Mercedes Morgan's Arc

Chapter 8 of 21

Mercedes stood at the summit with the west fork open below her. Fresh elk tracks cut across the snow in a wide band, headed down into the valley. She had come this far to see the herd with her own eyes. But the cub was awake on the sled, whining, and the wind was at her back. Any elk within a mile would smell wolf before she got close. She could not walk into that valley with a wolf pup on her sled and expect to see anything but empty snow. She knelt by the cub and thought it through. She could not leave him. He was too small, and there were other wolves in this country. She dug through her grandmother's pack and pulled out the bundle of soft cloth wrapped around dried herbs, the one her grandmother had rolled for wounds and for calming sick children. She untied it and spread the herbs on a flat stone. Balsam, yarrow, dried mint, and the sharp green needle her grandmother had called snowbreath. She crushed them together with the butt of her knife. Then she took the small stitched pouches from the bottom of the pack, the bright charms her grandmother had sewn for the cradle years ago, and stuffed each one with the crushed herb. She tied three around the cub's neck and one to the sled rail. The cub sneezed. The wolf smell did not vanish, but the herb smell rose over it, thick and green, the smell of a nursery, not a den. She led the horses down the west fork a quarter mile and staked them in a stand of pine, downwind of the valley floor. She left the cub on the sled with the charms and a strip of hare to chew. Then she climbed a rock spur that jutted out over the basin, went flat on her belly in the snow, and pulled the old binoculars from her coat. The housing was worn black, the brass rims dulled from her grandmother's hands. She turned the wheel until the far side of the valley came sharp. For a long moment she saw only trees and open snow. Then a shape moved at the treeline. Then another. Then the whole line broke and stepped out into the open, twenty head, then thirty, brown against the white, antlers up, calves close to the flanks. Mercedes lay still and counted them. Thirty-four. She watched them paw the snow for moss and drink from a break in the ice. She watched until her hands went numb on the brass. The herd was real. It was here. She lowered the binoculars and pressed her forehead to the cold stone. Now she had to find a way to bring them home.