“Meaning?”
“He lost somewhere between thirty to forty percent of the blood in his body.”
“What normally happens to a canine if he loses a third of his blood?”
“The same thing that would happen to you—massive irreversible organ failure leading to death. This animal shouldn’t even be alive.”
“I see.” They had bathed the wolf before surgery, but an earthy, canine smell still rose like heat from his body.
“The danger now is pneumothorax and infection. His immune system has been badly compromised. But the longer he holds on, the more hope we have.”
From behind me came a faint knock and Holman’s assistant entered the room. Like the doctor, she wore blue scrubs, but everything about her shouted teenager. Her movements were clumsy, tentative. She refused eye contact. She had a complexion like pancake batter and a streak of pink in her hair.
“Is now a good time?” She carried a gallon-sized plastic bag. It contained a black stick with red-and-white fletching. A layperson would have called the synthetic material “feathers.”
I extended a hand. “I’ll take that.”
“Shouldn’t you be heading home?” Holman said in a motherly voice that seemed to suit her.
“Don’t you need me to help remove his tube?”
“I’m going to leave it in a bit longer. And you need to get your kids ready for school.”
“I’d rather stay, Dr. H.”
“I’ll be here.”
“I’m worried that if I leave—”
“What happens next is all up to him now. It’s out of our hands.”
The young woman’s eyes and nose began to run. “I never saw a real wolf except in a zoo. I didn’t know there were wild ones around here.”
“There aren’t,” I said.
She gazed at me with her lips parted. If there were no wolves in Maine, what was this thing before us? But I didn’t explain my cryptic comment.
After she had closed the door, I raised the clear bag to the overhead light to examine the arrow. “This wasn’t shot with a bow.”
“You think somebody stabbed him with it?”
“That’s not what I meant. How long would you say this is?”
“Fifteen inches, give or take.”
“It’s sixteen inches,” I said. “The brand name has rubbed off, but it’s a Spider-Bite. I’m guessing the X2 model. You said the point had broken off, but it didn’t. If you look closely, you can see the shaft is intact. Only the broadhead is missing. It would have screwed into the end here. Imagine an arrowhead made up of three or four razor blades—”
The muscles in her thin neck grew tense again. “I know what a broadhead is. This isn’t the first animal I’ve seen that was shot by an arrow, let alone impaled on a foreign body.”
“That’s just it. Technically speaking, this isn’t an arrow at all. This is what used to be called a bolt or a quarrel. At sixteen inches, it’s too short to have been fired by most recurve or compound bows.”
Now it was her turn to rub her weary eyes. “I’m still not following you.”
“Whoever fired it used a crossbow.”
“Does that make a difference?”
“It doesn’t make a difference to the wolf. But it might help me find the son of a bitch who tried to kill him.”
We both fell silent. What Holman was thinking I couldn’t imagine. Within me, a dark storm was raging.
The joy I had felt at the prospect of Billy’s early release had been snuffed out. I couldn’t even remember having experienced it. The previous day seemed a lifetime ago.
I stared down now at the dying animal, my heart a vessel for molten metal.
Here he lay, the big, bad wolf. Since the dawn of humanity, his kind had been the embodiment of our every nameless fear. Rather than confront our own psychic failings, we had used our terror to wage a campaign of extermination against these rival predators. We had shot them from planes and poisoned them with strychnine-laced baits and imprisoned them in zoos for our children to gawk at. Were we any less afraid as a result? I didn’t think so. Humankind had created a sanitized, safety-cushioned world for ourselves—and we had never been more terrified.
I reached out a shaking hand toward the wolf. “Can you give me a minute alone with him, please?”
13
I had told myself I wanted something meaningful to do with my remaining time off. Now here it was.
Outside the clinic, the sky was as black as it had been when I’d arrived, but there was a hint of light now in the east. The air tasted crisp and metallic, and a scrim of frost lay across the lawn. April, in the Maine mountains, is a winter month. Not that I needed the reminder, having grown up not far from here.
In the darkness I could hear the thundering of the river across the highway. The Androscoggin has its beginnings in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, forty miles to the west. Snow had fallen heavily up in the Presidential Range that winter, and all the meltwater was rushing down to the distant sea. The flood carried great rafts of ice that made groaning sounds or even violent explosions when they slammed against each other in the surging stream.
The last time I had come through Pennacook, half a decade ago, it had also been nighttime, and the sky above the town had been sepia colored from the glow of the old Atlantic Pulp and Paper Mill. The smokestacks themselves had been illuminated all the way up from the ground, and the clouds of steam billowing
