Part 3
“He shouldn’t have followed it,” Lila said the next afternoon. “That doesn’t mean he was wrong about what he saw.”
She lay in a Duluth hospital room with a temporary cast from toes to knee. Her temperature had stabilized overnight, and the ankle fractures would heal without surgery. The frostbite on two toes remained uncertain; whenever a doctor said watch or wait, Lila listened as if being given terms she could enforce.
Tessa sat near the window with a field map across her lap. Cole had come to ask about the cable trail before new snow erased it, but Lila had already asked three times what was being done for Ash.
“Maren Liu is joining us before dark,” Tessa told her. “At first light, we’ll follow his tracks with a vet and the right equipment. No one’s chasing him blind through timber.”
Lila relaxed by a degree. “Okay.”
Her aunt, Denise, poured water into a paper cup and held the straw while Lila drank. Denise had Ethan’s straight eyebrows and none of his patience for field people who arrived carrying questions.
“Ten minutes,” she said to Cole. “Then she sleeps.”
Cole took the chair beside the bed. “Start where you found the fresh cable.”
Lila closed her eyes, assembling the route. “Camera seven. East edge of the Red Pine burn. There was a drag line beside the trail, and Dad saw gray fur on a spruce root.”
“Was the wolf still in the loop?”
“No. He’d pulled the anchor loose or broken something. We found blood, tracks, and a groove where wire had scraped the bark.”
“Your father photographed it?”
She pointed toward her belongings bag. A memory card lay inside a smaller evidence sleeve. “On the field camera. The card was in my inside pocket when the truck went down.”
Cole did not reach for it. “Why were you at the burn with him?”
Lila’s mouth tightened. “Because he asked me to come.”
Two winters earlier, she had gone for the same reason. After her mother’s death, Ethan’s invitations had become oddly formal: Check cameras Saturday? Need another set of hands. Work was the only place where he knew what to do with grief, and Lila had gone anyway.
Metal scraping frozen bark led them to the first snare. Ethan pushed Lila behind him. Through the branches she saw a gray wolf on his side, one hind leg cinched in a cable loop and blood striping his flank. Ethan called the veterinarian and told Lila to return to the truck.
“I’m not walking half a mile back alone.”
“Then stay behind the tarp and do exactly what I say.”
His fear made him sound angry. It often did. Lila stayed behind the tarp the team stretched between trees, out of the animal’s view. Whenever the wolf fought the wire, metal rasped and Ethan’s instructions became faster.
Lila switched on the recorder she used for school projects and described what she heard: dead pines rubbing together, snow ticking against the tarp, the wolf’s broken panting. Then she talked to fill the spaces.
She told the recorder about the smoke alarm her mother set off every Saturday because she refused to lower the pancake griddle, and the jar where Rachel hid the burned edges before Ethan came in from shoveling. The wolf could not understand a word. Still, while Lila’s voice held the same quiet cadence, he struggled less often.
Dr. Liu sedated him, cut away the cable, cleaned the wounds, and fitted a temporary tracking collar. His official number was M-18; in Lila’s recording, he became Ash. Ethan corrected her once, then used the name himself on the phone with Cole that night.
For a few months, father and daughter found a way back to one another through the wolf’s location reports. Then the collar stopped transmitting, Lila began applying to colleges, and Ethan treated each school beyond Minnesota as a symptom to be managed.
“He thought Chicago was me running away,” she told Cole now.
“Were you?”
Denise gave him a warning look.
Lila did not. “Partly. I wanted documentary audio. I wanted trains outside my window instead of telemetry beeps in the kitchen. He heard all of that as me saying his life wasn’t enough.”
On Friday, Ethan had planned to check three cameras and return by midafternoon. Instead, he followed the injured wolf’s track north. With the storm erasing his prints, Lila was more afraid to leave him than to follow.
At 2:30, she told him to turn around. Ethan insisted on reaching the next rise to call Cole, but his phone found no service there. By then the wind had covered the back trail.
The tote road was blocked by a tamarack dropped in the storm. Ethan could have left the truck and waited in the field cabin. He could have backed several miles to the southern route. Instead he studied the lake, tested the ice near the south shore, and said the crossing would save forty minutes.
“I told him about your stakes,” Lila said.
Cole kept his hands still on his knees. “What did he say?”
“That the springs were farther north. That he knew where the shelf ran.”
Ethan drove onto Blackwater slowly, following an old winter line he had used in other years. The whiteout erased the far shore. Stakes appeared and vanished at the edge of the headlights.
Lila started with the lake and ended with every conversation they had failed to have since Rachel died. She told him he listened harder to a radio signal from a wolf than to his own daughter. Ethan gripped the wheel until the tendons rose on the backs of his hands.
Then, instead of defending himself, he asked, “Why Chicago?” She heard challenge in it because challenge was what she expected.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
The front of the truck dropped before she could answer. There was no long crack to warn them. Black water folded over the hood. Ethan threw the truck into reverse; the tires spun and broke more ice behind them. Lila’s seat belt locked when she yanked it. Her hands forgot how the buckle worked.
Ethan used the rescue blade on his key ring to cut the webbing. Water rose over their boots. He broke the rear side window with the emergency hammer, shoved the field pack into Lila’s arms, and forced her through the opening. Her coat snagged on glass or metal. His second push bruised her ribs and sent her onto the broken ice. Her left boot caught in a narrowing crack; when she wrenched it free, the ankle folded under her.
“Come on,” she had screamed.
“My leg’s pinned.”
The truck tipped lower. Ethan did not promise he was behind her. He told her where the granite shelf was and made her repeat it.
“East shore. Blue whistle. Dry clothes first.”
She repeated the words. When he said, “Go, Lila,” she crawled because he had given her one job that could still be done.
At the shelf, she dragged herself into the shallow opening, changed out of her wet base layer, wrapped the ankle, and activated the emergency beacon. It lit but could not acquire a signal beneath the granite. Her phone had died in the water, and the whistle split at the mouthpiece when she blew it.
Ash arrived near dusk. At first he stood by the open water, the cable end knocking faintly against ice. Later he followed Lila’s crawl marks to the shelf. He never entered the hollow. He never came close enough to touch. He moved between the rocks and the lake, and when coyotes gathered beyond the inlet, his charge through the dark sent their voices back into the forest.
On the second night, wind dropped a slab of snow across the opening. Lila woke with the bivy against her mouth and the air gone stale. She struck her metal cup against granite until something dug from the other side. A slot opened. Cold rushed in with powder and the smell of wet fur.
She had not seen Ash after Cole’s team carried her away. That absence now worked at her more urgently than the pain medicine could quiet.
“The photograph,” she said.
Denise passed Cole the evidence sleeve. On the small camera screen, Tessa enlarged the final image from Friday. A broad wolf track pressed deep into the snow beyond the sprung cable. Beside it ran a narrow black line. At the edge of the frame, gray toes and a loop biting above the left front paw were blurred but visible.
Lila watched Cole recognize what the photograph meant. “He isn’t waiting at the lake now,” she said. “He’s bleeding somewhere you can still reach…”
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