Elara ignored the goats and examined the ground. There. A smear of dark, oily soil where there should have been loam. A single track—not a coyote’s, not a dog’s. Too broad, with blunt claw marks that didn’t retract. And at the base of a fence post, a tuft of coarse, black-tipped hair.

“He won’t eat,” Croft rasped, his eyes watery. “Won’t climb. Just stands there, starin’ at the eastern fence.”

“I want to see what Barnaby sees.”

But she added a private note in the margins, the kind she never showed clients: Barnaby taught me again that healing an animal’s body often starts by believing its fear. The wolverine never returned. But if it does, the goats will not freeze. They will fight. And that is the difference between medicine and salvation.

For three evenings, they played the call at dusk. The first night, the goats huddled into a trembling mass. The second, they lifted their heads, ears swiveling. The third, the oldest nanny let out a defiant bleat and kicked up a puff of dust.

Mr. Croft wept. Elara wrote in her chart: Acute stress response to novel apex predator. Resolved via environmental enrichment and auditory conditioning. Prognosis: excellent.

He climbed the rock pile an hour later.

Dr. Elara Vance had learned to read the silence of animals long before she mastered the language of humans. In her small, sun-drenched clinic at the edge of the Thornwood Valley, silence was the loudest symptom.

“It’s not a pathogen, Mr. Croft,” she said, standing. “It’s a predator. A ghost from the high timber.”

The ghost had a voice now. And a voice could be challenged.

Her heart ticked faster. Gulo gulo. Wolverine.

It was a Tuesday when the old hermit, Mr. Croft, stumbled through her door, his gnarled hands cradling a lump of matted fur. The lump was Barnaby, a goat as ancient and stubborn as his owner. But today, Barnaby was not stubborn. He was still. Too still.