Part Six: Before and After
The wildlife veterinarian — a lean, weathered man named Dr. Callum Ross who had been working with large animals for thirty years and had the hands and the eyes to prove it — arrived with two assistants and a portable examination kit and assessed the wolf with the same efficiency Andrea had brought to the baby. His expression, like Andrea’s, moved through alarm and into professional focus.
“Male, adult, large for his range,” he said, running careful hands along the wolf’s side. “Gunshot wound, here — small caliber, a few days old at least. Infection beginning in the surrounding tissue.” He pressed gently and the wolf made a sound — again, that sound Harold had no category for — and Callum Ross looked at the animal’s face with the expression of someone who understands a great deal about pain without being able to do anything about the understanding except act. “He’s been down for a while. Dehydrated. The blood loss wasn’t catastrophic, but combined with the infection and the cold and the time…” He trailed off.
“Is he going to be all right?” Max asked. He had moved back to allow the vet to work, but not far back.
Dr. Ross looked at the boy. He was the kind of man who did not soften things unnecessarily, Harold could tell — the kind who had learned that honesty, delivered with care, was more useful and more respectful than comfort that turned out to be false.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “He’s in poor condition. But he’s been in poor condition for a while and he’s still here, which tells me something about this animal.” He looked at the wolf again. “We’ll get him to the facility and stabilize him and see what we’re working with. That’s all I can tell you right now.”
Max nodded. He looked at the wolf. “He needs to know we’ll take care of him,” he said. “Can I—”
“Go ahead,” the vet said.
Max crouched down close to the wolf’s head. He didn’t touch the face — he was thoughtful enough to know not to touch an injured animal’s face. He just leaned close and spoke quietly, in the tone he used when he was being most serious: “We’ve got you now. You don’t have to stay anymore. She’s safe.”
The wolf’s eyes opened fully for the last time.
It looked at Max with those amber eyes — clear, present, entirely itself — for a long moment. Then it looked past him, toward where the paramedics were working, toward the sound that was still, weakly, persistently, making itself heard: the thin, insistent cry of a child who had been cold a long time and was beginning to be warm again.
Something in the wolf’s face — Harold could not explain this any better than that, and he had tried, in the months and years afterward, to find more precise language and never had — something changed. Settled. Released.
The amber eyes closed.
