Sarah moved before her conscious mind could even process the decision. She spun on her heel and sprinted back to her Ford pickup, her heavy boots tearing through the deep drifts. She yanked the driver’s side door open, left the engine running, and immediately slammed the heat dial to maximum. Scrambling to the cargo bed, she tore into a weatherproof storage bin and pulled out a stack of thermal emergency blankets. They were the thick, heavy-duty kind—the exact items she had obsessively carried everywhere since the crash, driven by a desperate, irrational compulsion to always be prepared for a disaster that had already happened. She was always prepared now, and always, terribly, too late. Until today.
When she rushed back to the tree line, the mother wolf did not bare her teeth. She did not emit even the faintest warning growl. She simply lay there, watching the human approach through half-closed, frost-rimmed eyes. Sarah dropped to her knees in the powder and reached out, her gloved hands trembling as she scooped up the first cub. It felt like a solid block of ice. Its tiny body was rigid, the delicate lips around its muzzle already taking on a terrifying, bruised blue hue. As Sarah pulled the freezing baby against her chest, the massive mother wolf let out a long, ragged exhale and slowly closed her eyes, as if silently whispering, “Yes. Please, take them.”
Sarah swaddled both cubs tightly in the thermal blankets, running them back to the truck and securing them in the center of the back seat, positioning two portable, battery-operated heaters directly toward them. The air inside the cab was already turning thick and sweltering.
But the mother was a different story. Sarah sprinted back to the shoulder and fell to her knees beside the massive animal. The wolf weighed easily a hundred pounds of dense muscle and wet fur. Sarah weighed exactly one hundred and thirty-seven. She shoved her arms under the wolf’s thick shoulders, planted her boots in the slippery snow, and heaved. Her boots lost traction, and she fell hard onto her hip. She had failed to lift even half of the creature’s weight. The wolf let out a low, pitiful groan, but her body remained entirely limp. There was no resistance, no feral panic.
The crushing truth hit Sarah like a physical blow: the wild animal desperately wanted to be moved. She was surrendering to a human, asking for salvation in the only language she had left.
“Okay,” Sarah gasped, her breath catching in the freezing air. “Okay, I’ve got you.”
She grabbed the thick scruff of the wolf’s neck and the heavy fur along her back, leaned her entire body weight backward, and began to pull. Centimeter by agonizing centimeter, she dragged the massive predator through the deep snow. Whenever a sudden, weak surge of adrenaline hit the wolf’s system, the animal would feebly paddle her front paws in the slush, trying desperately to help lessen the burden.
It took fifteen grueling minutes. Sarah sobbed the entire time. Sweat poured down her face and soaked through her heavy thermal layers despite the sub-zero wind chill. Her muscles screamed in protest, burning with lactic acid as she fell, scrambled back up, and pulled again.
“Come on!” Sarah screamed into the howling wind. “Come on!” She yelled it at herself, at the dying wolf, at an empty sky, at God, and at Ethan’s ghost. She screamed at anyone in the vast, indifferent universe who might be listening.
By the time she finally managed to heave the mother wolf up into the blistering heat of the back seat, settling her massive body beside the bundled cubs, Sarah was completely hollowed out. She practically fell into the driver’s seat, slamming the door shut against the blizzard.
Her hands shook with such violent, uncontrollable tremors that the metal keys clattered loudly against the steering column before she could finally force the truck into gear. Before hitting the gas, her eyes darted to the rearview mirror. What she saw shattered her heart all over again. The mother wolf, barely clinging to the edge of consciousness, had somehow managed to drag her heavy chin across the upholstery. She was facing her cubs. With a tongue that was weak, dry, and pale, she licked their tiny, frostbitten faces with infinite gentleness. Her yellow eyes fluttered, fighting a desperate, losing battle against the dark.
Sarah slammed her boot down on the accelerator. She did not turn the steering wheel back toward the familiarity of Helena. Instead, she pointed the heavy grille of the Ford forward, accelerating straight into the teeth of the storm toward Missoula. Toward the emergency veterinary clinic forty minutes away.
Through the blinding whiteout of the blizzard, she drove like a woman possessed. Hot tears streamed relentlessly down her pale cheeks as she gripped the wheel, her knuckles aching.
“Hold on,” she whispered frantically to the empty cab. “Please hold on. Do not leave them. Please, do not leave.”
She had no idea if she was pleading with the dying mother wolf, begging the lingering memory of Ethan, or speaking to her own fractured soul. The heavy windshield wipers slapped violently back and forth, fighting a losing battle against a heavy, wet snow that fell as if the entire universe was conspiring to bury everything good left in the world.
Twice, the heavy pickup’s rear end fishtailed dangerously on hidden patches of black ice. The terrifying sensation of losing control threatened to send Sarah into a full-blown panic attack, but she instantly corrected the steering, forcing herself to keep going. She drove with one rigid hand gripping the wheel, her eyes darting to the rearview mirror every ten seconds, absolutely terrified that the rise and fall of the grey flanks would suddenly stop. The two cubs had ceased their violent shivering. In the cruel logic of severe hypothermia, that meant one of two things: either the blasting heaters were successfully raising their core temperatures, or their tiny bodies were entering the final, terminal stages of shutting down entirely.
Sarah pressed her foot harder against the gas pedal. The engine roared.
Her mind violently snapped back to the sterile hospital room. She felt the phantom sensation of Ethan’s small, fragile hand suddenly going horrifyingly limp inside her own. She heard the steady, reassuring beep of the cardiac monitor suddenly flatlining into that endless, soul-destroying tone. She saw the vivid memory of her ex-husband standing frozen in the far corner of the room, his face buried in his hands, completely unable to look at her because looking at her meant looking at the truth.