The wind caught the edge of the door and drove it against Owen Kessler’s boot. He braced it with his knee, keeping the flashlight low. Something small moved in the animal’s mouth.
He had heard scratching beneath the racket of the loose flagpole cable. Now a wolf stood below him on the steps, her head lifted, a pup suspended by the skin behind its neck. Owen shifted the beam away from her face.
Blood had soaked the fur over her left shoulder. Along her back, fresh snow lay undisturbed; she hadn’t been inside anywhere warm. The pup’s dangling foot curled once and went slack again.
Behind Owen, on the other side of the open door, his rifle leaned beside the shelves. He registered its position automatically. Seventeen years after leaving the Army, he still knew where a room offered cover and where it could trap him.
At fifty, he was tired of knowing.
The pup stirred a second time. Owen pulled the throw from his reading chair and laid it near the woodstove, beyond the reach of a spark. Then he backed toward the kitchen, leaving the floor clear.
“Over here.”
The words carried too sharply in the little cottage. He shut his mouth and waited.
The wolf tested the threshold before committing her weight. Her nails tapped the floor; her nose worked toward the stove, the chair, the open kitchen. At the blanket she lowered her head and released the pup.
Owen began to crouch. A fold lifted along her muzzle, and he stopped with his thighs burning. She touched the small body with her nose, turned, and went out through the opening he had left.
Only when she was off the porch did he move again.
The old keeper’s cottage stood on a point outside Pelden, a small village on the Alaskan coast. Snow had shut the mountain pass that afternoon. Now, well past midnight, even the houses farther down the road seemed beyond reach. Stones rattled against the seawall below, and the automated lighthouse sent its beam into weather too dense to show him the water.
He folded the blanket loosely around the pup. Its breaths were so shallow that he had to watch the same patch of fur for several seconds before he trusted what he saw. He adjusted the stove screen to break the direct heat. Across the room, the electric heater under the window clicked on.
The telephone cord wouldn’t quite reach the blanket. Owen stretched it across his leg and knelt with the receiver at his ear, listening to Dr. Laura Voss wake up on the other end.
“There’s a wolf pup here. Its mother brought it in. She’s hurt.”
Laura’s questions came before he finished describing the blood. Where was the mother now? Was the pup breathing through its mouth? Could he see its chest move?
“She went out again,” he said.
“Leave her room when she comes back. No reaching toward her, and don’t give the pup anything to swallow. Tell me about those breaths.”
He counted while she listened. Years earlier he had spliced this cord rather than replace the telephone; now every turn pulled the receiver against his ear. He wished, with unreasonable irritation, that he had spent the money.
Laura told him how to keep the bedding dry and bring the pup’s temperature up slowly. She had treated injured wildlife before and would notify the wildlife duty officer. Then she said she was coming.
“You won’t get over the pass.”
“I don’t need to. I’m still in the village.”
He knew her chiefly from two repairs to her truck’s heater. Neither had involved an animal, much less the gray shape now climbing his steps again.
Owen laid down the receiver and retreated. The second pup made a strained little squeak as the wolf put it beside the first. He almost answered, the way a person might answer a baby waking in another room. Instead he stood still while she pushed the two bodies together.
Her front leg shook under her. Before Owen could work out where to put a water dish, she had gone.
“There are two,” he told Laura.
“I could hear that one.” Keys jingled at her end. “Put a light on for the turnoff. I’m leaving now.”
He switched on the porch lamp and opened the storage chest beneath the window. His wife had wrapped small packets of lavender among the wool blankets. Four years after her death, the smell still waited in ordinary places.
He kept his face turned into the chest a moment longer than necessary. Then he lifted a blanket carefully, without snapping it open, and carried it to the stove.
The livelier pup rooted against its sibling. Owen watched the quieter one breathe before adding a short piece of wood to the fire. The stove latch had a loose screw he could find in the dark, and the window above the sink needed pressure at its lower corner before it would seal.
He knew the cottage better than he knew most people now. He repaired boat motors, replaced cracked panes for older neighbors, and arranged to finish before anyone could insist he stay for a meal. On the sill lay his wife’s photograph, face against the wood. He no longer told himself the glass was merely catching too much sun.
A loud complaint announced the third pup. The wolf set it down and dropped onto her haunches with such suddenness that Owen leaned forward before catching himself. Fresh blood glistened through the dried streaks on her leg.
He filled a bowl and placed it against the wall, then returned to the kitchen. She studied him before drinking. When she struggled to shift her weight, he found a reason to look at the stove instead.
Flint, he thought. The short dark flecks in her pale coat reminded him of the stone he sometimes found among the beach gravel. He had no idea where she had denned, or how far she had come with those pups.
The cable struck the flagpole again. Owen’s hand clamped onto the counter, and the room slipped out of reach. There was dust instead of snow, heat instead of the stove, and a young soldier trying to force a message through a broken transmission overseas.
His thumb found the damaged corner of the counter. He pressed the rough spot, tracing where the brown surface gave way to the pale material beneath. The heater clicked. Water dripped from the wolf’s coat. He kept listening until he could hear the cottage again.
Flint had risen. She stood facing the entry stool, where his work gloves lay beside his boots. She caught one glove in her teeth and pulled it across the floor.
“Leave that.”
She carried it outside, dropped it just beyond the threshold, and looked back. When Owen stayed where he was, she seized the cuff and dragged it farther.
He looked from her to the three pups.
“One’s missing?”
The glove vanished over the edge of the step.
Owen called Laura again. She was beyond the village’s last houses. He described the wolf’s behavior, told her where the pups were, and said he was going after her.
“I’m only minutes away,” she said. “Don’t lock me out.”
He checked the stove and tucked the blankets so the pups couldn’t roll onto the bare boards. His left knee protested while he laced his boots. Into his coat and small first-aid bag went a flashlight and the knife he used for cutting fouled fishing line.
The other glove was still on the stool. Outside, Flint waited with the stolen one at her feet.
She took the service trail toward the disused weather station. Owen had repaired its gate years before and remembered the place where the path narrowed above the rocks. Snow had erased that edge. He tested each step, and twice the wolf stopped ahead until he reached her.
At the station she passed through a gap in the railing. Then she lay down beside a broken section of decking and looked into it.
Owen lowered himself carefully, putting his better knee on a crossboard. His light found old fishing mesh frozen beneath the deck. A pup moved inside the tangle.
Lying flat, he reached through the opening. Netting crossed a tiny foreleg, and a steel snare ran into the wood beside it. He drew one strand toward his blade.
The pup struggled. Under its chin, the wire tightened…
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