"Yes," Lucy said simply. "She is." She hopped off the fence rail and picked up the old bolt he'd replaced and turned it over in her hands, examining it with the same attention she gave to most things, as if the worn-out bolt also had something to tell her if she looked carefully enough. Then she set it down on the post and walked back toward the bunkhouse, apparently satisfied with how the afternoon had gone.
He picked up his tools. He stood by the gate for a minute, testing the hinge again, pressing it back and forth with his thumb. "Love with nowhere to go." He put the tools away and went back to work. The first real snow came on a Saturday in mid-November, early enough to be a warning but not so hard as to be the thing itself.
It came overnight and left 8 inches on the ground and a sky that looked like it had been considering more. Caleb was out at first light checking the livestock, testing the strength of the barn walls against the wind, walking the fence line to find any section that the weight of snow might have compromised. He was on the north fence when he heard Owen. The boy was calling from somewhere behind the barn, not frightened, just loud, with the particular volume of a child who has discovered something and wants everyone else to discover it, too, immediately. Caleb changed direction and came around the corner of the barn to find Owen standing knee-deep in snow, which on Owen was approximately thigh-deep, waving both arms.
"Look," Owen said. He was pointing at the tracks in the snow. Three sets, parallel, coming up from the tree line and stopping about 30 yards short of the barn, the tracks were large, clear, not dog tracks. Wolf. Caleb crouched down and looked at the nearest print.
Big, bigger than a hand, the claw marks clear and deep, fresh or close to it, pressed into snow that had stopped falling only a few hours ago. "When did you come out here?" He said. "Before breakfast." Owen said.
"Alone?" "Yes." Caleb stood up and looked at the tree line. Nothing moving, which didn't mean much. "Come here."
He said and picked Owen up under his arms and set him on his hip because Owen's legs weren't long enough for what was going to be the pace back to the bunkhouse and walked back at a speed that was deliberately unhurried because running near a tree line you couldn't see into clearly was a specific kind of bad idea. He told Mara and Evan at breakfast. Evan leaned over the table to look at the rough sketch Caleb made of the track placement. "Three of them." He said.
"At least." Caleb said. "Could be more that stayed back." "Are they dangerous?" Lucy said.
"Wolves are dangerous." Caleb said, "when there's not enough food, which there isn't this winter in these hills." "So, yes." Lucy said. "Yes."