Noah to the van.
They drove home in deathly silence. Noah was staring out the window, brow furrowed, immersed deep in his angry thoughts. He was practically vibrating with rage, so Alex left him alone.
The journey home seemed to last forever, but finally, Alex parked the van next to one of the trucks and got out. Noah followed. He stood next to the van for a few seconds before he slammed the door shut so hard that Alex was tempted to check if the windows were still intact.
“Fuck!” Noah suddenly screamed at the top of his lungs and slammed his palm against the side of the van a couple of times. Without looking at Alex, he stalked out of there.
Alex stared after him. He wished he knew what to say or do, but he had nothing. Aside from somehow resurrecting the dead wolf, there probably was nothing he could do to make it better. He sighed as he locked the car and dropped the keys off to the office where Carl had hooks on the wall for all the necessary keys.
Alex figured he’d give Noah some time to cool off before he attempted to talk to the guy, so he went on and started with the evening feeding. Things on the animal front had changed a lot in the weeks Alex had spent here.
The moose had been set free. The bear, a permanent resident due to his missing leg, had gotten somewhat used to Alex, or at least, it didn’t roar every time Alex approached his enclosure. There was another new deer in one of the enclosures, next to where the moose had been a week ago. The litter of fox pups that had been tiny, helpless balls of fur when Alex arrived to the center had grown a lot. They were now constantly play-fighting and chasing after each other and chewing everything in their paths. Alex always got a kick out of how they all stopped whatever they were doing when Alex was anywhere in the vicinity and cocked their heads to the side in unison as they waited to see if anything interesting would happen.
“Only food, guys. Kind of,” Alex muttered. The pups couldn’t hear him, but he still sometimes talked to them. Talk about irrational behavior. The mixture of dog kibble, formula and chunks of raw chicken was anything but appetizing, but the pups seemed to like it well enough. Feeding them was always tricky. They were a curious bunch and had been in the center from when they were only a couple of days old when their mother had been killed. They were iffy about humans, but not exactly afraid, even with all the precautions of gloves and the makeshift walls in front of their enclosure. It wasn’t a good thing for a fox not to be afraid of humans.
Carl seemed to think they could go back to living in the wild like normal foxes, so they were all trying to limit the contact with the animals as much as possible. Food was scattered around the enclosure to give them a chance to hunt for it, and Alex was only tasked with cleaning the place every few days. No talking, no touching, and as far as Carl was concerned, it would have been best if Alex had found a way to turn himself invisible.
Alex finished his rounds and cleaned the feed buckets. Carl still hadn’t gotten back. Alex didn’t know how he even planned to get back seeing that Alex and Noah had taken the van, but frankly, Alex didn’t care that much about it. Carl was a big boy. He’d survive.
Now Noah, on the other hand… Alex was definitely getting worried about him. The guy had disappeared somewhere, and Alex had no idea where to look for him, or if he even should.
Done with work, Alex went to the bunkhouse and opened the fridge to figure out some dinner. Too bad he hadn’t gone to the store in a few days, but he had an entertaining five minutes trying to figure out if there were recipes that would contain only salt, pickles and stale bread. Finally, he just tossed the bread and ate pickles out of a jar. The salt went back to the cabinet for the next time Alex felt like venturing into the culinary world.
He tried watching a movie, but thoughts of Noah’s whereabouts kept him too occupied to concentrate. Finally, he gave up and got out of the house, grumbling to himself the