The questioning in this round is predictable, almost perfunctory, and Koda follows it with only half her attention as she forces calm onto her own mind in preparation for her testimony. She must be cool; she must be detached. She must give no hint of her personal interest, make no display of her grief. For justice.. For all the wild beings who deserve to live out their lives without the added perils of human cruelty. She calls up the memory of the mother wolf, Wa Uspewicakiyape’s mate, sleeping peacefully, her pup curled up beside her, a spatter of milk drying on the end of his nose. For all the years and the generations to come. She holds that thought clear before her, a banner and a promise, while voices drone on half-heard.

Did Dr. Rabinowitz examine the body of William Everett Dietrich, deceased?

Yes, he did.

Did he perform an autopsy?

Yes, ma’am.

What were his findings?

Mr. Dietrich died of a gunshot wound to the head. Specifically a 9 mm. bullet that entered the frontal bone of the skull medially and approximately one centimeter above the level of the supraorbital ridge and exited, also medially, at the Y-seam where the left and right parietals meet over the occiput, leaving a wound approximately 4.75 cm across.

In layman’s terms?

In layman’s terms, he’d been shot between the eyes and his brains blown out a two-inch-plus hole in the back of his head.

Died instantly?

No one ‘dies instantly,’ but brain activity and autonomic functions would have ceased within minutes, possibly seconds.

Any other wounds on the body?

None.

Cause of death: gunshot wound to the head. So say you one, so say you all?

No one disputes the verdict; no one was expected to. No one finds it necessary to see the autopsy photographs which the good Doctor has prepared as slides. The easy part is behind.

Koda forces her attention back to the courtroom as the clerk calls Lieutenant Manuel Rios, USAF. Manny takes the oath, swearing, as Koda had done, not on the Bible but on the medicine pouch invisible beneath his shirt and tie. The hand that he raises still shows red where the transparent dressing covers the burns he sustained in pulling Donaldson from the flaming APC, and a murmur runs through the room. Rapid City has become a small town, Ellsworth an even smaller one, and the tale of the attack on the convoy returning with the generators has made its way not only through the entire military corps but into the civilian population as well, growing in the telling. Added to Manny’s exploits at the Cheyenne, it has become a piece of local folklore, rapidly swelling toward the epic of the Red Knight and the Androids. One part facts, two parts awe, seven parts pure imagination: shake well and serve warm.

Somebody needs to be keeping a real record of what is happening. Otherwise we’re all at the mercy of Blind Harry and the grapevine.

*

Gingerly, moving as though his muscles still pain him in a dozen places, Manny takes the witness chair and begins his story.

The pickup bucks and yaws as Andrews wrestles it along the double ruts that pass for a road. Something large and hard, probably a rock hidden under lingering snow, bangs against the forward axel, and Andrews winces as the front end of the truck comes down hard. In the truck bed, a pair of wire cages rattle like tambourines with every lurch, while something smaller rolls loosely from side to side, clattering across the metal ridges. “Yo!” Manny yells above the din. “You gonna charge me for this chiropractic treatment? My damn tailbone’s busted!”

Andrews grins, never taking his eyes off the trail. “Hey, you’re the one that swore this ditch was really a road. I just follow directions.”

“It is a road,” Manny insists indignantly. “It just hasn’t been graded recently, that’s all.”

Another rock, this time mercifully passing under the left wheels, raises the driver’s side of the vehicle a good six inches and slams Manny’s right shoulder into his window. In the back, one of the cages skates clear across the cargo bed and hits the side with a clang of metal against metal. “We’re gonna have to tie those things down on the way back if we find anything!” Andrews shouts above the racket.

“I brought the rope. There’s an easier way back if we need it, though.” He pulls a pair of wire cutters from his pocket. “The Callaghan place has a blacktop running up from their main gate along the tree line we’re headed for.”

“Fuck, man!” Andrews takes his eyes off the twin ruts to glare at Manny. “Why the hell aren’t we on it now?

Manny shrugs, replacing the clippers. “You don’t cut somebody’s fence unless you have to. Hell, there was a time you could get arrested just for carrying a pair of cutters off your own property.”

“For a pair of pliers? Damn, I always knew you Westerners were weird.”

“Not for ‘a pair of pliers.’” Manny makes quote marks in the air with his right hand. “For what you were likely to do with ‘em. They’re rustler’s tools.”

“Yeesh.” Andrews’ breath hisses out between his teeth. “We’re getting major bones dislocated, just because of some antiquated law? Is there even anybody still on this Callaghan place to give a shit?”

“Well, bro, if there is, I don’t wanna get shot just to please your greenhorn butt. Mind that—oh shit.”

The right front tire comes down in a deeper than usual rut filled with snowmelt, spins and sinks to a halt. Andrews guns the motor, which only digs the wheel deeper and sends mud spattering out into the dry grasses on either side. Abruptly he cuts the engine. “Okay. You steer. I’ll get out and push.”

Manny shakes his head. “Turn it back on. Just don’t run over me when I say ‘go.’”

Not giving Andrews time to argue, he slides out his side of the truck and makes his way to the back, grinning. A city boy like Andrews might need a freeway to get from home to the corner store, but this is old hat to the ranch-bred Rivers clan. Leaning over the side of the truck bed, he extracts a three-foot length of two-by-eight. To the muffled sound of Andrews’ swearing, he wedges one end under the offending tire. “Okay!” he yells, hopping out from in front of the grille. “Go!”

With a grinding of gears, the truck surges out of the rut and onto level ground beyond. Manny tosses the board back into the truck bed and climbs into the passenger seat, steadying himself with his good hand. “Damn,” says Andrews, “I thought you said this thing was four-wheel-drive.”

“I did,” Manny agrees equably. “And it was. Been a little too occupied to fix the old rustbucket, if you know what I mean.”

A few hundred yards further up the rut, Manny surveys the line of bare trees along the top of a ridge. A vein of exposed limestone , broken and tumbled in spots, runs under it, here and there making a shallow overhang where a denning wolf might shelter. From what Koda has said, from what Tacoma has said she said, the place where she had found the dead pups ought to be just about—“Pull over at the next level spot,” he says. “The rockpile under that ledge doesn’t look natural.”

As the truck comes to a halt, he studies it more carefully. The pale spring light, standing down from noon, lays long shadows along the top of the rise, throwing cracks and gouges in the stone into sharp relief. In several places, blocks broken off from the rock face have fallen to the soft clay soil below, to be half hidden by rain-borne earth and winter-dry vegetation. Under the ledge, though, the ragged chunks of stone are all relatively small and massed together. Exposed rock above them shows dark and weathered above the outcropping, rootlets forcing their way through fissures where the rock will one day split but has not yet. Manny runs his hand over the stone, noting the rounded edges of old breaks, the grit where soil has discolored its creamy whiteness. He points to the cairn beneath the jutting rock layer. “Those rocks didn’t fall there. This has to be the lair.”

“The male should be somewhere around here, then,” says Andrews.

“Somewhere fairly close. You can bet the bastard put the trap near here because he thought there was a den in the area.” Turning back to the truck, he takes a 30.06 Winchester surmounted by a massive scope from the gun rack behind the seats. Carefully he loads a dart into the chamber and hands the weapon to Andrews. “You’re going to have to do the shooting if we need this; my left arm still won’t support any kind of weight.”

Andrews slips the rifle strap over his shoulder. “Just tell me when and what at.”

“Watch where you step,” says Manny, and heads toward an open glade to the east.

The snow still lies on the ground in patches, slick around its melting edges. As they mount the ridge and approach the small stand of trees, Manny can see what appears to be a mound still heaped beneath the bare canopy. The recent fall has drifted nowhere else, though, and here on the north side of the ridge it lies clean, marked only by the rippling wind. Andrews, at his shoulder, says softly, “That’s him, isn’t it?”

Manny nods grimly. “Likely. We need to make sure, though. Don’t put your feet down anywhere you can’t see. We don’t know how many of the damned things there are.”

A moment later, he kneels beside the mound, lightly brushing powder away from fur that still shows red where the blood of the terrible wounds has frozen. Very gently Manny clears the head and throat, still showing the puncture marks of teeth, works his way down the torn limbs and belly to the mangled leg. Rage rises within him, burning its way up from a spot just beneath his solar plexus, tightening his throat, clenching his fists into knots around the ice-hard flesh beneath his hands. From behind him he hears Andrews swearing softly and incessantly, biting off the words with the cold precision of an automatic weapon stitching a line of metal-jacketed rounds along an enemy front. “God. Damned. Son. Of. A. Mother. Fucking. Bitch!”