Edmund Graves's Arc

Chapter 6 of 8

Edmund did not sleep. By first light he was at the tree line with the short spade and a coil of wire, watching the pines toward the boarded cottage. The wolf had stood there yesterday and looked from him to the burial and back. Any tracker who followed that animal would end at the crawlspace lattice. He could not move the body again so soon. He had to move the wolf. He baited a spot near the deer path with a strip of raw pork from the icebox. He set the wire in a loop between two young pines, low, at chest height for a running dog. He staked the free end to a root. Then he sat behind a rock with the spade across his knees and waited. The plan was simple. Catch it. Kill it. Bury it deeper than the hiker. He heard the girl before he saw her. A small voice calling a name he did not know, then boots in dry needles. She came around the bend in a green vest with a satchel bumping her hip, braid over one shoulder. Ten years old, maybe eleven. A neighbor's child he had never spoken to. She stopped at the pork and looked at the wire and then at him behind the rock. "Mister, that's a snare," Maddie said. Her voice was flat, not scared. "You can't put those here. My dad walks through." Edmund stood up slow. He made his face into the face he used at the feed store. "Just for coyotes. Been at the trash." She did not move. She was looking past him now. He turned his head. The wolf stood on the path, brown and gray, yellow eyes steady. It had come in without a sound. It looked at the wire. It looked at the girl. Then it stepped over the loop, walked past the pork, and sat down beside her boots like it belonged there. Maddie put her hand on its shoulder without thinking. "He follows me sometimes," she said. "Since summer." Edmund's mouth went dry. The animal that knew where the hiker lay was now a child's companion. A pet the whole road would see. If he killed it here, she would tell. If he touched her, someone would come looking within the hour, and the pines behind him held a shallow grave a quarter mile off. He made himself smile. He bent and picked up the pork. "Bad idea, you're right. Sorry, girl." He cut the wire free with his knife and pocketed the loop. She watched him walk back toward his house. The wolf watched too, sitting at her leg like a dog on a porch. Edmund reached his door and shut it and put his forehead against the wood. The count still stood at thirteen. The witness now had a witness of her own.