Part 3
Erase one.
The words stayed with Evan while he worked the tarp into a cradle around the she-wolf and her pup. A trapped animal was an emergency. A collared research animal with a severed transmitter was evidence. The difference mattered, but not to the wolf, not right then. Her breath was too shallow, and her eyes were beginning to slip toward a dull place Evan did not like.
He tied the tarp corners to the rescue sled with slow, deliberate knots. The mother tried twice to rise. Both times her injured leg folded, and both times her muzzle turned frantically toward the pup until Evan shifted the little body closer to her chest.
“I’m keeping him with you,” he said. “You hear me? I’m not taking him away.”
The male wolf watched from the road.
Evan did not bind the mother’s muzzle again. He considered it, because caution had kept him alive for three decades, but the thought lasted only a second. She had earned the right to breathe, and if she had wanted to punish him for coming close, she had already had chances.
He got the sled secured, gathered the field kit, and backed toward the snowmobile with Boone tucked against his leg. The male shifted then. Not a lunge. Not even a step forward, exactly. Just a tightening of the body that made every other wolf at the timberline seem to tighten with him.
Evan lowered his gaze to the snow between them.
“I’m taking her to help,” he said.
The wind swallowed the sentence.
He started the snowmobile.
The engine sounded too loud in the narrow wash. The male wolf held his ground for two breaths, then moved aside just enough to open a strip of road. It was not permission. Evan knew better than to make a story out of instinct. But it was space, and space was enough.
Boone climbed onto the footboard between Evan’s knees, his body braced against the vibration. Evan eased the machine forward. The rescue sled jerked once, then slid after them, the tarp shifting under the weight of the mother and pup.
At first he thought the pack had stayed behind.
Then the headlight swept across a bend in the road and caught gray bodies moving parallel through the trees.
They were not chasing. They were not escorting in any gentle, human sense. They were keeping with what belonged to them. The dark-shouldered male stayed nearest, appearing and vanishing between spruce trunks with the steady rhythm of a shadow that had learned the trail.
The road dropped toward the creek bottom, where the storm had packed drifts against the banks. Evan slowed until the snowmobile crawled. Behind him, the sled bumped over a buried branch, and the pup gave a thin cry. The mother lifted her head under the blanket. In the timber, the male stopped.
“I know,” Evan muttered.
He was not sure which creature he was answering.
The machine fought the drift, skis nosing down while the track chewed through loose snow. Evan shifted his weight, kept the throttle even, and felt the snowmobile begin to climb. Too much power would spin them sideways. Too little would bury them until morning. The track finally caught a firmer layer and lurched onto the far side of the creek road.
Then the hitch cracked.
The sound was small, almost foolish beneath the wind. Evan felt the sled pull wrong, twisting behind him. He killed the engine before the broken hitch could drag the tow bar under the track.
Silence dropped hard.
The sled sat crooked, one runner buried in a drift. The she-wolf slid against the tarp wall, her wrapped leg pressed at a bad angle. Evan was off the machine before the thought finished forming.
“Stay,” he told Boone.
Boone jumped down and ignored him, planting himself between Evan and the tree line.
Evan knelt by the hitch. The pin had sheared where old metal met a repair he had meant to replace properly weeks ago. He could hear his own voice from that morning, telling himself it would hold for one more run. Men had died in the backcountry for less stupid sentences.
His gloves were too bulky for the rope. He pulled them off, shoved them under one arm, and exposed his fingers to the cold. Pain hit fast, a clean bright shock through the knuckles. He threaded rope through the safety chain, looped it twice around the tow bar, and tied the kind of ugly knot a man hoped would hold long enough to be forgiven.
A sound came from behind him.
Boone turned first.
Evan looked over his shoulder and found the dark male wolf standing ten yards away on the trail. Closer than before. Close enough that Evan could see ice clinging to the fur beneath his jaw. The wolf’s nose angled toward the sled, toward the hidden mother and pup. He took one measured step.
Boone did not bark. He lowered his head and stood trembling, every instinct in him caught behind training and trust.
Evan held the rope in his numb hand. “No closer.”
The male stopped.
For several seconds, the trail held all of them still. Evan could hear the mother breathing beneath the tarp. He could hear the pup shifting in its scrap of wool. He could hear the wind combing through the black spruce overhead.
Then the male turned his head.
Not toward the sled.
Toward the far edge of the road.
Evan followed the motion with his flashlight. The beam landed on a depression near the snowbank, already softening under new flakes. Not wolf. Not deer. Not Evan’s own boot.
A human print.
Deep. Fresh. Angled toward the ridge.
Beside it, a broken branch stuck out of the drift with a strip of blue survey tape tied around it, bright as a bruise against the snow. Evan stared until the cold in his bare fingers became distant and unimportant. Whoever had cut that collar and set that steel had not vanished days ago. Someone had been on this trail after the storm started. And the pack was looking exactly where he had gone…
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