Snowbound (14 page)

The beam of Will’s headlamp cut through the onslaught of snow, and aside from the wind, it was stone-silent. He followed Kalyn’s footprints away from the tent. Her tracks headed down through the meadow, and as he walked, his headlamp seemed slowly but steadily to dim, until he could barely see anything but the ankle-deep snow at his feet.

The headlamp winked out. He reached up, tapped the bulb. It flickered on and off, then on again. He went on in the snow, the coldness of the flakes nicking his face like shaving cuts.

As he came to the collection of boulders where he’d cooked supper, his light winked out again. He tapped it. Nothing. Just darkness, cold, and snow.

He called Kalyn’s name and waited, kept thinking his eyes would adjust, begin to pick out things in the dark, but they didn’t. Though he knew the general direction of the tent, he hated the prospect of having to stumble back to it, sightless in the storm.

The snow let up.

A fingernail moon glanced over a cloud, and the world appeared before him out of the void.

The snowpack glowed. Will could see his breath in the eerie light, the profile of trees, the tent forty yards away at the opposite end of the meadow.

He looked into the woods—mostly dark there, save for where beams of moonlight slanted through the spruce, lighting random patches of snow.

Kalyn’s tracks veered into those woods.

Everything began to darken. It snowed again. The moon vanished and the world returned to black. He fiddled with the headlamp, but it was dead.

In the dark, arms outstretched, he started back for the tent.

Devlin had pulled the sleeping bag over her head, and she was trying to return to a beautiful dream—back at her home in Colorado, a cool summer night, crickets chirping, purr of the river coming across the pasture and no moon, but a million stars. She was walking toward the farmhouse, where her father and Kalyn sat on the back porch, drinking wine, laughing. She opened her mouth to speak, to tell them how happy she was.

• • •

Will was working his way through profound darkness, trying to find the tent, confident he was headed in the right direction, but soon his hands were touching the snow-glazed bark of spruce trees, and he realized he’d wandered out of the meadow, back into the woods.

He should have stopped right there, but he kept plodding forward, no sense of sight, everything else in overdrive, his ears picking up the steady thudding of his heart, the dry-grass scrape of snow falling on the hood of his parka, his nose detecting the sterilized odor of snow-rinsed air.

The world blinked—a strange electric blue. He saw trees, his footprints.

Darkness again.

It thundered.

He imagined where the tent stood, saw it in his mind’s eye, assured himself he hadn’t veered that far off track.

He started to call out for Devlin, let her voice guide him back to the meadow. But what if she couldn’t hear his words, just heard him yelling? She might leave the tent, strike out into this darkness by herself, lose her way.

The forest lighted up again. He corrected his bearing and kept going, fighting off the first needling tinge of panic as he stumbled along in the dark.

Will stopped walking. As far as he could tell, he was still in the trees. It was snowing and moonless and he might as well have been blind. He decided there was no point in going on in these conditions. He’d been on the move for at least ten minutes, and if he went any farther, he might not be able to find the tent again, whenever the hell the moon decided to reappear.

He sat down against the trunk of a large birch and waited.

Within a minute, he was shivering. He’d left the tent without gloves—a stupid fucking thing to do—and the gun was freezing to the touch, so he set it beside him in the snow and pulled the sleeves of his parka and fleece jacket over his hands.

Ten excruciating minutes passed, his face growing numb, the snow still falling.

The darkness held.

He stood up and brushed the snow off his pants, his parka, having decided to walk around the tree several times in an effort to get warm.

Something moved in the vicinity.

He held his breath, straining to listen.

Whispered, “Kalyn?” The sound repeated, closer now, ten or fifteen feet dead ahead, and he’d started to back away from it, when he heard another noise behind him, close enough to recognize—careful footsteps sinking in the snow.

“Kalyn, that you?” He was picking up noise on his left. Now his right. He squatted down, digging through the snow until he grasped the Smith & Wesson. “I have a gun,” he said in full voice, panic rising in his chest, constricting his throat.

The snow dissipated. He looked up, saw the moon again, or at least a piece of it. A handful of stars. Ragged black clouds.

He scanned the woods—slim black tree trunks, his footprints leading up a gentle slope.
The meadow’s just over the top, I think. I haven’t come that far. I’d have heard Devi scream if anything had happened.

At first, he thought it was a person crouched down twenty feet ahead, and he raised the .45. But as it skulked toward him, he recognized his mistake, took several steps toward it, waving his hands wildly in the air.

The wolf was pure white, and the moon made its pink eyes appear to glow. It loped back through the trees. After thirty feet, it stopped, turned, and faced him again, head cocked. “You’re endangered,” he said, “so don’t make me shoot your ass.”

Will began to follow his own footprints back toward the hill, the moon shining down into the forest now.

He sensed movement to his right and left and behind him, though he hadn’t heard a thing.

Will spun around, looking back toward the tree he’d been hunkered down against. The three black wolves that were tracking him stopped.

He ran at them and waved his arms.

They dispersed among the spruce but didn’t go far. He glanced back toward the hill, caught the white wolf creeping toward him again. It stopped when it saw that Will had noticed.

He heard the three black wolves coming from behind, turned and faced them.

As they stopped in their tracks, the lead wolf moved toward him again.

“I don’t have time for this stupid game,” he said.

He began following his footprints back up the hill, that white wolf backpedaling in the snow as Will moved toward him, its head low, muzzle pointed toward the ground, long tail flicking back and forth. Will could hear the others coming behind him.

He reached the top of the small hill, but instead of seeing the meadow and the tent as he’d expected, he saw only more forest, his footprints winding aimlessly through the trees.

I’ve come farther than I thought.

He turned slowly around so he could see the wolves, noticed for the first time that they wore collars. They were closer than before, all within fifteen feet, and the black wolf on his left had arched its back, its ears now erect, hackles raised, lips curled back. Will could see the long incisors.

And he felt pure old-fashioned terror—primitive fears, eons of old programming firing in the synapses. He lunged at them and waved his arms, but they backed only a few feet away, and the largest of the black wolves, a 150-pound male, didn’t move at all, just stared him down through focused yellow eyes. For the first time, Will noticed the pair of gray wolves lurking thirty feet behind the others.

Jesus. Six of them.

He jogged up through the trees.

It was snowing again, and he thought he heard thunder, but he wasn’t sure with his heart banging relentlessly in his chest.

The wolves loped along beside him as Will tried to retrace his own footprints, and something snapped near the back of his left leg, the click of teeth clamping shut.

He stopped, spun around, leveled the .45 between the big black wolf’s eyes, and fired.

The report filled the woods, and the wolves scattered.

The one he’d killed lay crumpled in the snow, a mound of black fur. “Go find an elk or something!” Will yelled.

He pushed on through the trees, now moving at a solid clip through the snow.

He kept expecting to emerge from the forest, and at last he did, but it wasn’t into the meadow they’d camped in.

He came out of the trees, and the ground sloped for two hundred yards down to the shore of a narrow lake whose water appeared black as blood.
The inner lake.
He looked to the near end, saw where a ribbon of water flowed out of it, knew that was the stream they’d followed earlier in the day, hoped it would guide him back to the meadow, to Devlin.

As he started for it, he heard something moving in the woods, and not creeping or sneaking, but the full-on noise of something,
somethings
, running toward him.

He ran for the end of the lake, glancing over his shoulder every few steps, trying to keep his footing in the snow. The third time he looked back, he saw five shadows break out of the trees, racing toward him in tight formation, kicking up powder clouds in their wake.

It was snowing hard again, and the moon disappeared, the world now gone cavern black. He could see nothing, but he heard them coming, and as he looked back, the sky flickered with lightning and he saw them—
Oh God, so close
—aimed the .45, firing at the lead wolf, the big white one with pink eyes. It was panting, its huge blue tongue swinging out of its mouth.

Lights-out. No way to know if I hit
—

Something rammed him from behind, a wolf throwing the full weight of its muscled frame into his back.

Will went down, toppled over several times in the snow, jaws snapping all around him, as he smelled the sharp odor of their scent glands, then on his feet again, somehow untouched.

Lightning offered a fleeting glimpse of where he stood, forty feet from the lake’s edge, the mouth of the stream, and the wolves surrounding him, snarling, growling, the ones behind him lunging at the back of his legs.

Darkness again. He’d dropped the gun when he’d fallen up the slope, had nothing but his bare, freezing hands.
This is not happening
.

Something ripped a piece out of his leg and he screamed—more out of fear than pain, too charged with adrenaline to feel a thing—kept spinning around in the merciless dark, his hands outstretched, getting shredded as he fended off bites.

The sky lighted up, the wolves right there, five sets of bared teeth and eyes mad with the ravenous rage of the hunt, crouched down, on the verge of lunging.

Will spotted a stand of spruce trees at the mouth of the stream, thought,
You get to those trees and you climb them
. He pushed on through the dark as thunder echoed across the lake, struggling against the mounting pain in his legs.

Electricity raked the sky. He was just five yards from the trees, saw that the branches were low, thought,
I can climb that
.

Devlin crawled out of her sleeping bag and unzipped the tent, caught a draft of bitter, choking cold that ran down into her lungs like battery acid. The moon shone upon the meadow. The snow had let up. She didn’t know how long she’d hidden in her sleeping bag—an hour, perhaps two—and though, up until this moment, she’d done exactly what her father had said, not leaving the tent, she still felt like a coward.

It had been some time since she’d heard the gunshots, and the Wolverine Hills stood silent now. She laced her boots and zipped up her oversize parka, dug the pair of gloves and hat out of her father’s backpack. In Kalyn’s, she found the .357. She’d never held a gun in her life, but she picked it up and put it in her pocket.

The snow came halfway to her knees, having partially buried the tracks around the tent. She followed them down through the meadow to the point where they split, one set veering into the woods, the other crossing the meadow, back toward the tent, missing it by less than ten feet.

She was seized with a sudden coughing fit, her eyes watering as her lungs strained against the cold. When it passed, she turned and followed the tracks that went by the tent, her legs sore from yesterday’s hike, her lungs raw, her body reeling with every breath.

She pushed on through woods, down small hills and up them again, through glades of drifted snow, thinking the tracks seemed strange. They didn’t go in any one direction, but wound erratically through the spruce, crisscrossing over themselves, and, at one point, even circling the same tree three times.

Her legs were killing her when she came out of the trees at last. She stopped to let her racing heart slow down. A long lake stretched out below her, and the way the moonlight fell upon it, the surface resembled black ice,

though it had yet to freeze. Her eyes followed the course of what she hoped were her father’s tracks. They beelined downslope toward the lake’s end, and she smiled, spotted movement by the water, just a few hundred yards away.

Dad
. She almost shouted the word as she started down the slope.

Thirty yards out from the trees, she stopped. From the woods, she had seen only movement by the lake. On closer inspection, she saw with more clarity what she was heading toward, and it didn’t appear to be her father. It looked like several people, children perhaps, on their hands and knees, crawling around in the snow in some sort of game. In the windless silence, she could hear them, but they weren’t speaking any language she understood. They were growling and snarling, fighting over something.
Wolves. Why do Dad’s tracks go down there?

She turned around, and quietly, carefully started back up the slope.

Halfway to the woods, she felt it coming—an insuppressible itch in her lungs, growing exponentially with every passing second.
Hold it, Devi. You have to hold it.
The cough jumped out of her, then another, a series of violent spasms that shook her body and burned her throat.

When the coughing spell had passed, she looked downslope, saw the wolves already coming—five of them bounding toward her through the snow.

She ran for the woods, only fifteen yards away, but her legs felt leaden and stiff, barely capable of pushing her up the hill. She lost traction and fell facedown in the snow. By the time she’d regained her footing, she heard the wolves panting, close enough for her to see their eyes gleaming, big tongues lolling out of their smiling, bloody mouths.

She reached the edge of the woods. The first three spruce trees she passed didn’t have a branch below ten feet. The fourth did. Weak, sluggish, and out of breath, she reached up, grabbed a snowy branch, and hoisted herself up as the first two wolves entered the forest. The next branch above her head was barely the width of her thumb, but she took hold where it joined the trunk, climbed another two feet.

Teeth snapped down on her right boot. She screamed, kicked the wolf’s muzzle with her other foot, now dangling five feet above the ground. She barely hung on to the branch, her wool gloves ripping.

The wolf fell onto its back, and she scrambled up another two feet, found a solid branch to stand on, her arms wrapped around the trunk of the spruce as if clinging to life itself.

She peered down. Five wolves—two black, two gray, one white. The white one was the biggest of the bunch, bigger than any dog she’d ever seen, and it stared up at her, its pink eyes brimming with intelligence and cunning, its mouth stained black. The wolves were leaping toward her now, some coming within two feet of the branch she occupied.

She climbed higher.

After awhile, the wolves gave up. The black ones and the white one lay in the snow, while the gray ones circled the tree and growled.

Devlin found a big branch to sit down on.

In five minutes, she was shivering. She considered taking out the gun, but she was trembling to the point where she didn’t think she would hit a thing. It had begun to snow again, and now all the wolves lay around the base of the tree, looking up from time to time, whimpering for her to come down.

Devlin was colder than she’d ever been, and every few breaths, her lungs clogged and she coughed until her throat burned.

The sky dumped snow.

She wept.

The blizzard had obscured her view of the lakeshore, and she wondered where her father’s tracks went, where they stopped, refusing to even contemplate the worst. Instead, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine her birthplace in the desert waste of Ajo, Arizona—the bone-dry air, how the heat radiated off the pavement, making it feel like you’d stuck your face in a furnace, the desert at sunset, the warm nights, beautiful cacti. She never wanted to see snow again, not even on Christmas.