CHAPTER 9: The Town

She needed to get out of the house.

This was not something Claire admitted easily. She'd been raised by a woman who considered the desire to escape one's circumstances a form of weakness—or not weakness exactly, but imprecision, a failure to locate the actual problem. Ruth's philosophy had always been that discomfort resided in the person, not the place, and that moving yourself from one location to another accomplished nothing except the transportation of your discomfort to new scenery.

Claire had spent fifteen years disagreeing with this philosophy from a comfortable distance of fourteen hundred miles.

But on the eighth morning, she woke before dawn with the particular restlessness that had accumulated like weather pressure over days of reading and watching and sitting in the warm circle of the lamp while her mother slept and the wolves kept their vigil and the journals gave up their contents piece by careful piece. She needed groceries—this was true and practical and sufficient justification. The refrigerator held the remnants of what Sarah had brought on her last supply run. They needed milk, bread, coffee, the basic infrastructure of a household functioning through a long siege.

She left a note on the kitchen table, borrowed Sarah's spare car key since the Subaru handled the dirt roads better than her rental, and drove into the gray October morning before anyone was fully awake.

---

The road to Dawson Creek took forty-five minutes in good conditions. Today the conditions were adequate—no ice yet, though the temperature sat just above freezing and the sky had the particular sealed quality that preceded snow. Claire drove with the window cracked despite the cold, needing the air, needing the sensation of the landscape moving past at a speed that felt like progress.

She hadn't driven these roads in fifteen years, but her hands remembered them. The curve past the Hendersons' old place, abandoned now and returning to the land with the patient efficiency that Montana applied to human structures when humans stopped arguing with it. The bridge over Cutler Creek, one lane, the wooden planks announcing every vehicle with a sound like a drumroll. The long straightaway through open range where, on a morning like this one, you could see thirty miles in one direction and understand immediately why painters and madmen had always been drawn to the West.

She let herself look at it. The openness of it. She'd forgotten—or suppressed the knowledge, more accurately—that this country had this quality. The scale that made a person feel both irrelevant and somehow essential, as if the landscape needed a witness and you'd arrived to perform that function.

In Seattle, she designed spaces to give urban people access to something smaller and more manageable. Pocket parks. Green corridors. Carefully considered patches of nature inserted into the grid of the city like translations of a language most of her clients had never spoken fluently. She was good at her work and she believed in it—cities needed green, needed the interruption of wildness in the geometry of construction. But driving through this country on an October morning, she understood with uncomfortable clarity that what she translated for a living was something she'd been running from.

---

Dawson Creek had not changed significantly.

This was both reassuring and faintly melancholy—the way a place that has remained static while you've changed reveals, by contrast, the full extent of your own movement. The main street was four blocks long, anchored at one end by the grain elevator and at the other by the county courthouse. Between them: the hardware store, the diner, the post office, the library where she'd spent a morning earlier in the week. The general store, which occupied the largest building on the main street and had operated under the same family's ownership for three generations, judging by the faded sign above the door: Gruber's—Est. 1952.

She parked on the street and sat for a moment, hands in her lap. Through the diner window she could see the shapes of people at tables, the movement of a waitress, the amber warmth of a space that existed to provide exactly what it advertised: ordinary life proceeding at its ordinary pace. She watched it for a moment the way you watched something through glass that you were no longer sure you qualified to enter.

Then she got out of the car and went to do what she'd come to do.

---

Gruber's smelled like every general store she'd ever been in, which was to say it smelled like several things at once: coffee from the small percolator on the counter, the dry smell of packaged goods arranged on high shelves, machine oil from the hardware section in the back, the particular sweetness of the candy display near the register that no amount of time seemed to eliminate from a place that had sold candy for seventy years.

A teenage boy she didn't recognize was stocking shelves near the door. He glanced up, nodded, returned to his work. Claire took a basket and moved through the aisles, consulting the list she'd written at the kitchen table. Coffee—she found the brand Sarah favored. Milk. Bread. Soup, several cans, the kind her mother had always kept. She was reaching for a box of crackers when she became aware that she was being watched.

The sensation was distinct and unmistakable—not threatening, but deliberate. The particular quality of attention that meant someone had recognized her and was deciding what to do about it.

She turned.

Two men stood at the far end of the aisle near the coffee display, ostensibly reading the back of a coffee can with the focused attention that the back of a coffee can had never warranted. They were both old—seventies, probably, the kind of Montana old that came from decades of outdoor work and looked like weathered timber. One wore a Carhartt jacket in faded brown. The other was taller, leaning on a wooden cane, with a white beard that had been grown not for fashion but because shaving had become an inconvenience somewhere around 1995 and he'd never revisited the decision.

When she looked at them, neither pretended they hadn't been watching.

"Claire Larsen," the one with the cane said. Not a question. A statement of identification, the way you named a species when you spotted it in the field.

"That's right." She kept her voice even. "I don't think I remember you."

"You wouldn't. You were small the last time I was out your way." He moved toward her with the careful pace of a man whose hips had strong opinions about rapid movement. "Jack Talbot. My ranch is east of yours—or it was, sold most of it to the Hendersons years back." He extended a hand, large and rope-scarred, and she shook it. "This is Merle Gustafson. His family's had land in this valley longer than anyone's kept track."

Merle nodded. He was the shorter one, with eyes the pale blue of winter sky, set in a face so creased and sun-darkened it was difficult to read. He didn't say anything, but he looked at her with the frank assessment of a man who'd spent his life sizing up animals and weather and other people's intentions.

"I'm sorry about your mother," Jack said. "We heard she wasn't well."

"Thank you." The formal exchange of a small town that handled loss with formality because informality would overwhelm it. "She's—holding on."

"Ruth would." Something moved across Jack Talbot's face—not quite a smile, the ghost of one, the memory of knowing someone well enough to find their stubbornness endearing rather than obstructive. "She's always been a woman who does things on her own schedule."

Claire looked at him carefully. He knew her mother. Not in the way that neighbors knew each other in a county this size—the way of necessary proximity, of sharing roads and weather and the general difficulty of the country. He knew her the way you knew someone you'd watched make a decision you'd thought about for thirty years.

"How well did you know her?" Claire asked. "And my father?"

Jack and Merle exchanged a look. It was brief and contained multitudes—the compressed communication of two men who had discussed something many times and arrived long ago at an agreed position on how much of it to share.

"Well enough," Jack said. "Your father and I used to talk at the diner, sometimes, in those early years. Good man. Serious. He cared about this country the way people who didn't grow up in it sometimes care—maybe more than those of us who take it for granted."

"He cared about the wolves," Claire said.

"He did." A pause. "We didn't always agree with his work. Some of us felt the wolf reintroduction complicated ranching in ways the biologists didn't have to live with." He said this without hostility, as simple historical record. "But we respected that he was trying to understand something real. He wasn't performing science. He was doing it."

The teenage boy wheeled a stock cart past them and disappeared around the corner. Merle watched him go, then looked back at Claire with those pale winter-sky eyes.

"You've been out there a week," Merle said. His voice was gravel and rust, a voice that had been used sparingly and outdoors. "You've seen them."

Claire went still. "Seen what?"

Merle looked at Jack. Jack looked at his cane. A silence passed between the three of them that was somehow comfortable despite everything it contained.

"The wolves," Jack said finally. "They've been seen near the property. People talk, in a town this size. Wildlife services got a report from someone driving the county road—said there was a pack sitting in the meadow off the Larsen access road, just standing there." He paused. "They sent someone out to check. The wolves were gone by the time he arrived. But the tracks were there."

"Seven," Merle said quietly. "Always seven, they said."

Claire looked from one old face to the other. "You know about them."

"We know about your family," Jack said. His voice carried something careful in it—not evasion, but the precision of a man who'd decided the exact shape of what he was willing to say. "We've known for a long time. This valley holds its stories close, but not so close that people don't see what's in front of them." He shifted his weight on the cane. "Your mother made her choice. Whatever she decided, whatever—arrangement she came to with that country out there—we've respected it. We didn't interfere. That's the compact in a place like this. People live as they need to live."

Claire waited. There was more. She could feel it the way you felt a sentence that hadn't ended yet.

Jack looked at her directly. His eyes were dark brown, deep-set, the eyes of a man who'd looked at difficult country for a long time and found a way to keep looking.

"Your mother made her choice," he said again. "We respect that. We've always respected that." A pause, weighted and deliberate. "But choices have consequences. That's not judgment. That's just the nature of a promise. It doesn't matter if you made it to a person or a bank or—" he paused, choosing— "or something else. A real promise collects what it's owed."

The store was quiet around them. Somewhere in the back, the stock boy's cart rattled and stopped. The coffee percolator made its patient sound.

"My father," Claire said. "Did people know what happened? The real version?"

Another exchange of glances between the two old men. Merle studied the floor.

"People knew something happened that winter," Jack said carefully. "Your dad came into town once, toward the end of November. Sat at the diner counter for about an hour, drank three cups of coffee, didn't eat anything. Marlene was working then—she's been gone fifteen years now, God rest her—she said he had the look of a man who'd been shown something he didn't know how to carry." He paused. "He left a note on the counter when he paid. Not for her—she said it wasn't addressed to anyone. Just lying there. She read it before she threw it out."

Claire held very still. "What did it say?"

Jack looked at her with the expression of a man who has held a piece of information for thirty years, who has thought carefully about whether it was his to keep or to give, and who has finally arrived at the answer.

"It said: I can't let it take her." His voice was quiet and even. "'She made her promise but she didn't make it for herself, and that's not right, and I'm going to fix it.'"

The store breathed around them. Cold air from the door as a customer entered. The teenage boy's cart in the distance. The ordinary sounds of ordinary life in a town that had been holding onto a story for thirty years.

"He was going to try to break it," Claire said. Her voice came out flat. "He went to the wolves to break her promise."

Jack nodded slowly. "That's what we figured. After." He let the word sit. After—after the blizzard, after the spring thaw, after the sheriff and the recovery and the quiet weeks when Ruth Larsen had accepted the casseroles and the condolences and had said very little and had continued to live on the ranch alone with her daughter as if she were fulfilling an obligation that had simply changed shape.

"She never told anyone what happened," Merle said. He spoke slowly, as if each word were being retrieved from some depth. "We didn't ask. You didn't ask Ruth Larsen things she hadn't offered. But we—" he paused, looked at Jack— "most of us figured she knew. Most of us figured she understood exactly what he'd gone to do and couldn't stop him."

Claire thought of the final journal on her desk. The green cloth cover. The blank pages at the end.

"She couldn't stop him," Claire said. It wasn't a question.

"No," Jack said. "I don't expect she could. A man who's decided to sacrifice himself for his wife—" he shook his head. "That's not a man you stop with words."

They stood in the aisle of Gruber's General Store while the percolator percolated and the October light came flat and gray through the front windows, three people holding between them the weight of a story that had shaped thirty years of a valley's quiet knowledge.

Merle reached out and touched Claire's arm—a brief, dry touch, the gesture of a man who rationed physical contact carefully and meant it when he offered it.

"Your mother's a woman of her word," he said. "In this country, that's not a small thing. We've always known that about her." He withdrew his hand. "Whatever comes—you let her keep her dignity. That's all a person can ask for at the end."

Claire looked at him. "I'm trying."

"I know." He nodded once, the movement of a man closing a conversation that had reached its natural end. "You've got her in you. More than you probably know."

She finished her shopping in a silence that felt somehow different from the silence she'd entered the store with—heavier, but also cleaner, the way air felt after a long-overdue rain. At the register, the teenage boy totaled her groceries without looking up from his phone, indifferent to the weight of what had just been discussed three aisles away.

She loaded the bags into the Subaru. Through the diner window, she could see Jack Talbot settling into a booth, Merle across from him, a waitress approaching with coffee. Two old men in a small town, carrying their stories back to their regular table, returning to the ordinary business of a Wednesday morning.

Your mother made her choice. We respect that. But choices have consequences.

Claire sat in the car for a moment before starting it.

The mountains were invisible behind the clouds. The main street of Dawson Creek proceeded with its quiet purpose around her—a woman leaving the post office with a package, a truck pulling up to the hardware store, a dog sitting outside the diner with the patient optimism of dogs everywhere.

She thought of her father at this same diner counter. Three cups of coffee. A note that wasn't addressed to anyone.

I can't let it take her.

She started the car and drove back toward the mountains, toward the ranch house at the edge of the forest, toward her mother, toward whatever the November journals contained that she hadn't yet allowed herself to read.

The first snow of the season began on the highway, small and tentative, the sky finally making good on its long-standing threat. By the time she turned onto the dirt roads it had stopped, but it left a faint white dusting on the peaks above the ranch that hadn't been there in the morning.

Winter was building. Patient as the wolves. Patient as everything in this country that had learned to wait.