Annie took a bite of the doughnut and set it on a napkin. “Paperwork. I need to finish the rest of these illegal-exotic forms.”
A few weeks had passed since her meeting at the gate with Daniel, and she had been back to the south shore of Lake Lumin a handful of times, but hadn’t found any fresh cougar tracks there.
She must have been wrong about the cat claiming the valley as his territory after all. He had probably continued migrating south, she’d figured, and she had thrown herself headfirst into the next task instead, dismantling the exotic zoo that Ronnie Boyd had set up on his property.
Annie had spent the last several days taking apart makeshift habitats and driving the animals down one at a time to a rehabilitation center in Portland. Normally, it would be a job for Animal Control, but in a town as small as Lake Lumin, she effectivelywasAnimal Control.
So far, she’d transported two wild boars, a capuchin monkey, three lemurs, and a box full of venomous snakes that she’d eyed over her shoulder the entire drive down. Ronnie had also caged a family of squirrels and two large black crows, which she’d released on the spot with a stern warning. His wife and teenaged daughter, Jamie, for their part, seemed relieved to see the animals go. The place was starting to stink, Jamie confided in a whisper when Annie left with the snakes.
Jake folded his hands behind his head, watching Annie as she scribbled her signature at the bottom of one of the forms.
“I hate paperwork,” she grumbled as she flipped the page over and started at the top of the next.
“I don’t mind it,” he said amiably. “It’s like raking leaves or doing dishes. I like seeing progress in a quantifiable way.”
“Well, I hate it,” Annie said. “If I had my way, I’d spend every single second of my work week outside.”
Jake watched her for another minute. “You know, I believe you,” he said finally.
Annie smiled at him, then turned back to her forms, aware of his eyes lingering on the side of her face as she wrote.
“Tell me something,” he said after another pause. “How’d you end up with this job?”
Annie looked up. “What do you mean? I transferred here.”
Jake dropped his feet down from the desk and leaned toward her. “No, I mean, why this job in the first place? Why become a game warden?”
Annie opened her mouth and closed it again. She’d learned during this first month on the job with him that Jake was a master of distraction, always leading her astray from her duties down inane rabbit trails of conversation that rambled for an hour or more before she snapped back to reality and chided him for interrupting her work.
She turned back to the forms. “I was raised by wolves.”
“Oh, come on.” He leaned forward. “There’s a story in there, somewhere. Let me hear it.”
It had been a long while since she’d been asked the question directly. Comments were made from time to time, surprise expressed at her being a woman officer in such a male-dominated field, but no one ever asked her flat out why she’d chosen the job in the first place. No one since Brendan.
Annie scribbled her name on the bottom of the next form, then placed her pen down with a sigh and leaned back in her chair. Jake was still gazing at her, his blue eyes bright with curiosity, and she wondered how on earth she could possibly put into concise words everything that had led to this career choice.
The truth was, she was a game warden because there was nothing else she could be. She would die behind a desk—just wither and die—like a wildflower brought inside to live in a pot. It wasn’t in her. She needed the woods the way she needed food, and the longer she went without them, the deeper and more desperate her hunger grew. They were her home. Her calling. Her savior. The plain fact of it was, they had brought her back to life.
“You really want to know?”
Jake’s head bobbed. “I do. So do Mom and Dad, actually. They drink their coffee by the front window and think it’s pretty weird that you disappear into the woods every morning when the sun comes up.”
Annie laughed and Jake grinned back at her.
“Have you always been like that? Miss Outdoorsy?”
Annie shook her head. “No. Not at all, actually. Back when I was a kid, my life was mostly spent inside. You know, neighborhood friends, Disney movies, maybe the occasional trip to the park.” She hesitated. “And then… when I was nine, my mom got sick. It dropped a bomb on our family. I guess something like that always does. It was stage four breast cancer. Completely unexpected, and within the span of an afternoon, every single thing in my life changed.”
All trace of humor had gone from Jake’s face, and Annie avoided his gaze. If she looked at him, the words wouldn’t come out, so she stared down at the forms as she told him. The cancer was aggressive, and within four months it had ravaged her mother’s body to the point that Annie didn’t recognize her anymore. She’d lost her curves, and her hair, and the glow of her skin. The only thing it didn’t touch was her eyes, which were too bright at the end. Annie had been afraid to be alone with her, scared of the gray, sunken face on the pillow, and those bright eyes that stared and stared, like she wanted Annie to know some secret she wasn’t able to tell.
The pain was still there, deep down in Annie’s chest, threatening to well up, but she pushed back against it, turning at last to face Jake. His face was full of understanding, and she latched on to it, taking strength.
“Afterward, once they’d boxed up everything in the room and closed the door for good, it was like my dad couldn’t stand to be in the house anymore. When it was the two of us alone at home, he just… wandered through the rooms like a ghost. Neither of us knew how to be around each other in that house with our grief, so, we got out. It was once in a while at first, and then every day, driving to different trails around townfor hikes, swimming in the cold lakes up in the mountains. He even bought a mountain bike, but one good crash landed it in the shed permanently. He took me along on his adventures—mostly, I figured, because I was too young to leave behind. But after a while we changed toward each other. Our relationship grew into something more than it had been before. Something that can only be forged out there in the woods, I think.”
Jake nodded for Annie to keep talking.
“At first, it was an escape, a sort of distraction, but after a while the wilderness became his passion. He came alive again in the woods, and then some. He joined a group that maintained the trails, then signed up as a volunteer with search and rescue. He took a handful of survival courses and led some, too. Then, when I was twelve, he told me to load my pack, and he dropped me off at the base of South Sister Mountain. It was a Saturday afternoon, and he told me to summit the peak over the weekend and he would pick me up first thing on Monday morning.”
