I make my circuit. The paracord lines are intact, the cans undisturbed. The dead spruce is still across the mining road, wearing its new snow like a wedding veil. No tracks on the south trail. None on the deer path, either.
Then I come around the back of the hut, to where I hung the deer.
I strung the quarters from the meat pole I rigged between two spruces—eight feet off the ground, which is high enough for most things in these woods.
But I guess it wasn't high enough, because the pole is down. One end has been dragged clean off its crotch in the tree, and the rope I tied it with lies in the snow, frayed where teeth worked it apart.
The meat is gone.
All of it. Both hindquarters, the backstraps I wrapped in the tarp, the shoulder. The snow around the pole has been churned into a crime scene. Tracks overlapping tracks, four sets at least, maybe five, dog-like but narrower, the stride too long for any dog.
Coyotes.
A whole choir of them. They must have worked the rope in shifts while the wind covered the noise. Probably around the same time that I was occupied with my head between Caroline's legs.
I stand in the wrecked snow and let the anger come and go. There's no profit in it. Coyotes do what coyotes do; the failure is mine. A man who hangs meat low and lets himself get distracted with innocent things deserves whatever mess he wakes up to.
Twenty years ago, I'd have called this what it is: sloppiness. Now, I can only heave a tired sigh.
I follow the drag marks twenty yards into the trees, just to be thorough. They've cached what they couldn't eat, buried in snow that the storm is already erasing. I could spend half a day recovering scraps that would make us both sick. For obvious reasons, I don't bother. My only remaining choices are getting made for me.
I walk back to the hut and do inventory.
Beans: eleven cans. Kerosene: maybe four days at current burn rate. Coffee: two days, if Caroline keeps drinking it out of spite. Kibble: six days for Wolf, less if I start splitting it with us, which I have done before in a life I don't talk about. Wood: plenty. Wood was never the problem. But you can't eat wood.
I take stock of what's outdoors, too. The storm coming down off that ridge is not a one-day storm. A week pinned in this hut means we'll churn through everything we have. And the moment it clears—the moment the sky opens up enough to run snowmobiles—Reznik's men will come swarming.
So that's about the brunt of it.
We can starve waiting for them, or we can be found fed.
Those are the options if we stay.
So we cannot stay any longer.
I stand at the woodpile with snow collecting in my beard, and I run the route in my head. I do it backward, from the destination to the door. Pike Hollow is the only goal that makes sense right now. It'll take twelve miles if we went by the trails that Reznik's men will no doubt be watching. Closer to fourteen the way we'd have to go: down the north drainage, along the creek where the trees are thick and the ground is ugly, around the long, craggy shoulder of the mountain that no snowmobile can traverse, and into town from the back side.
Worse still, it has to be on foot. The snowmobile is basically a flare with a seat on it. Anyone with half an ear can hear that aftermarket exhaust for two miles in still air. It also leaves a track a blind man could follow. It's basically screaming our location to the world.
On foot—and hidden in a storm—we're nothing but two gray smudges in a world of white noise. The same weather that wants to kill us is the only thing offering to hide us.
But Caroline's ankle… Will it hold? My bullet wound will sting, but I don't think it will slow me terribly. I've done worse with worse.
I turn the route over and over. I'd give us 50/50 odds of making it out unscathed. Shit chances, and if I had it my way, I'd change a lot of things. But I don't. It's this or nothing.
Well, notnothing.
The satellite phone sits against my chest like a second, heavier heart. One call and Lukas would have men in Pike Hollow by nightfall, storm or no storm. He has helicopters, he has people who owe him things in every county in this state. But then I would owe him things, again, forever, and—knowing Lukas—so might she.
I won't let that happen.
Not while my legs still work.
When I go inside, Caroline is awake, sitting up in the bed with the quilt around her shoulders. Wolf is beside her with his chin on her knee. They both look at me as I come through the door.
"Uh-oh," she says. "You have yoursomething happenedface on."
"That's just how my face looks."
