The defroster had cleared a narrow fan of glass in front of Nora Bellamy. Everywhere else, ice feathered across the windshield. She leaned forward, following the shallow wheel tracks that appeared and vanished under the blowing snow, and waited for the number she knew would make her hands begin to shake.
Mile 62.
She had driven two hours from Alderwick to reach this stretch of highway in western Wyoming. A paper-wrapped bundle of sunflowers rode beside her, its stiff brown edges rattling whenever the pickup hit a rut. She’d bought them that morning from a florist who no longer asked what occasion they were for.
February ninth. Three years since the accident.
The curve lay just beyond the next rise. Nora could find it without a sign, without daylight, without the scarred pine that stood a little back from the shoulder. Her right foot always lifted from the accelerator there. Her shoulders always tightened before she saw the tree.
She’d been driving when the tires lost their grip. There had been no warning patch she could point to afterward, nothing she could circle on a photograph for the insurance investigator. The car had simply stopped obeying her, and the pine had struck the passenger side.
Caleb’s side.
He’d been seven. At the hospital, they had worked on him for three hours while Nora waited with dried blood on her sleeve from a cut so small she hadn’t needed stitches. Later, someone had guided her to his bed. She had held his hand and offered God everything she could think of, including a life she would then spend years resenting Him for leaving her.
Her husband had said the same things in different rooms: nobody could have seen that ice; she hadn’t been speeding; it could have happened to anyone. He kept saying them through the first year and most of the second. By the evening he packed his clothes, he spoke so quietly that she’d had to stand in the hallway to hear him.
Even then, he hadn’t blamed her.
That had never stopped her from doing it herself.
Snow collected along the wiper blades. Nora slowed, watching for the narrow space where she could pull off without sliding into the ditch. The dashboard clock changed to 4:14 as she brought the pickup to a stop.
She sat with both hands resting on the wheel. That was the minute she remembered from the accident report, the minute she had built her annual visit around. Twenty minutes at the cross. Flowers fastened to the tree. Then home, where Caleb’s shoes still waited by the door.
Her therapist, Dr. Vivian, had spent three years trying to get her to describe what happened during those twenty minutes. Nora generally studied the seam in the office sofa until the question went away.
A gust caught the door when she opened it. She braced a boot against the running board, climbed down, and retrieved the flowers. Their yellow heads looked almost indecent against the snow.
Caleb used to bring her sunflowers from the garden with too much stem and half the roots attached. He would stand in the kitchen while she searched for a jar, scattering dirt on the floor and offering advice about which window had the best light.
She held the bundle against her coat and started toward the pine.
The white cross was still attached above the old injury in the bark. Nora could see one arm of it through a layer of snow. She had almost reached it when she noticed a dark patch beyond the tree, low to the ground and moving in a way the wind couldn’t explain.
She stopped.
At first she thought it was a discarded coat. Then a head lifted an inch, and a pair of ears emerged from the blowing snow.
A wolf lay on her side scarcely twenty yards from Caleb’s cross. Her gray coat was crusted along the flank, and the snow beneath her chest trembled with each difficult breath. Two much smaller bodies pressed against her belly.
Nora took a step backward before she understood what she was looking at. She searched the trees, expecting another adult to come out of them.
There was one, but he wasn’t coming.
Beyond the female, a larger wolf lay motionless beside a churned strip of snow. Broad tracks led from the woods to the pavement. Tire marks cut crookedly across the shoulder, and a dark smear marked the place where something had struck and slid. The male’s body had come to rest well away from the first disturbance.
Between the road and the trees, the snow had been scraped into a shallow trough. Along either side of it were the female’s paw marks, awkward and uneven. She had pulled her mate clear of the traffic.
Now he lay beyond her reach.
Nora looked back at the pups. They were trying to work their way beneath their mother, searching for warmth or milk. One lifted its muzzle, opened its mouth, and made a sound so small Nora saw it more than heard it.
She lowered herself into the snow. The flowers slipped from under her arm and landed beside her knee.
The mother raised her head again. Her eyes followed Nora’s movement, but her lips stayed loose over her teeth. She didn’t lift her ears or attempt to stand. After a moment, the effort of holding her head up became too much, and she let it settle onto the snow.
Nora knew very little about wolves. She knew enough not to walk up to one with pups. She also knew that an animal lying still in weather like this was in terrible trouble.
Her phone was in her pocket. She could call the state game and fish department. Somebody would come, eventually, after finding a vehicle and negotiating roads the storm was closing by the hour. Two hours, perhaps three.
She watched the female’s chest struggle through another breath.
They didn’t have that long.
For several seconds, Nora remained crouched there, calculating a sensible course that didn’t require her to put a wild predator in her truck. She could return to the cab. She could make the call. She had stopped; that was more than most people would have done in this weather.
Then she noticed a second set of marks.
The female had moved the pups. From the hollow where she’d first sheltered them, she had dragged herself and the two little bodies several feet toward the highway. Toward the only place a passing driver might see them.
Nora remembered sitting in an ambulance with a blanket around her shoulders, watching people hurry past the open doors. Every time another pair of boots appeared, she had looked up, certain that this person might be the one who could help her boy.
She stood so abruptly that one foot slid out from under her. Catching herself against the pine, she scrambled back to the pickup.
The engine was still running. She turned up the heat, cleared the rear seat, and pulled the emergency blankets from the covered box in the bed. She had bought them after Caleb died, along with a shovel, a first-aid kit, extra gloves, and enough supplies to equip a woman who no longer believed there was such a thing as being prepared.
She returned with a blanket unfolded between her hands.
The wolf watched her come. Nora waited for a growl, but none came. She reached slowly toward the darker pup and slid a hand beneath its chest. Its body felt distressingly stiff. When she lifted it, the mother’s eyes closed.
“I’m taking them somewhere warm,” Nora said, barely able to hear herself.
She gathered the pale pup too, wrapped them together, and carried them against her chest to the truck. On the rear seat, she made a nest with the blankets, leaving their faces uncovered. Warm air from the floor vents rose around them.
Then she went back for their mother.
Up close, the wolf seemed enormous. Nora had lost weight steadily since the accident, forgetting meals and finding excuses not to replace clothes that had grown loose. She weighed little more than a hundred and thirty pounds. The wolf couldn’t have been far below a hundred.
Nora worked her arms beneath the animal’s shoulders and tried to lift.
Pain shot through her lower back. She dropped to one knee, and the wolf made a rough sound deep in her throat.
“Sorry. I’m sorry.”
She spread a blanket beside the wolf and eased as much of the heavy body onto it as she could. Lifting wasn’t going to work. She gathered two corners and began to pull.
The blanket caught on buried gravel. Her boots slipped. She stopped, planted her feet, and pulled again. A few inches. Then a few more.
Once, the wolf pressed a forepaw weakly into the snow as Nora strained, contributing so little movement that Nora might have missed it if she hadn’t been staring down at her.
“That’s it. Help me.”
By the time she reached the truck, Nora was crying hard enough that she could barely see the open door. She had been at it for nearly fifteen minutes. Sweat chilled beneath her clothes, and her fingers had gone clumsy inside her gloves.
She used the blanket and the running board to gain height, hauled the wolf’s shoulders onto the rear floor, and stopped to breathe with her forehead against the doorframe. Then she climbed halfway inside and dragged the rest of the animal after her.
“Please,” she kept saying. To the wolf, to God, to the small boy she still spoke to when nobody could hear. “A little more. Please.”
At last the hind legs cleared the sill.
Nora shut the door and stumbled around the hood. She couldn’t stop shaking long enough to fasten her seat belt on the first attempt. In the mirror, she saw the wolf lift her muzzle toward the edge of the seat where the pups lay. Her tongue brushed their fur twice before her head sank down again.
The nearest emergency veterinarian was in Brenley, forty-five minutes beyond the curve. Nora turned away from the road home and drove into the storm…
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