This brilliant, competent woman who can repair generators and organize food storage and make me so hard it hurts is scared something will happen to me.
It makes me realize how much I care about her, too.
And how completely fucked we both are when rescue finally comes.
“Fine,” I concede roughly. “But we make noise. Lots of it.”
She nods. “Cougars usually avoid confrontation with humans if they know you’re there.Usually.”
I don’t like the emphasis she puts on the word usually.
But I understand completely what she means. If an animal is starving, say because a five day blizzard wiped out its usual food source, it will do things it ordinarily wouldn’t do.
Like attack a human.
We bundle up in layers. She’s already wearing my Columbia hoodie under her coat. Has been wearing it almost constantly since that first day. My scent on her skin... my warmth wrapped around her body.
Mine.
I grab two metal pots and wooden spoons from the kitchen. Makeshift noise makers. Not exactly high-tech, but better than nothing.
Finally we return to the mudroom and step outside into air so cold it burns my lungs.
The sun is brilliant on the pristine snow, making everything blindingly white.
Beautiful but deadly, I remind myself.
The walk through the deep snow to the wood storage feels like a mile instead of fifty yards. We hug the walls of the house, moving outward to circumnavigate the bigger snow drifts, and I constantly scan the tree line along with the chalet roof above us. You know, just in case the cat is perched there. We occasionally bang our makeshift noisemakers.
I’ve made Sorrel walk in front of me so I can protect her back. She’s so close I can hear her breathing, and see the white puff of each exhale.
I can also hear her teeth chattering. She’s shivering, despite all the layers.
I rest a gloved hand on her and stop walking.
She looks over her shoulder at me. “Gregory, what are we--”
I lower my makeshift noisemaker and shrug off my Patagonia jacket. Fifteen hundred dollars of technical winter wear that suddenly means nothing compared to her comfort.
“Put this on,” I order, draping it over her shoulders as an additional layer.
“Gregory, no,youneed--”
“Put it on.” I command. “You’re freezing and I’m about to haul wood. Thermodynamics. I’ll be working, generating heat. You’ll be standing watch. Mostly.”
She opens her mouth to argue, then closes it. She lowers her pot and slips her arms into the sleeves. The jacket swallows her, hangs past her hands, and she stops shivering.
I can’t help but smile.
Mine.
It definitely feels colder now, wearing just the sweater, but I grin and bear it.
She slightly rolls up the sleeves of my Patagonia jacket so that she can grip the pot with her gloves, and we continue the walk.
We reach the wood storage and I immediately see them. Fresh paw prints in the snow. Huge and recent. The tracks circle the food storage containers just twenty feet away, then disappear into the tree line, coinciding with where we saw it earlier.
“Gregory.” Sorrel’s voice is tight with fear.
