The cap on the spring-box drain wouldn’t catch its threads. Evelyn Mercer turned it backward, felt the small drop that meant the grooves had lined up, and tightened it with Hugh’s wrench.
A sound came from below her, somewhere in the timber. She held still, listening, while her phone vibrated against her ribs.
DANA. Third call.
Evelyn silenced it through her coat. “Yes, there’s weather coming. We’ve established that.”
The reply was a handful of wet snow blown under her hat brim. Across the meadow, the farthest trees had disappeared. The heavy snowfall wasn’t supposed to reach this part of Idaho until evening, but the forecast had apparently been revised without consulting her.
She put the wrench in her pack. The spring was drained, the job finished. Twenty minutes downhill and she could be in her kitchen, where her daughter would undoubtedly call again.
That morning Dana had asked her to switch on the satellite messenger Hugh had bought. Evelyn disliked the thing: its buttons, its beeps, the implication that going outside now required a reporting procedure. When she’d refused, Dana had told her to stay near the house, just this once.
Just this once. As though seventy years of living had amounted to a long series of poor decisions.
Evelyn had taken the wrench and left before either of them could improve the conversation. Hugh had handled the spring every September until his stroke eighteen months ago. She could handle it now. She could still cut kindling, tend the place, and get onto the tractor, provided she approached the step from the proper side.
Then the sound came again.
It was too brief to identify, but there was effort in it. Pain, perhaps. Evelyn looked downhill toward Veylan draw, where the trail bent away from a stand of firs.
She could also recognize a bad walking surface. Snow was settling on flattened grass above loose stones, and the replaced knee beneath her left trouser leg had already begun objecting. Dana knew that knee’s limitations almost as well as she did.
Evelyn planted the ash stick Hugh had made after the operation and stepped off the trail.
She went down sideways, testing each foothold. A fallen spruce blocked her view. Its uprooted base had left a hollow beneath a tangle of dirt-covered roots, and something moved in that hollow’s shadow.
Evelyn stopped.
The wolf was smaller than the adults she occasionally saw crossing the far pasture, but no longer had a pup’s roundness. Long legs, broad feet, a narrow middle. Snow clung to the dark fur along its back. One front paw was held in steel jaws, and a chain ran from the trap to a half-buried log.
It lifted its muzzle and showed its teeth. The noise it made scarcely reached her.
“Let me look,” she said.
Her old work voice had come back. She’d used it in kitchens where someone’s husband couldn’t breathe, beside beds in trailers, in upstairs rooms reached by unsafe stairs. Thirty-seven years of home nursing had taught her not to spend breath sounding frightened.
She moved closer. The wolf lunged, stopped hard by the chain, and stood trembling on three legs.
A scrap of fresh deer hide hung from a young tree farther up the slope. Beneath the accumulating snow, boot impressions still had edges. Whoever had done this had been here recently.
On her property.
Beside the passage deer and elk used between the creek and the ridge. A place where a loose dog or one of Wade’s lambs could just as easily have stepped.
Evelyn took out her phone. There was no signal. She tried an emergency call anyway, then typed a message to Dana.
VEYLAN DRAW. WOLF HURT. CALL WARDEN.
The phone failed to send it.
She stood with snow melting against the warm glass in her hand. She had limited daylight, an unreliable leg, and an injured wild animal that had already tried to bite her. There might be adult wolves close enough to hear every sound they made.
She could go home and bring help.
The youngster pulled again. Its paw turned inside the trap, and fresh blood marked the snow.
Evelyn saw a hospital bed instead: Owen at nine, coming out of sedation, searching past the equipment until he found her. He hadn’t wanted another explanation of the treatment. He’d wanted the beeping to stop. She had pressed the call button and waited for someone who could silence it.
She lowered her pack beside a stone.
“You aren’t him,” she told the wolf. “I know that.”
Inside were a headlamp, gloves, a first-aid pouch, a foil emergency blanket, and matches in a waterproof packet. There was also the red scarf Dana had knitted during Owen’s final winter. Evelyn pulled it out last.
Some rows were wider than others. Dana had taught herself from videos in the hospital lounge, counting stitches while the coffee went cold beside her. She’d rejected Evelyn’s offers to help with the edges. Years of wear had softened the uneven wool.
Evelyn approached from behind the animal’s shoulder, keeping out of its reach. The scarf went over its eyes. She folded her heavy canvas overshirt around its shoulders and held the cloth between her hands and its mouth.
The wolf fought until its strength failed. Evelyn waited through the last shudder.
“Keep a little in reserve,” she murmured. “We’re not finished.”
Hugh had once helped free a neighbor’s cattle dog from a trap. She remembered his boot on one lever, the pressure needed on the other. Remembering was easier than doing it with stiff fingers and a frightened wolf under her arm.
She braced the trap with her boot and worked the end of her walking stick against the opposite spring. The wood bowed. The jaws stayed closed.
Snow slid down the back of her neck. She changed position, lowered herself farther, and felt the bad knee resist her full weight.
The chain scraped the log.
“Hold still,” she said, though she wasn’t certain which of them needed the instruction.
She leaned onto the stick with both hands. There was a sharp complaint from the ash near its metal tip. The spring moved.
Evelyn caught the wolf’s leg through the canvas, drew it clear, and lost her balance. The trap clapped shut as she fell onto her back.
The wolf tore free of the scarf. It staggered away, made several strides, and collapsed onto one shoulder.
For a while Evelyn watched snow fall toward her face. When the dizziness eased, she rolled onto her side. Her gloves had come off. Two nails were damaged, and a cut across the base of one hand was bleeding steadily.
She pressed snow to it before catching herself.
“Oh, that’s intelligent.”
She took out gauze instead and wrapped the hand. The wolf watched her from where it had fallen, ears flat, mouth closed.
“I expect somebody’s looking for you,” she said. “I’m fairly sure somebody’s looking for me.”
Her message remained unsent. The battery showed eleven percent.
She couldn’t carry an animal that size down the slope. She also couldn’t leave it lying in the open while the storm filled in around it.
The hollow beneath the spruce roots had a dry patch at the back. Evelyn spread the emergency blanket there, worked the overshirt beneath the wolf, and pulled it a few feet at a time. Once it snapped at the cloth. She kept her grip and waited before moving again.
Under the roots, she examined the foot as well as she could. It was swollen but warm. Nothing above the paw felt obviously broken. She put on a loose gauze dressing, allowing room for swelling, then settled the scarf around the youngster’s chest and shoulders.
Red yarn caught on a spruce needle. She freed it with her thumbnail.
There were dry twigs beneath the fallen trunk. She gathered what she could reach and scraped a little patch of earth clear at the shelter’s opening. The first match went out. The next lit the birch bark she carried in an old prescription bottle, a precaution Hugh had once laughed at and later borrowed.
The wolf shrank from the fire. Evelyn kept it small and sat between the animal and the worst of the draft until the smoke began drawing outward.
Darkness arrived before she had gathered enough wood. She spread the foil over her lap and tucked an edge around the wolf. In her pack she found two cheese crackers, ate one, and put the other away. For a moment she considered offering it, then shook her head at herself.
The phone lit. Something changed beneath her message, too quickly for her to read. Then the screen went dark.
Beside her, the wolf made a faint sound in its sleep.
Evelyn began humming. It was a tune she had used when Owen couldn’t settle after his medications, one that required no words and could be repeated for as long as necessary.
Movement beyond the flames stopped her.
Two reflected points appeared between the trees. A large wolf emerged far enough for her to see the pale hair across its chest and muzzle. It remained well back, head lowered, testing the air.
Evelyn’s fingers found her damaged walking stick.
The youngster lifted its head and gave a strained little cry. The adult’s ears turned forward. Its eyes followed the movement beneath the red wool.
Then it stepped toward the shelter…
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