Part 2
Sarah dropped to her knees in the snow. The bright green plastic dinosaur slipped entirely forgotten from her numbed fingers, disappearing into the white powder.
The two cubs—they looked to be no more than eight weeks old—were rooting blindly against their mother’s stomach, desperately trying to nurse. But the mother wolf had nothing left to give them. The babies were so weakened that their tiny, high-pitched whimpers were completely swallowed by the roaring wind.
Gathering what looked to be a monumental amount of effort, the mother wolf slowly lifted her heavy head from the snowbank. Her pale yellow eyes found Sarah’s face. There was no wild predation in that stare, no territorial aggression, no baring of sharp teeth. The animal was simply too far gone. Her nervous system was actively shutting down. She dropped her heavy chin back into the snow, her eyes drifting half-closed in the terrible, lethargic surrender of severe hypothermia.
Sarah’s mind raced, calculating the brutal logistics of survival. She could retreat to the warmth of her idling truck and dial Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. They would eventually dispatch a ranger, but given the severity of the blizzard and the condition of the mountain pass, they would be two, perhaps three hours away. In this wind chill, the rescue team would arrive to find three frozen corpses.
She could turn her back. She could climb into her cab, turn up the radio, and drive away, leaving this fresh nightmare behind. But Sarah’s eyes tracked the ragged drag marks in the snow one more time. The mother hadn’t just collapsed immediately after dragging her mate. She had used the absolute last reserves of her failing strength to drag her two cubs closer to the asphalt. Closer to the danger of passing tires. She had been trying to keep moving until her muscles simply stopped firing.
Sarah moved before her conscious mind could formulate a rational plan. She scrambled up, her boots slipping on the ice, and sprinted back to her pickup. She cranked the heavy engine, instantly blasting the internal heater to its maximum output. Reaching behind the passenger seat, she grabbed the heavy, foil-lined emergency thermal blankets—supplies she had carried obsessively in her vehicle ever since the crash, a paranoid compulsion that had haunted her for three years.
Running back to the tree line, she approached the wild animals. The mother wolf did not issue a single growl. Her ears did not flatten. She simply watched the human approach with dull, unblinking eyes.
Sarah fell to her knees, reached out, and scooped the first cub into her arms. Its tiny body was horrifyingly stiff, its lips tinged a frightening shade of blue. She wrapped both trembling cubs tightly in the crinkling silver foil, carrying them to the truck and wedging them gently onto the floorboards, directly in front of the blasting heat vents.
Then she ran back into the storm for the mother.
The adult wolf weighed well over a hundred pounds. Sarah, hollowed out by years of skipped meals and restless sleep, barely weighed a hundred and thirty. She hooked her arms under the wolf’s front shoulders, burying her gloved hands into the thick, freezing ruff of fur, and attempted to lift. Her lower back screamed. The wolf was pure, terrifying dead weight. She didn’t fight, and she didn’t help. She was completely pliable, her body slowly giving up its final degrees of heat to the Montana winter.
Sarah adjusted her grip, dug the heels of her boots into the snow, and began to pull.
She dragged the massive predator backward, inch by agonizing inch. Her muscles burned, and hot sweat poured down her spine despite the sub-zero air. She slipped twice, falling hard onto the icy shoulder, scraping her knees through her denim jeans. She scrambled back up, grabbed the heavy fur, and pulled again.
It took fifteen grueling, muscle-tearing minutes to cover sixty feet. Sarah gasped for air, her throat burning, tears of pure exertion freezing to her eyelashes. When she finally managed to heave the mother’s heavy hindquarters onto the rear floorboards of the cab beside the swaddled cubs, Sarah collapsed against the side of the truck bed, her chest heaving violently.
She climbed behind the steering wheel and slammed the heavy door. Her frozen hands shook with such violence that she missed the gearshift twice. She glanced up at the rearview mirror. In the back, the mother wolf lay completely motionless, her dry, pale tongue lolling slightly over her teeth. Her eyes were shut, fighting a losing war against the encroaching darkness of shock.
Sarah slammed her heavy boot onto the accelerator. She didn’t turn the wheel back toward the empty house in Helena. She pointed the heavy Ford forward, pushing deeper into the storm toward Missoula. Toward the only twenty-four-hour emergency veterinary clinic that could handle serious trauma.
The blinding snow battered the windshield, the heavy wipers thrashing back and forth like a frantic heartbeat. The sterile smell of the truck cab was quickly overpowered by the heavy, pungent scent of wet fur, copper blood, and wild animal. Sarah gripped the wheel, her knuckles stark white, whispering a desperate, rhythmic mantra into the glowing dashboard.
“Hold on. Please hold on. Do not stop breathing.”
The heavy truck fishtailed violently twice on hidden patches of black ice, the rear tires kicking out toward the guardrail, but Sarah refused to ease her foot off the throttle. She corrected the steering with sharp, jerky movements. Her eyes darted to the rearview mirror every ten seconds, demanding to see the shallow rise and fall of the grey chest in the back seat.
The tiny cubs had stopped shivering entirely. She knew enough about cold exposure from living in the mountains to know exactly what that meant. It could mean they were finally warming up in the foil blankets, or it could mean their core temperatures had dropped past the point of autonomous regulation. They were either stabilizing, or they were actively dying. Sarah pressed the accelerator closer to the floorboards, ignoring the red needle of the speedometer climbing past seventy on an iced highway.
Her mind was suddenly under siege by the memory of the hospital room.
She felt the terrifying, phantom sensation of Ethan’s small fingers going completely limp in her grasp. She heard the steady, mechanical beep of his heart monitor stretching out into that flat, endless, deafening tone that still woke her up in a cold sweat. She saw the image of Mark standing perfectly still in the sterile corner of the room, staring at the linoleum because looking at his wife meant confronting the unbearable, unfixable truth that their life was over.
Sarah gripped the steering wheel harder, her jaw locked. She had been helpless in that hospital room. She had been helpless on the ice three years ago. But she was not going to be helpless today.