The Dam That Drowned Us

rived at ten, and I spent the rest of the morn

he water. They looked at the padlock, and at the key in my pocket, and at the control handle in the gatehouse, which was at the raised position with the safety pin still in it. A gate cannot lift with the

r a compass that pointed south. She answered their questions about the crack in short, careful sentences and she said she wo

ty pin,"

abou

o. A gate does not lif

body pulle

e key to th

ngers the way I had counted them a hundred times in my head already that morning. "The spa

hat the list of people with a key was short and I was on it and so was she, now, because

o write my report and I am going to have a very long ba

two,"

g I said to her that d

at in the site office and wrote out the gate readings in the ledger in my best hand, and I looked at the wall where the drawdown schedule was pinned, and I thought about

man called Tomos who sat in the gatehouse with a thermos and a trans

at smells of coal. I ate bread and cheese standing up. I listened to the radio for the shipping forecast. I washed my plate and put it on the rack, and then I

I wen

and it drops through a stand of pines to a concrete apron above the old west sluice, the one that was decommissioned in 1931

el about the size of a dinner plate, red with rust, and I put both hands on it and turned it the way my father had tau

began to

the morning the church roof came up out of the black the way a whale comes up, slow and wet and impossible. The rain had stopped and the moon was

I took the old key from the string around my neck, the iron key with the te

g. It is a folding and a stretching, a breaking of bones that knit as they break, and the first time it happens to you it takes twenty minutes and the second time it takes five and by the hundredth time yo

ut a long time. Under that it smelled of the pack, of my pack, three hundred wolves gone into the water fifty years ago and their scent still in the walls, faint

anding up against the sky. The front door was shut. The front door was always shut. I had tried it in wolf form and in human form and with a crowbar, and it had never given an in

e the garden had been, and I found the flat stone under the old pear tree, and I dug it out

ried him in the churchyard up the hill where the water has never reached. But this is where I keep him. A flat stone under a dead pear tree, with his name cut into it in my own hand,

hts in the mud with a trowel, and no one had ever asked me why the reservoir was always at t

y paws and I looked at the pack house door ac

ll that came out of the pack house was not the smell of a place that had been shut for fifty years. It was candle wax and f

way, low down,

on me, and I knew it. I knew it the way I knew my own paws. It was the old Alpha's wolf, the one that had gone into the

and more questioning, and the gray wolf looked at me and then

mething moved in the dark

in the mud of the drowned garden as a man with no clothes and no boots and the water running

" I

in the photographs in the chapel and a coat the color of old blood. She stood in the doorway of the pack house with the moon behind her

water has been down for t