Part 5
Grant and Nora left for the circled coordinates before sunrise.
The snow had stopped, but the cold behind it was sharper. Their snowmobiles followed the old fire cut toward the burn scar, then slowed where young pine grew thick between blackened trunks. Places like that made perfect funnels. An animal moving the path of least resistance could be guided straight into a hidden loop.
They found the first illegal set within twenty minutes.
It was empty. Gray fur clung to the cable, and frozen blood darkened the anchor tree. Nora photographed the site from every angle before Grant cut the wire loose and bagged it. Neither of them spoke until the restraint was sealed.
“Samuel was right,” Nora said. “The lock didn’t open. He tore free.”
Grant looked at the blood trail leading north. “With part of it still attached.”
They followed the track through knee-deep snow. Sometimes Cinder had placed the injured foot almost normally. In other stretches, the paw dragged, leaving a thin red skip beside the print. The pattern told a story no animal intended to tell: pain, rest, movement, pain again.
A mile from Copperline, the trail crossed Grant’s own snowmobile route from Saturday morning.
He stopped so abruptly that Nora almost walked into him.
His old track was still visible under the newer snow, compressed into a shallow trench. Cinder’s prints approached from the west, circled the packed trail twice, and turned back toward the lake.
Grant remembered seeing a gray shape in the trees that morning.
He had been checking reported trap lines along the south ridge. He had seen the animal for perhaps three seconds, limping between spruce trunks, and decided not to chase one wounded wolf through a storm while two missing people were somewhere else in the drainage.
Except they had not been somewhere else.
June had been under the rocks less than two miles away.
Nora watched his face. “You couldn’t know.”
“I could have followed him.”
“You saw a wolf in wolf country.”
“I saw a hurt wolf cross my trail and go back the way he came.”
“And you had a missing truck, no confirmed direction of travel, and twelve miles of winter route to cover.”
Grant looked down at the prints. Guilt had a way of ignoring useful facts.
The pattern appeared again farther south. Cinder had followed the packed snowmobile route for about sixty yards, then left it and returned toward Copperline. Maybe he was seeking easier travel. Maybe he was moving through familiar territory. Maybe he had heard machines and gone toward them because machines had once brought people who cut wire from his flesh.
No one could prove intention.
That did not make the tracks easier to stand over.
By noon, they had found five more cable loops. One held the frozen remains of a fox. Another had been baited with scraps that should not have been there. A third had been pulled nearly straight by something strong enough to scar the bark. Near the last set, Grant photographed a boot print with a broken heel pattern and covered it with an evidence bin before wind could erase it.
The criminal case could wait a few hours. Cinder could not.
The old radio receiver from Samuel’s case still worked, barely. His team had collared Cinder after the first snare injury, but the satellite transmitter had failed months earlier. The short-range beacon might still pulse if the battery had not died completely.
Grant swept through the frequencies while Nora checked the blood trail. Static hissed through the receiver, then flattened. Static again. Nothing. Then, on the fifth frequency, a faint pulse answered.
Nora looked up. “That collar was supposed to be dead.”
“Not dead enough.”
They followed the signal into a cedar swamp where the snow swallowed their legs and dusk came early under the branches. The pulse strengthened, weakened, then strengthened again. Near a frozen creek, they found a bed pressed beneath a cedar and a piece of cable caught on a root.
The fragment was ten inches long, bent like a hook, and black with old blood.
Nora crouched beside it. “It came off.”
Grant looked at the trail beyond the creek. The red marks continued.
“Then the wound is worse than the wire.”
They climbed the shallow bank.
Cinder stood on the far side beneath drooping cedar branches, snow gathered on his muzzle and the old scar pale along his flank. For several seconds, wolf and people looked at one another across the frozen creek.
Then Cinder tried to turn away.
His injured leg folded beneath him, and he went down hard in the snow…
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