Unbound (24 page)

Days past. Ranger tried to work out how to escape the kennel. He attempted to jump the fence, but it was too high. He tried to climb it, but he had paws, not hands, and he fell repeatedly. He could not dig through concrete, and the gate was padlocked.

Kylie kept lunging and snarling at him for a couple of days whenever he moved too close to the fence that faced the enclosure she shared with Sheepy, who turned out to be a timid, blue-eyed husky-wolf mix.

“I have an image to maintain,” she told him in the night. “If I behave oddly, they’ll stick needles in me and put a thermometer up my bum.”

He wondered why she even stayed at the sanctuary if she hated the other wolves so much, but she never explained that, even if she talked about a lot of other things late at night.

Another veterinarian looked at Ranger. He was force-fed worming medication that was so bitter it made him drool all over the examination room floor, and doused in stinging flea powder that hurt his eyes and made him sneeze. Later in the day, a tall man with spindly arms and legs and an outdated moustache who Ranger had learned was called Tanner, and who was the manager of the sanctuary, came with a catchpole to take him to an enclosure next to Clover and Sheepy’s, across from the kennels.

He had an acre to himself. He was not placed immediately with the other wolves, though a day later Tanner and Wright cautiously brought Clover into his enclosure.

They fought, but not seriously. Rather, they snarled in each other’s faces and knocked each other over, and then Clover stalked away in a huff, her hackles up all along her back from her shoulders to the base of her tail, her ears back. Ranger padded after her, nipping at her hocks until she spun around to try and bite his face and then he raced away across their cage, dodging between snowy spruce trees, the leggy golden wolf chasing after him.

“I think they’ll get along all right. We’ll put Sheepy in tomorrow,” Tanner said to Wright, who hummed thoughtfully and muttered something about calling someone.

Getting out of the enclosure proved no easier than getting out of the kennel and run. The fences were built down into the ground, and the ground was frozen solid. Ranger scraped away the snow in more than one place to claw at the dirt, working until his paws bled just to dig an inch.

“You can’t dig out,” Kylie told him that night, picking up one paw and then the other to examine his raw paw pads. “You’ll either have to change back and climb over, or wait until the thaw. Ground’s too hard right now. You got somewhere to be?”

The wolf wasn’t good at keeping track of the days without Sacheverell. Sachie kept a calendar on his bedroom wall and crossed each passing day off every evening. It was easy for Ranger to remember when the next Tuesday was, or how many days there were until the Winter Solstice, when he could simply glance at that calendar whenever he needed to. Even if he wasn’t paying that much attention, he always knew when it was a weekend and when it wasn’t because Sachie went to school.

It was harder to keep things straight out in the enclosure.

The wolf kept track of the passing of the moon phases, though, watching the moon wane away to nothing. As the new moon came and went he stopped eating and ceased leaving the little wooden den, spent his time huddled up in the straw. He felt sick all the time from fear and shame.

Sheepy happily ate Ranger’s food as well as his own, the first couple of meals, and then Clover started to bring him bits and pieces and nudge them toward him with her nose. He turned away. She shifted and shoved at his shoulder, and said: “If you don’t eat soon, they’ll take you in for needles and a thermometer!”

He ignored her, and the next morning Pearl came and took him away.

“I can’t find anything wrong with him,” the veterinarian said, after a lengthy examination. “If he doesn’t improve, you may want to consider bringing him down to the animal hospital so we can do some more in-depth testing.”

Pearl and Tanner exchanged worried glances.

The vet left antibiotics to be given twice daily, in case the wolf was unwell from the wounds on his shoulder and flank.

He was put back in the little kennel, and Clover and Sheepy were moved back into the enclosure across the way for company. He paced a while, whining and pawing at the fence, and then he went and lay down in the straw.

He wanted to go home.

When the young man whose name Ranger didn’t know who was on evening feed came to give the wolf his antibiotics, Ranger growled and rushed at him, lips pulled back from his teeth, hair all on end. The young man slammed the gate shut and locked it in a hurry, swearing under his breath, backing away.

“What’s
wrong
with you?” Kylie asked, later.

The moon waxed gibbous. Ranger paced around and around and didn’t eat anything except the odd mouthful of snow. He felt like his heart was trying to crawl up his throat, and his legs itched with restlessness even though he was exhausted.

On a bitterly cold morning Wright came out to the kennel with a catchpole tucked under one arm and a dart gun in his hand. Ranger leapt at the gate at him, barking and snarling weakly. Wright stood back until Ranger dropped back down onto all four paws, breath sawing in and out of his lungs painfully, and then he sighed and readied a tranquilizer dart.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Ranger, loading the dart into the gun.

Ranger backed into the little wooden shelter, but the door-opening was too big, and he couldn’t hide. He saw Wright raise the gun, ready it, and he felt the prick of the dart just below his hip. He twisted around to bite at it, pulling it out of his skin with his front teeth. Upon reflection, that was not a wolf-like thing to do – a normal wolf, when struck with a dart, would tend to try and get away from it, not turn around and delicately remove it.

The wolf spat the dart out onto the straw between his feet. His eyelids began to feel heavy, and his thoughts went fuzzy, and the next thing he knew he was back in the dog crate in the white station wagon, speeding along the highway, and he felt too shaky and dizzy to even sit up.

They gave him another dart through the bars of the dog crate that he couldn’t even reach to remove because the crate was so small, and then the next time he woke up he had a muzzle over his nose and he was in a little cage in a room with other animals in cages stacked up one on top of each other. Across the aisle from him were a couple of very sick-looking cats, their third eyelids extending partway across their eyes, bags if IV fluid hanging down from hooks by their cages, the tubes disappearing inside.

One of the cats smelt as if it were dying. When Ranger lifted his muzzle to sniff at the ear, he could detect the faint, sweet odor of an animal that was decaying from the inside out. He thought the other cat might recover, but it smelled dehydrated.

He got up to shift in his little cage, which was full of warm blankets, and found that he couldn’t move properly. There was a painful pinching sensation in his foreleg, and he looked down at it in surprise to discover that his leg had been shaved off in a little patch and there was a cannula in his leg, held in place with surgical tape and soft bandages. He was hooked up to an IV, too.

Disconcerted, the wolf licked at the cannula, trying to dislodge it, but the bandages tasted
disgusting
. They were as bitter as apples still small and green on the tree, with weeks left to go before they ripened. His mouth filled with saliva and he dribbled all over his blanket before deciding that maybe he would leave the cannula where it was.

He felt sleepy, drifted, and startled awake when a nurse in pale purple scrubs put a little paper plate of something that smelt awful down in front of him. It looked like chunks of meat in gravy, but it smelled like
dog food
. From a can.

It was a monumental effort to get to his feet and turn around so he wasn’t facing it and couldn’t smell it as strongly. As he flopped back down onto the blankets, he thought he heard someone sigh heavily, but then he was asleep again.

Someone came and took the plate away while he was asleep. Someone else flicked the lights in the room off after they had checked all the animals. Ranger woke and slept and woke again. The lights flickered on and off multiple times during the night as one of the nurses came through to make sure all of the animals were still alive.

Morning came. More canned dog food was put in front of him. He turned his head away.

Wright came to visit, and stood outside Ranger’s little cage with the veterinarian who’d come up to the sanctuary days or weeks or months before, the wolf wasn’t certain anymore. They spoke to each other, but their words seemed far away and sort of muffled, like Ranger was hearing them from underwater.

“—Maybe cancer,” the veterinarian said. “We won’t know for certain unless we do a CAT scan. The antibiotics aren’t helping at all. We’ve given him an anti-emetic, and IV fluids, but he’s still not eating…” Ranger didn’t hear what he said next because he’d started to doze and he was half-dreaming about the time he’d caught a mouse and dropped it on Michelle’s pillow.

“… May need to consider euthanasia…”

“… Rabies?”

“No, not rabies. He isn’t having difficulty swallowing. I called the man who vaccinated him. Doctor Payne. He worked with large animals down in Tamarack, and also the Tamarack wolf pack.”

“What?” Wright sounded surprised.

“They use an oral bait drop method of vaccinating the wolves down there, like they do in some places over in Europe,” the veterinarian said. “Doctor Payne told me that he vaccinated this wolf personally, just handed him the bait vaccination. He doesn’t have rabies.”

“Winter wolf syndrome?” Wright asked.

“It would explain the aggressive behavior, maybe, especially since you placed him next to an unaltered female and he hasn’t been altered himself, but he shouldn’t’ve stopped eating. I’m inclined to suspect a brain tumor.”

Later in the morning, two nurses came and lifted him out of his cage and onto a gurney. He couldn’t summon the energy to growl at them, and he lay still on his side when one of them laid her hand on his shoulder and smiled at him.

“You’re awfully nice, for a wolf,” she said to him, scratching him behind his ears. “We don’t usually get wolves from the sanctuary down here – they’re normally all treated up there by Doctor Rush. I thought you’d be meaner, though.”

He thumped his tail, twice, against the gurney.

“I like you.”

They took him to a room with an odd machine with a hole in the middle and a bed on a mechanical lift in front of it, and they shifted him from the gurney to the bed and strapped him down. He didn’t struggle, laid still even when they started the machine up and the bed whirred and moved into the hole of the machine and it sounded like the world was booming around him. This, he assumed blearily, was a CAT scan.

He woke up back in the cage, and Tanner was there, tugging anxiously at his moustache.

“—Nothing wrong,” the veterinarian said. “I’ve looked over all of the images, and there are no anomalies. He just seems to have—”

“—Lost the will to live,” Tanner interrupted him.

“Yes. Sometimes dogs pine away when their old owners die and they go to a new one – it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen it happen. From his teeth, I wouldn’t’ve even said this wolf was particularly old. Such a shame, he’s a beautiful animal…”

He slept again.

“What the hell are you doing, you stupid wolf?”

Ranger blinked, and blinked again because he wasn’t sure what he was seeing was real. There was Michelle, crouching down in front of his cage, scowling deeply.

“Vermont,” she hissed. “We were looking for you for two weeks, after we realized you weren’t just on a hunting trip behind town. And you were in
Vermont
. Why, Ranger? And why are you at the vet’s?”

He whined and flattened his ears and looked down and away because her gaze was too intense to meet.

“I didn’t think putting that collar on you would ever actually have any use,” she went on, heedless of the fact he was trying to melt through the blankets and disappear. “You don’t normally stray too far from Tamarack. I figured you might get caught if we went on a day-trip to Norfolk or something. But Vermont.” She shook her head disbelievingly. “Come on, I’m busting you out.”

The wolf hauled himself to his feet laboriously as Michelle opened the cage door. A nurse removed the IV drip from his leg. Michelle clipped a lime green leash to his collar. He felt shaky and weak as he followed her down shiny white hallways that smelled so strongly of cleaning chemicals his nose burned. A couple of veterinary nurses met them in the lobby and carried him over the snow in the parking lot to Michelle’s little white automatic with snow chains on the front wheels.

Sachie was leaning against the back of the car, his hands in his pockets. The boy smiled brightly when he saw the wolf. He opened the door to the back seat so the nurses could bundle Ranger into the car.

Michelle said goodbye, and then she and Sachie were in the front, pulling carefully out of the parking lot and onto the road while Sacheverell cranked up the heat.

“I suppose it’s quite the story, how you ended up there,” Sachie said, cheerfully. “But you can’t tell us, can you? Hey, did you want something to eat? You look really skinny for some reason. I can see your hips and ribs and everything. Guess that’s why you were at the vet’s, actually.”