The first dog bark came while both pups were nursing. The mother wolf lifted her head, and the smaller pup lost his hold. He squeaked, rooting blindly against her belly, while his brother kept feeding. Outside the den, morning light made a pale strip across the moss. The bark came again, farther down the slope, then another dog answered it.
She rose before either pup was finished. The larger one rolled into the hollow his mother had left and snapped at his brother’s ear. A few minutes earlier, their rough little game had seemed to be the whole business of the morning. Now the wind carried engine oil, smoke, wet dog. She moved to the mouth of the den and stood there, nose high, sorting one scent from another. The dogs were coming uphill.
The den had been hidden well until that morning. Its entrance faced a fold in the hillside where rainwater ran around it, and from the opening she could watch the path by which a deer might pass. For weeks she had crossed the slope alone to hunt, returning before the pups’ cries carried far. The larger pup had begun to meet her at the entrance. The smaller still waited on the needles, more interested in the milk she brought than in the daylight outside. Neither knew the trail through the trees. She listened to the dogs climb it now, closing the distance that had kept her family out of sight.
A man called for them to search the slope. Another said he had seen tracks near the creek. Their voices reached her in bursts through the firs; she could make nothing of the words, but the dogs’ direction was plain. She turned back. Both pups were awake, tumbling over the old needles. The older one had just managed to pin his brother when she caught him by the loose skin at his neck.
He twisted and protested. She carried him out, keeping low under the ferns, and crossed the short stretch to a thicket of young spruce. At its center the ground dipped behind a rotted log. She put him there, pressed him once with her muzzle, and left him crouched among the roots. He tried to follow. A low warning from her stopped him.
The den was close enough that she could see its dark opening through the trees. It looked impossibly far away once she started back. A dog gave a sharp, excited yelp below her. Boots scraped across stone. She ran into the den and found the smaller pup still in the nest, paddling clumsily toward the light. She lifted him by the scruff and turned.
A man’s shape filled the entrance. He wore a faded hunting jacket and carried a rifle. He shouted to someone behind him as she lunged past his legs. For one instant there was open ground, the thicket ahead, and the familiar weight of the pup between her teeth. Then a gun went off.
The weight vanished.
She stopped so hard her hind paws skidded in the grass. The pup lay behind her, no larger than a clump of sod, where he had landed. She went back and touched his side with her nose. A second touch turned his muzzle toward her. There was no answering movement. She licked the wet fur above his eyes, then pushed him once more.
From the slope came the bark of the first dog. More men were calling now. One of them had seen the spruce thicket.
She stood over the pup who would not get up. The air still smelled of his milk-warm skin. She could stay there until the dogs reached her, or she could cross those few yards to the other pup. She turned away from the body. There was no clean way to make that choice; there was only the faint sound of his brother crying under the roots.
One of the hunters called that he had hit the pup. She heard the satisfaction in his voice as sharply as the crack of the rifle, though the words meant nothing to her. The thicket stirred again. She made herself cross the open grass, passing the small shape she had just licked. At the edge of the spruce she stopped to listen. The living pup had gone quiet, perhaps because the dogs were near. She found him by scent, flattened beside the log where she had put him.
The larger pup had not moved. He wriggled when she seized him, and his warm, stubborn struggling filled her mouth. She plunged into the trees. A shot broke bark off a trunk ahead of her. Behind her, the men let their dogs go.
Their paws struck the ground in a ragged rush. She knew the narrow tracks beneath these firs, the fallen cedar she could pass under and the stony rise where scent thinned. Carrying a pup made every opening smaller. She ducked a limb that caught his back, shifted her grip, and ran harder. His thin cry ceased, but she could still feel him moving against her teeth.
At the cedar, the fastest dog found a way around. It was a red husky, young enough to throw itself recklessly into the brush. It came alongside her for three strides, snapping at her flank. She wheeled with the pup held high and bared her teeth. The husky sprang back. She used that single step of space to dive beneath the cedar and climb the bank beyond it.
Men crashed through the brush where the dogs had passed. She heard one call the others after her. The red dog answered from below, already on her scent again. She kept the pup’s neck firmly in her jaws and ran toward the older trees, where the branches grew close and low.
On the slope behind her, Greg Hart recognized the gray wolf by the pale mark on her shoulder. Two years earlier, his dog Orlo had died after a fight with a wolf on this mountain. Greg had never proved which wolf it had been. The certainty had grown in the telling, and by now he could no longer separate the animal before him from the one he had promised to kill. He yelled for Paul and Seth to keep the dogs moving. The red husky tore ahead.
The wolf could hear only their pursuit. She cut across a wet patch where ferns slapped her face, then climbed through rock and thin soil. The cub’s breath brushed the corner of her mouth. Behind her, the husky came back into the track. She changed direction at once. Farther off, an engine started, then another. The men were sending their vehicles toward the lower road.
The sound of water lay ahead of her, deep beneath the noise of the dogs. She headed for it because the trees were thicker there, because her paws had not yet failed her, because the small heart against her jaws was still beating. At the top of the next rise, the track narrowed between two boulders. The husky barked just behind her. She cleared the gap with the pup swinging from her mouth—and saw that the far side fell steeply toward the river.
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