Eureka woke slowly into a day that felt like it had been promised long before anyone dared to name it. Frost held to the edges of every roof, bright as ground glass, and the square steamed with early cooking fires and breath. A dozen canvas awnings went up along the brick lanes—some new, some stitched from old tarps, some quilted from blanket scraps. People strung bunting made of torn shirts and ribbon, a pale carnival in a world that had learned to love whatever color it could find. Music stumbled into existence as someone tried a fiddle, laughing when the bow squeaked, then finding the note again and holding it.
The convoy from Libby rolled in just as the sun hit the courthouse clock, trucks emptying into a ripple of greetings and waving hands. Thane climbed down first. The brick under his claws felt familiar; Eureka always smelled faintly like sawdust and hearth smoke, a town that used wood to mean home. Gabriel hopped out with his guitar already slung and picked three warm notes to say hello. Holt was right behind him, tail going like a metronome rescued from a fire, and Rime shadowed Thane’s left shoulder with the same calm, contained focus he carried into patrols, only softened now by the sight of so many unguarded faces.
Marta stepped from the cab, cheeks bright in the cold, and the Eureka mayor—Franklin with the clean coat and the comfortable laugh—came forward to hug her like siblings.
“You brought the spark,” he said, grinning over her shoulder at the arriving column.
“We brought the flame,” Marta said. “You lit the field.”
“Flatterer,” Franklin replied, but his eyes shone. He clapped Thane’s arm with the ease of a man who’d learned the right place to touch a wolf. “You too. We saved you a spot.”
Thane’s mouth tipped into a small smile. “I don’t sit much.”
“Then stand where the soup is thickest,” Franklin said. “You look like you eat like a bear.”
“Only when Holt cooks,” Gabriel said.
Holt overheard and barked a laugh. “I cook good. Burn little.”
“Little?” Rime said, deadpan.
“Medium little,” Holt corrected gravely, which got two nearby kids to giggle until they fell against each other.
Whitefish rolled up a few minutes later, Henry Braddock waving out a window like a man trying to greet the entire town at once. Kalispell came in more quietly—a long-bed truck with sides built from reclaimed picket fences, loaded high with burlap sacks that smelled like grain and something sweeter. A handful of Spokane folk arrived near noon, late on purpose and sheepish about it, carrying a crate stenciled with a tidy black coffee cup that made Gabriel look like he had discovered a religion.
“Diplomatic tribute,” their driver said, shivering and proud. “From the mayor. He says to consider it a sin tax on his jokes.”
“Paid in full,” Marta said, and the man looked relieved in a way that said his humor didn’t travel as far as the coffee.
Before long the square felt full without feeling crowded. Tables appeared with the logic of real community—no one directed, but everything found place. Kalispell’s baker, a woman with ringlets falling out of a scarf, started kneading dough in a big wooden trough with the quiet satisfaction of someone who could turn hunger into bread by pure force of will. She glanced up at Holt, who watched with intense concentration, head tilted like a dog listening to an unfamiliar instrument.
“You want to try, big fella?” she asked.
Holt considered the dough, then his own paws. “I… try gentle.”
“Gentle is the trick,” she said, stepping aside. “No punching.”
He set his hands into the dough with monstrous care, shoulders tight with the effort of not being what his body wanted to be—strong, fast, decisive. The dough dimpled. He pressed, folded, pressed, tongue poking from the corner of his mouth in absolute focus. The baker watched. “Good. Now pull, and fold again.”
Holt pulled. He folded. He succeeded. He grinned over his shoulder at Rime as if he’d just lifted a car. Then, carried by joy, he forgot himself and put too much shoulder into the next push. Flour rose like a blizzard, white dust fountaining up to coat Holt head to toe. The baker got hit in the face. Two kids shrieked with laughter. Gabriel choked on air and fell to a knee, cackling.
Holt froze, a statue of a wolf made of baking mistakes. “I ruin bread,” he said, horrified.
“You made it exciting,” the baker coughed, eyes watering as she wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “We’ll call it… mountain bread.”
Rime leaned in close and blew at Holt’s muzzle, sending a fresh cloud into the air. “Better,” he said, perfectly straight.
Holt sneezed, then started laughing too, huge and relieved. “I knead good. Gentle good. Sometimes storm.”
“Sometimes storm,” Rime agreed.
Sable arrived without fanfare, because of course she did. One moment she wasn’t there, and the next she sat like a white piece of winter on a bench near the fire. People had begun to recognize the shape of her presence in a place—less a body than a gravity. Children drifted toward her like things pulled by a planet; their parents watched with the mingled fear and wonder of a world still learning new physics.
The first brave kid, a girl with a hat too big for her head and a pom on top like a signal flare, held out a hand full of something. “Do you want a… uh… cran-raisins?”
“Dried fruit,” her brother stage-whispered.
Sable eyed the offering as if it were a creature barely worth the hunt. Still, she took one, placed it in her mouth, and chewed. She blinked once.
“Very small,” she said.
The girl nodded solemnly. “We made them in our oven.”
Sable nodded back, thoughtful in a way that made the other wolves lean closer. “Small food should not need so much chewing,” she said. “Too many teeth for that little.”
Two more kids found their courage and sat at her feet, telling her stories about wolves they had drawn—wolves with capes, wolves with schoolbooks, wolves riding bicycles with training wheels because in their minds there was no such thing as a wolf who couldn’t be trained if it wanted. Sable listened with the attention she reserved for threats and the hunt, head cocked. Sometimes she smiled without moving her mouth; you could see it in the way her eyes warmed like an ember under ash.
At the square’s center, someone had hoisted a banner between two lamp poles that read FESTIVAL in letters cut out from a dozen different fabrics, some of them glittering in ways the pre-Fall world would have called tacky and the post-Fall world called miracle. Above it, like a crown, a string of tin stars made from old cans turned in the fire so they caught light like they wanted to be something more precious and, in their way, were.
Music tried a few approaches and then found itself. A street player from Eureka brought a fiddle and set a tune running like a clean creek; Gabriel found him with a grin and slid a counter-melody under it, picking with his left hand while his right kept a rhythm on the guitar body, claws rattling wood like a train. Where the fiddle went high, Gabriel went low; where the guitar wanted to be pretty, the fiddle steered it into something with dirt under its nails. A Kalispell boy with a drum made from an old bucket and a deerhide tried to join, and after three bars of chaos, they fell into each other like they’d practiced for years. People clapped without being led. Rime’s ear flicked in time, the smallest tell, and Thane watched a smile touch the corner of his mouth like a secret.
Marta moved through it all with the ease of the person everyone expects to have a plan and the humor to let that plan be interrupted by seventeen better ideas. She accepted a wreath of woven grasses from a Whitefish grandmother and put it over her own scarf like royalty with a sense of humor. She got cornered by a choir of three teenagers who had been practicing harmonies in a root cellar and decided now, right now, was the time to debut a song about the phone lines; the rhymes landed like a drunk on a porch, but the joy was right on pitch, and when they ended with a three-part “thank you,” Marta bowed to them with the seriousness of an audience in a grand hall.
Hank worked like a man off duty, which meant he supervised the potato fire with the intensity of a smuggler and spent twenty minutes in a heated argument with two small boys about whether a stick was a sword or a fishing pole. He compromised by awarding it the rank of a “sword that can fish,” which created a new problem he refused to own.
Mark found the century-old dynamo the Eureka tinkers used to run the string of lights over the square and spent a happy half-hour elbow-deep in it with two new friends, muttering about brushes and bearings like other people mutter about soup recipes. When the lights fluttered and then steadied into a brighter glow—just enough to paint the crowd in a soft, even warmth—a cheer rose as if someone had just told the world it could stay up late.
Rime stood near Thane’s shoulder, relaxed but vigilant in the way only a wolf can be when the scent of laughter sits on top of the old scent of danger. A pack of children crept up on him, torn between wanting to touch and wanting to not be caught touching. The bravest reached out and dangled a small string of tin stars, the same kind that hung over the banner.
“For tail?” she asked, eyes huge.
Rime looked down at her, then at the stars, then at Thane.
“Up to you,” Thane said, voice low.
Rime crouched, a slow lowering that brought him level with the child. “Gentle,” he said.
She tied the string to a tuft high on his tail with fingers that shook from excitement. Another child added a ribbon that might once have been part of a dress. A third tucked a feather in, trembling solemnly. Rime stood carefully, testing the weight. The decorations chimed softly when he moved.
“You look like a holiday,” Gabriel said around a grin.
Rime blinked with the calm of someone who has crossed too many rivers to worry about getting his feet wet. “I am festival,” he said.
“Yes,” Thane said, warmth in his voice. “You are.”
A phone rang somewhere inside City Hall, the soft, insistent tone of a life regained. Heads turned. The ring was picked up, and a moment later Franklin’s assistant stepped to the doorway and shouted with theatrical glee, “Spokane says they want next year’s festival!”
A cheer went up—Eureka loved being a host, but loving it meant knowing you could hand it away like a gift and still keep the joy. “Tell Spokane we’ll bring flour,” the baker yelled, holding up her hands, white to the elbow.
“Tell Spokane I bring… calm kneading,” Holt added, without convincing anyone.
“Tell Spokane we bring wolves,” a Whitefish boy shouted, like he was announcing a parade.
“Tell Spokane we bring jokes,” a man from Spokane called from the edge of the square, lifting the coffee crate and shrugging. “But we’ll pay the fine again.”
Marta laughed. “Tell Spokane we heard you,” she said, and the assistant went to the phone to pass it along, a human relay in a chain that felt unbroken for the first time in living memory.
The afternoon fattened into something golden. Games started without anyone deciding to start them. Arm-wrestling happened on a barrel between Hank and a Kalispell mechanic with forearms like braided cable; the match went long enough to draw a crowd and end in a draw when a small child climbed into Hank’s lap and declared herself the referee who had to go pee now. Rime explained, with profound seriousness, the difference between a road and a trail to a group of Whitefish teens who nodded like acolytes. Sable let a toddler touch her muzzle and didn’t even flick an ear when the child announced to everyone in the exact tone of revelation, “She warm.”
As the sun slid down and the lamps gave the square a theatrical glow, Gabriel took the center with the fiddle player. He started a melody that felt like walking home and watching your breath in front of you; the fiddle answered with a rope of notes that sounded like a hill at dusk. Holt, perched on a barrel to keep from knocking anyone over, kept time with one claw on wood, expression so serious you’d think he was holding the whole song together by will.
“Sing something,” someone called, and Gabriel did—not a showoff song, but a small one, the kind that fits between conversations and holds them instead of drowning them. He sang about good trouble and honest work, about copper that remembered, about claws that didn’t always need to be sharp. People hummed along where they could, clapped where they couldn’t, and when he finished, no one shouted or whooped. They just breathed out like a room being right-sized.
Thane drifted to the edge of the square, where the light faded into the comfortable dark. Rime followed. They watched together, saying nothing, the two of them stitched to the scene by threads that had nothing to do with duty and everything to do with belonging. After a while, Thane said, “This is what it was for.”
Rime nodded, slow. “We learn,” he said. “They learn. All pack.”
“All pack,” Thane echoed.
Sable joined them without sound. She stood with her hands behind her back, eyes on the crowd, jaw set in that familiar line that meant she was happy and would never admit it. “You make noise,” she said softly.
“Good noise,” Thane said.
“Good,” Sable agreed. “Not fear.”
“No fear,” Rime said, and the way he said it made Thane’s chest loosen, a knot finally undone.
Holt barreled into them then, caught by momentum he had no desire to resist, flour still in creases of his fur like accidental war paint. “I win bread,” he announced, which was not precisely true, but close enough that the baker across the square gave him a thumbs-up that he took to be a medal.
“You win patience,” Rime said, deadpan.
“Harder,” Holt agreed.
Franklin climbed onto a crate and clapped until the nearest conversations hit pause. “Friends,” he called, voice warm with cider and something sweeter. “I don’t have speeches. I have soup. But I want to say this: when the world fell, I thought we’d spend the rest of our lives alone. I thought we’d talk in small rooms and pretend that was enough. And now look.”
He swept a hand at the square. “Look at us. Wolves and humans, laughing like it’s legal. Whitefish, Kalispell, Spokane, Libby, Eureka—five towns if you count my mother-in-law’s opinion, which you should not. We did this. Not by force. By food. By wire. By will.”
He raised a mug. “To the world. May it keep getting bigger. And to our wolves—may you always eat first and never have to eat alone.”
Mugs rose. Hands lifted. A howl started from the far side of the square—one of Sable’s younger wolves, unable to help himself—and another joined, and then Holt, of course, and then Rime, and then without deciding to do it, Thane tipped his head and let a note out that carried clean across the square and into the edges of the dark, the kind of sound that turns a crowd into a single thing. The humans didn’t howl—they laughed, they clapped, they stood under it like a warm rain. Sable didn’t look at anyone, but her throat moved with the shape of it, and for a heartbeat the entire valley seemed to align on one long breath out.
Later, after the light had gone soft and the fires had burned down to beds of bright coals, after the last coffee had been poured and the last loaf torn apart by a dozen careful hands, after a Spokane envoy promised to send up more beans because Gabriel had convinced them that coffee could be a foreign policy, the square settled into the kind of tired that means contentment. People packed what needed packing and left what could be left for morning. Children slept on shoulders. A teen leaned against a lamppost, listening to nothing like it was a soundtrack.
Thane walked a slow circle, because he always did, not out of suspicion but habit honed into care. Rime paced the counterpoint. They met by the courthouse steps, where the town’s single working clock ticked into the new hour with quiet dignity.
“Good day,” Rime said.
“Good day,” Thane agreed. He looked back over the square—Sable sitting with a cluster of elders, Holt now earnestly guarding the last loaf like a knight, Marta taking a final phone call on the long line to tell someone in Whitefish that yes, everyone was fed and yes, we will bring you the recipe, and no, you cannot patent the word ‘wolfbread.’ “We should do this again.”
“We will,” Rime said, unblinking certainty.
“You two always working?” Sable asked, appearing at Thane’s elbow without moving through space like other people.
“We’re resting,” Thane said.
“You two ever stop?” Sable asked, appearing at Thane’s elbow like she’d stepped out of the air.
“We’re resting,” Thane said.
“You make rest look like plan,” she said, mouth twitching just a little.
“We leave for Glendive soon,” Thane answered, voice low — not breaking the quiet, just marking what’s ahead.
“They’ll think it’s an army,” Rime said.
“It is,” Sable said. “Army of trade.” After a beat, she added, “Bring coffee.”
“We will,” Thane said.
They stood there a little longer, three silhouettes at the edge of a square that had decided to belong to joy tonight. When they finally peeled off toward their bedrolls and borrowed blankets, the last thing they heard before the soft churn of sleep was a phone ringing in the City Hall office—one ring only, then a voice, soft and laughing, answering across a line that used to mean nothing and now meant everything.
Somewhere, in a place where voices get kept when they are done being flesh for the day, the valley spoke back to itself. And it was enough.