He was beside me in seconds, following my gaze. "What is it?"
I crouched, brushing away the fresh powder. Beneath it, the snow was packed and disturbed—not by weather, but by movement. By weight.
Paw prints.
Large ones. Larger than any natural wolf, pressed deep into the older snow layer.
"Shifter," I breathed.
James knelt beside me, studying the tracks with an intensity that was new. His wolf, I realized. Learning to read what his human eyes had always missed.
"How old?" he asked.
"A day, maybe two. Before the last snowfall." I traced the edge of one print, measuring with my fingers. "He's big. As big as you were, maybe bigger."
"The feral?"
"Has to be." I stood, scanning the slope above us. "He came through here heading east. Toward the ridge."
We followed the tracks.
They told a story—one I read in fragments, piecing together behavior from the pattern of movement. Here, he'd paused. Circled. Scented the air, probably catching something on the wind. There, he'd broken into a run, the prints elongating with speed, chasing prey or fleeing a threat I couldn't identify.
The tracks led us higher.
The den appeared an hour from the ridge.
A small overhang in the rock face—barely large enough for a wolf to curl into, protected from wind on three sides. The snowinside was packed flat, compressed by a body that had sheltered there repeatedly. Tufts of dark fur clung to the rock edges where he'd squeezed in and out.
But it was the rest that made my stomach turn.
Bones. Scattered around the entrance like discarded trash. Mountain hare, mostly. A few ptarmigan. One larger skeleton that might have been a young caribou, picked clean and cracked for marrow.
And claw marks. Deep gouges in the stone, overlapping and chaotic. Not patterns. Not communication. Just... destruction. The frantic scraping of an animal that couldn't stop moving, couldn't stop fighting, couldn't find peace even in shelter.
"Jesus," James breathed.
I crouched at the den entrance, studying the marks. They were everywhere—the walls, the floor, even the ceiling where he could reach. Some were old, worn smooth by time. Others were fresh, the stone still pale where it had been scored.
"He's been here a long time," I said quietly. "This is his territory. His... home, if you can call it that."
"Those marks." James's voice was strained. "What are they?"
"Nothing. They're nothing." I stood, brushing snow from my knees. "He's not trying to communicate. He's not holding onto anything. He's just... existing. Surviving. The human part that would make marks mean something is gone."
James was quiet. Through the bond, I felt him struggling with something—revulsion and pity warring for dominance.
"You said ferals are people," he said finally. "Trapped people. But this looks like..."
"An animal."
"Yeah."
I turned to face him. "That's what feral means, James. The person is still in there—buried so deep they can't reach the surface. But from the outside, there's nothing left to see. Nosigns. No messages. Just instinct and survival and the slow forgetting of everything that made them human."
He looked at the den. At the bones. At the desperate claw marks covering every surface.
"That's worse," he said quietly. "That's so much worse than a monster."
