We did not tell the compound.
That was Darius's decision and I did not argue it, because the logic was clean: we had one feeling from one direction on one morning, with no corroborating evidence beyond the instinct of a woman whose wolf had spent a long time being right about things she couldn't fully explain. You did not mobilize five hundred wolves on an instinct.
You mobilized Cole.
Cole went to the southern boundary alone, which he described as a routine perimeter check and which everyone understood was not that. He came back an hour later with the compressed expression of a man who had found something he did not yet know how to classify.
"Something passed through," he said. "Not recently. The trail is cold."
"But there was a trail," Darius said.
"Yes."
"One wolf?"
Cole paused.
