Chapter 39: The Missing Page

I asked Harlan for three things.

The first was a truck and a driver and the right to take the pack truck to Boise and back without a single wolf in this territory asking me why. The second was a letter in his hand and on the pack letterhead, signed and sealed, saying that the Alpha of the Palouse Ridge pack supported the claim of blood that the Gamma would file in front of the Council of Alphas on the tenth of October. The third was the pack house to himself for one afternoon while he went through every drawer and every cupboard in the Alpha's office and brought out every piece of Council paper he had ever signed and put it on the kitchen table so Silas could read it.

He agreed to all three before I finished the third one.

We went down the ridge together at first light with Mrs. Pike carrying her basket and Harlan carrying his hat, and we came into the pack house yard just as the sun was coming up over the barn roof. There were wolves in the yard. The Corrigan boys were there and the young border-wardens and a handful of others who had heard something in the night and had come to see what it was. They looked at me and they looked at Elias and they looked at Harlan and nobody said anything.

"Pack meeting," Harlan said. "Tonight. The pack house yard. Everybody in the territory. Tell your neighbors."

We went into the pack house and Harlan went to his office and did not come out for two hours. Mrs. Pike went into the kitchen and put the kettle on and started making bread because that is what Mrs. Pike does when there is a crisis. Silas sat down at the long table with his sling and his pencil and the box of Council paper Harlan brought out, and Arthur Renn sat down beside him with the record open and his spectacles on the end of his nose.

I went to the tack room.

I went alone. Elias wanted to come and I told him no. I told him that the last time I had been in that tack room I had found a coat and a scarf and a knife and I had stood in the dark listening to two men talk about killing a wolf, and I needed to go back into that room by myself and come out with my hands steady.

The barn was quiet. The horses were out in the paddock and there was snow on the saddle rack and the tack room door was shut.

I opened it and went in and stood in the middle of the floor.

The box was still behind the board. The coat was still in the box and the scarf was gone and the knife was gone, and there was a thing in the box that had not been there before. It was a page.

It was torn at the edge and burned along one side and it had been folded and refolded so many times that the creases had gone soft, and it was written in a hand I had seen before on the founders' record.

I picked it up very carefully and carried it out to the light.

It was the missing page. The one Ruth had copied in 1954. The one that had been torn out of the founders' record before Arthur Renn was born. Somebody had torn it out and folded it and put it in a box in a tack room, and somebody had tried to burn it and had not finished the job.

I took it into the pack house and put it on the table in front of Arthur Renn.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he took off his spectacles and put them down and did not say anything.

"Read it," I said.

He read it. He read it twice. Then he pushed it across the table to me and put his head in his hands.

I read it.

It was in the old Alpha's hand. It was written on the night of the new moon in 1891 and it had been witnessed by two wolves whose names I did not know. It said that the founders had taken his Luna from her house on the sixth of April and held her in the mill and drowned her in the pond on the twelfth and told the Council she had died of a fever. It said that he had gone to the Council with the truth and the Council had taken the founders' side because the founders had the deed. And it said that he was going to do a thing that could not be undone.

And then there were seven lines at the bottom, and the seven lines were the cure.

I read them four times before I believed them.

"A cure made in public," I said. "In the circle. In front of the pack. By the Luna and the cursed wolf together. The Luna has to take the curse with her own hands and give it back to the moon, and the cursed wolf has to let it go, and neither of them can do it alone." I looked up. "It is not a thing I do. It is a thing we do. Together."

Arthur Renn lifted his head.

"That is why the founders wrote no cure," he said. "They only knew the first half. They knew the curse was a witness and they knew it could not be hidden, and they thought that meant it could not be broken. They never saw this page because the old Alpha did not give it to them. He gave it to the pack and the pack hid it and the founders tore it out of the record and burned it and put it in a box in a tack room, and they never knew what was on it." He looked at me. "And the man who put it in that box was a fool, because he kept it. He kept the page that could break the curse and he kept it in a box in his own barn for eighty-five years."

"Who put it in the box?" I said.

Arthur Renn looked at the page.

"The name at the bottom is Silas," he said. "The first Silas. My great-grandfather's partner. He wrote it down and he witnessed it and then he signed it and then he kept it, and he kept it in a box in this barn, and it stayed in this barn until your brother found it." He put his hand flat on the page. "Owen found this. He found the coat and the letters and this page, and he read it, and that is why he went to Dale. It was not the coat that scared him. It was the page."

I sat down in the chair at the end of the table.

"Then my brother died for a piece of paper," I said.

"He died for the truth," Arthur Renn said. "Which is a thing that people have been dying for a very long time."

June came in through the back door with snow on her boots.

"Wren," she said. "There is a man in the yard and he is asking for Dale and he says he is from the Council and he has a paper."

I got up and went to the window.

There was a car in the yard, black and long and dusty from the road, and there was a man standing beside it in a dark coat with a folder under his arm. He was not Silas. He was older, and heavier, and he had a face like a closed door.

"Arthur," I said. "Come and look at this man."

Arthur Renn came to the window. He looked out. Then he put his hand on the sill and his face went the color of the snow.

"That is Elias Kessler," he said. "He is the Council's chief clerk. He is the man who signs the cull orders and the trial claims and the land deeds." He looked at me. "And he is the man who sent me a letter in 1968 telling me that if I ever let anyone see the founders' record he would have me dismissed and my pension taken and my name struck from the archive."

The man in the yard turned and looked up at the window.

He looked straight at me and he did not smile.

"Wren Halloran," he called. "I am looking for the Beta of this pack. I have a paper for him. It says the Council has decided to hear the trial claim on the twenty-ninth of September after all, and it says the Council has issued a warrant for the arrest of a wolf known as Elias, and it says the Council will pay one thousand dollars to any wolf in this territory who brings him in."