Joe looked at the salt lick that the neighboring rancher had left for the bison—supposedly a friendly gesture. Could someone have put that drug, feel-good, on the salt lick to make the animals passive? He’d been told that the drugs gone over wolf and feel-good hadn’t caused any trouble in this part of the Midwest Region, but that didn’t mean the drugs couldn’t find their way here now. Just because the Controller, the man who had made the drugs, was dead didn’t mean the supply had dried up completely. But how many humans beyond select police officers knew the drugs had been made from the blood of the cassandra sangue? Some of those girls were still being cared for by humans. Some were still living in the compounds, more than willing to trade a cut on their skin for having someone else take care of them. So the danger the two drugs posed wasn’t gone, just covered with a bit of dirt.

<You smell anything wrong with the meat?> Joe asked. <Sickness? Or those bad drugs I told you about?>

Wolves and Coyotes all paused, then began sniffing again. <Smells like good meat.>

A Wolf tore into a smaller bison. After eating a couple of mouthfuls, he waited. They all waited.

<Just meat,> the Wolf reported. <I don’t feel weak or angry; just hungry.>

“How many of these can your meat freezers hold?” Joe asked Tobias, waving a hand at the carcasses.

“A few, but not enough,” Tobias said. “Floyd Tanner would know, since he’s the town’s butcher and has the big freezer. The ranch house is supposed to hold supplies for a month for everyone living there, but I don’t know if we’ve picked up this month’s supply of meat yet.”

“We have a springhouse where we cache some meat. That might hold one of the smaller bison if we cut up the carcass. And Floyd Tanner can cut up another carcass and distribute the meat to all the families in the town.” And maybe he could send some of the meat to Simon, trade it for things Simon could acquire more easily in Lakeside than he could here.

Tobias looked grim. “This was a third of the Prairie Gold bison herd. Even after we take what meat we can, most of it is going to rot where the animals fell.”

Joe caught a wild, dangerous scent in the air. So did the rest of the Wolves and Coyotes.

There won’t be as much meat left to rot as you think. The Elders are gathering for a feast. Joe looked at Wyatt. Like the rest of the shifters, the Grizzly was looking at the land beyond the dead bison.

“Let’s make use of what we can and get away from the kills,” Wyatt said in a quiet rumble.