Second Nature (29 page)

“You don’t remember?” Connor said.

The trapper smiled, and Connor made a note to himself to suggest a visit to the dentist as well.

“I remember it every day,” the trapper said. He was now so old that ten years gone often seemed quite a bit closer than the day before. “I wish we’d never caught him. Or we should have left him there. Maybe he would have bled to death and maybe he wouldn’t have, but I never felt right about sending him back to people when he’d never learned to defend himself from them.”

He agreed to take Connor into the woods, but it would be slow going, and they’d have to put it off until morning. Connor spent the night on the couch where the dogs usually slept, and at dawn his cramped muscles woke him. They set off early and still didn’t get close until after a lunch of crackers and cheese. The trees were so thick and so tall Connor actually felt dizzy; it seemed a sin to speak in a place as deep and green as this.

“This is probably the spot where we found him,” the trapper said, but in fact he was certain of the place. He’d come here quite often. He always had a gun with him, but he rarely went after anything these days, just like those old men he used to scorn, who swore that deer could cry.

“Are there still wolves around?” Connor asked. Now that he was here, he wasn’t sure what he wanted the answer to be.

“Nobody sees them unless they want to be seen,” the trapper said. He pulled off his gloves, slowly because of the lumps on his wrist, and reached into his jacket pocket for some chewing tobacco. “We had some fellow here from the National Park Service who reported back to Washington there wasn’t a wolf left in Michigan, and just that morning I’d seen tracks, so you tell me who the fools are.”

If there were birds in these woods, they weren’t singing now. The ground was still covered by a few inches of snow, although the ferns were already unfolding. The trapper picked some fiddleheads that he’d cook with butter for supper.

“Do you ever see him?” Connor asked.

The trapper looked up and considered the patch of blue sky through the branches above them.

“Would I tell if I had?” he said.

Connor smiled and listened carefully. He held one hand above his eyes and gazed north. Up on the ridgetop nothing moved, at least not anything he could see. That was just as well. In no time the sky would be growing dark, and it was a long way back home.