Snowbound

FORTY-ONE

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.