Charles shook his head and Tag let the old bag fall.

“Found it by the side of the creek over there,” said Tag, pointing vaguely south and downhill. “Don’t know what it was doing there. Maybe wild animals dragged it around. Maybe someone just dropped it where I found it. Makes as much sense as anything else I’ve seen here. I found a couple of other odd things by the creek, too.”

“What did you find?” Anna asked as they started off with Tag in the lead.

He shook his head, and Anna gave him a gentle shove that had Brother Wolf sharpening his gaze on Tag and stepping to a better attack position. But Tag just laughed.

“It’s better if you see ’em. Faster, too,” he said. “I’d be all day describing, and Charles would take one look and tell me a dozen things I didn’t notice.”

Anna gave a huff of amused agreement and slanted a look at Charles. Brother Wolf wanted to preen at her recognition of their prowess. Charles just smiled at her.

Tag led them down the hill, toward a busy creek meandering around the side of the mountain. They encountered a path when they were about halfway there, and Charles looked back up the hill to see where it led to in Wild Sign.

“The smallest yurt,” said Tag, answering Charles’s unasked question. “Smelled like witches, too. White ones. I didn’t go in, though, because I was still running as wolf. That yurt and the one you and Anna explored, several of the tents, and two cabins all smelled of them. Too many witches in this place to be coincidence.”

Charles nodded agreement and Tag looked pleased.

Someone had cleared a stretch of bank of the stream and piled stones to keep back the grasses and bushes. They had dropped a tree across the creek, trimmed off the branches, and then used an adze to flatten the upper side of the trunk and make a passable bridge.

There were signs that the stream was a lot deeper in the spring, maybe tall enough to cover the top of the tree-cum-bridge, but it was still plenty deep. It was hard to be sure, because the water was very clear, but Charles judged it waist deep where it pooled next to the tree-bridge.

Tag took them across the bridge and then led them off the trail to where a thicket of willows, their leaves bright autumn yellow, grew in a section of spongy ground. Someone with big claws had, very recently, ripped up a swath of waist-high grasses and young bushes to reveal the dead.

“They killed them before they left,” Anna said, sounding faintly sickened. “These were witches. Did they sacrifice them for power?”

Charles knelt beside one of the skeletons. It wore a collar with a two-year-old expired rabies tag and an ID tag. The ID tag read Bear. Below the name was a phone number. On the other side the tag had been engraved with a heart. Charles rested a hand on the skull and waited to see what it could tell him.