CHAPTER 4: Vigil

By the third night, Claire had a system.

She ate dinner early—whatever Sarah had prepared, simple things, soup or sandwiches, food that didn't require much attention—and then positioned herself in the chair by her mother's window before the light failed. She told herself it was practical. She wanted to document what she was seeing, to observe it clearly and without the distortion of half-sleep and cold-induced confusion. She brought her father's old field notebook, found in the barn during an afternoon of restless searching, and a pen.

She did not tell herself she was keeping vigil. That word belonged to the wolves.

They came at dusk. Precisely at dusk—not the golden hour before, not the full dark after, but that specific threshold when the mountains went from purple to black and the meadow grass lost its color and became simply pale. Claire had tested this on the second night by watching the clock. Six forty-seven, which was the moment the meadow light died. Six forty-seven, which was when they emerged from the tree line, one by one, with the unhurried purpose of creatures that had never been confused about where they needed to be.

Seven of them. Always seven, always the same configuration—the silver female at center, three to her left, three to her right, spaced with that deliberate geometry that continued to resist any normal behavioral explanation Claire could construct.

She wrote everything down. Arrival time. Weather conditions. Formation. Duration. Behavior. The field notebook filled slowly with her careful handwriting, and she was aware, with a feeling that fell between irony and grief, that she was doing exactly what her father had done. Applying the tools of observation to something that observation alone couldn't contain.

---

On the fourth day, she drove to town.

The library in Dawson Creek was small—a single room attached to the back of the county offices, staffed by a woman named Margaret who wore reading glasses on a beaded chain and seemed genuinely delighted to have company on a Tuesday morning in October. Claire asked for whatever they had on wolf behavior and got three books, two wildlife management pamphlets, and an offer of coffee that she accepted.

She sat at the single reading table and went through everything methodically.

Wolves were highly intelligent, she read. Highly social, with complex pack structures governed by cooperation rather than simple dominance. They communicated through vocalizations, body posture, scent marking. Their territories could span hundreds of square miles. They were curious about humans, occasionally, but wary—proximity to human habitation was associated with threat, with the historical reality of being hunted to near-extinction. Healthy wolves didn't approach human dwellings. Didn't linger. Didn't hold formation while facing a building in the dark.

She read about known anomalous wolf behaviors. Wolves that had become habituated to humans through feeding—a problem, always, because it erased the fear response that kept both species safer. Wolves that had lost pack members and behaved erratically in grief. She read about the documented mourning behaviors of pack animals, the way wolves returned to sites where other wolves had died, the way they howled in patterns that biologists described carefully as appearing to serve a social bonding function while clearly struggling to avoid the word mourning.

She found one paper, published in a wildlife biology journal and buried in the back of a pamphlet collection, that described a pack in northern Minnesota that had repeatedly returned to the site of a human hunter's death—a man who had spent thirty years in their territory, who had never hunted them. The pack had made daily visits to the site for eleven days before ceasing. The researchers had no explanation they were comfortable publishing. The paper's conclusion read: Further study required.

Claire read that sentence twice and wrote it in the field notebook.

She couldn't find a single documented case of wolves maintaining a nightly vigil outside a dwelling for multiple consecutive days. She hadn't expected to. What she'd seen in the meadow didn't exist in the literature because, apparently, it had never happened before. Or if it had, no one had written it down in a way that survived the scrutiny of peer review.

She drove home with the books in the backseat and a feeling she recognized from difficult projects at work—the frustration of a problem that refused to resolve into its components.

---

Ruth watched them every night.

This was what Claire hadn't been prepared for. She'd expected her mother to sleep through the vigil, or to be only dimly aware of it through the window. Instead, Ruth was always awake when the wolves arrived, her eyes open and already fixed on the tree line as if she'd felt them coming before they emerged from the forest. She didn't ask Sarah to raise the head of the bed anymore. She'd started asking.

Claire watched her mother watching the wolves and couldn't read her expression. It wasn't fear—she was certain of that. Ruth Larsen had apparently run out of fear sometime in the past thirty years and not bothered to replenish it. It wasn't exactly grief, though grief was somewhere underneath. It wasn't anticipation in any ordinary sense.

It was the expression, Claire finally decided, of someone waiting for a long-postponed conversation to begin. The expression of obligation.

On the fifth night, Claire finally asked.

She'd held the question for days, reluctant to push, aware that with her mother time was no longer something that could be wasted on caution. Ruth was declining—slowly, steadily, like a tide going out. Some days she was sharp and present, her eyes tracking Claire's movements around the room with that characteristic intensity. Other days she drifted, spoke to people who weren't there, surfaced intermittently from somewhere deeper and further than sleep.

Tonight she was sharp.

The wolves had been at the tree line for twenty minutes. The silver female sat at center as always, patient as stone. Ruth's eyes moved between them with something that looked almost like recognition.

"Mom." Claire sat on the edge of the chair, leaning forward slightly. "What are they waiting for?"

Ruth didn't look at her immediately. Her gaze stayed on the wolves, on the silver female in particular, with a quality of communication that Claire found deeply unsettling—as if they were exchanging something that didn't require words or movement or any medium Claire had been taught to recognize.

Then Ruth's eyes came to her, and they were clear and direct and carried the full weight of whatever she'd been carrying for thirty years.

"They're waiting," Ruth said.

Claire held herself still. "Waiting for what?"

A long pause. The kind of pause that wasn't uncertainty but selection—Ruth choosing with great care what she was willing to say tonight and what she was not.

"For me to keep my word."

Her voice was quiet, without drama. She might have been reporting the weather or noting that the woodpile needed stacking.

Claire felt the cold move through her again, the same cold she'd felt standing at her bedroom window four nights ago. "What word?"

But Ruth had turned back to the window. Her hand, resting on the blanket, moved slightly—an almost imperceptible gesture, barely the movement of two fingers. As if answering something. As if acknowledging a signal from the meadow that Claire couldn't see.

"Mom." There was an edge in Claire's voice now, frustration and fear wound together. "What do you mean, keep your word? What did you promise them?"

Ruth was quiet for a long time. The wolves remained motionless in the dark meadow. The house creaked and settled. From the kitchen came the small sounds of Sarah preparing the evening medications, the tap running, cabinet doors opening and closing.

"Not tonight," Ruth said finally. Her voice had changed—thinner, more distant, as if she were already beginning the long pull back into sleep. "There isn't enough tonight."

"Then when?" Claire heard the desperation in her own voice and didn't bother to hide it.

Ruth's eyes closed. "When I'm ready." A pause, long enough that Claire thought she'd fallen asleep. Then: "When you're ready."

Claire sat with that for a moment. Outside, the silver female stood in the moonlight, perfectly still, looking at the house with amber eyes that caught the light and held it.

She wasn't ready. She understood this about herself with sudden clarity. She'd come here to witness a death, to discharge an obligation, to stand at the end of a relationship that had always been more distance than closeness. She'd come prepared for grief, for medical emergencies, for the paperwork and logistics that followed a person's departure from the world. She'd come prepared for many things.

She had not come prepared for this.

---

She called her friend Jess from the satellite phone Sarah kept for emergencies. Jess was a veterinarian in Seattle, sensible and warm, one of the few people Claire trusted with anything that mattered.

"Wolves don't behave this way," Claire said. She'd explained it carefully, clinically—the arrival time, the formation, the consistency, the duration.

There was a pause on the line. Jess was thinking—Claire recognized the quality of her silence.

"You're right that it's unusual," Jess said finally. "Social animals sometimes exhibit what we'd call grief-adjacent behaviors near sites of significance. There's work on elephants, on great apes. And wolves are—they're more cognitively complex than most people realize." A pause. "But nightly visits to a specific house, consistent formation—I don't have a framework for that."

"Neither does the literature," Claire said.

"What does your mother say?"

Claire looked out the window at the dark meadow, at the seven shapes barely visible at the tree line. "She says they're waiting."

"For what?"

"She won't say."

Another silence, longer. Then, gently: "Claire. Is it possible that your mother is—that her illness is affecting her perception, and you're looking for a rational explanation for something that's being filtered through her experience of it?"

It was a reasonable thing to say. It was exactly the kind of thing Claire would have said herself, two weeks ago, in her Seattle apartment, looking at rain on glass.

"It's possible," Claire said carefully. "But the wolves are real, Jess. I can see them from the window."

After she hung up, she went back to the chair by her mother's bed. Ruth was asleep, her breathing slow and shallow, her face relaxed in a way it never quite was when she was awake—age and illness smoothed out into something approaching peace.

Claire opened the field notebook and wrote: Day five. Arrived 6:47. Duration so far: 2 hours, 14 minutes. Silver female maintained center position entire duration. No vocalizations. No movement. Formation unchanged.

She paused, pen hovering.

Then she wrote: They are waiting. Whatever that means—they are waiting. And I don't think it has anything to do with grief or habituation or any framework I was taught to use. I think it has to do with my mother. I think she knows why they're here. I think she's known for a very long time.

She capped the pen and sat back.

Outside, the wolves held their vigil with the patience of creatures that had never been confused about the nature of a promise.