Part 2
Eli did not think. He moved because thinking would have taken too long.
His fingers were numb and blistered, but they were free. He tore the loose rope from his wrists, tucked his knees under him, and kicked at the tailgate with both boots. The first blow sent pain up his legs. The second bent the rusted latch. The third broke something loose with a scream of old metal, and the tailgate dropped open beneath him.
He fell out with it.
The snow caught him hard and cold. His burned hands plunged into powder, and the shock of it tore a sound from his throat that was almost a sob. The air outside felt like knives, but it was clean. He rolled away from the truck, dragging one leg, then forced himself up on his elbows and crawled toward a fallen pine half-buried at the edge of the road.
Behind him, the truck groaned.
The wolf had already retreated to the tree line. Eli caught one glimpse of it through the smoke—gray body, amber eyes, the canvas pouch at its feet now ripped open and empty. Then the animal turned its head toward the road as if it had heard something Eli could not.
Eli threw himself behind the fallen pine and covered his head.
The explosion hit the forest in a single white-orange flash. The fuel tank blew the truck bed apart, hurling chunks of metal through the trees and sending a sheet of heat across the snow. For a moment the woods were all firelight and noise. Then pieces began to fall back to earth, hissing into drifts.
Eli lay still until the echoes thinned.
He was alive.
That knowledge did not come with joy. It came with work.
He pushed himself onto his knees, coughing until his ribs cramped. The night around him tilted, then steadied. The logging road was empty except for the burning remains of the truck and a long, black smear of smoke bent sideways by the wind. Grant and his men were gone for now, but not far. A man like Grant did not walk away from a witness who could put him in federal prison.
Eli needed the old fire cache.
Years before, when the Forest Service still kept a lookout platform on Miller Ridge, Eli and his son Caleb had stocked a small emergency box in a stone alcove below it. Blankets. A flint striker. An old first-aid tin. A coil of paracord. Nothing fancy, nothing that would impress people who believed rescue came with a cell signal. But in the backcountry, small things often decided whether a man became a story told over coffee or a body found in spring.
The cache was three miles west.
Eli checked the thermos strapped to his pack strap. Still there. The false bottom still tight. The notebook had survived the fire because Grant had never looked inside the one thing an old man carried like a habit.
He got to his feet and staggered into the trees.
The wolf followed.
Not close. Never close enough to be mistaken for tame. It moved behind him and to the left, a gray line passing between trunks, appearing and disappearing with the snowfall. Eli saw it twice in the first mile and heard it not at all. Once, when he stopped to press his forehead against the bark of a spruce, the wolf stopped too.
“You got what you came for,” Eli muttered.
The wolf only stared.
Eli found a young balsam with a split in the bark and used the edge of his belt buckle to scrape at the pitch. The resin came away in cloudy amber beads, sticky and sharp-smelling. He softened it in his mouth as his father had taught him, then smeared it carefully over the worst of the burns on his wrists. It hurt badly enough to make his knees loosen, but after a minute the pitch sealed the torn skin against the air.
The forest had always been a hard doctor, but it was a doctor all the same.
A sound rose behind him.
At first, Eli thought it was the wind pushing through the spruce crowns. Then he heard it again, lower, broken into pulses.
Engines.
Snowmobiles, at least two of them, somewhere back near the logging road. They had found the wreck. They had seen the tracks leading away.
Eli looked over his shoulder.
The wolf had lifted its head, ears forward. Its nose pointed into the storm.
“Yeah,” Eli said softly. “I hear them too.”
The weather turned against him before he reached the ridge. The wind dropped from the treetops and became a wall. Snow blasted sideways through the timber, erasing the world twenty feet at a time. Eli tried to keep west by the feel of the slope under his boots, but exhaustion made the land unreliable. Twice he stumbled into waist-deep drifts. Once he hit the ground and lay there longer than he meant to.
Cold was persuasive. It spoke softly. It told a man that rest was reasonable, that closing his eyes for one minute was not surrender, that warmth could be imagined until the body stopped asking for the real thing.
Something shoved his shoulder.
Eli opened his eyes to fur and breath.
The wolf stood above him, its body braced against the wind. Snow packed along its back and whiskers. It did not whine. It did not lick his face. It simply stood there, blocking the worst of the gusts with its chest, then turned and dug forward with its forepaws, breaking a shallow trough through the drift.
After a few feet, it looked back.
Eli laughed once, a dry sound lost in the storm. “Bossy thing, aren’t you?”
The wolf dug again.
So Eli crawled.
He followed the path the animal broke, using his elbows and knees when his legs failed. The wolf moved in short bursts, always ahead, always returning just far enough for Eli to see the dark shape in the whiteout. At the top of a rocky rise, the wind suddenly lost its teeth. The wolf slipped between two granite boulders tucked under a ledge of ice and cedar roots.
Eli squeezed in after it and collapsed on stone.
The space was small, dry, and shielded from the storm. The wolf lay across the opening with its head on its paws, still watching the white woods beyond. Eli curled against the back wall, shaking so hard his teeth clicked. He did not sleep so much as fall away from the world.
Near dawn, the wolf growled. Eli opened his eyes. The storm had softened, but somewhere below the ridge, faint and ugly in the new quiet, dogs began to bark…
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