned and then thickened again as the wind moved it around. Somewhere down in the valley a helicopter went over and went away. I drank two swallows from the water bottle in my pack, and I did not shift, and eventually the thing inside me went quiet. Not asleep. That was finished. Just quiet, the way a dog is quiet when it hears a door open.

It was full dark when I stood up. My legs were shaky. I got the lantern going and stood at the big window with my hands on the sill and looked out over the valley, and the valley looked back at me in bits of orange where the fire was working.

The sill under my hands was rough. I ran my palm along it out of habit, and my fingers caught on something that was not grain.

I looked down. There were scorch marks on the wood.

Not old ones. The lookout had been used before, and the woodstove had made its own marks on the floor over the years. These were on the windowsill, at the corner, a fan of blisters where something hot had touched the wood and pulled away, and there was a finer trail of them running along the edge of the frame and down to the corner of the wall. I put my face close. The smell was faint and chemical, and it was not pine and it was not the stove. I have been around accelerant. I have smelled it in burned-out garages and on the edges of suspicious fires and in the county's training pit out at the airport.

Gasoline.

I got out my flashlight and went over that windowsill like a woman reading a legal document. The marks were a splash, a stop, a change of direction. Something had caught fire here, against the glass, and someone had put it out or it had burned itself out. There were two tiny holes in the window frame that did not belong there, and when I got close I could see where something had been driven in and pulled out again.

I thought about the arson call I had answered last spring. A man in Corvallis who burned his own barn for the insurance and did such a bad job of it that the burn pattern looked like a child's drawing. The investigator had shown me the mark of a propane torch against the sill and I had said, well, that is not how lightning works, and he had laughed and said no ma'am, it is not.

This was not lightning either. This was not a cigarette thrown into dry grass. Someone had opened this lookout's window and set something burning against it.

I sat back on my heels in the middle of the floor with the flashlight beam trembling on the wood, and I made myself think it through in order. The lookout sits on the ridge above the den. You can see the pack's roof from the north window if you know where to look. Whoever put those marks on the sill knew exactly how far away the ridge was and wanted to watch something burn. There was no better seat in the whole valley.

I got up and walked the lookout from end to end. I did not know what I was looking for. I found it anyway, under the mattress of the cot: a folded sheet of paper gone soft at the creases, and inside it, a picture cut from a magazine and a single line written in pencil in the corner, in a hand I did not recognize.

The picture was of the Sapphire Mountains. The line said: nine is not enough.

I stood there with that paper in my hand and the lantern guttering and the smell of gasoline still in my nose, and I felt the ground move under me in a way that had nothing to do with the fire.

Nine is not enough. I say nine when I am scared. I have said it since I was a child and I could not tell you why, and I said it under my breath the way other people say a prayer. It is not a thing I tell people. My sister knew it. My mother knew it. That is the whole list, and my mother has been dead for twenty years and my sister for fifteen.

I put the paper in my jacket pocket, and then I stood in the middle of the lookout and listened to my own heartbeat and told myself the obvious thing, which was that anyone in the valley could have said a number. It was a coincidence. Coincidences happen. The paper had been under a mattress for years, probably, and someone had written a note to themselves about a road, route nine, evacuation route nine, because everybody in the county had been arguing about route nine since June.

But the window was scorched. The window was scorched and the note said nine, and the fire on the ridge had started at the bunker and the bunker sat under the lookout like a coin under a cup, and Dane had said the boy was pack and that the only wolf on that slope was him.

I had to get out of there. I had to get back to my truck and down to the fairgrounds and find Tessa and put all of this in front of somebody who would listen. I picked up the lantern and turned to the door and stopped, because there were boots on the stairs.

One set. Heavy. Coming up at a pace that was not apologetic.

I had left my radio in the truck. I had left my phone in the truck too, in the cup holder, because the fire season had gotten into the habit of saving me from having to answer it. I looked around the little room for something to hold in my hand and found the fire axe in its bracket by the door, and I took it down and held it across my body and stood to the side of the doorframe.

The boots reached the landing. There was a knock.

"Rhea."

I knew the voice. I had known it for fifteen years and it had said my name that morning in the gravel by an ambulance. I did not lower the axe.

"It is Dane," he said, through the door. "I saw the lantern light. I have been looking for you since noon."

"Go away."

"I cannot do that." A pause. "I need to tell you something, and I need to tell you before someone else does. The boy in the ambulance. He woke up on the way to Missoula and told the doctor a grey wolf bit him. He also told the doctor that the grey wolf was a woman."

I had the axe head against my palm and my back against the wall and my heart going like a bird in a sack, and I did not say anything.

"Rhea," Dane said, quieter now. "Open the door. There is a box of matches on this landing and a scorched spot in front of the window, and you and I both know what that means. I have been at the fire all day and I have been thinking about a word your sister used once, a long time ago, when she was trying to tell me something without telling me. The word was nine."

I looked down at the folded paper in my jacket pocket. My mouth was dry.

"Open the door," he said. "Please."

I put my hand on the latch.