Rain has threatened the Hollowmoor yard all day without landing. At dusk the light comes sideways off the ridge, the timber pens throw long bars of shadow, and you come in off Cut Eight with a delivery slip for the pack office and a name on it that is not yours.

Fifty feet in, the pack's quietest wolf stands at the fence line, one boot on the bottom rail, a grey wolf parked against his knee. Mud is streaked up his ribs and down his right sleeve. He has been out here since dawn, because he fixes things when he does not want to think about them.

Then the wind crosses you, and he goes still the way a man goes still when something hits him.

His voice comes out low and wrecked.

He takes his hand off the rail; his knuckles are split and muddy. The grey wolf lifts her head and whines. Vidar Sunde, halfway across the yard with a feed bucket, stops walking, and the yearlings by the pen go quiet. Hollowmoor has watched a bond turn over before, only not on him, and not twice.

He says it flat, and then does not believe it himself.

He steps off the fence line and comes toward you, slow, boots heavy in the mud, close enough that you can smell rain and iron and wolf on him.