Three days later, on a Sunday, Mara went into the Backs.
This was not something she had planned. She had planned to take a long bike ride on the forest road that ran along the base of the ridge — the maintained road, the one with the guardrail and the reflector posts, the road that families used on weekends. But she'd gotten distracted by a deer path that cut away from the road uphill into the trees, and then by the way the light fell through the canopy in long parallel shafts like the ribs of something enormous, and then by the sound of water she couldn't locate, and by the time she realized she'd gone past the signs she was already a quarter mile in.
The Backs were different from the rest of the forest. She'd known this abstractly — everyone in Sutter Falls knew this abstractly — but she hadn't understood it until she was standing inside them. The other forests of the ridge had the regular vocabulary of wilderness: birdsong, wind in the upper branches, the scurry of squirrels. The Backs had none of these. It was not silent — there was still the wind, still the creak of old wood — but it was quiet in a different way, a way that felt intentional, like the pause between words rather than the absence of them.
The light was almost blue.
Mara stood at the edge of a small clearing where a fallen cedar had created a gap in the canopy, and in the center of the clearing there was a stone she had no rational explanation for. It was about three feet across, flat on top, clearly not naturally occurring — the edges too even, the surface too smooth. It was covered in lichen the color of old pewter, which meant it had been there a long time. Longer than the signs.
Etched into the surface of the stone, just barely visible beneath the lichen, were marks that might have been letters and might have been something else. She crouched to look at them.
A sound behind her — not large, but close. She turned.
The wolf was standing at the tree line.
It was enormous. That was the first thing. Oregon did have wolves — they had come back to the state over the past decade, reintroduced, cautious presences in the mountains — but she had never seen one, and she had not understood from photographs what "large" meant when applied to a wild wolf. This animal was the size of a small pony, dark gray across the back shading to black at the paws and muzzle, and its eyes were a yellow so pale it was almost white. It was looking at her with an expression that she could only describe as considered.
She should have run. Everything in the human brain that is old enough to predate civilization knows that you run from wolves. But she didn't run. She stood up slowly, keeping her movements deliberate, and met those pale yellow eyes, and the wolf looked back at her, and for a moment that seemed to last much longer than it was, nothing happened at all.
Then the wolf stepped toward her, and Mara did the thing her body apparently decided to do before her brain had a vote: she held out her hand.
The wolf stopped. It looked at her hand. It lowered its head, sniffed the air between them, and — and she would describe this to herself later in the exact words she used in the moment because no other words fit — it sighed, the way a person sighs when accepting something inevitable.
And then it bit her. Not hard — not savagely, not in the way of an animal attacking. More in the way of a seal pressed to paper. A deliberate, brief pressure of teeth on the soft part of her hand between thumb and forefinger, enough to break the skin, and then it pulled back.
Mara looked at her hand. Two small punctures, welling with blood. Not serious. Barely painful.
When she looked up, the wolf was gone.
She stood in the clearing for a full minute, alone with the blue-tinged light and the ancient stone, before her brain caught up to events and she turned and walked very quickly back through the trees to the road and her bike.
She cleaned the wound with the first aid kit she kept in her bike bag — she always kept one, this was a thing her mother had drilled into her — and wrapped it with a bandage, and rode home, and told no one.
That night she had a fever of 103.