Wolf Stalker by Gloria Skurzynski

crossing the road toward them.
    â€œHey, Mike. What’s the rush?” Steven asked him.
    â€œTryin’ to get away from those guys.” Mike tossed his head toward a rusty pickup truck, with huge tires, peeling out of the parking lot. Inside the cab, three big men were crammed together.
    â€œWho are they?”
    â€œA posse of angry ranchers.”
    â€œWhat’d they want from you?” Steven asked.
    â€œI didn’t wait to find out. Soon as I opened the door and heard them yellin’ inside about wolves endangering their livestock, I just turned around and scooted right back out.” Mike grinned guiltily over his narrow escape. “I did hear one thing, though, before I closed the door. They were saying George Campbell’s dog, the one that got killed by the wolves, was worth a thousand dollars.”
    â€œA thousand? We heard him say 500 on the radio,” Jack mentioned.
    â€œShoot! I know for a fact,” Mike told them, “Campbell got the dog from an old rancher who lives out past Gardiner, and that rancher never charged more than 20 bucks for a weaned pup. I have an idea the price goes up every time George Campbell tells his story.” Mike chuckled, then asked, “Where are you guys off to now?”
    Steven held out his hand to show Mike the roll of film and answered, “Jack and I need to develop this. He took a few pictures that might show something useful, if we’re lucky. But probably not.”
    â€œHow ’bout if I borrow Ashley for a while?” Mike suggested. “I’d like to check out what each of the three kids remembers about the shooting, one at a time. I can take her to the ice-cream shop—”
    â€œYes!” Ashley cried. “I’ve got a great memory! I’ll tell you everything that happened.”
    Steven rolled his eyes. “Ashley’ll confess to anything if you buy her a chocolate sundae. We’re meeting at the Lodge at 5:30, Mike.”
    â€œSounds good. See you then.”
    The darkroom was located in the basement—dark-rooms were almost always in basements, because less outside light reached them that way. After Steven checked all the equipment and jugs of chemical solutions, he turned out the lights to begin processing the film.
    Jack remembered the first time his father had taken him into their darkroom at home. He’d been not quite eight years old, and excited to be initiated into the mysteries of his father’s work. The total blackness hadn’t frightened him because he could sense his father’s nearness, and all the while, Steven kept talking, explaining everything he did.
    At that time Jack had been reading a book about the first Indians who’d lived near the Teton Mountains, deep inside caves lit only by small, smoky fires. If the fires went out, the caves became so black that nothing real could be seen, but after a while, the eyes of the imagination played tricks, and real-looking images would appear before them in the darkness. They thought it was magic. Then Indian fathers would tell their sons about hunting with spears and arrows, and teach them to beg forgiveness of the animals they killed for food.
    Two thousand years later, when Jack first stood in the total blackness of his father’s darkroom, and Steven explained to him how to develop film, he’d thought of those early Indians in their dark caves. Because images began to appear to Jack then, growing clearer and clearer in the developer trays. They were the animals Steven had captured on film with his camera. Watching them come forth from blank paper, shaping themselves into bears and cougars and bison right in front of his eyes—it had seemed like magic to Jack, too.
    Now he waited, hoping that his own pictures would turn out perfect. In his mind’s eye, in this darkness, he remembered how the wolf had stared at him with those yellow eyes, alert and unafraid. He wanted to show his mother just