Here and there, the sun broke through the trees to make pools of vivid green foliage and these the wolf would always skirt. Sometimes he would double back and find a better route so as not to puncture the silence with the telltale snap of a dead branch.
The forest floor was steep and tangled with blowdown, like tinder in some epic fireplace, and the wolf had to weave his way carefully among it. Now, in this final descent to the valley, the going was more difficult. When the sun rose, he stopped to drink, then found a shaded nook high among the sliprock and slept through the heat of the day. It was as though his journey had some special purpose. Even through the night, wherever it was possible, he had stayed below the timberline, edging the shadows, in a trot so effortless that his paws seemed to bounce without touching the ground. He had kept high, shunning the trails, especially those that ran along the water, where sometimes in this season there were humans.
He had headed north along a high ridge then turned east, following one of the winding rocky canyons that funneled the snowmelt down from the divide to the valleys and plains below. He had set out the previous evening, leaving the others in the high country where even now, in July, there lingered spring flowers and patches of tired snow in gullies shy of the sun. And perhaps this vestige of a rumor in his nostrils, that here a hundred years ago so many of his kind were killed, should have made him turn away. Perhaps, as he moved silently down through the forest on that late afternoon, his summer-sleek back brushing lower limbs of pine and fir, the wolf sensed it. They say it lodges in the soil and is slowly sucked through coiling roots so that in time all that grows there, from the smallest lichen to the tallest tree, bears testimony. The scent of slaughter, some believe, can linger in a place for years.
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