Breaking Free: A Colorado High Country Crossover Novel, Pamela Clare [i can read book club .TXT] 📗

bag on the tailgate, and set the head on top of it. “All right, boy, let’s see what Winona has to say about you.”

There wasn’t as much flesh left on it as Winona had imagined, the skull intact, the bones unbroken but exposed, a few vertebrae still attached. She worked as methodically as she could, examining every surface.

She canted the head so Jack could see the left jawbone. “These are tooth pits where the animal bit down. These grooves are called scores.”

Jack pointed. “What about those deeper grooves?”

“Those were probably made by rodents.”

“Rodents?”

“They eat bones and antlers for calcium, and they’ve got those big front teeth. See how those marks are deeper at the bottom than the top?” She pointed with a gloved pinky finger. “I sometimes give bones to rodents at the clinic. Their bite marks look just like this. I bet these came from a squirrel.”

Jack leaned closer. “I had no idea.”

Winona went on with her examination. “I wish I’d taken more time to study the bones from the roadkill I fed Shota. Most of the time, he got frozen blocks of meat to gnaw on. There was nothing left by the time he’d finished.”

Still, the bite marks looked like they could be from a wolf, but she couldn’t be certain. For all she knew, they might just as easily come from a mountain lion or black bear. “It’s possible that these marks weren’t left by the predator that killed the steer. Kleptoparasitism is very common. A mountain lion kills an elk, feeds, and caches the rest. A black bear finds the cache, drags the kill away, and feeds on it for several days. While the bear isn’t looking, foxes or coyotes take their share.”

Nature wasted nothing.

She turned the skull to see what she could of the vertebrae. “A mountain lion typically attacks the neck and crushes the vertebrae and part of the skull. That didn’t happen here, but…”

She ran a gloved finger over a mark on the bottom of the lowest vertebra. It was too narrow to be scoring from a tooth. It was almost razor-thin, like a...

“I think this was made by a knife.” She held it out so Jack could see.

“A knife?” He leaned in, brow furrowed. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“It looks like a cut mark to me, but I don’t know enough about forensic science to be certain. I could be making this up.”

“I appreciate that disclaimer, Winona, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

She set the remains down on the plastic. “I’d probably be more helpful to you if I took a careful look around the pasture. That’s where the story is.”

Jack bagged the remains and set the bag inside the cooler. “Let’s head out there and see what Chiago has for us.”

While Nate hung back so as not to tread on sign, Jason walked around the site of the kill, studying it, and snapping photos with his phone.

A large depression in the grass where the steer had fallen. Lots of dried blood and small bits of tissue drawing flies. Scattered sign—overlapping tracks from squirrels, coyotes, humans, and possibly a wolf.

Click. Click. Click.

Jason knelt beside a single clear print of a front paw that was as wide as his palm. It certainly looked like a wolf, but he needed to see a complete set of tracks to be certain.

Click.

He tried backtracking, following bent and broken grasses and the occasional partial print in a straight line back toward the fence. He hadn’t gone far when he found what he’d been searching for—tracks from both the front and hind paws—and beyond that, gray fur snagged on barbed wire.

This was where the animal crossed into the pasture.

But where had it gone afterward?

Click. Click.

He walked back to the site of the kill, looking for drag marks or places where the grass had been flattened. There were none, except…

He backtracked the way he and Nate had come, heading toward the gate. He’d assumed that Jack and Nate had trampled the grass when Nate had entered the pasture to examine the site and cover it. But maybe Jason was wrong about that. He stepped carefully, his gaze moving over a two-foot-wide path.

Boot tracks. A front and hind paw print. And there—dried blood on the grass.

Click. Click. Click.

He saw that Winona and Jack had joined Nate and made his way carefully over to them. “I’m pretty certain I know what happened here.”

He walked them through it, starting at the site of the kill and moving toward the barbed wire with the bit of fur, which he plucked off and handed to Winona. “This is where the wolf entered the pasture. It can be hard to tell a wolf track from that of a large dog, but there are differences.”

He pointed to the toes. “See how the claw marks are visible for each of the toes and how they point forward? We often don’t see all of the claws on dog tracks, and the outer toes tend to be splayed outward. But the biggest difference is the way they walk.”

“The way they walk?” Nate asked.

“Wolves walk in a straight line. Dogs don’t. See where the rear paw track is right in front of the larger front track? You wouldn’t see that with dogs.”

The three bent to examine the track.

“So, we’ve got ourselves a wolf.” Jack lifted his gaze from the track to Jason. “Can you tell how many wolves were here? Is it a pack?”

“So far, what I’ve seen looks like a lone wolf.”

“It wasn’t a pack.” Winona glanced around the pasture, the wind catching strands of her dark hair. “If a pack had attacked that steer, there’d be several drag trails and depressions in the grass where pack members sat down to feed. They would have left some of the larger bones, maybe hide. There would be something here.”

Jason motioned to them to follow him. “There’s more.”

He led them back to the kill site, knelt, and pointed. “There are lots of boot tracks around the place where the steer