Part 4
Cole and Tessa were back at Red Pine before first light. Dr. Maren Liu followed in a tracked utility vehicle with sedation equipment and a heated transport crate. She had treated Ash after the first snare injury, though she reminded them that history would not make him cooperative now.
“Pain narrows an animal’s choices,” she said. “It doesn’t make any of those choices safe for you.”
Fresh snow had ended shortly after midnight. The new layer showed one set of uneven wolf tracks leaving Blackwater, crossing the fire cut, and turning into the burn. Every fourth or fifth print carried a red crescent. Where the animal stepped over deadfall, the cable drew a clean line through powder.
They found the broken snare at camera seven. Its anchor wire had pulled free from a young spruce, but the locking loop was gone with the wolf. Tessa photographed gray fur in the hardware while Cole marked the location for investigators. Twenty yards away, another cable hung empty beneath loose snow.
The setting was not careless. It was designed by someone who understood how animals moved around fallen timber. Brush closed one side of the gap; a bait scent drew from the other. The opening between them looked easier than forcing a new path, and the loop waited at chest height for a coyote or leg height for anything larger that stepped through badly.
“Ethan saw one and assumed one,” Cole said.
“We’re doing the same if we stop looking,” Tessa replied.
They marked three more within a quarter mile. One held a dead fox, frozen into the shape of its last resistance. Cole covered it until the evidence team could arrive. There would be an investigation, owners of nearby hunting camps to interview, cable and boot patterns to compare. None of it would bring Ethan out of the lake or close the wound above Ash’s paw before infection reached the joint. They left the untouched sites flagged and followed the blood.
By midmorning, the trail crossed the packed trench made by Cole’s snowmobile on Saturday. Ash had approached from the east, walked along it for forty yards, circled once, and returned toward Blackwater. Cole stopped.
He remembered the gray shape between the spruces. The search had been entering its second day, visibility was poor, and his assignment was to cover twelve miles of tote road for a missing truck. He had seen a limping wolf come to the edge of his trail and turn away. He had logged the sighting in his field book, told himself injured wildlife would have to wait, and kept riding.
Tessa studied the crossing. “You saw him here.”
“For maybe three seconds.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“No.”
That was true and inadequate. He had seen the old flank scar. Some part of him had placed it, then rejected the thought because following a hurt wolf while two people were missing seemed like the kind of choice no one could defend later.
Ash’s tracks used the packed route again half a mile west. They converged with Cole’s Sunday path shortly before the animal returned to the lake.
“He could have wanted easy footing,” Cole said.
“Yes.”
“He could have been circling within his range.”
“Yes.”
Tessa did not offer him the absolution hidden inside those possibilities. She only started forward again, making him choose whether to remain over the old tracks or follow the fresh ones.
The cable line ended at the lip of a cedar bog. Ash had gone down there once, leaving a full impression of shoulder and hip, then risen and continued along the frozen creek. In places the snow held no blood. In others, droplets fell close together where he had stopped.
Maren checked the light through the trees. “If we don’t locate him before dusk, we back out. I’m not darting into a bog when we can’t monitor where he falls.”
Cole wanted to argue. Instead he asked, “How much light?”
“Ninety minutes worth using. Two hours if you want to lie to yourself.”
They widened their spacing and moved slowly enough to keep the trail intact. Tessa found the cable fragment first, snagged under a cedar root. It was nearly a foot long and bent at the end. The locking loop was no longer on it.
“It pulled free,” she said.
Maren crouched beside the blood-blackened wire. “Or cut through tissue until it slipped. We need the wolf.”
The tracks crossed the creek. On the far bank, beneath boughs lowered by snow, Ash stood watching them.
Up close, he looked smaller than he had on the lake. His winter coat hid the worst of his weight loss, but not the angle of his hips or the tremor running through the injured leg. The paw rested on the surface without pressure. Above it, fur clung in a dark ring around the wound.
Cole stopped everyone with one hand. Ash’s ears flattened. He shifted backward and nearly fell.
Maren moved behind a cedar trunk and prepared the dart. Wind came toward the humans, carrying their scent straight to him. There was no clean way to circle downwind without losing sight of the animal.
“He’ll run when it hits,” she said. “Do not follow until I call it.”
The dart struck high in Ash’s rear thigh. He wheeled and crossed the creek in two bounds. The injured foreleg collapsed on the third. He rolled, regained his feet, and pushed into the cedars while the bright tag on the dart flashed between branches.
They waited through every minute the drug required. Waiting went against the body when an injured animal was moving away, but moving too soon could drive him into open water or make his heart work harder against the sedative. Maren kept her watch raised. Tessa followed the last visible branch movement with binoculars. Cole listened to the creek ice ticking beneath snow.
“Now,” Maren said.
They found Ash forty yards into the bog, down in a hollow between roots. Maren approached from behind his shoulders, secured his muzzle, checked reflexes, and fitted a monitor before anyone else touched him.
The cable was gone. Its work remained: a deep circular wound above the paw, swollen and hot beneath the frozen fur. Each step had opened it. The smell told Maren infection was already established.
They covered Ash’s eyes, started fluids, and carried him in a sling to the heated crate. Cole supported the injured side. Through two layers of gloves, he could feel the ribs that snow and fur had concealed on the lake.
At the vehicle, Maren cleaned enough of the wound to inspect it. Her expression changed when she moved the paw. “The tendons are intact,” she said. “The joint may not be.” “Can you save the leg?” Tessa asked. Maren secured the last wrap and closed the crate. “First I have to save the wolf…”
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