WOLFVILLE

1.1: Not Who You Think I Am

Old grey fur hugged the feet, the only pieces still intact of the rabbit.

Timmory Cross stared. The camera hung off her neck as she crouched to poke the carcass with a stick. Its long padded feet were kicked together, spine twisting through leaf litter and clotted with dry red blood. Most of its bones were missing. It didn't look much like itself, not even the skull.

She fixed the camera to her eye. The eye socket stared back. Timmory snapped a few photos of her subject, unsure of what happened to the creature to have it sprawled so elegantly in repose. It couldn't have been a kill. She nudged it with her toe, disturbing channels of ants sipping the sugars of its decay. She exposed the scavengers that picked it apart and took photos of them too. Fragments of lives fascinated Timmory. That was usually why she came to Gaspereau Mountain.

Her careful feet stepped over the rabbit. Timmory let the camera rest and steadied her hand on the aspen overlooking the dip where the carcass was left, then stepped up and into the brush. On warm mornings like this, the forest unraveled; insects and birds made the trees come alive in symphony. Sun danced and leaves shivered as omens of the breeze. Dragonflies hovered like tiny drones past her head, mosquitoes tickled her arms and left welts even without sticking her. Timmory hummed a song stuck in her head that she remembered from yesterday. Nearly tripping over a deep cleft, Timmory slapped the back of her neck and inspected the paw prints in the ground, mud still pliable from the rain a few days ago. Maybe it was a kill. Timmory took a photo and stepped after the tracks—

Until a spot of curious shade caught her eye a meter away. She loomed over the patch in the grass where three ink blots charred the dirt black, burnt growth retaining its shape as carbon. Timmory touched it with the tip of her shoe, but while it looked to be wet, it only smeared like ash. She wondered what had touched the Earth there.

"Tim, what are you doing?"

She took a photo of the three spots, then returned to the wolf tracks. "Hey, bring Brutus over here! You wanna see something crazy?"

A head of blonde hair bobbed toward her, her friend climbing through brush off the edge of the trail near their campsite. Julia brought the German shepherd tight on his leash into the trees with her. Timmory knelt, jostling Brutus by the scruff when he bounded up to her. She kept him in place until Julia, puffing and swiping debris off her thighs, stood in front of Timmory.

"Look," said Timmory, borrowing Brutus' paw to compare it to the tracks.

"They're so big! Are those wolves?" Julia leaned down.

"I think so. They look too big to be coyotes, and I don't think coyotes come this deep into the woods," Timmory pointed out, only guessing. She let Brutus go and gave him a pat. "Thanks bud."

The dog licked her chin and Timmory grimaced and stood, wiping it away. When Brutus zeroed in on the rabbit carcass, she grabbed the red bandana around his neck and guided him back to Julia. She wasn't about to let him eat leftovers and get sick.

"You don't think they were around last night, do you?" asked Julia, crackling through the branches. "I heard about those attacks."

"Not near our campsite. Brutus would've noticed," said Timmory.

"That's a relief. I'd hate to be eaten by wolves the week before school."

Timmory laughed. "That would be ironic."

Julia snorted. "Are you still taking pictures of weird shit or can we move on?"

"Onward to the next weird shit," declared Timmory.

Soon it would be too cold to camp overnight. All the best discoveries were made in the dawn; she wanted to explore as much as she could before she was limited to camping on the three or five weekends she had left.