Part 5
Owen and Maya left for the circled coordinates before sunrise.
The storm had passed, leaving the kind of cold that made every breath feel edged. Their snowmobiles followed the old fire cut until the trees grew too tight, then they went on foot through young pine and blackened trunks. The burn scar was healing, but slowly. New growth crowded the spaces where the fire had opened the forest, creating narrow routes that funneled anything moving through them.
A person who knew animals could turn those routes into traps.
They found the first illegal restraint twenty minutes in. It was empty, anchored around a spruce root, the cable bent and dark where something had fought it. Maya photographed every angle while Owen stood back, forcing himself not to cut the thing loose until the evidence was documented. The restraint looked simple. That was what made it ugly. No loud machinery, no visible cruelty from a distance, just a hidden loop waiting for a foot or neck to enter it.
When Maya finished, Owen clipped the cable and bagged it.
“Nathan was right,” she said. “The lock didn’t release. Smoke tore himself out.”
“With part of it still on him.”
They followed the trail north. Sometimes Smoke had set the injured paw down almost normally. Other times, it dragged beside the track, leaving a red skip in the snow. The pattern changed with fatigue, terrain, and pain. Owen had spent his adult life reading tracks, but this one felt less like evidence than a confession the animal had never meant to leave.
A mile from Redglass, the wolf’s route crossed Owen’s old snowmobile path from Saturday morning.
He stopped so abruptly that Maya nearly stepped into him.
His track was still visible under the newer snow, compressed into a shallow trench. Smoke’s prints came from the west, circled the packed trail twice, and turned back toward the lake.
Owen remembered a gray shape between the spruce trunks that morning. Three seconds. A limp. A flash of fur in blowing snow. He had been working a missing-person search over twelve miles of drainage, and he decided not to chase one injured wolf when two people might be freezing somewhere else.
Except Avery had been under the rocks less than two miles away.
Maya watched his face. “Don’t do that.”
“I saw him.”
“You saw a wolf in wolf country during a search with no vehicle location and a storm covering tracks.”
“I saw a hurt wolf cross my route and go back toward the lake.”
“And you had no way to know what that meant.”
Owen looked down at the prints. Guilt did not care for useful facts. It took the shape of whatever would hurt most and called itself truth.
The same pattern appeared farther south. Smoke had used the packed snowmobile trail for a short distance, then left it and returned to Redglass. Maybe he liked the easier walking. Maybe pain drove him in circles. Maybe he had heard engines and followed them because machines had once brought people who cut wire from his body.
No one could prove intention.
That did not make the tracks easier to stand over.
By noon, they had found four more illegal sets. One held the frozen remains of a fox. Another had been baited with scraps that should never have been left on public land. Near the last restraint, Maya found a boot print with a distinctive broken heel. She photographed it, shielded it with an evidence bin, and radioed the coordinates to a conservation officer headed their way.
The criminal case mattered. Smoke mattered sooner.
Nathan’s old field receiver still sat in the orange case. The satellite transmitter on Smoke’s collar had failed months earlier, but Maya thought the short-range beacon might still pulse if the battery had any life left. Owen swept the frequencies while she followed the blood trail into a cedar swamp where the snow swallowed their legs above the knees.
Static hissed in the receiver.
Then came one faint tick.
Owen froze.
Maya looked back. “Was that him?”
He adjusted the antenna. Static. Wind. Another tick, thin and distant, barely there at all.
“Not dead enough,” Owen said.
They followed the signal until the afternoon dimmed early beneath the cedars. The pulse strengthened, vanished, and came back, pulling them toward a frozen creek where the water moved under cloudy ice. Beneath a low branch, they found a bed pressed into the snow and a piece of cable caught on a root.
It was ten inches long, bent like a hook, blackened with old blood.
Maya crouched. “It came off.”
Owen looked beyond the creek. The red marks continued. “Then the wire wasn’t the worst of it.”
They climbed the bank and saw him.
Smoke stood on the far side under hanging cedar boughs, snow dusting his muzzle, the old flank scar pale against the gray of his coat. For several seconds, wolf and humans held still across the frozen creek.
Then Smoke turned to leave.
His injured leg folded under him, and he dropped hard into the snow…
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