The wolf was watching her again.

Wren had been in the Black Ridge Mountains long enough to know the difference between a wolf using her as a landmark and a wolf using her as a subject. Landmarks got glanced at. Subjects got studied. The big grey male at the edge of the tree line had been doing the latter for twenty minutes, and she had been doing it right back.

She had come to Montana for a wolf pack and stayed for reasons she hadn't written in any grant application. The research was real — the data was real, three years of movement patterns and behavioural anomalies that she could not make fit any existing literature — but she was honest enough with herself, in the privacy of her own field notes, to admit that she kept coming back because the mountain was the first place she'd been where the silence felt like company instead of absence. She had grown up in a medium-sized city with a family that was not unkind, exactly, but was very loud, and she had gone to university at nineteen and discovered that she was extremely good at the kind of work that required sustained solitary focus and not very good at the social architecture that surrounded it, and she had found the research station in the Black Ridge when she was twenty-three and had been leaving most of herself there ever since.

Her supervisor called it dedication. Her mother called it avoidance. Wren called it fieldwork and didn't correct anyone.

She didn't move. One of the first things she'd learned up here was that stillness was a language, and she was fluent.

He was enormous — not just large-for-a-wolf, which was what had made her sit up in her blind eighteen months ago and start writing things down she couldn't fully explain. He was *wrong*, in the specific way that made her scientific vocabulary fail her, because what she wanted to write was *intentional* and that was not a word you applied to animal behaviour if you wanted your grant applications to survive peer review.

He turned his head. Looked directly at her through the aspens.

Then he was gone.

She stayed in the blind for another forty minutes, making notes in the pinched handwriting she'd developed for field conditions. *Alpha male — designated B7 — direct sustained observation, dusk approach, voluntary withdrawal. Third confirmed sighting this month. Continues to display non-standard threat calibration: no territorial display, no vocalisation, no submission behaviour. Approaches and observes. Leaves when he determines the observation is complete.*

She didn't write: *He looks at me like he's deciding something.*

She drove the three kilometres back to the research station as the sky went from orange to dark, the truck rattling over the fire road with the familiarity of four thousand previous rattles. The station was a single-room cabin that the previous occupant — a Forest Service botanist in the nineties — had left in a condition that suggested he'd expected to come back and never did. She had replaced the windows, re-insulated the floor, added a propane heater and a satellite dish and a shelf for the equipment that was her actual reason for being here.

The camera trap was on the table.

She stopped in the doorway.

It was one of hers — the one she'd set on the north ridge trail, she was nearly certain, though the housing was slightly scratched in a way she didn't remember. Someone had removed it from the tree she'd clamped it to, carried it here, and placed it on her table with what she could only describe as a considered amount of care. Not thrown down. Centered. The SD card was still in it.

There was no note.

She turned the camera over in her hands for a long time. Then she checked the footage.

Most of it was deer. Two foxes. One very startled raccoon. And then, at 3:47 AM three nights ago, eleven seconds of a man standing in the trail, looking up at the camera with unhurried attention — the same quality of attention, she thought and did not write down, that the wolf at the tree line had turned on her an hour ago.

The man was tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, dressed for weather she didn't think required that level of preparation. His face in the infrared was all sharp angles and stillness. He looked at the camera the way she'd been looking at the wolf: *cataloguing*.

He reached up and unclipped it from the tree with one hand.

The footage ended.

She sat with it for a while. The propane heater ticked. Outside, something moved through the aspens, the dry-leaf sound of October making everything into a question.

She made coffee. She reviewed the footage twice more. She made a note in the log: *Camera trap — N. ridge, position 4 — removed and returned, unknown party. Footage reviewed. Image captured: unidentified male, approximate age 30-40, sufficient familiarity with research equipment to handle without damage. No vandalism. No footage deleted. Possible: reserve staff? Possible: private landowner.*

She didn't write: *He put it back without taking anything.*

She didn't write: *He looked at it the same way he looks at me.*

She went to sleep. She dreamed of a wolf standing at the edge of the tree line, close enough that she could see the specific grey-gold of its eyes, and the wolf looked at her the way she had always wanted to be looked at — like she was worth being patient for.

She woke up at five AM and lay in the dark thinking about that for longer than she should have.

---