Snowhook by Jo Storm

It was not a dog. It was a wolf. And now it was less than ten metres away.

The wolf was almost twice the size of Rudy, both in height and girth. Nothing about those yellow eyes that stared at them said dog. That was the first thing Hannah noticed — or, rather, felt through her whole body. The wolf’s muzzle was long and tapered, and its legs were also long and thin next to the thickness of its fur, which puffed out in the cold, making it look almost sheep-like. Outside of this forest, it may have looked gangly, or awkward. But it didn’t look like that here. Here, it looked like what it was: the apex predator, top of the food chain.

She abandoned the drag mat and punched down on the two-pronged brake. It dug into the snow and stopped the sled without ceremony; Peter lurched forward and Hannah slammed her belly into the bow of the sled, losing her breath for a moment.

All four dogs knew that this was no dog, and certainly no friend. The gangline slackened just a little bit as they faced the wolf, drawing together into an even smaller, tighter pack. Bogey, the closest to the wolf, had his ears flat to his head, and the lips of his wide brown muzzle were stretched back as far as they would go to reveal all of his teeth and most of his gums. Beside him, Sencha stood stock-still in a half crouch. The hair along her entire back was raised. She moved at such a glacial pace that there was almost a minute between her lifting her paw and taking a step forward.

The wolf swung its muzzle up, catching their scents and exposing its throat. Rudy exploded, screaming and howling, his inhales hooked with hate and the instinct to kill or be killed. Only Nook was silent, her body mirroring the wolf’s in an easy, half-relaxed stance. Interested. Deciding. The wolf dropped its head and took a few steps toward them. With that, Nook changed, bringing her body down into a slight crouch like Sencha, and baring her teeth like Bogey.

The wolf’s gaze flickered over to Hannah. It doesn’t look like it’s scared, she thought as the wolf stared at her, unblinking. It looks like … like it’s measuring the odds.

Beside Nook, Rudy was throwing himself into his harness, trying to get at the wolf. Each jump forward caused the sled to lurch and thrust the brake up painfully into Hannah’s foot. She was already at the limit of her strength; if all the dogs threw their weight into their harnesses like that, she wouldn’t be able to hold it back.

Hannah took one arm off the bow of the sled and began shouting hoarsely, the cold air and her dry mouth causing her voice to crack. She waved her arm like a maniac, trying to look threatening, but was completely ignored for her troubles.

The wolf flicked its eyes over her again, and over the sled and the shiny blanket that encased Peter, and then it went back to staring at the four dogs. It kept its head the same height, extended at the shoulders, for a few seconds more. Then it turned off the trail, taking one last, measured look at them before bounding away across the wind-whipped snow, only occasionally breaking through. For all its mass, it weighed less than any of her dogs, Hannah realized. No one fed this wolf specially prepared meat and vegetables after a hard day of hunting. She suddenly had the disturbing thought that, to the wolf, she was just a warm hunk of meat moving around, and only the size of her pack had dissuaded the wolf from making a different decision. She was not a threat; only the dogs were. She felt light-headed.

The whole episode had lasted less than a minute, although her drumming heart and the fatigue creeping through her already exhausted body told her that what the encounter had lacked in length was made up for in intensity.

Peter had not even spoken, but as the wolf disappeared, she heard him let out his breath in a whoosh. “Holy crap,” he said.

Hannah shook her head. “That was a wolf, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” he confirmed. “Way too big to be a coyote. Beautiful, wasn’t it?”

Mentally, she tried to stick the word beautiful between calculating and killing machine.

“It was something,” she said. “God, and I thought the moose was scary.”

“Yeah. A pack of those wolves, they would have pulled that moose down no problem. Right now they have the advantage.”

Hannah thought of the wolf running on top of the snow, and then the moose, labouring through the drifts, and shuddered.

“I wonder why it was on the trail, though,” he continued, shifting to look around. “Those grey ghosts don’t normally go anywhere near people.”

“Probably the same reason as us,” said Hannah. “It’s easier. I mean, if a moose wants to use it, why not other animals?”

He nodded. “I guess, yeah.” She watched him scan the side of the bush where the wolf had gone.

“What are you looking for?”

He craned his neck to look behind them. “More.”

Hannah turned her head so fast she saw spots dancing on the snow in the empty trail behind them. “Shit!” she said.

“Yeah, they don’t work alone, especially in the winter,” he said. “And sometimes they’ll send out a decoy and sneak around behind you.”

“Are they all that big? It was so big.” Hannah could hear the disbelief in her own voice.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen that many — maybe four in my whole life. It sure looked big.”

“Maybe it was the leader.”

“Maybe. All I know is, where there’s one, there’s usually more. Let’s get out of here.”

Hannah called up the dogs, and they started off again, slowly, hesitantly, still looking around. But they ran. When the trail began to angle down, Hannah rode the drag mat.

The trail then turned leisurely again, and there were more downhill sections as they left the wide-cut blaze. The trees thickened again as they descended, but Hannah could see all the way down the hill to where the trail came out on a large open area again.