Four Live Rounds

As he came to the collection of boulders where he’d cooked supper, his light winked out again. He tapped it. Nothing. Just darkness, cold, and snow.

He called Kalyn’s name and waited, kept thinking his eyes would adjust, begin to pick out things in the dark, but they didn’t. Though he knew the general direction of the tent, he hated the prospect of having to stumble back to it, sightless in the storm.

The snow let up.

A fingernail moon glanced over a cloud, and the world appeared before him out of the void.

The snowpack glowed. Will could see his breath in the eerie light, the profile of trees, the tent forty yards away at the opposite end of the meadow.

He looked into the woods—mostly dark there, save for where beams of moonlight slanted through the spruce, lighting random patches of snow.

Kalyn’s tracks veered into those woods.

Everything began to darken. It snowed again. The moon vanished and the world returned to black. He fiddled with the headlamp, but it was dead.

In the dark, arms outstretched, he started back for the tent.

. . .

Devlin had pulled the sleeping bag over her head, and she was trying to return to a beautiful dream—back at her home in Colorado, a cool summer night, crickets chirping, purr of the river coming across the pasture and no moon, but a million stars. She was walking toward the farmhouse, where her father and Kalyn sat on the back porch, drinking wine, laughing. She opened her mouth to speak, to tell them how happy she was.

Will was working his way through profound darkness, trying to find the tent, confident he was headed in the right direction, but soon his hands were touching the snow-glazed bark of spruce trees, and he realized he’d wandered out of the meadow, back into the woods.

He should have stopped right there, but he kept plodding forward, no sense of sight, everything else in overdrive, his ears picking up the steady thudding of his heart, the dry-grass scrape of snow falling on the hood of his parka, his nose detecting the sterilized odor of snow-rinsed air.

The world blinked—a strange electric blue. He saw trees, his footprints.

Darkness again.

It thundered.

He imagined where the tent stood, saw it in his mind’s eye, assured himself he hadn’t veered that far off track.

He started to call out for Devlin, let her voice guide him back to the meadow. But what if she couldn’t hear his words, just heard him yelling? She might leave the tent, strike out into this darkness by herself, lose her way.

The forest lighted up again. He corrected his bearing and kept going, fighting off the first needling tinge of panic as he stumbled along in the dark.

FORTY

Will stopped walking. As far as he could tell, he was still in the trees. It was snowing and moonless and he might as well have been blind. He decided there was no point in going on in these conditions. He’d been on the move for at least ten minutes, and if he went any farther, he might not be able to find the tent again, whenever the hell the moon decided to reappear.

He sat down against the trunk of a large birch and waited.

Within a minute, he was shivering. He’d left the tent without gloves—a stupid f**king thing to do—and the gun was freezing to the touch, so he set it beside him in the snow and pulled the sleeves of his parka and fleece jacket over his hands.

Ten excruciating minutes passed, his face growing numb, the snow still falling.

The darkness held.

He stood up and brushed the snow off his pants, his parka, having decided to walk around the tree several times in an effort to get warm.

Something moved in the vicinity.

He held his breath, straining to listen.

Whispered, “Kalyn?” The sound repeated, closer now, ten or fifteen feet dead ahead, and he’d started to back away from it, when he heard another noise behind him, close enough to recognize—careful footsteps sinking in the snow.

“Kalyn, that you?” He was picking up noise on his left. Now his right. He squatted down, digging through the snow until he grasped the Smith & Wesson. “I have a gun,” he said in full voice, panic rising in his chest, constricting his throat.

The snow dissipated. He looked up, saw the moon again, or at least a piece of it. A handful of stars. Ragged black clouds.

He scanned the woods—slim black tree trunks, his footprints leading up a gentle slope. The meadow’s just over the top, I think. I haven’t come that far. I’d have heard Devi scream if anything had happened.

At first, he thought it was a person crouched down twenty feet ahead, and he raised the .45. But as it skulked toward him, he recognized his mistake, took several steps toward it, waving his hands wildly in the air.

The wolf was pure white, and the moon made its pink eyes appear to glow. It loped back through the trees. After thirty feet, it stopped, turned, and faced him again, head cocked. “You’re endangered,” he said, “so don’t make me shoot your ass.”

Will began to follow his own footprints back toward the hill, the moon shining down into the forest now.

He sensed movement to his right and left and behind him, though he hadn’t heard a thing.

Will spun around, looking back toward the tree he’d been hunkered down against. The three black wolves that were tracking him stopped.

He ran at them and waved his arms.

They dispersed among the spruce but didn’t go far. He glanced back toward the hill, caught the white wolf creeping toward him again. It stopped when it saw that Will had noticed.

He heard the three black wolves coming from behind, turned and faced them.

As they stopped in their tracks, the lead wolf moved toward him again.

“I don’t have time for this stupid game,” he said.

He began following his footprints back up the hill, that white wolf backpedaling in the snow as Will moved toward him, its head low, muzzle pointed toward the ground, long tail flicking back and forth. Will could hear the others coming behind him.

He reached the top of the small hill, but instead of seeing the meadow and the tent as he’d expected, he saw only more forest, his footprints winding aimlessly through the trees.

I’ve come farther than I thought.

He turned slowly around so he could see the wolves, noticed for the first time that they wore collars. They were closer than before, all within fifteen feet, and the black wolf on his left had arched its back, its ears now erect, hackles raised, lips curled back. Will could see the long incisors.

And he felt pure old-fashioned terror—primitive fears, eons of old programming firing in the synapses. He lunged at them and waved his arms, but they backed only a few feet away, and the largest of the black wolves, a 150-pound male, didn’t move at all, just stared him down through focused yellow eyes. For the first time, Will noticed the pair of gray wolves lurking thirty feet behind the others.