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path itself, he had once told Grace that it was like something out of a fairy tale. He had thought of it that way when he was a child and had first visited his uncle David and when he returned so many years later the path from the trailer to the animals seemed even more so. My god that you could walk through such a landscape. My god that such a landscape existed anywhere but in your dreams. And yet here it was. Were a fox to step out from behind the trees and speak in human words, or a raven to descend wearing a suit coat and a top hat, you would not have been surprised. Worlds overlapping.
    He unlocked the office and started the coffeepot and then unlocked the tiny gift shop down by the parking lot and then the medical room and finally stood in front of the wolf enclosure once more. He thought he had seen Zeke when he had turned up the path from the gift shop, the wolf’s body a quick blur against the fence line, but there was no sign of him at all now. Though he waited there for the animal’s appearance, the wolf did not come. Bill resigned himself to that fact and returned to the bare, boxlike construction trailer that he used as an office, pouring himself a mug of coffee and then sitting for a time looking at invoices he knew he could not currently pay, a process he had hardly started before Bess arrived, knocking twice on the office door and then opening it. Morning, she said.
    Morning.
    She stood in the doorway, a woman perhaps ten years older than he was and whom he had hired soon after his uncle had died because he
knew he would be unable to run the rescue on his own and because he had begun talking to the animals in earnest, talking and listening, a habit that sometimes made him doubt his sanity.
    There’s coffee, he said.
    Sounds good.
    His words were her cue to enter the office trailer and pour herself a cup and begin going over the day’s schedule with him: the feedings, the turkey vulture’s antibiotics, some planned maintenance on the lower fence, the building of a new raptor enclosure, which volunteers they would have that day and which they would not. But instead she stood there unmoving near the closed door. So … uh … what happened? she said.
    With what?
    Last night. You left in a hurry.
    Moose, he said.
    In town?
    Down near Ponderay. Hit by a pickup.
    He did not want to talk about it but there it was. He told her what had happened and when he was done she said nothing for a long time, standing there in the doorway in silence. He did not look at her, kept his eyes focused on the paperwork on the metal surface of the desk. At last she said, simply, Awful.
    He nodded. Well, he said, let’s do the schedule.
    She moved forward into the trailer and they went over the day’s routine just as they might have without the moose. She reminded him she was taking two of the eagles out to an elementary school in Sandpoint later that morning and he told her he would help her load the bird. Then she nodded and stepped out the door, the coffee cup steaming into the chill air.
    He returned to the trailer in the late morning. The plastic thermometer that hung by its door read just under thirty degrees, but the sky was bright and clear and so there had been a few visitors when they opened the gate at ten: a family of three on vacation from somewhere farther west, and two women, perhaps mother and daughter, neither younger than sixty. What do you think, old man? he said to the bear when the women started up the path.
    The bear looked at him, swinging its nose up the fence.
    That’s gonna be us one day. Old men stumbling around. You want a grape?
    The bear’s lips curled in a smile again. Bill removed a ziplock from his jacket pocket. Don’t tell anyone I’m giving you treats for no good reason, he said. He slipped a grape through the fence. Majer took it carefully in his distended lips, one after another until the bag was empty. I’m serious about keeping this secret, Bill said. You know the rule: Don’t feed the