Part 2
D.H.
The letters were shallow and ugly, scratched into the trap with the point of a file or a knife. Caleb held the steel steady with one glove and rubbed away more ice with the other, waiting for the mark to become something else. It did not. There was no brass tag, no permit number, no clean stamp from a man willing to put his name on what he had done.
Only those two letters, half hidden under blood and snow.
The wolf watched him watching the trap. Her breath came in hard bursts now, fogging white over the pups tucked into the coat. Caleb wanted to stand there and let his anger sharpen into something useful, but the mountain did not care about anger. The light was thinning. The wind had shifted north. Every minute he spent thinking about Dale Hargrove was another minute the wolf bled into his coat.
“Later,” he said.
The word came out like a promise.
He shoved the trap into the sled’s rear well, not because he wanted the extra weight but because proof had a way of disappearing in Raven Creek when it belonged to the wrong man. Then he tightened the rope around the sled frame and checked the wolf’s leg again. The bandage was already spotted through.
She bared her teeth when his hand came near. Caleb did not blame her. He used the torn sleeve of his coat to add pressure, tying it with the kind of clumsy gentleness that made his fingers shake more than the cold did.
The pups had grown quiet. That worried him too. Quiet in the mountains could mean peace, but most times it meant something was losing the strength to complain.
He slid one hand beneath the gray pup and tucked it closer to the mother’s belly. The wolf’s head snapped toward him, but she stopped short. Her nose touched the back of his glove. For a second neither of them moved.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “I know what they are.”
He almost said I had one once.
He did not.
The trail out of the cut rose steep for the first half mile. Caleb leaned into the rope until it cut across his chest, the sled dragging behind him with a low hiss over the packed snow. The added weight was brutal. The wolf was lean under her winter coat, but she was still a full-grown animal, and the pups, trap, rope, pack, and wet canvas made the sled pull like a deadfall.
Every twenty yards he had to stop. Every stop made the wolf lift her head and look back down the canyon, as if some part of her still measured the distance to escape. Caleb knew that look. He had worn it himself at every church supper after Sarah and Noah died, every time some kind woman set a hand on his arm and told him God had a plan.
If God had a plan, Caleb had wanted no part of it.
The trail narrowed where the spruce gave way to shale. Here the old game path cut along a slope above Willow Creek, which ran unseen below under shelves of rotten spring ice. In summer, the ledge was no trouble. In winter, a careful man respected it. In late April, after three warm days and a hard freeze, it was worse than either.
Caleb paused before stepping onto it.
The wolf raised her head. Snow clung to her muzzle and whiskers. Her eyes were still sharp, but her body had begun to sag against the ropes. The black pup had crawled half over her shoulder and slept there, its small nose tucked into the fur at her neck.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Caleb said. “I know.”
He took the first step sideways, placing each boot where the rock showed through. The sled followed in short jerks. Twice it bumped against buried stone. Once the wolf growled, not at Caleb but at the jolt that ran through her injured leg. He muttered an apology before he could stop himself.
The old Caleb would have laughed at that.
The ledge bent around a granite shoulder. Wind hit him full in the face there, hard enough to blind him for three steps. Caleb turned his head, squinted against the ice needles, and felt for the next foothold with his boot.
The rock was not there.
His right foot punched through a skin of snow into empty air. His weight shifted before he could throw it back. For one helpless second he saw the white slope tilt, the sled rope snap tight across his ribs, and the wolf’s eyes flare wide from behind the blowing snow. Then Caleb went over the edge…
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