Four Live Rounds

She reached the edge of the woods. The first three spruce trees she passed didn’t have a branch below ten feet. The fourth did. Weak, sluggish, and out of breath, she reached up, grabbed a snowy branch, and hoisted herself up as the first two wolves entered the forest. The next branch above her head was barely the width of her thumb, but she took hold where it joined the trunk, climbed another two feet.

Teeth snapped down on her right boot. She screamed, kicked the wolf’s muzzle with her other foot, now dangling five feet above the ground. She barely hung on to the branch, her wool gloves ripping.

The wolf fell onto its back, and she scrambled up another two feet, found a solid branch to stand on, her arms wrapped around the trunk of the spruce as if clinging to life itself.

She peered down. Five wolves—two black, two gray, one white. The white one was the biggest of the bunch, bigger than any dog she’d ever seen, and it stared up at her, its pink eyes brimming with intelligence and cunning, its mouth stained black. The wolves were leaping toward her now, some coming within two feet of the branch she occupied.

She climbed higher.

After awhile, the wolves gave up. The black ones and the white one lay in the snow, while the gray ones circled the tree and growled.

Devlin found a big branch to sit down on.

In five minutes, she was shivering. She considered taking out the gun, but she was trembling to the point where she didn’t think she would hit a thing. It had begun to snow again, and now all the wolves lay around the base of the tree, looking up from time to time, whimpering for her to come down.

Devlin was colder than she’d ever been, and every few breaths, her lungs clogged and she coughed until her throat burned.

The sky dumped snow.

She wept.

The blizzard had obscured her view of the lakeshore, and she wondered where her father’s tracks went, where they stopped, refusing to even contemplate the worst. Instead, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine her birthplace in the desert waste of Ajo, Arizona—the bone-dry air, how the heat radiated off the pavement, making it feel like you’d stuck your face in a furnace, the desert at sunset, the warm nights, beautiful cacti. She never wanted to see snow again, not even on Christmas.

FORTY-TWO

When she opened her eyes, the wolves were gone. She’d dozed off, her face flattened against the tree trunk, her cheek bark-scraped and numb from the cold. She felt the congestion in her lungs, thought, I shouldn’t be out in this weather. I need my therapy. This could turn into pneumonia. The snow fell even harder than before, but now she could see.

Dawn had come, the sky a few shades shy of black, and the muscles in her arms were strained from clinging to the tree.

Devlin took her time climbing down, and when her boots finally touched the ground, the powder rose above her knees. She walked to the edge of the woods and looked down toward the lake, the world all snow and wind, the utter silence terrible. She wanted to follow her father’s tracks to the lake’s edge, but they’d been covered in snow. Besides, that would put her out in the open, and for all she knew, the wolves were lying in wait for just such an opportunity. She’d have to stay in the trees.

Devlin walked along the forest’s edge, paralleling the lake, her coughing fits coming more frequently. Every few minutes, she’d stop to listen for the wolves or her father calling her name. Often, she thought she heard him, but it was only wind and her own longing.

She walked for an hour, the open space between the lake and the woods narrowing, the sky lightening toward morning and the snow still falling, harder than before, if that were possible. She realized there must be a leak in her boots, because her feet were wet and she couldn’t feel her toes. She was hungry, thirsty, more afraid and unsure with every passing moment.

Devlin was contemplating turning around, trying to find her way back to the tent, when she broke out of the trees and saw it. For a moment, she forgot the pain in her legs and lungs, the fear of being alone in the wilderness. Oh, thank you. She’d seen something like this before, and it took her a moment to recall where. The summer after her mother’s disappearance, she and her father had taken a road trip. One of their stops in the Pacific Northwest had been Crater Lake, and there was a lodge on the rim of that caldera that bore a striking resemblance to what stood a half mile in the distance, on the shore of this unnamed Alaskan lake.

It was a sprawling five-story tower with projecting four-story north and south wings, some of the windows glowing with what appeared to be candlelight.

She took shelter under a massive spruce tree, weighing her options. She didn’t remember for sure, but she thought the pilot was flying back to pick them up sometime tomorrow afternoon. In the face of wolves and the blizzard and the cold, her choice was easy. Just check it out. I’ll die if I stay out here. Besides, maybe Dad and Kalyn are inside.

She didn’t like leaving the cover of the forest, but with the snow coming down so hard and all visibility shot, she figured it hardly made a difference.

She was wading through the snow now, up to her thighs, and she was as close to the inner lake as she’d yet come.

Two floatplanes were tethered to a nearby pier, so blanketed in snow, the only parts showing were slivers of their amphibious floats just above the surface of the water.

The facade of the lodge loomed ahead—an ornate porch of fir pillars, a huge wooden door, those eerie candlelit windows, behind which she thought she saw shapes moving.

A howl rose up from the other end of the lake, and in light of her recent encounter, it was the most horrifying thing she’d ever heard.

Devlin worked her way through the snow toward the lodge, but instead of heading directly for the porch, she made for the south wing, close enough now to see the construction. The first floor had been built of stone, and the top three stories shingled, a handful of which had peeled away. Long, steep eaves sagged down from the roof, occasionally sloughing off enormous blocks of snow.

She smelled wood smoke as she worked her way around the chimney to the back side of the south wing. There were few windows cut into the stone of the first floor, and she ran her hand along the rock as she moved toward the veranda that extended from the back of the central building.

The steps leading up were buried, and she didn’t want to climb them.

Another howl split the silence, much closer now. She glanced over her shoulder, half-expecting to see the wolves emerge from the storm.

She saw an opening beneath the veranda. Struggling thirty more feet through drifts, she finally stepped under the veranda, out of the snow. On bare ground again, she took a moment to brush the powder from her parka and pants and to shake it out of her hair.