Fog rose from the sedges like steam from a kettle, hanging a white veil over the low meadows. The forest smelled of wet wood and resin, and the quiet rumble of a woodpecker mingled with the snarling cawing of ravens. Jagna steered her bike along the sandy duct, her wheels getting bogged down every now and then in the soft patches of sand. Her backpack whipped around her shoulder blades, heavy with batteries, memory cards and a folded tripod. - 'There's still a bit more to go,' she said, turning back to Nikolai. - 'On the map the flow is behind this clump of alders. Nikolai corrected his cap, in which some mist had already accumulated, and smiled half-heartedly. - What if, for once, you went where the map doesn't know the paths? - Here every path is someone else's,' she replied. - Usually someone who has four paws. She liked this state, when the human hustle and bustle dissipated and all that remained were the drops settling on her sleeves, the steady pulse and the footprints. A broad paw was imprinted in the wet clay just off the road - four fingers and a pad, clear as a seal. A wolf. Jagna crouched down, pulled a tailor's meter from her trousers, which she had learned to use as surely as a pen. - Nine and a half wide. 'Look at the claws - fingers spread, as if it's running faster than usual,' she muttered, more to herself than to Nikolai. - It's not a dog. See the lines on the pillow. Nikolai leaned in next to her. - What if it was the one with the transmitter? The smyk? - He didn't feign indifference; he had an app on his phone that sometimes sent alerts about the movements of tagged individuals. Smyk moved like a shadow - disappearing for three days, only to suddenly appear on the edge of a clearing in the middle of the day. - 'The signal went off last night,' Jagna said, drawing in the air as if she could sense the answer in it. - 'I'm not sure it was him. But the footprints are fresh. A flickering stream cut through the duct like a scratch on old glass. Old alder trees, gnawed by beavers, grew by the ford; they lay at odd angles, with jagged fibres. Water swirled between the stones and splashed across the sandy patch. Jagna hung a photo trap on the log, positioning the sensor just above the height of the wolf's shoulder. She gently pressed the button. The LED blinked. - 'We'll leave it here for a week,' she decided. - They'll come through here. They have to. They collected the previous camera from the other side of the stream. Wrapped in drips like a starchy curtain, it looked dead, but inside a memory card held the last few nights. Jagna slipped it into the tablet's reader and squatted on a log; Nikolai stood over her, inhaling the smell of wet moss. The first shots were familiar: a wild boar dragged sideways, rubbishy in its autumn fur; then a pair of roe deer flitted like two grey hands through the air. The bison stepped almost into the lens, blew steam directly into the glass and walked away, leaving only a buzzing trail on the path. Then the night, thick as coal. Two flashes of eyes, low to the ground. The silence of the photograph until it buzzed in my fingers. - 'Back off,' whispered Nikolai. - It wasn't a boar. Jagna scrolled through frame by frame. A wolf emerged from behind an alder, turned its head towards the camera as if it heard something they couldn't. A slender silhouette, its back lit up with frost, and on its neck... something flashed. Jagna zoomed in on the image. It could have been a telemetry collar - wide, dull. But just at the edge of the metal there was a thin, sharp glint, as if something too shiny, too smooth to belong in the wolf's fur was stuck in the forest. - 'It's just a reflection,' Nikolai said, though it sounded more like a wish. They moved on. Another night. At three seventeen on the shot, a thread of light crossed the space - a thin, cold dash that ran over the carp of a fallen trunk and went out. It was not a torch carried in hand; the light was level like a sword that had no end somewhere. In the same second, the lens captured the trembling of the leaves, followed by a silence in which the blood in the pulse seemed audible. - Was someone here with a drone? - Nikolai scratched the back of his neck. - At this time of day? In the middle of the reserve? - Or something shining similarly. - Jagna felt the chill from the mist creep under her jacket. - I don't like this. She closed the tablet, but the image of the thin line didn't disappear from her mind. Probably nothing. Or something that shouldn't be here. The water behind the rushes churned and for a moment every sound seemed louder - the splash, the flutter of wings. A pair of mallards swooped up from the trough, cutting through the mist with a flat beat of their darts. - Did you hear that? - She asked, though she knew Nicolas was hearing exactly the same thing as she was. - Yes. - His voice was lower, more focused. - And this. At the edge of the silence there was a short, broken screech that was more felt than heard. It was not the voice of a deer. Nor was it a howl - that single, short, abrupt call. Jagna felt it under her skin like an electric pulse. - A wolf pup? - Nikolai glanced up questioningly. - At this time of year? - she replied immediately, although she wasn't at all sure. - It could have been a warning. She had learned from the project organisers not to trust first associations. Wolves had their own codes, their own silences and their own ways of disappearing. Yet something else was buzzing at the bottom of that silence - the sound of disorder, a reminder of that thread of light. They decided to walk in the direction from which the screech had come. They left the bikes in the scrub, marking the location on the GPS. Here, the young spruce forest cut into the old part of the forest like a dark green wave. A layer of last year's needles yielded under their boots, supple as a mattress. The smell of resin mingled with something metallic, and somewhere up high, invisible in the milky glow, ravens were changing positions, as if deliberating on something extremely important. - 'Look,' hissed Nikolai. - 'On the blood... I mean, on the ground.' - He corrected himself immediately, as if he didn't want to launch into words for something that wasn't there. Indeed - no reds were drooling on the ground. But the mud was riddled with fresh furrows, as if something heavy had tried to pull itself out from under a branch. Two parallel tracks, narrow and sharp as from ... Jagna knelt down. - Links? - She said too quietly for anyone outside the forest to hear. - Or the wire. - Her lips formed themselves into a line. She didn't want to encapsulate the thought. Just then something rustled in the bushes to her right. At first the sound was as small as falling snow, but after a moment it was heavier, rhythmic. A silhouette on four legs emerged from the thicket - an unhurried step, head low, ears taut as bows. The light of the mists reflected in its eyes with a green, muffled glow. The wolf stopped at the edge of the path. The wind brought the smell of wet fur and earth to them. Something tougher than fur flashed on its neck. Jagna opened her hand and glided her phone to a slower mode. No sudden movement. The wolf lifted its muzzle, drew in air and then moved a step to the side, as if trying to shield the side of its body from their view. Jagna noticed that there was something clinging to him by the wide strap of his collar, the telemetry one - a thin metal shape, almost invisible under the fur. The wolf twitched and barely perceptibly hunched its shoulder blades. - Don't come any closer,' she whispered. - If it hurts, it might throw up in a panic. From behind, to the left, where the youngster loomed against a wall of old hornbeams, there was a stretched sound, completely out of this setting - like the quiet buzzing of a drive, like the breathing of a machine that doesn't understand that it has no place here. The wolf rapturously turned its head in that direction. The crows raised a lament that cut into Lamb's ribs like a comb. Nikolai raised his hand slowly, showing her the phone screen. On the map, the blue dot marking Smyk flicked and began to move, although a moment ago the signal was non-existent. A notification appeared next to it: "sudden accelerated movement - battery level unknown". - He's running away," he whispered. The forest drew in the air with them. She could hear her own heart, and she heard a chase she couldn't see - the crackling of branches, paws touching the ground on their toes, and something else she couldn't name. In the beech tree to her left, something heavy stepped onto a dry branch, which snapped with a sound so pure it hurt. The wolf tensed and moved three steps in a second, looking back. Nikolai took half a step forward. - Shall we help him? - He asked the question, the tip of which hung in the cold air. Jagna was already opening her mouth to answer when, at the edge of the youngster, where the light of the mists was becoming whitish again, a red eye flashed - a dot that flashed, dimmed and returned again, shifting smoothly like a breath. The smell of metal became suddenly sharper. Something rustled along the bark, as if a wire was being pulled. The crows fell silent in one movement, like a closed book. The wolf squatted down, ran its back, and Jagna tightened her fingers on her camera strap. From the darkness to her right, a second pair of eyes slid out, lower, hovering lower to the ground, and just beyond them, at the limit of her vision, moved a shape whose features she could not make out. Then, somewhere very close by, there was a metallic clatter, as if steel were suddenly trying to enter into conversation with wood, and everything that was alive at that moment froze with them.