Part 5
Nolan and Marisol left before sunrise with the receiver from Peter’s case and enough gear for a long day in deep snow.
The coordinates led them away from Granite Hollow and into the Rock Creek burn, where young pines had grown dense between the blackened remains of older trees. It was the kind of place a person could make a trap line disappear. Game trails narrowed between deadfall. Snow drifted smooth over disturbed ground. From a distance, every opening looked natural.
The first cable set was exactly where Peter’s map promised.
It was empty now, but fur clung to the wire, and the anchor tree had been scraped raw. Marisol photographed the loop, the blood, the brushed snow, the boot impressions beside it. Nolan cut the cable only after she finished.
“Whoever set this knew what they were doing,” she said.
“Knew enough to hide it. Not enough to care what suffered.”
They followed the blood trail north. Cinder’s tracks appeared in broken sequences, vanishing where wind had filled the path and returning under cedar cover. Sometimes the injured paw landed squarely. Sometimes it dragged. At one slope, the wolf had slipped, leaving a long red smear where he pushed himself up again.
A mile from the lake, the trail crossed Nolan’s Saturday snowmobile route.
He stopped.
His own track still marked the snow as a shallow trench under the new powder. Cinder’s prints came from the west, circled the packed route twice, then turned back toward Granite Hollow.
Nolan remembered Saturday morning with an unpleasant clarity. A gray shape had crossed ahead of him between the trees. He had slowed, seen the limp, told himself he would report it after checking the southern traps. One wounded wolf in wolf country was not enough to abandon a route during a whiteout.
Lily had been less than two miles away.
Marisol watched him from the other side of the trail. “Don’t do that.”
“I saw him.”
“You saw movement in a storm.”
“I saw a limp.”
“And you had no missing truck yet. No broken whistle. No reason to know a girl was under the rocks.”
Nolan looked toward the lake, hidden by forest and weather. “He came this way again on Sunday.”
“You don’t know why.”
No, he did not. That was the cruelty of it. Maybe Cinder had been using the packed trail because it hurt less to walk there. Maybe he had followed machine scent. Maybe he had been circling his own territory. Maybe he had come looking for the only moving human noise near the place where Lily was trapped.
The tracks gave him facts. They did not absolve him.
By noon, they had found five more illegal loops. One held the frozen body of a fox. Another had been torn from its anchor and dragged twenty feet before snagging around a stump. Near the last set, Marisol spotted a clear boot print with a broken heel notch pressed into the crust.
She photographed it, measured it, and covered it with an evidence container weighted by snow.
“Dale’s people can work that,” she said.
Nolan was already scanning beyond it. “Cinder first.”
The blood trail thinned near a cedar swamp. There, the snow swallowed their legs to the knee, and travel slowed to a miserable crawl. Nolan switched on Peter’s old receiver and swept through the frequencies listed in the case log. Static filled the headphones. Then, at the fifth setting, a faint pulse answered.
Marisol stopped breathing for half a second. “That collar died months ago.”
“Satellite died,” Nolan said. “Maybe the short-range beacon still has a little battery.”
The pulse strengthened eastward.
They followed it past a frozen creek, through cedar shadows, and into a hollow where deer had yarded earlier in the winter. Under one low tree, they found a bed pressed into the snow. Blood dotted the edge. A few yards away, a ten-inch piece of cable had snagged on a root, bent into a hook and dark with frozen blood.
Marisol crouched beside it. “It came off.”
Nolan looked at the blood trail continuing beyond the hollow. “Too late to do him much good.”
The light was failing when the receiver began to pulse steadily. Nolan saw Cinder before Marisol did.
The wolf stood across the creek under sagging cedar branches, his coat dulled by exhaustion, the old scar pale along his ribs. For several seconds, he stared at them. The wind lifted the fur around his neck.
Then he tried to turn away.
His injured front leg buckled. Cinder dropped into the snow, lifted his head once, and could not get back up…
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