The boxes were the last thing. By the end of the week a county van would come up the snowed-in road to take Walt Haines to the nursing home in Kalispell, and everything he meant to keep had to fit in cardboard by then. He knelt in the middle of the half-empty front room with a roll of tape and a marker. Outside, the worst blizzard of the year was trying to tear the cabin off its foundation. The wind came over the ridge with a sound like a wounded animal, flung snow against the double-paned windows, and set the log walls creaking with every gust.
Walt was seventy-two. His beard had gone thick and gray, his face was cut with deep lines, and his hands carried the calluses of fifty years spent gripping an ax, a rifle, and a steel compass. He had worked nearly all those years as a forest ranger in this corner of northwest Montana, and the cabin at the edge of the national forest had been his fortress. Tonight it felt like someone else’s house.
He picked things up one at a time and held each one before it went into a box. His old binoculars. The gun-cleaning kit. A handful of favorite books. The cabin had always smelled of dried herbs and pine pitch; tonight the smell belonged to the past.
His fingers found Ellen’s wool shawl. His wife had had warm brown eyes and a soft voice that could settle a frightened person or a frightened animal. She left bread crumbs on the windowsill for the birds and nursed hurt squirrels on the kitchen table. Two years ago an illness had taken her, and since then the cabin had been too big, too cold, and too quiet. In the evenings the silence pressed on him until he could hardly breathe. He had stopped seeing a reason to get up in the morning.
He folded the shawl into the box and opened the small wooden keepsake box. On top lay a photograph: Ellen laughing, her arm around a tall young man. Danny. Their only son.
As a boy, Danny had loved these woods. He’d built snow forts right outside the window. Then he grew up and left for Los Angeles, and the city kept him. Now he wore expensive suits, drove a fine car, and lived high up in a glass tower. Distance and two lives with nothing in common had built a wall between them. They talked on Christmas and Thanksgiving, briefly and awkwardly.
“How’s your health, Dad?” Danny would ask, sounding tired.
“I’m fine, son. Don’t worry about me.”
Then came the long silence on the line, and Walt hurrying to say goodbye. He didn’t want to be a burden on a young man with a life of his own.
He could feel his own time running out. The forest no longer gave him strength. The cold had started getting into his bones and staying there. A week ago he had called county senior services and asked for a bed, and that call had been the hardest thing he’d ever done. Darkness, age, and loneliness had finally beaten a stubborn man.
He laid the photograph in the box and ran the tape across the flaps. The rip of it sounded harsh in the quiet. He fed a thick pine log into the wood stove, watched the flames jump, and lowered himself into his armchair while his knees popped. He closed his eyes. He wished he could fall asleep and wake up in town, in a warm brick building where no wind howled.
Under the roar of the storm, something scratched.
Walt opened his eyes. The wind moaned in the chimney. A pine limb on the roof, he told himself, and closed them again.
The scratching came back, clearer and steady, and it wasn’t on the roof. It came from low on the oak front door, faint and stubborn, the sound of something asking to be let in.
He frowned. No animal in its right mind left its den on a night like this, and no person would cross the woods in the dark into the teeth of this storm. A lost traveler? A hunter in trouble?
He got up, every joint complaining, lit the kerosene lamp with a kitchen match, and took it in his left hand. His right hand went into the pocket of his winter pants, where the heavy hunting knife always rode. In a hard winter, a hungry bear sometimes stayed awake and came nosing around houses for food.
Close to the door he could hear more than claws: quick, ragged breathing and a thin whimper.
“Who’s there?” he called.
Only the wind answered.
The iron bolt was ice-cold. He yanked it back and hauled the door open. The storm burst in, snow stinging his face, the lamp flame thrashing but holding. He raised the lamp. The porch was empty except for the drifts.
He was reaching for the door when he saw it on the bottom step: a small dark shape half buried in snow.
He bent closer. It was a young animal, crusted with ice and shaking so hard it seemed its heart would give out. Its fur was soaked and matted with mud. Its paws were rubbed raw and bloody, and one ear was torn. With great effort it lifted its head, and a pair of frightened yellow eyes, startlingly intelligent, looked straight up at him.
Walt went still. He had seen eyes like those in the woods his whole life, though never this close and never on his own doorstep. It was a wolf pup…
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