Part 2
She did not run when Cal entered the timber. She kept perhaps thirty yards ahead, moving at the uneven pace her kittens could manage, and before he had gone a hundred steps an ember shower swept over the highway behind him. Orange flecks spun across the turnout and died in the snow; several lodged in exposed grass and remained bright.
The truck could no longer pass for shelter.
Cal lowered his head and followed. The trail threaded between spruce trunks, climbed over a shelf of stone, then bent east along the slope. Whenever the kittens bunched around their mother, she waited. Whenever they strung out, she circled back to the last one. Cal happened to benefit from those pauses, though he could not tell whether she included him in her count.
At the first bend, he looked back for the last clean shape of the Kenworth. Only the trailer’s white roof showed through the trees. Leaving a disabled rig violated every rule that had kept him employed: stay with the vehicle, make yourself visible, wait for the people who knew where to search. The rules assumed the vehicle was safer than the ground around it. Burning grass at the turnout had changed that calculation, but it had not made the choice feel less reckless.
He pulled one flare from the pack and moved it to an outside pocket. If rescuers reached the highway before the fire did, the empty truck would tell them he had left on foot. Cal broke a dead branch and scratched an arrow into the snow at the trail mouth, then followed the cats before the next gust erased the mark.
His freight boots were made for fuel islands and icy steps, not a backcountry trail. Snow hid loose rock. Twice his ankle rolled far enough to send a warning up his leg, and twice he caught himself against a tree. The bobcats passed over the same ground without seeming to disturb it.
The wind rose until the treetops moved in opposing directions. Somewhere behind them, a limb cracked, then another. The fire itself sounded less like the clean roar Cal expected and more like heavy traffic heard from inside a building—low, continuous, interrupted by sharp reports as heated branches failed.
He checked the compass clipped to his pack. Southeast. The mother had chosen a line that crossed the wind rather than running directly before it. Cal knew enough about mountain weather to understand how little that guaranteed. Fire traveled according to fuel, slope, and gusts, and the ground ahead remained hidden.
“You know this country,” he called, more to keep his breathing measured than to persuade her. “I’m borrowing that knowledge. That’s all.”
The mother glanced back at the sound. Her face was pale around the muzzle, with a dark comma-shaped mark beneath one eye. Then she vanished behind a granite shoulder.
Cal hurried and found the four kittens stalled at a narrow drainage. The bottom held a frozen creek, mostly covered by drifted snow. Their mother tested the edge, chose a place where stones broke the surface, and crossed in four quick bounds. Three young followed. The smallest crouched on the bank, crying in thin, rasping notes.
Cal stopped well uphill. Every instinct urged him to keep moving, but crowding a frightened wildcat toward ice would help no one. The mother returned to the far bank. She called once, then waited with her body low and still.
The kitten jumped. Its back paws slipped, claws scratching white lines over the ice, but it found the next stone and scrambled across. Only after the family began climbing the opposite bank did Cal descend.
His weight made the creek complain beneath the snow. He used a dead branch as a staff and stepped where black rocks showed through. Cold water washed over one boot at the final gap, shallow but immediate. He gained the bank, sat long enough to tighten the laces, and forced himself up before the wet could settle against his sock.
The trail steepened into a gully where stone walls narrowed the wind. For ten minutes the air cleared. Cal could smell cold earth, the wool of his own coat, and the faint cedar scent Nora had rubbed into the walnut box years ago. The relief was dangerous; it made him want to stop.
He drank two mouthfuls of water and checked behind him. Smoke poured above the gully entrance, turning afternoon into a copper dusk. The first flakes of ash came down without sound.
Nora had loved walking trails and hated waiting for him to agree to them. At highway overlooks she would leave the car before he had finished checking the time, then wave him toward whatever view he had decided could wait. He could still hear the impatient beginning of her laugh. Too often, he had answered it while looking at a freight message, convinced that providing for a future excused him from the present.
Three years after her death, he could identify the habit and still practice it.
The mother bobcat called from above. Cal looked up to find her on a ledge, the kittens clustered behind her. She remained there until he shouldered the pack.
“All right,” he said. “I heard you.”
Beyond the gully, the trail became harder to see. Wind had stripped snow from the ridgeline and piled it waist-deep in hollows. Cal moved from one patch of bare ground to the next, keeping the tawny bodies in sight. The smallest kitten began to lag. Its mother shortened her advance, never carrying it, never touching it except to turn its face toward the trail.
The mother waited until the smallest kitten moved, then climbed another twenty yards and stopped again. Cal fell into the same rhythm, reaching each pause before he considered the ground beyond it.
The light thinned. His wet boot had gone from painfully cold to numb, and his lungs burned whenever the smoke thickened. He knew he had been moving for hours, though time had lost its divisions. Distance became the mother’s pauses and the number of times Cal decided he could reach one more.
At the next crest he looked back. The highway was gone beneath a moving sheet of smoke, and red light flickered in two separate folds of the slope. A gust flung sparks high enough that they seemed to join the ash overhead.
When Cal turned around, the bobcats had disappeared.
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