Part 5
Noah did not confirm the suspicion, but Caleb read the answer in what the deputy refused to say. He hired two experienced trackers and offered a reward for proof that Walter was alive. Deep snow, another storm system, and thirty-one miles of broken winter country kept the search from moving as quickly as fear demanded.
At the cabin, Walter knew none of that. February softened for three days, then closed its hand again.
The blizzard arrived out of a blue-white afternoon. Wind drove snow beneath the eaves and packed it around the door. By night the stovepipe drew poorly; by morning, damp wood smoldered and smoke rolled back into the room. Walter cleared the lower pipe but could not safely reach the cap in the wind.
He and Gray spent three days beneath blankets, feeding the stove a few dry sticks at a time. Walter measured their food and lied aloud about how much remained. On the fourth day, the wind eased, but Walter could not.
His cough had deepened from smoke and cold. Fever or simple exhaustion—he had no thermometer left that worked—made the walls shift when he stood. He drank too little because melting snow required fuel, and the final can in his pack felt too heavy for his hands.
During one lucid hour, Walter opened the radio case and found condensation beneath the cracked battery seal. He wiped it, warmed the unit inside his shirt, and tried the county frequency. Static answered. The mountain blocked the handheld signal in good weather; after days of wet cold, the radio was only another object he lacked the strength to repair.
Gray lay along his back at night, lending body heat without curing anything. When Walter woke, the wolf was watching him.
“You should go,” Walter whispered. “You’ve done your part.”
Gray stood, paced to the door, and returned. Walter laughed once and began coughing again. “Fine. We can both be unreasonable.”
On the sixth morning, the storm had passed. Walter remembered trying to sit up, then found himself on the floor beside the bunk with one cheek against cold boards. Gray nosed his face, circled the cabin, and scratched once at the threshold.
Walter spoke Ellen’s name without knowing he had done it. Gray licked the melted snow from his cheek, pulled once at the sleeve of his coat, and paced between Walter and the door. None of it was a diagnosis or a plan. It was the restless behavior of an animal whose one dependable person had stopped moving.
Walter could not lift his head to open it.
Gray pushed through the door, which Walter had failed to latch.
The wolf followed a braid of odors the storm had uncovered beneath the clean snow: mice, old cooking grease, and oiled canvas. Half a mile downslope, under a spruce whose lower branches touched the ground, stood the steel-lined cache Walter’s father had built against bears. Drifts had buried the lid and a fallen branch pinned it.
Gray dug until blood marked one broken claw. He worried the rotten outer box with his teeth and opened a gap beside the metal lining. Inside lay sealed cans and ration packets.
The gap was too narrow for the canvas bag. Gray backed out, dug along the hinge side, and returned to the opening until the rotted wood gave way beneath one paw. Snow fell into the box. He pushed his muzzle through, sneezed, and caught the food odors that had survived the sealed plastic and metal.
Gray seized the canvas handle of the ration bag. A can slipped free, rolled into the snow, and caught against his forepaw. He gripped it carefully between his teeth and started uphill.
Walter surfaced to a cold rim pressing his wrist. Gray stood over him, panting, snow packed along his belly. Beside Walter’s hand lay a can of beef stew, punctured only by two shallow tooth marks. The stamped date was recent enough; Walter and Ellen had refreshed the emergency supplies three summers before her illness, on their last trip to Blacktail.
“Your taste is improving,” Walter murmured.
Opening it took several attempts. He ate a few bites, drank melted snow after he managed to relight the stove, and fed Gray from a separate portion. Food did not end the illness. It bought Walter time. He cleared the stovepipe after the wind dropped, heated the room, and kept drinking, but two days later he still crossed the cabin with one hand against the wall.
On the third morning, using the tow sled as a brace, he followed Gray’s trail to the cache and brought back the remaining provisions. Ellen’s handwriting—BLACKTAIL, AUGUST—still marked the lid of one plastic bin. Walter sat beneath the spruce with his glove over the words until Gray nudged his elbow.
“She saved us too,” he said.
That afternoon, Gray ranged downslope on his permanent, efficient limp. He returned near dusk with another wolf following twenty yards behind.
She was young, pale gray, and thin enough for her hips to show. A white patch on her chest formed an uneven star. She would not cross the clearing while Walter stood in it.
Walter set meat well away from the cabin, backed onto the porch, and waited. Gray approached the food first, then moved aside. The female ate fast, stopping between mouthfuls to watch Walter.
“Star,” he said quietly, because the chest mark made any other name seem dishonest.
She slept that night beneath the cabin’s side awning. She tolerated Walter’s presence only if Gray stood between them, and she never entered the cabin. Walter, still weak enough to need the porch rail, never tried to touch her.
Gray divided his time between the stove and the trees. Walter did not ask him to choose. The animal had found a member of his own kind, and the relief Walter felt was threaded with the knowledge that companionship could lead away as easily as it led home.
The next bright morning, a mechanical thud crossed the mountain. Gray and Star rose together, ears forward. Walter stepped outside and saw a helicopter tracing the creek drainage below.
It banked over the clearing, and sunlight flashed from its window.
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