Ellen had no idea if he was successfully calming the beasts, but his low, husky voice was working an unwilling magic on her. He didn’t talk about anything but the wolves. She wondered if he realized how much he was revealing about himself.
Isle Royale, he told her, was less than a thirty-mile stretch across Lake Superior from here. Since the late fifties, the island was one of the few places on the continent where the endangered species of gray wolf was protected. A few years ago, though, the species had started dying out. Numbers dropped from fifty to eleven. No one could pin down the problem. The wolves had an ample food supply; the winters weren’t that harsh; neither disease nor age seemed to be the contributing factor. They simply weren’t breeding. The best theory seemed to be genes—that the three surviving packs were too inbred. The wolves needed a new gene pool if they were going to survive.
“So two years ago, I flew in White Wolf. He’s from Alaska—where I was working then. Carried him, his best girl and two more from that pack, and settled them on the island. They seemed to be doing fine. They mated and bred, and everything was going hunky-dory—until this winter.”
Normally the icy waters of Lake Superior created a formidable barrier between the island and the Upper Peninsula. But that stretch of lake had frozen before, in winters as violently cold as this one. “The damn doofuses walked across on the ice floes. They got it in their heads that they wanted to set up housekeeping on this side. Not a brain in their idiot heads.”
It was hard for Mary Ellen to think of wolves in affectionate terms like “doofuses,” but clearly Steve did.
“No one wants them. No one’s ever wanted wolves. People don’t mind a romantic story about them, like Jack London wrote or Walt Disney filmed, but find one in your backyard and that attitude changes real quickly. Man has always been afraid of wolves—it’s as simple as that, and no laws have ever protected them from being hunted down. They need to be taken back to the island, partly because the whole species isn’t going to make it—not without this new blood—and partly because their chance of surviving here is worse than a bookie’s odds. So that’s what I came here to do—transport them back to the island. Only damn, I hit a little snag I never expected.”
“A snag?” She couldn’t imagine what he’d consider “a little snag.” He mentioned rounding up the wolves and transporting them to the island as if this were an ordinary project for him. Even trying to picture the act boggled her mind.
“White Wolf’s mate was shot several days ago. And unfortunately, she’d just given birth to a litter of pups less than ten days before that.”
“Someone shot the mother?” Her voice was small. Minutes before, she’d been in a bloodthirsty rush for him to aim that gun and shoot to kill. That white behemoth of a wolf—and his cronies—had terrified her. Still did. But she hadn’t thought of the wolves as vulnerable then. She hadn’t pictured a young mother hunted down, leaving a nest of helpless newborn babies. “I guess I should have expected that something had happened to the mother. I mean, obviously you wouldn’t have any reason to be feeding the pups if the mom was alive.”
“Well, normally if a mother wolf dies, another female in the pack will take over. She’ll bond with the pups and start producing milk. Only there’s only one other female in the pack. She’s no spring chicken and that didn’t happen. So I’m feeding them formula five times a day. Unfortunately they’re just too young and weak to move right now. And the rest of the pack—they won’t leave. Not without their young. There isn’t a human alive who can understand a wolf’s loyalty. He’ll sacrifice his life to protect those he loves. They take care of each other. That instinct is as strong in wolves as their need to eat or breathe.”
Steve grabbed her arm when she stumbled on a slick ridge. She hadn’t been looking where she was going, but at him. His face was ruddy from the cold, yet the temperature didn’t seem to bother him. He released her arm quickly, but the gesture had protected her from a fall as automatically as the wolves he’d been talking about. His affinity for the animals was no accident, she mused. He was like them. A lone wolf. A man who valued loyalty, who willingly made personal sacrifices for something he cared about, who was instinctively protective of others around him. He’d obviously chosen his work and his life-style. That kind of strength—that kind of loneliness—was beyond anything she knew.
But being a loner...Mary Ellen knew a lot about that. She’d lived her whole life with the tag of misfit.
“So,” she said, “how long are you stuck with this problem?”
“It’ll be at least a month, maybe more, before the pups are strong enough to be relocated. And the whole thing is a gamble. Someone would say a stupid gamble, trying to keep them together. It’s not like I couldn’t ship the pups off to some zoo—there’s no problem finding people willing to take care of them. But they’d never make it outside of captivity if I separated them from the pack now. They imprint on the grown-ups. The older ones teach them how to survive in the wild, something no human could do. It’s real iffy whether I can keep them all safe for that long. There’s a town meeting this Thursday. I know damn well they have in mind voting an open season on my pals.”
She glanced at him again. His voice never fluctuated from that slow, lazy drawl. He made that town meeting sound like nothing more challenging than a Sunday stroll. Yet it had to be hard, being an unwanted stranger with an unwanted cause, and she couldn’t imagine the guts it would take to face down a townful of people who viewed him as an enemy.
She knew how it felt to be judged, so it was probably natural that she felt a compelling emotional tug for him. She was a loner, too, but a misfit not by choice. For an instant she wanted to reach out and touch him as if they shared a personal bond—when there was no bond. He had guts. She didn’t. He had strength to burn, volunteered for difficult situations. Her response to the difficult situation with Johnny had been to cringe, get an itchy case of hives and then duck and run lickety-split, like the coward she was. She looked away. “I guess you’ve had to deal with that kind of problem before?”
He never got around to answering her, although when he suddenly stopped walking, she wasn’t sure why. The craggy ridge looked no different than the landscape they’d just traveled—wild and woody. There were no footprints in the snow, no sign any human had ever discovered these primitive backwoods. The forest was dark, deep, endless, winding around hills and snow-swept, jutting crags of land. Then, though, she spotted an olive green box, like the kind of case people packed drinks and sandwiches for a picnic in.
Steve bent over and pushed the top off. The box definitely wasn’t being used for picnic supplies. Strange-looking baby bottles were packed around hot-water sacks. He unwrapped one and showed her. “I got the bottles from the hospital in Houghton. They’re meant for babies with cleft palates, but they work just as well for pups too young to suckle.”
She edged closer, her arms wrapped around her chest. A wisp of a smell hit her nostrils—strong enough to make her nose crinkle.
He chuckled. “I should have warned you. The formula isn’t exactly aromatic.”
“Good grief, what’s in it?”
“Piles of disgusting stuff, from raw egg yolks to vitamins. Trying to fool them that this is their mama’s milk has been an uphill trip, I’ll tell you. But never mind that. Are you ready to fall in love?”
Her eyes flew to his faster than a shooting comet. “I beg your pardon?”
Slowly, lazily, he studied her face as if the color in her cheeks was the most fascinating thing he’d seen in a blue moon. “You’re not all that sure
