Part 6
The echo was still moving through the basin when Nate answered Cal.
SHOT FIRED NEAR RELEASE DEN. I’M MOVING TO OBSERVE. TRACK ME.
He did not believe he was bulletproof, and he did not mistake anger for authority. But the collar had stopped moving less than half a mile from the den, and forty minutes was long enough for a wounded lion to die. Nate clipped the satellite phone high on his vest, checked that Cal had received the update, and followed the snowmobile track on foot.
The machine had stopped below a narrow saddle. Beyond it, Nate found the first bullet strike—a pale gouge in a pine at the height of a mountain lion’s chest. There was no blood on the snow. F-17’s tracks broke hard to the west, away from the rocks where she had hidden her cub.
She had drawn the shot away from the den.
Two men were moving along the opposite slope. Wade carried the rifle. Travis carried a dark pack and kept looking behind them toward the valley. Nate crouched behind a fallen trunk, recorded several seconds on his field camera, and keyed his radio. Static answered. As he began to withdraw, loose snow slid from beneath his boot and whispered down the open slope.
Travis turned. Wade found Nate’s position a second later.
“Cal has your coordinates, Wade,” Nate called. “Put the rifle down.”
The shot struck the trunk in front of Nate and blew bark across his face. He dropped behind cover, heard Travis shout something, then the snowmobile engine catch below the saddle. Nate did not fire into the trees. He tried to give Cal the direction of flight, but his radio answered with static; the ridge had cut him off.
He began backing toward the last place his satellite phone had shown a clear signal. Wade fired once more, farther away this time. Nate stepped around a wind-bent fir—and a slab of snow broke loose beneath him.
There was no long fall, only a violent sequence of white sky, branches, and stone. He hit the bottom of the ravine on his left side. Pain shut the world off for several seconds.
When sound returned, it came as a thin ringing. His left boot was twisted beneath him, and the pain told him the ankle was badly broken. Every breath caught beneath his ribs. The satellite phone had torn from his vest; he found it ten feet away with its screen crushed and casing split.
Nate lay still until nausea passed. Then training replaced panic in small, ordinary steps. He dragged himself beneath the overhang of an uprooted tree, spread the foam pad from his pack, and pulled an emergency bivy over his legs. He stabilized the ankle as well as he could without examining it more than necessary. Two chemical hand warmers went inside his jacket. The actions did not make him safe. They made the next ten minutes possible.
Twilight filled the ravine early. The temperature fell toward fifteen degrees, and wind poured through the trees above him with the steady sound of distant traffic. Nate tried his handheld radio at intervals. Static. He blew three notes on his whistle until the pain in his ribs made him stop.
He had told Cal to track him. The last message had gone through. He repeated those facts as the cold worked past the bivy and into his wet clothes.
For years, Nate had imagined death as a door back to Laura. He had never said it aloud, but the thought had traveled with him from truck cabs to the Bering Sea and into every empty field station: if something happened, at least the waiting would end.
Now, with darkness settling over the ravine, that old comfort did not come.
He thought of Laura standing barefoot in their kitchen, one hand beneath her pregnant belly, laughing because Ellie kicked whenever Nate spoke. He remembered the crib he had assembled crooked and then rebuilt at midnight. He remembered the last text on his phone, unanswered for twenty-seven minutes because he had been driving.
None of those memories asked him to follow them into the dark.
“No,” he said, though no one was there to hear. His teeth had begun to chatter. “Not here.”
He pulled the bivy higher and struck one gloved hand against the other. He wanted another spring in the Bitterroots. He wanted to hear the absurd bark of sandhill cranes over the valley. He wanted to see whether the cub’s spots faded as he grew. The wanting itself frightened him. It was the first honest claim he had made on his own future in eleven years.
Somewhere above, an engine passed and faded. Nate used the whistle again. No answer came.
Hours lost their edges. He surfaced and sank through shallow dreams: deck lights on black water, Laura’s blue coat at the airport, a cub’s first thin cry. Once he woke convinced that someone had laid a warm palm against his shoulder. It was only pain pulsing beneath the cold.
Then the forest changed. The wind still moved overhead, but the smaller night sounds had stopped. Nate heard snow compress beyond the uprooted tree. One step, then another—soft under weight, measured, too close to be a deer. He reached for the flare in his pack and stopped. A low sound moved through the darkness, not quite a growl and not quite a purr. It vibrated in the roots beside him. Two amber eyes opened at the edge of the overhang…
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