Part 3
The wind tried to knock him down with every step. Snow flew sideways and stung his face like ground glass. He ducked his head and pulled his hat lower. The flashlight cut a few yards into the storm, and beyond that there was nothing.
The pup was ahead of him, a small dark shape plowing through drifts that came up to its chest. It sank, floundered, jumped, sank again, and kept going. Every so often it looked back, and its yellow eyes caught the beam for an instant before it turned and threw itself at the snow again.
The timber groaned around them. Old pines swayed and creaked overhead, and loads of snow came down off their crowns in heavy slides. Walt’s body reminded him quickly how old it was. His breath came short and shallow, the cold burned his lungs, and his knees throbbed with every step.
“Don’t stop,” he muttered into his collar. “Whatever you do, don’t stop.”
He walked the way he’d learned to walk forty years ago, picking the wind-packed stretches where the crust would hold him, his face buried in the sheepskin collar, shotgun in his right hand, light in his left. The beam jerked across the drifts and found twisted dead trunks, the black lips of ravines, buried brush.
He couldn’t have said whether an hour had gone by or twenty minutes.
The pup began to fade. Its jumps got shorter, and it stopped more often, sunk to its ears, sides heaving, its back caked white.
Walt drew even with it. “Come on, little one,” he shouted over the wind. “Get behind me. I’ll break trail.”
He went first and took the storm full in the face, smashing the crust with his boots and plowing a trench the pup could follow. That made it easier for the animal. For Walt, the cold was working through the sheepskin, and his toes were going numb. He knew what that meant. Frostbite was starting. He had to move faster to keep the blood going.
The ground began to rise. They were climbing toward the rocky ridge that ran across this side of the forest, and up here the wind was meaner, spinning the snow into funnels and filling the air with ice dust until he coughed into his mitten.
Then the light found a wall.
A huge old spruce had come down across their path. Its trunk and dense, needled limbs made a barrier as high as his chest. The pup ran back and forth along it, nosing for a way under, but snow had packed every gap. It whimpered and looked up at him.
Walt played the light over the tree. He couldn’t climb that trunk, and neither could the pup. Going around would cost time and strength they didn’t have.
He slung the shotgun over his shoulder, waded into the crown, and started tearing the branches apart with his mittened hands. He snapped dead limbs, shoved green ones aside, and let the needles rake his face. It took fifteen minutes of hard work before a narrow tunnel opened through to the other side.
“Go!”
The pup slipped through. Walt squeezed in after it on his knees. His coat caught on a broken limb and tore, and then he was through.
On the far side, the storm seemed to ease a little. The thick evergreens broke the wind. They kept climbing, and the slope grew steeper until Walt could feel his heart hammering high in his chest. He stopped and leaned against a pine, poured tea from the thermos into the cup, and drank it down in gulps. The heat spread through him. He poured a little more into the cup and held it low, and the pup lapped it dry.
“How much farther?” he panted.
The pup’s ears went up. It swung its head toward a dark crag looming ahead, and then it was running as fast as its legs would carry it.
Walt hurried after it. His light swept over black boulders and found, under a jutting shelf of rock, a dark opening: an old rock shelter half filled with drifted snow and broken branches. In the snow beside it ran a line of enormous tracks, already softening as the storm filled them in.
The pup stopped at the mouth of the shelter and gave a short, calling cry.
Walt came up slowly. The wind barely reached here, and in the still air his nose caught a smell he had known all his life, warm and sharp and faintly sweet.
Blood. Fresh blood.
He slid the shotgun off his shoulder and held it in both hands. He aimed the light into the black mouth of the cave.
Inside, among loose rock and dirty snow, lay a big dark body. It wasn’t moving.
Walt drew a long breath, set his grip on the stock, and stepped into the dark.
The air under the rock was still and heavy, thick with the smells of blood, wet earth, and wet fur. The beam slid over damp stone. Walt kept both hands on the shotgun, his finger beside the trigger. A wounded animal in a tight space is twice as dangerous.
The light found her.
A grown she-wolf lay on the bare rock. She was big, bigger than most, and she was broken. Her gray flank was laid open by deep, ragged gashes. Her left shoulder sat at a wrong angle. Around her, a dark pool had frozen to the stone.
Walt read the story at a glance. Claws had done this. The tracks outside belonged to a grizzly that had never gone to den, kept awake and roaming by hunger, and in these mountains there was nothing worse to meet in winter. She had fought it to protect her den. She had lost, and she had lived just long enough to lead her pup away.
The pup shot past Walt’s legs and threw itself against her. Its cry rang off the stone. It licked her muzzle with its pink tongue, then her wounds, as if it could stop the bleeding, then nudged her with its nose, begging her to get up and come.
Her breathing was a wet, labored rasp. Her ribs rose slowly. At the pup’s touch she opened her eyes, already clouded, and lifted her head just enough to press her nose into its wet neck.
Walt lowered the shotgun. Something hot closed in his chest. He had seen death in these woods more times than he could count, and this one got through to him anyway. He remembered sitting beside Ellen’s bed at the end, ready to trade his own life for one more look from her, and knowing nobody would take the trade. The pup was asking the same thing of a world that had nothing to give.
He took a step, and his boot crunched on the gravel.
The she-wolf’s head came around. The haze left her eyes, and in its place came the fury of a mother defending her young. She tried to get her front legs under her. Her muscles shook. Fresh blood ran onto the stone. She bared long white fangs and growled, so low he felt it more than heard it.
“Easy, girl,” Walt said, as calmly as he could. “Easy now. I’m not going to hurt you.”
He went down on one knee, laid the shotgun on the rock well out of reach, and showed her his empty hands. He set the flashlight on a stone so that it lit his face and the frost in his beard, and he took off his hat.
She kept growling, but her strength was going. Her front legs folded, and she dropped back onto the bloody stone. The pup burrowed under her neck and whimpered.
Walt opened his pack. His fingers, stiff with cold, fumbled with the ties of the first-aid kit. He got out the bandage and the iodine and edged closer. The pup turned toward him and took a timid step, as if to hurry him. It remembered the warm cabin and the hot meat, and it seemed to believe this man could drive death away.
Walt aimed the light at her side to see how bad it was. It was as bad as it could be. The bear had torn into everything that mattered, and blood still pulsed slowly from the deepest wounds. No bandage and no salve would touch this.
His shoulders sagged. He had come through the storm and risked his life, and he was too late.
He let the beam drop to her front legs, and his breath stopped.
Just above the joint of her right foreleg, a thick white band of scar circled the leg where no fur had ever grown back. It was the clean, ugly mark a steel trap leaves.
Walt knew that scar, every ridge of it.
Two years ago, at the very start of spring, he’d found a young she-wolf caught in a poacher’s trap beside a frozen creek. The steel had bitten almost to the bone. She was starved and waiting to die. He couldn’t bring himself to finish her. He’d thrown his jacket over her, tied her muzzle with rope, and carried her home.
Ellen had nursed that leg for three weeks. It was the last spring before her illness took hold. She cleaned the wound with herbs from the woods, changed the dressings, and fed the wolf fresh meat from her hand. The wolf snarled at her the whole first week, and Ellen talked back to her in that soft voice of hers, and little by little the snarling stopped. When the leg had healed, Walt opened the door, and the young wolf limped off into the timber.
His hands began to shake.
It was her. The wolf he and Ellen had given a second life.
Now it all made sense. The pup hadn’t found his door by accident. The mother had been trying to reach it herself, and she had gotten as far as this cave before the blood loss stopped her. She remembered the cabin. She remembered hands that brought healing instead of pain. With the last of her strength she had sent her pup the rest of the way, through the storm, to the one place in all that country where she knew someone would help.
The she-wolf had stopped growling. She was looking straight at him. The rage had left her fading yellow eyes, and so had the fear of the man with the gun. She knew him…
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