the arrow in its place Fletcher thought that even a clumsy archer might bring down such a target. He steadied his left foot against a fallen log, but with his eye on the wolf he failed to note that the underside of the log was rotted out. When the log collapsed beneath his weight, the wolf caught the sound and was gone. It was gone, but not before Fletcher discharged his weapon. The arrow caught the wolf in the flank. Fletcher heard a yelp of pain, and then scrambling in the brush.
When he reached the brow of the hill, all he could find was a thin trail of blood and the oddly mixed and dragging paw prints made by three good legs and the one crippled by the arrow.
He went back for the horse, but did not mount. Instead he walked the horse along the ridge, picking up the trail where he had left off, then following the prints and blood down into the glen until the trail disappeared completely in the swift water near the north fork of the river. The wolf was wounded, but how badly he could not tell, and it had enough of its wits about it that it managed to lose both the hunter and the horse by taking to water.
Fletcher worked both sides of the river for a mile or more in either direction, looking for the wolf’s prints in the mud of the riverbank and then just beyond the heavy boulders that lined the water’s edge. The fork in the river only complicated things because it added two additional banks where the wolf might have left the water, and the spring snow melt had swollen the river and increased the chances that the animal had drowned and been carried down one of the two rivers. Fletcher moved methodically down one bank, then up another, and only when the light began to fade did he decide to withdraw. He would return in the morning with one of the sheriff’s hounds that might pick up the trail by scent.
The return to the village was slowed by only one distraction. Just off the path Fletcher spotted a hunter’s bivouac. As instructed, he stopped to investigate, though he did not spend more than a moment; he paused only long enough to note its location and check briefly inside. It was low-slung, hunkered down into a little mound of earth like an animal’s lair, large enough for two or three good sized men to spread out protected from the weather, with its back directed toward the road and its opening masked by a stand of tall trees.
What he did not see was that high in one of the trees there was a small wooden perch, placed there as a lookout for game or authorities by the hunter who had built this secret shelter within the king’s demesne.
What he did see chilled him to the bone. Within the bivouac, on a short peg driven into the wall, there was a girl’s coat, no doubt left there because the spring day had turned warm. This bit of evidence he read as easily as a monk reads Latin. The coat belonged to his sixteen-year-old-daughter, Elspeth.
❧
Elspeth swung down from the crab-apple tree and gathered up a half-dozen small apples she had picked and dropped into the grass. Then she sat on a rock beside the river that ran through middle of the forest. She drew her head back and tried to roll the apples one at a time down the bridge of her nose. The trick, she thought, is to hold perfectly still. Easier said than done, though, but worth the effort—why, she did not know. As she finished with each apple she threw the core hard across the river, trying to reach the other side.
This did not last long. There was a moan or a yelp coming from the underbrush on the other side, beneath the low canopy of branches. Something was hurt. She touched the hunting knife at her waist, then moved down the river to a little bridge of rocks, then threaded her way carefully across to the other side.
It was a wolf, badly hurt with the broken shaft of an arrow in its flank. It did not take a hunter like her father to know that the wolf was dying.
Elspeth wondered what any person of compassion should do in such a case. There was little danger of being bitten; the wolf was too far-gone for that. It was obviously in great agony. She sat on the edge of the river and chewed a long blade of grass and thought, but her thoughts were troubled by the agonizing whimpers from the animal on the bank. “Poor thing,” she said. Then she rose and withdrew her knife from its sheath.
“There,” she said. “Not long now. Hold on.” She wiped her forehead with her sleeve, held her breath, and then with a single hard stroke she had the throat cut, and the beautiful animal closed its eyes and was gone.
A breeze came up and ruffled its fur, and Elspeth drew her hand back quickly. Only moments before, the animal had been warm, quivering, probably as much in agony as in fear, if it felt fear. It had throbbed with a beating heart. She had killed chickens, and had even helped her father slaughter a hog once, but never before had she killed anything so wild or so beautiful. The animal was magnificent. She turned to go, but something caught her eye. A row of heavy teats on the animal’s underbelly told her there were pups somewhere. The teats were full and round, and obviously in need of suckling. She whistled then, and muttered, “You’re a mama.”
She climbed a boulder that lay hard on that side of the river, taking care to keep her profile low in case the hunter might still be near. Deepening shadows covered her movements, but they imposed an urgency of their own.
She started up the bank of the river, stooping low as she walked, looking out for the animal’s tracks but moving quickly because of the encroaching darkness.
“What kind of man shoots an animal and then leaves it to die like that?” she said to herself, spitting disgustedly into the dirt because she already knew the answer. From the markings on the shaft of the arrow she knew what kind of man had done this. The hunter had been her father.
It was not difficult to find the lair. Elspeth tracked back along the river until she found where the wolf had entered the water, then along the trail of prints and blood to the place on the bluff where the wolf had taken the arrow. Somewhere along the way she found part of the shaft wedged in among some branches where apparently the wolf had rubbed its shank until the arrow had broken off. She continued this line of movement, reasoning that a wounded female would lead its attacker away from its pups. She found the lair just a little way from the bluff, nestled in beneath the ruins of an old Roman wall.
She crouched, not wanting to attract the attention of the wolf’s mate. The lair was concealed behind some low-lying branches of an elderberry, barely a stone’s throw away, and she moved in cautiously. There was only a single pup, barely visible in the darkening light. The pup was the size of a small cat, and when she drew it out it was unable to open its eyes.
“There,” Elspeth said softly. “You’ve got no mother.” She stroked the pup’s fur cautiously, keeping her hand well back of its head in case it might lunge and bite her. “Don’t worry, baby, I won’t abandon you, not when you’ve got no mother.” She knew enough about the forest to know that without a mother the pup would starve, but she also knew enough about the village to know that it had no future there either. There were dangers either way, and not just for the wolf. From the dogs in the village. From her father. From Sheriff Ranulf, who would want to know what she was doing with a wolf pup—if she were caught. Of these, she feared her father the most. There was no telling what he would do if he discovered she had been in the king’s forest.
“You’re hungry,” she said, though she did not really know that. Perhaps the pup had stirred this first inkling of maternal instinct in her. “I’ll feed you,” she added, then said reassuringly, “gruel—goat’s milk and boiled oats. Bet you never had goat’s milk and boiled outs.”
The journey back to the village went quickly enough. On the way she stopped at the bivouac for her coat. She wrapped the pup in the coat as long as she was on the road that led into the town of Warwick, but at a certain place the road forked off to a footpath to Wharram, the village where she lived with her father. In Wharram she held the coat before her like a sack of potatoes. Surprisingly the pup remained still, so no other of the villagers suspected anything
