evidence of my release swirl away down the drain.
Stumbling out of the shower, I dry off while chewing on a Teeny Greeny Breath Fresh Teeth Treat. Dressed, my hair finger combed, I come back out to the wolves wild and gathered in a furry puddle on the floor.
Ziggy is chewing on the strip of birch bark I’d been using to mark my place in a thick tome about the Salem witch trials that I’d gotten from the lupine library. I lift my mattress, sending him scrabbling frantically to the floor along with my piled blankets, then I lie down, open the book, trying to remember where I’d left off reading the night before. Trying to ignore the shuffling and contented sighs of the wolves beside me.
I can’t find my place.
Grabbing my pillow, I leave my book and lie down on the piled blankets on the floor. Beside me, jaws pop in a yawning whimper. Paws scrabble in hunting dreams against the wooden floor. The musty, musky smells of fur and wheezed wolf breath mix with the breezes and the rustling of leaves and calling of birds and the humming of crickets and all the lulling sounds of life being lived in summer.
* * *
After Evening Song, we load the trucks with shovels and picks and chains and start the long drive to undo what I spent so long doing.
I wasn’t there when August bought this huge tract of land, but I was certainly there when Daniel Leary, August’s human consigliere, passed a manila envelope to a state administrator. I stood silently behind Leary, my hand on the back of the commercial-grade chair, looking at a rust stain on the threadbare carpet. After Leary explained the need to speed along permissions and reports, the man hesitated.
They all do, the first time. My job was to raise my eyes when he hesitated. As soon as he saw the crumpled steel chair back, he slid the envelope into his desk drawer.
Then he began talking nonstop about area jobs and progress and improvements to the land. Like they all do.
The first time.
Ostensibly, everything was done to prepare for a pipeline from shale plays in Nova Scotia to points south. In reality, August wanted to tear a path into Homelands. He put me in charge of the human work crew, and when two of them had to be decommissioned, I drove the excavator that tore through the land at the edge of Homelands myself.
This was the last stretch we cleared. August didn’t want the Great North knowing what was going on until it was too late to start the slow remedies of law and lobbying.
At the top of the access road, Ziggy pulls the truck to a stop. Wolf after wolf jumps down from the truck, hitting the ground with a heavy squelch. Since I was riding the hump, I am the last one out, landing next to a circle of dumbfounded Pack. Their backs are silvery in the headlights of the truck, long shadows stretching out across a field of mud, exposed stones, and wood chips. There is a deep, silty pond near the middle, left by the stump of a particularly big tree. A few more stubborn stumps remain: those we cut low, drilling in holes filled with potassium nitrate. A dead bird lies moldering near the roots of one.
I stare at the ruined desolation of muck and sawdust, all brown and gray except for that same muddied yellow excavator. The wind smells like rust and iron and diesel, like blood in a wound that will never clot.
Ziggy squats next to a sapling bent into the mud. When he tries to lift it, it snaps off in his big hand. He stares at it, distraught, then he strides toward the gap between the mountain to the west and the range to the north. It had been filled with loose rock until the very end. When the hunters were celebrating their upcoming trophies and the Great North lay helpless as the Iron Moon took hold, the excavator ripped open access to Homelands. The bearded devastation of Ziggy’s face does nothing to disguise his heartbreak. I stand next to him, looking over the dark profile of Homelands like I had on that first night when it reminded me of my mother’s warning about forests stark and grim.
“The Alpha said to wait for her,” Ziggy says without looking at me. “She doesn’t want us to start until she is here to watch over the forever wolves.”
“I’ve