Page 2 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

I photograph them. I call Fish and Wildlife again and leave a second message with more detail in the same flat voice. Then I kneel beside the closest carcass and start coiling the snare wire I pulled, because I need to keep busy, need to think about what comes next instead of looking at four dead animals arranged like a threat at my gate.

A truck comes up the logging road while I'm finishing the last coil.

A white Dodge, mud on the plates, two men in the cab. They don't get out. They sit behind the windshield and watch me hold their snare wire. I stand and face them and the wire coils over my arm, the weight of it presses against my sleeve.

The passenger lowers his window.

"You're making a mistake, lady."

I don't step back. My boots stay where they are on the gravel. "You're trespassing on private land."

He looks at me like I'm an inconvenience. He's forty-something, wearing a ball cap, and has the kind of tan you get from working outside. "Not for long."

The driver reverses without a word. They back down the gravel and disappear around the first bend, and the dust takes thirty seconds to settle.

Then I walk back to my truck and see that both of my rear tires are flat.

Not flat. Cut. Two clean slices per tire, deep through the sidewall, too far gone to patch. They did it while I pulled their snares and coiled their wire and played the part they staged for me—face the message, and while you're looking, we take your wheels.

My phone shows no signal. I know it won't. The east boundary sits in a dead zone that runs from the gate to the creek, a quarter-mile pocket where the ridge blocks the nearest tower. I keep telling myself to call the carrier about a booster. Eighteen months now. Someone knows my routine, knew about the dead zone, knew I drive the perimeter on Mondays, and blinded every camera before I arrived.

I sit on the rock above the gate for twenty minutes. The first ten, I think about the coyotes and the cameras and the cut tires and the logistics of getting out of here on foot. The second ten, I wait for my hands to stop shaking, and I don't think about what the shaking means, because if I follow that thread I'll land on the word scared and scared leads to alone and alone leads to admitting that I built twelve acres of self-sufficiency around the principle that I'd never need anyone again and the principle has a crack in it tonight.

I walk a quarter mile uphill to the ridge where the signal picks up. It's only one bar, but enough.

I scroll through my contacts and I don't stop at Fish and Wildlife. I don't stop at Diane. I scroll past every name until I hit the one I need and I press call before I can talk myself out of it.

"Thomas." My voice sounds steadier than my hands. "I need you at the east boundary."

Silence for half a beat, and then his voice comes through, low and immediate. "What happened."

Not how are you. Not is everything okay.

I tell him. Disabled cameras, snare lines inside the fence, the carcasses, the truck, the two men, and my tires. I leave out the twenty minutes on the rock. I leave out the shaking.

"Stay on the ridge. I'm coming."

I count fourteen minutes because counting keeps me from thinking about why I called him instead of 911. Why the first name I wanted on a day like this belongs to a minotaur medic who brings me injured raccoons at ten PM and writes the species name in block capitals on every intake card.

His truck comes up the logging road and stops at the east gate. He steps out and his size fills the tree line—seven feet, broad through the shoulders, his graying fur dark in the dusk. The medical kit hangs at his side. I told him I'm not hurt.

He brought it anyway.

He scans the boundary. His face gives nothing. He looks at the tires, the coyotes, the cameras, and then he walks toward me.

He reaches me on the ridge. He looks at my hands, my eyes, my breathing. Then his fingers close around my wrist, light and firm, as his thumb finds my pulse and presses.

He counts. His wire-rimmed glasses sit crooked on his nose, and the broken horn on his right side juts out. His expression doesn't change because he's reading my heart rate the way he reads every vital sign on every patient he's ever treated.

My pulse doubles under his thumb. He doesn't mention it.

Chapter 2

Steel

Arranged carcasses, not dumped — a clear message or threat. Cameras painted, SD cards pulled — someone who understands surveillance. Snare lines inside the property boundary, not the state forest margin. Tires slashed with a fixed blade, two clean cuts each. Whoever did this wanted her stuck here long enough to sit with what they left.

I finish the photos, lower the phone and let myself look at her.