Part 2
“Because whatever you caught was strong enough to drag it away from you,” Eli said.
Mason seized the passenger handle.
The lynx exploded upward beneath the blanket. Its snarl filled the cab, deep enough to seem too large for the animal producing it. Mason stumbled back, and Wade pulled him clear of the door.
For one second the blanket fell away.
Black fur. Wide snowshoe paws. A ruff framing a face unlike any domestic cat’s. The lynx stared through the glass, then dropped into the footwell again.
Wade’s expression held no surprise. Only recognition.
“So you did pick it up,” he said.
“I found it half frozen.”
“You found something that belongs to us.”
Eli looked at the cable. “That sentence would interest my old office.”
“You don’t have an office anymore.”
“No. But they still answer their phones.”
Mason reached inside his jacket. Eli did not see a weapon, but Wade stopped him with one glance.
“Think,” Wade said quietly. “His truck is sitting in the road. His son knows he left Missoula. You don’t make a retired warden disappear because he took an animal out of an illegal set.”
“He stole from us.”
“He kept you from saying that into somebody’s camera.”
There was no camera that Eli knew of, but Mason looked toward the dashboard anyway.
Wade stepped closer to the driver’s window. “Here’s what happens. You give us the lynx. We put you on the second machine and take you to the highway patrol closure. You get warm. Your son gets his father back.”
“And the lynx?”
“It was dying when you found it.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
Wade’s jaw tightened. “Mason sent the trail-camera picture to a man who buys rare pelts. The picture traveled. A collector offered enough to keep my place through spring.”
There it was—not a confession polished for Eli’s benefit, only a fact Wade had grown tired of hiding. Two dry summers and a winter without enough clients had put his guiding business in trouble. Eli had heard the talk in town.
Mason leaned toward the glass. “Nobody outside that buyer knows this thing is real.”
“I do,” Eli said.
“That’s your problem.”
Wade turned on him. “Enough.”
The storm pressed against the men, tugging loose snow from their clothes. Wade rubbed a gloved hand over his mouth and looked suddenly older than Eli remembered.
“You shouldn’t have left Missoula tonight,” he said. “You know that.”
Eli said nothing.
“You’ve got a dead truck and maybe an hour before this cab turns into a freezer. You can call what you’re doing principle if you want. From out here, it looks a lot like pride.”
The criticism landed because part of it was true.
Eli had seen the warning. He had heard Nate asking him to stay. He had left because a business card beneath a napkin felt like a verdict on the life he had built with June.
The lynx had nothing to do with that.
Wade tapped the window once. “Give me the animal.”
“No.”
Mason swore, but Wade stepped back.
“We’ll check the lower sets,” Wade said. “When we come past again, maybe you’ll be ready to make sense.”
“You’ll come past again because you’re afraid I’ll send somebody to your trap line.”
Wade pulled his face covering over his mouth. “That too.”
The men returned to their machines. Mason kept looking at the truck as the engines started. Their lights swung across the road and vanished into the storm.
Eli waited until he could no longer hear them.
The lynx remained crouched beneath the blanket. One paw had struck the water cup, spilling most of it, but a damp patch around its muzzle told him it had taken at least one drink.
“Your manners aren’t much better than his,” Eli said.
The animal blinked.
Eli pulled the satellite messenger from his coat. The orange cord had tangled around a button. He freed it, held the device near the windshield, and pressed the emergency control.
Nothing happened.
He pressed again. The screen glowed weakly, displayed a searching symbol, then warned him that the battery was low.
“Of course.”
He tucked it beneath his shirt, against his skin, to warm it.
The line cabin had a stove, split wood, and a metal emergency box if no one had emptied it. Staying in the truck meant waiting for Wade and Mason to return. Walking meant entering a storm that had erased the road ten feet beyond the hood.
Eli took his compass, headlamp, first-aid kit, and two chemical hand warmers from behind the seat. He found the collapsible cargo sled he used for firewood and pulled it through the rear door.
When he opened the passenger door, the lynx recoiled from the wind. Eli stepped back and left the way clear.
“You can go,” he said. “I won’t stop you.”
The animal looked past him into the blowing snow. It tried to stand, placed weight on its injured hind leg, and folded back down.
Eli laid June’s blanket in the cargo sled. He turned his face away and waited.
The lynx did not climb in for him. It dragged itself beneath the dashboard, forcing Eli to use the blanket as a loose barrier. He never closed his hands around its body. After several tense minutes, the animal backed onto the sled and collapsed into the wool.
Eli folded one side of the blanket over it as a windbreak, leaving its head and an escape route uncovered.
He strapped on his snowshoes and tied the sled line around his waist. Before closing the truck, he put the warmed satellite device on the hood.
The screen still showed the searching symbol.
He raised it toward the sky until the wind nearly tore it from his hand. At last the symbol changed.
SOS SENT.
No reply appeared, but something had left the valley besides snow.
Eli clipped the messenger to his coat and faced his compass east.
The first two hundred yards were worse than he expected. Wind-driven snow erased the beam of his headlamp and filled the tracks behind him almost as soon as he made them. The cargo sled caught on buried brush, jerking him backward.
Each time he fell, the lynx surged beneath the blanket. Each time, Eli waited for claws through the wool.
They never came.
At the edge of the trees, the wind weakened. Eli found a shallow drainage he remembered from patrols and followed it toward Split Rock. The snow there reached his knees even with the snowshoes.
His breath scraped his throat. The cold settled in the joints of his hands.
He thought of Nate standing in the doorway. Not angry at first—only tired. Nate had been thirteen when Eli became district warden and learned early that supper could wait for a call about an injured elk, a missing hunter, or a spotlight seen from a back road. June had filled the empty chairs Eli left behind.
After she died, Nate began trying to fill Eli’s.
Eli had treated every offer as an attempt to take something from him.
The sled line pulled tight. He looked back.
The lynx had raised its head. Snow clung to its whiskers, but its eyes were alert. It was looking behind them.
A distant engine rose above the wind.
Eli extinguished the headlamp and pulled the sled into a stand of young firs. A white beam moved between the trunks below, sweeping the drainage.
Wade and Mason had returned sooner than promised.
Eli crouched over the blanket while the beam passed across the branches. The lynx did not growl. Its body went rigid, every instinct concentrated on invisibility.
The light paused.
Eli held his breath.
Then an engine revved farther down the slope, and the beam moved away.
He waited another minute before continuing.
The line cabin appeared only when he was almost upon it: a low rectangle of dark logs pressed against the foot of Split Rock. Snow covered half the door. Eli cleared it with his hands, found the old latch, and shoved his shoulder against the frozen wood.
The door opened inward with a crack.
He dragged the sled inside and barred the door. The cabin smelled of mouse droppings, iron, and old smoke. A stack of split lodgepole pine stood beside the stove.
Eli lit kindling with fingers that barely bent. When the first flames caught, the lynx crawled from the sled and vanished beneath the lower bunk.
He fed the stove, set a pan of snow on top, and lowered himself onto the floor. Heat had only begun to reach the room when the satellite messenger chirped.
SOS RECEIVED. SEARCH AND RESCUE NOTIFIED. HOLD POSITION.
A second message appeared beneath it.
DAD. IT’S NATE. ANSWER ME.
Eli’s thumb hovered over the keys.
Outside, two engines came through the trees and stopped beside the cabin.
Through the snow-smeared window, Eli saw Wade step from one machine with a rifle slung across his chest. Mason pulled a long catch pole from the cargo sled and moved toward the rear wall.
A light swept across the front window. Then Wade’s voice carried through the door. “Eli Mercer, open up…”
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