is happening here?” she murmured. “Why isn’t anything ever simple?”
“If we had the answer to that, we could get rich off it,” Beth said. Rose frowned. Beth got off the ground and went to her mother, then hugged her stiff and frustrated form. “Mom, only God knows what’s going to happen to the Blazing B in the next year and a half,” Beth said. “But no matter what happens, he’ll take care of us.” Her eyes locked on her grandfather’s. They overflowed with tears of hilarity, and he wiped them off his cheeks.
“God is good,” he said.
“Yes,” Beth echoed. “God is good.”
“You’ve all gone crazy,” Rose accused.
Wally said, “Bananas!”
Everyone stared at him.
He beamed at Beth. “I had bananas for breakfast.”
42
Later that evening, as the last rays of summer sun were slipping behind the San Juans, Beth went to the horse pasture with an apple for her father's horse Temuche. The sorrel gelding ate the juicy fruit with a great deal of chomping and then pushed at her hands looking for more treats.
“I think Hastings was holding out on me about the wolf pack,” she confided “I think that's why he didn’t flinch when Mercy saved us from the cougar.”
Temuche pawed the dirt once.
“Were you in on the secrecy too? What else do I need to know, old fellow?”
He pawed the earth another time, and something in the ground caught Beth’s eye.
The paw prints of a wolf.
Temuche didn’t seem at all troubled by the tracks cutting through their feeding ground. None of the other horses did either. Maybe the horses recognized Mercy for his true self. During her journey back to the Blazing B, Beth had decided that the appearance of that wolf was a supernatural revelation of God’s glory in one of the most natural expressions on earth: a wild animal returning to the home where he had once been driven out. Without anything but hope to give her confidence, she saw a promise in the family’s discovery of the wolves’ den—a promise that even if the Borzois were driven off this land, someday they would be allowed to return.
She followed the tracks and quickly realized that the trail was headed for the barn. The side door was wide open, and the prints headed directly inside.
The interior lights had been left on and were spilling out into the night sky. Beth rushed in.
“Mercy?” she whispered.
She heard a rustling in the tack room and moved toward it first, and as she rounded the doorway she surprised Jacob Davis, who was standing under the bare bulb of the little tack room, looking down at the corner where his empty saddle rack protruded from the rough wood wall.
He startled when she barged in, which startled her. They both stood there for a minute, she with her hand over her heart, waiting for it to settle. Jacob ran his hand through his hair and laughed lightly.
“You snuck up on me,” he said.
“Sorry. I didn’t expect anyone here right now.”
“Me neither.”
“What are you doing?” She took a few steps into the room and noted that Mercy’s paw prints crossed the dusty floor and went straight into the corner where Mathilde’s saddle should have been hanging. There was just one set of prints headed in one direction. They led to the wall and seemed to disappear into the saddle rack itself. She couldn’t stop staring at it and suddenly wished that she wasn’t here, in this room with those prints and this man and that empty rack on the wall.
He said, “Do these mysterious wolf friends of yours walk through walls?”
“Mercy opened a door by himself once, but walls—I don’t think he walks through walls.”
“Huh.” The response was half impressed, half skeptical. Jacob crossed his arms and joined her in staring at the corner where the prints stopped so inexplicably.
“Where do you think he went?”
“He goes wherever he wants,” she says.
“Maybe you can tell me more about him.”
Beth nodded but didn’t know where to start.
Jacob kept his eyes on the empty rack and said, “I was going to ask if you’d mind me tagging along when you and your grandfather take the car back to Burnt Rock. I can drive the trailer for Hastings. I’d like to hear the whole story.”
“It’s a pretty long story,” she said.
“If the drive’s not long enough for it, we can find something else to do until you tell it all. However long it takes.”
“Okay,” she said.
He said, “It took guts to do what you did. Going after your grandfather like