At 6:14, the knock came while Dev Kaylor was trying to decide whether a trap that size belonged in an evidence bag or under a welding blanket.
Three knocks, evenly spaced. Not a neighbor's knock, and no one he knew would have come around to the mudroom at dusk.
He set the blanket over the steel jaws, though he had wired them open, and wiped his hands on his jeans. Four nights of dried creek mud still clung inside the hinge. He had photographed the trap where he found it, photographed the spring numbers that had been ground away, and then done the stupidest useful thing available: brought it home. For four days it had lain on the pole-barn floor under a feed sack while he read wildlife statutes at night and called nobody. This evening, after unloading fence posts at the lower pen, he had finally carried it up to the house to photograph again under a decent light.
Through the door glass he saw a woman standing beyond the storm door with both hands visible. She was perhaps his age, thirty or a little older, in a rain-dark coat. Her right trouser leg had been cut up the seam and fastened again with safety pins. She kept her weight on the other foot.
Dev left the inner door on its chain.
"Front door's around the house."
"I need the trap you took from the creek."
His hand settled on the dead bolt. "Okay. Who are you? How do you even know I've got a trap? I haven't told anybody. I haven't told the county, and I'm supposed to have told the county."
She looked past him, not into the house but toward the covered shape on the workbench. Dev shifted to block that line.
"Audra Liske." She had to stop for breath before the rest. "You pulled that trap off me four nights ago. I came to pay the debt before the man who set it gets to your door."
"What man? Coming here how? Nobody knows it's here."
"I've been behind his vehicle since the creek. I know how it smells. Four days he's driven your side of the valley, stopping on the ridges to listen with a box in his hand." She glanced toward the lane. "Tonight he turned up your road."
Dev studied her face for the prelude to a smile. None came.
"I pulled it off a wolf."
"You tried the tire iron first. It slipped. You wrapped your left hand in the blue corner of your groundsheet before you touched the second spring. When you got the jaws apart, you moved uphill instead of toward the trail because I was between you and it." She paused to breathe through something. "You left the iron. I pushed it into the creek so he wouldn't find your grip on it."
Only the wolf could have seen the iron go into the water. Dev had assumed the current took it.
"You were huge," he said, and then, because that was no use to anybody, "Show me your hands."
She raised them a little higher. Empty, scraped, trembling at the fingertips.
"Turn around."
"No."
"If you want in—"
She didn't answer that. She took her weight off the bad leg for a second, put it back, and looked at the lane.
He had already asked too much and still had questions stacked behind his teeth: what she was, how a wound got from one body into another, how long she had stood out here deciding to knock.
"There's a transmitter on it," she said. "It clicks, then it sends. When I fought the trap, it clicked every three minutes. When I lay still long enough, it quit." She breathed. "It started again when you carried it in. I heard it from your fence."
"There's no transmitter. I went over the whole thing. I was looking for a tag, a name, a phone number, anything I could hand somebody."
"Look under the swivel housing. I had my face on that chain half a night."
From beneath the welding blanket came a small, hard tick.
Both of them heard it. Audra looked at the watch on Dev's wrist.
"Time it from that."
Dev's thumb found the timer. "I thought that was the freezer." He was already counting back. "So it talked the whole drive home, till I got out of his range. Then it lay in the barn and went quiet. And tonight I carry it into the house and it tells him right where—" He stopped. "Then it doesn't matter what I do with it now. He's got the house."
"Yes."
"So what are you doing here? You said a debt. There isn't one. It was a trap, I had a tire iron, anybody walking that creek would have—"
Audra had turned her head toward the lane before he finished. "I can hear him on your road. That's what I came about."
Dev heard nothing. Then an engine labored somewhere beyond the first rise, too slow for the paved road. He looked through the side window. The lane was still empty, but wet branches beyond the bend showed brief washes of light.
He unhooked the chain and opened the inner door without opening the storm door. "Okay. Mudroom. The kitchen door stays locked, sorry, it just does. This one I'm leaving unlatched. You want out, you push it and go. I'm not shutting anybody in with anybody."
Audra put two fingers to the storm-door latch, pushed it open an inch, and let it fall back against the frame. Then she opened it and stepped over the sill. The cramped room held a boot rack, utility sink, freezer, workbench, and too many tools hung in outlines on the wall. Dev locked the door into the kitchen and put its key in his pocket.
Audra sat on the bench beside the outside door. Up close, her skin had the pale, taut look of pain worked on too long. Blood had dried above her boot.
Dev pulled the blanket off the trap. Its jaws spanned most of the bench. One blunt tooth still held a dark tuft of coarse fur.
"That one," Audra said.
Dev looked at the tooth, then at her leg, and made himself stop comparing them. "I've got a proper kit. Can I get those pins out and cut whatever's under there?"
"Yes." She was already working the top pin loose. "There's a wrap. No alcohol on it."
Dev set the first-aid box within her reach. She took out the scissors and handed them to him, then turned her knee to give him access. The wrap was improvised and dirty. Under it, two deep pressure cuts curved around her lower leg in the same spacing as the jaws on the bench. They had begun bleeding again.
He rinsed with saline only where she pointed, laid clean gauze over the cuts, and stopped when she took the roll from him. She wrapped the leg herself.
The timer showed one minute forty-eight seconds.
"How far is his receiver good for?" Dev asked.
"He climbs to listen. The ridges, not the hollows."
"So farther on open ground. How much farther?"
"I don't know."
"Does it log where it's been, or only where it is? Is it directional? What frequency is it?"
Audra tightened the gauze and shut her eyes for a moment. "I don't know. I only ever heard it from the wrong end."
Dev turned the trap on its wired-open side. Beneath the chain swivel, a black capsule sat inside a shallow steel guard. A braided cable no thicker than a bootlace fixed it to the baseplate.
He reached for the bolt cutters. Audra opened her eyes at the sound of them coming off the wall.
"Not those. They'll crush the case on the plate."
"The cable might be hardened." But he hung them back and took down the small cutters. "I want it in one piece. Sooner or later I'm explaining this to a game warden, and I'd like to have more than a story about a wolf."
He braced the braided cable clear of the capsule and leaned his weight down. The cable parted with a sound like a clipped guitar string.
The capsule came free into his glove. A yellow diode flashed once.
"Still awake," Audra said.
His timer reached three minutes. The capsule ticked in his palm.
Dev dropped it into a galvanized parts can, pressed the lid tight, and nested that inside the steel cash box he used for receipts. He ran a thumbnail along the hinge seam. "Steel might hold it in. Might not." He shut the lid anyway.
The engine went silent beyond the bend.
Dev called emergency services. He gave his address and reported that a man was tracking an illegal steel trap to his house. The dispatcher asked whether he could remain inside. He looked at the trap, at the mudroom's two doors, and at Audra's eyes fixed on the dark glass.
"Not safely," he said.
The nearest response was coming from a long way out. Dev put the phone on speaker and lowered the volume.
Audra tested her leg, winced, and stood. "Give me the box." She waited for the leg to settle. "South, down your draw. He follows it away from the house."
"In which body?"
"The one that can go down the draw without a light."
"On that leg? Carrying his signal?"
"That's what I came for."
Dev pictured the wolf in the creek bed, enormous and silent, lifting a ruined foreleg while he fought the springs. He had spent four days telling himself the animal had understood that he meant help. Now understanding had arrived at his house and was trying to turn itself into bait.
"No," he said.
Audra's face closed.
He caught his own mistake before he could build a fence around it. "I mean I carry the box. It's my address on his receiver now, and I'm the one who wants the evidence. You choose the route."
She watched him for a second. "The draw. It comes out under your lower pen."
"The stock pen." Dev could see it before he'd finished saying it. "Okay. Road gate at the top, off the old stock track. Sorting gate at the bottom. The lane between them's too narrow to turn anything around in. And my pickup's sitting crosswise past the far end, because I unloaded posts there this evening and never moved it. So he drives in after the signal, I shut the road gate behind him, and he can't go forward and he can't back out without tearing something up. We open the box once down there, let it send, he comes to the pen instead of the house, and we keep him there till the sheriff's people show. If he tears the gate out, fine, he does it on camera. On my phone, anyway, propped on a fence post."
"He'll walk the high edge first. The wind's off the road. It comes down the draw to us."
"Then we stay low."
Audra looked toward the lane again. "He has a launcher. And a pole with a wire loop. He used both at the creek after you left."
"On you?"
"He missed. Keep a gate between you and him."
Dev fetched a coil of rope, a gate clip, a headlamp, and his canvas tool bag. He added gauze and water. The pry bar knocked against the wrenches, and Audra flinched each time.
"He'll hear that from the road."
Dev took it back out. She was looking at the open patch of rubber mat. "After I change, I can't talk. One scrape, stop. Two, go. If I hit the fence wire, get behind the nearest gate."
"Go where? Which way is go?"
She touched the outside of his left boot with hers. "I touch the side I want. Don't reach for me."
"How long does it—"
"Seventy seconds. Once it starts it doesn't stop. I can't talk through it, can't hold anything." She touched the new gauze. "Twice inside an hour, this opens up."
Dev looked at the upper windows. "Can you do it now? Can you hurry it?"
"It goes when I start it. Nobody else starts it." She nodded at the mat. "Clear that. Time it, if you want."
Dev moved the cutters, wire ends, and cash box away from the open patch. Audra touched her coat's top button, then left the coat on. She lowered herself to both knees and placed her palms flat.
"Now," she said.
Dev started the timer.
The first changes were small failures of fit: shoulders pressing against cloth differently, fingers losing their workable spread, shoes collapsing as the feet inside them altered. Then the shape of her occupied more floor. Clothing lost its separate edges wherever the body changed, neither tearing nor remaining as something that could snag. Dev had no category that helped. He kept his attention on the timer, the table corners, the freezer latch, anything she might strike.
At thirty seconds she could not have stood as either woman or wolf. At forty-five, the wound opened through a lengthening foreleg, blood darkening the new fur. She made no human sound and could not tell him to move when her hindquarters crowded the boot rack. He moved it anyway, without touching her.
At seventy seconds, exactly, the enormous wolf drew one complete breath. Her coat was rough charcoal along the back and wet-black at the shoulders. The right foreleg hovered above the mat.
Dev stopped the timer. Audra looked at the cash box, then at him, and scraped once.
Stop.
Headlights passed slowly across the upper windows. A door closed near the lane.
When the light moved away, Audra scraped twice.
Dev put the cash box in the canvas bag and took the weight himself.
They left through the mudroom door at 6:54. Audra went first into the draw, placing three feet with care and the fourth barely at all. Dev followed below the lip, bent under wet grass. Twice she touched his right calf and moved him deeper when the wind shifted. Once she scraped, and he froze while a narrow white beam traveled across the yard above them.
The parts can clicked inside the cash box. Muffled, but audible against Dev's hip. He kept both lids shut.
At the cutbank below the old pen, Audra stopped beneath a fringe of hanging roots. The sorting lane lay uphill: wire fence on one side, plank rails on the other, road gate open behind it. Dev's pickup stood crosswise beyond the far gate, precisely where he'd left it, making the lane a pocket with one way in. He had never been so grateful for his own unfinished work.
Audra smelled the air. She touched his left boot.
They climbed on the downwind side.
Dev set the phone against the road-gate post with its camera aimed uphill at approaching vehicles. He tied the rope to the gate, ran it along the fence, and took the free end back to the sorting post. The next pulse was due in twenty-two seconds. He carried the cash box to the feed trough halfway between the gates, opened it, and lifted the parts-can lid with one gloved finger.
Tick.
The yellow diode flashed. Dev sealed both lids and ducked behind the sorting gate.
An engine started above them almost at once.
The setter's utility vehicle rolled down the old stock track without headlights. A pale screen glowed near the steering wheel. As the rear bumper cleared the open road gate, Dev hauled on the coil. The gate swung shut, and he snubbed the line around the sorting post. The vehicle nosed deeper into the lane. Its headlights came on, found Dev's pickup across the far end, and it stopped.
The driver stepped out carrying a short launcher in one hand and a receiver in the other. A loop pole leaned against the open door. Dev could see no part of his face clearly under the brim of his cap.
"Where's my trap?" the setter said.
Dev stayed behind the gate. "Not here. Police are on the way."
"Open the far end."
The receiver gave a sharp electronic chirp. The setter looked toward the trough, then saw Dev's phone on the post. He raised the launcher.
From beneath the plank rail, Audra struck the fence wire.
Dev dropped behind the sorting gate. A dart cracked against his pickup's rear quarter panel and spun into the mud.
The setter took the loop pole and moved along the vehicle's side. "Down," he said toward the dark beyond the rails. "Stay down."
Audra emerged inside the pen, broad enough to fill the space between two posts. She did not change back. The command did nothing except fix the setter's attention on her.
He thrust the loop through the rails.
Audra gave ground until the cable ring passed her muzzle. Then she turned under it, caught the aluminum shaft behind the loop in her teeth, and wrenched sideways. The pole slid through the setter's hands. She dragged it low across the gatepost, feeding the loose cable into the narrow angle above the bottom hinge.
One scrape.
Dev stopped with his hand on the gate.
Audra shifted her bite farther down the shaft. The cable tightened around the hinge pin instead of her neck.
Two scrapes.
Dev pulled. The sorting gate swung its remaining foot and pinned the pole against the post. Aluminum folded. The cable snapped back into the rails and stayed there, kinked beyond use.
Audra released the shaft. Blood ran along her lifted foreleg, but she did not cross the fence toward the setter.
The setter dropped the ruined pole and reached for the launcher. Dev shouldered the sorting gate back open. Its edge struck the launcher from the setter's hand and knocked it beneath the plank rail, inside the pen.
For a moment the setter had the receiver and nothing else. Sirens carried faintly above the wet fields.
He got back into his vehicle.
"Don't," Dev said, seeing the reverse lights.
The vehicle accelerated backward. Its rear bumper caught the closed road gate, bowed it, then tore the upper hinge out of the post. The gate fell under the tires. The vehicle fishtailed onto the stock track and climbed toward the road with one rear light broken.
Audra could have cleared the fallen gate before it reached the rise. Instead she stood beside the disabled loop, watching until the engine faded.
The receiver lay in the lane where it had fallen from the open door. The launcher lay inside the pen with a spare dart beside it, and the spent one was somewhere in the mud by his pickup. Dev took his phone off the road-gate post and left the rest where it was for the responders.
Audra touched his left boot and headed down into the draw.
Under the cutbank, out of sight of the lane, she lowered herself onto the grass. Dev checked his watch. Thirty-six minutes had passed since her first change.
She looked at the road, then at the right foreleg. Before he could ask, she lowered her nose between her paws, and the change back began.
Dev set the timer and cleared the canvas bag away. He could do nothing during the seventy seconds but keep the ground open and listen to the sirens grow. The body contracted through shapes that had no stable balance. At fifty seconds the wound bled faster. At seventy, Audra lay curled on her side in her restored coat and clothes, breathing in shallow pulls.
When she opened her eyes, fever had put a bright, unfocused sheen in them.
"Second change inside an hour," she said. "Bleeding. Pain. Fever. Water."
Dev opened the tool bag. "Can I wrap it now?"
"Over the first. Keep the knee free."
He did. Her skin was hot even through his gloves. She took three measured swallows from the bottle and refused a fourth by turning her face away.
"You don't owe me anything after this."
Audra pulled the cut trouser seam closed over the new bandage and fumbled a pin through it. "Good. I'm tired of owing you."
He wanted to know where she would go, who would look at the leg tomorrow, whether she could get far enough before the fever climbed.
"Which route?"
"South down the draw." She shut her eyes and opened them again. "Their lights stay up on the road."
"Can you make it?"
She put her weight on the leg and tested it. "Give me six minutes before they come down to the gate."
Dev gave her the six. He went back to the mudroom and photographed the separated trap where it lay. He packed his laptop, medication, lease papers, and two changes of clothes into a duffel. The setter had his address whether the transmitter ever sent again. Dev would give a statement, preserve the evidence, and sleep somewhere else.
At 7:44, the first wash of emergency lights reached the upper trees. Dev switched on the yard floodlights and aimed every bright angle toward the broken pen. Below them, unseen from the drive, grass whispered along the draw and then went still.
The gate would need a new post. His pickup's side panel bore the dent from the dart. Audra's blood marked the mudroom mat and the lower fence. Dev added the damaged gate and truck to the notes on his phone, left the wired-open trap uncovered on the bench, and went out with empty hands when the first response vehicle came through.