Edmund Graves's Arc

Chapter 7 of 8

By afternoon Edmund saw the girl again from his kitchen window. She was at the fence line with the wolf at her heel, closer to his property than yesterday. She had a stick and was poking at something in the leaves. The wolf watched the woods, not her. Edmund set down his coffee. The boarded cottage lay a quarter mile through the pines behind her, and she was drifting that way. He could not shoot her. He could not shout at her and make her remember him as the strange man with the wire. He needed her afraid of these woods without being afraid of him. He went to the shed and found the old ax handle and a burlap sack. Then he thought better of it and took only a small game call from a nail on the wall, a wooden tube that made a wounded rabbit's cry. He circled wide through the trees, downwind, past the cottage with its plywood windows. He kept the crawlspace lattice at his back and moved toward the deer path she was following. When he judged the distance right, he crouched behind a deadfall and blew the call twice, short and thin. Brush cracked to his left. Not the girl. Something smaller and lower crashed through the ferns and stumbled into the clearing between them. A bear cub. Brown, knee-high, eyes wide, mouth open in a small startled sound. It froze in the leaves and stared at nothing. Edmund went very still. A cub meant a sow. He could hear the girl now, close, calling the wolf. Then the wolf came through the trees at a trot, hackles up, and put itself between the cub and the sound of the girl's boots. Its yellow eyes found Edmund behind the deadfall. It held there one beat. Then it turned its head sharply back the way she was coming and gave a low, hard bark. Maddie stopped. Edmund heard her boots slide in the needles. "Come back," she said to the wolf. "Come on. Come." The wolf barked again, driving her. She retreated. Edmund heard the crashing in the brush grow louder somewhere north, a heavier animal moving fast, and the cub bolted toward it. The wolf stayed a moment longer, eyes on Edmund's hiding place, then turned and followed the girl back toward the road. Edmund waited until the woods went quiet. He crawled out and walked the deer path to where she had turned around. Her boot prints stopped forty yards short of the cottage. Tomorrow her mother would hear about the bear and the girl would be kept to the yard for a week, maybe longer. He walked home the long way. The wolf had moved her off his ground for him. It had also looked him in the face and chosen not to bring her closer. He understood then that the animal was not protecting the burial. It was protecting the girl. From him.