The path began just beyond the last houses at the edge of town, rising in a series of pale switchbacks through dry grass and low pines toward the open hills above Missoula.
Frank took it at an easy pace at first.
The light had that strange late-afternoon clarity particular to high places, everything seeming at once sharper and less substantial, as though the world had been lightly outlined rather than fully made. The town below lay in a quiet spread of streets and trees and parked cars, all of it receding with surprising speed as he climbed.
For the first ten minutes or so he thought of nothing in particular. He was simply aware of the steady incline, the faint warmth still held in the ground, the small shifting sounds of birds deeper in the brush.
Then, gradually, another awareness came over him.
He was tired.
Not absurdly so. Not yet. But more tired than he ought to have been.
He slowed a little and looked down at the path as if the ground itself might account for it.
“That’s odd,” he murmured.
He had slept well enough. The day had been a full one, certainly, but not the sort of day that ought to leave a man feeling hollowed out by late afternoon. And yet there it was: a slight weakness in the limbs, a peculiar looseness in the head, as though some vital part of his concentration were beginning, very gently, to thin out.
Frank kept walking.
A few minutes later he became aware of another sound behind him.
Not close. Not urgent.
Just the light, regular suggestion of movement somewhere further down the trail.
He turned.
A wolf stood on the path below him.
It was grey, lean, perfectly still.
Frank looked at it for a moment.
Then he frowned.
The odd thing was not that it was there.
The odd thing was that he did not feel frightened.
He ought, presumably, to have felt frightened. That much he understood in theory. A man alone on a hillside, late in the day, being followed by a wolf, ought to feel something sharper than mild curiosity.
But the feeling refused to arrive.
The animal merely stood there, looking up at him with a calm, unreadable attention.
Frank gave it one last look, then turned and carried on.
The trail lifted and curved. The town below grew smaller. The air seemed brighter now, too bright almost, washed in a pale gold that flattened distance and made the far slopes look strangely theatrical, like painted scenery.
After another bend in the path, he glanced back again.
The wolf was still there.
Not hurrying. Not gaining on him.
Simply following.
“Right,” Frank said softly.
He walked on.
A little while later he looked back once more and saw that there were now four of them.
He stopped.
The wolves stood in a loose line on the path below, all quiet, all watching him.
Again the expected fear failed to come.
Instead there was only the same bewildering lack of urgency, as though some part of him had already accepted their presence and folded it into the day without protest.
He stared at them.
“Shouldn’t I be bothered by this?”
The question went nowhere.
He resumed climbing.
By now the tiredness had deepened into something harder to ignore. His legs felt heavier. His breathing came a touch shorter than it should have done. And beneath that physical effort there was something stranger still: a sense that the day had begun to drift away from him, becoming at once more vivid and less believable.
The path swung upward again in another long switchback.
As Frank rounded it, he had, for no reason he could have named, a sudden image of rain falling on a narrow street of brick terraces. Wet pavements. Low front doors. A small upstairs window lit against the evening.
The image vanished at once.
Frank stopped and pressed a hand lightly to his forehead.
“What was that?”
There was no answer.
Only the brightness. The path. The dry grass moving faintly in the breeze.
He climbed higher.
At the next turn he became aware of the wolves no longer following directly behind. The silence around him had altered somehow. It had widened.
Frank moved to the outer edge of the path and looked down.
Several switchbacks below, gathered across the trail and the slope beside it, stood a whole pack of wolves.
Not four now.
A dozen at least. Perhaps more.
Fifteen. Twenty.
It was difficult to say.
They stood in complete silence, all of them looking up toward him.
For a moment the sight was so strange, so perfectly composed, that it seemed less like something happening than something being remembered.
Then, from somewhere to his left, a man’s voice said warmly:
“That’s our lot, son.”
Frank smiled before he even understood why.
The hillside vanished for half a second.
He was elsewhere—or had been elsewhere once—small enough that the world rose around him in tiers of noise and colour, his hand swallowed in a larger hand, his father’s coat rough against his shoulder, voices rolling up from the crowd in one great living sound.
He could feel the happiness of it before he could think it.
A child’s happiness. Sudden, complete, unquestioning.
The smile stayed on his face for a moment.
Then it faltered.
“Dad?”
His voice sounded smaller now.
He turned to his left.
There was no one there.
Frank looked back down the hill.
The wolves had gone.
The path below lay empty in the late light, bending away through dry grass and rock as though nothing had ever stood upon it at all.
He stared for a few seconds longer, then lowered himself slowly onto the side of the trail.
The effort of sitting down felt unexpectedly immense.
“I’m absolutely spent,” he said, though even to himself the words seemed to come from a great distance.
He rested his forearms on his knees and let his head hang for a moment.
Then, very quietly:
“I hardly knew you.”
The sentence surprised him by how true it felt.
He closed his eyes.
Behind them the brightness did not diminish. It grew.
Brighter and brighter, until the light seemed no longer to belong to the hills at all but to some other place entirely, some interior place where memory and longing had become indistinguishable.
For a final moment he saw things he could not possibly have seen together: blue water under indoor lights, a row of archery targets beneath open sky, rain on red brick, a glowing computer screen in a darkened room.
Then even those began to fade.