Now I retreated to my leather armchair and a copy of Edmund Morris’s biography of Teddy Roosevelt. I’d been a history major at Colby but had found the demands of my profession—the long hours, the endless paperwork, the constant motion—had broken my habit of reading for pleasure.
Sitting there, I remembered Dani’s gibe at me for being nearly middle-aged.
Thirty didn’t feel old.
Except when it did.
Somehow I had forgotten that Roosevelt’s first significant achievements came as the police commissioner of New York City. He’d rooted out corruption from among his own force, planted the seeds for what would become criminal-justice academies, and roamed the streets at midnight to observe his men in action. I wondered what TR would have done to reform the Maine prison system.
I fell asleep in my chair with the book open on my lap.
I had a dream that a fly had somehow found its way inside my house and had landed on my shoulder. It seemed to want to tell me something. But when I turned my head aside, it began to shriek.
I sat upright and the book fell to the floor. The lights were still on, but I had forgotten to add wood to the stove, and the room had grown cold. The buzzing was coming not from a fly, but from my phone.
It was nearly two A.M., and my friend Warden Gary Pulsifer was on the line. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“What’s going on, Gary?” I expected the worst, as one always does at that hour.
“Listen, I knew you’d want to hear this as soon as possible. I think you might want to drive up to Pennacook as fast as you can.”
It was an old mill town on the Androscoggin River in western Maine, most noteworthy in my mind for having been Dani Tate’s birthplace. Pennacook sat at the foot of a chain of low mountains that were the trailing edge of the Appalachian Range. My sleep-fuzzed mind could think of zero reasons I might need to go there, especially at this miserable hour.
“Why?”
“Shadow’s been hurt.”
“Shadow?”
“That wolf of yours is bleeding to death in the back of my truck.”
PART 2All Stories Are About Wolves
12
Déjà vu.
“Will he live?” I asked the veterinarian.
“What do you want to hear?” Dr. Elizabeth Holman said.
“An honest answer to my question.”
“Then no. He’s not going to live. I doubt he’ll make it through the next twenty-four hours.”
The wolf lay motionless on the stainless steel table between us. He was even bigger than I remembered: seventy inches long from nose to tail, 140 pounds of muscle, bone, and sinew. His front claws were longer than jackknives. His canine teeth could have punched holes through the skull of a bull moose.
But his ordeal had left the powerful animal diminished. On his desperate flight through the forest, he had lost clumps of black fur and torn the pads of his feet to shreds. Those injuries were mild compared to what the surgery had done to him. He had an endotracheal tube jammed down his throat and a catheter taped to his foreleg where fluids were being pumped into his stagnant bloodstream. The vet tech had shaved his coat down to the skin in two other places: where the arrow had entered and where the point had exited. The rest of the carbon-fiber shaft had remained inside the wolf’s body for God only knew how long. Days? Maybe even weeks?
Careful to avoid the pillowy bandage taped to his rib cage, I pressed my palm against the wolf’s side and felt the faintest heat coming through my bare hand. I hadn’t wanted to reveal my emotions to the vet or her assistant. Under the circumstances, it was important that I appear aloof, disinterested, professional. When in truth the attack upon the animal couldn’t have felt any more personal to me.
What happened, Shadow? Who did this to you?
The small room was utterly unlike the surgical wing I had spent so many hours in the previous day. Yet I couldn’t shake the eerie sensation that I was reliving that earlier experience. A priest had once described purgatory to me as a netherworld in which you were forced to suffer repeatedly with your sins until you could finally see them with moral objectivity.
“I’d like to have a look at the arrow.”
“My assistant is bagging it up for you.”
“None of you touched it, I hope.”
Dr. Holman thrust out her bony chin. She was thin limbed and hollow cheeked in the way people are who run long distances every day, rain or shine. People who are so physically fit they appear terminally ill. I noticed a tiny gold crucifix held by a chain in the hollow of her throat. “We wear gloves when we operate, Warden Bowditch.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“The Pennacook Hospital for Animals isn’t some fancy clinic like you have downstate, but we’re fully accredited—”
“I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m a bit sleep-deprived.” With its fluorescent lights and white-painted walls, the operating room was too bright for my tired eyes.
“That makes two of us.” Lips pursed, she looked me up and down. “Gary—Warden Pulsifer—tells me you’re a warden investigator. Is that why you’re not wearing a uniform?”
“Actually I am on my vacation. You can call me Mike by the way.”
“My friends call me Lizzie.”
I removed my phone from my pocket and found the recording function. “Can you repeat for the record what you told me before—about the exact nature of his injuries? And how you treated them?”
A divot appeared between her eyebrows. “I thought you were on vacation.”
“I may need to open a criminal investigation, depending on what happened.”
Her gaze drifted toward the door. “Wouldn’t you rather we talk in my office?”
“Here is fine.”
The answer displeased her because she was understandably exhausted and wanted to sit down. But I wasn’t ready to leave Shadow’s side. These were likely to be my last moments with him.
With
