chanted in rhythm with the clicking of the arrows. “Rest, like a cloud. Softly … softly … silently … silently.”
The boy’s cadence slowed. He lowered his voice further.
“Listen to your brother. Listen to your spirits.”
Moments passed and the wolf’s eyes closed and he lay on his side. His tongue dropped from his jaw and curled in the dirt. His thick tail thumped once in the grass.
“Trust your brother and no harm will come to you.”
The boy closed his eyes but continued to tap the arrows, more slowly, more quietly, until their clicks were no louder than the call of a cricket.
After a moment of silence, Storyteller opened his eyes, laid the arrows beside him and rested his hands in his lap. He paused and then whispered, “Trust your brother. He trusts you.”
He placed his hands on the ground in front of him and knelt forward but the wolf did not stir and the boy reached for the springs of the trap and struggled to open its powerful jaws. Daredevil lay still, his rib cage rising and settling in a slow, steady fashion; his wound caked with blood and dirt; green-headed flies buzzing and sitting on the blackened, matted blood.
Storyteller stared at the wolf’s bloody forepaw and laid the fat of his copper-colored hand beside it. The paw was broader than his hand and, although he had seen wolves’ tracks in the mud and snow many times before, he shook his head in wonderment.
He slid the bowie from its scabbard and reached for the wolf’s throat. “Trust your brother,” he said. “He will set you free.” He slipped the broad blade under the radio collar and cut at it until it fell away from the wolf’s neck and lay curled in the grass. “There,” he whispered. “You’re free as the thunder that rolls in the mountains.”
The boy leaned back on his haunches, sat erect and set his hands on his knees, the glittering bowie still tight in his grip. His heart was beating as hard as he had ever felt it, but he could not contain the smile on his thin lips. “I will not tell anyone our story,” he said, “for they would just laugh at me.”
He stood, put up his knife and looked down at his brother. “Go now,” the boy said. “The spirit of Littlelataw will always be with you.”
Storyteller picked up his bow, quivered his arrows, returned to the wolf and laid the grouse and the duck in front of him. He re-set the trap, tripped it with an arrow to leave his sign, and then walked toward the edge of the woods where he stopped. “Go on, git!” he yelled, and disappeared into the trees.
The wolf stood and pulled his injured forepaw to his chest and then set it carefully on the ground and took a hobbled step. He limped in a circle around the trap and then lifted his leg and made water and sniffed the dead birds and tore into them, coughing and spitting feathers as he ripped the skin free from the birds’ carcasses. When he was through eating, he stared at the trap and his surroundings and limped into the forest. As he disappeared into the undercover, he and the boy left a puzzle for the trappers who later would come upon the scene: their bloody trap holding nothing but a single arrow and a few buff hairs of a wolf’s foreleg; a pile of grouse and mallard feathers blowing about in the matted grass; and a Fish and Game GPS radio collar lying nearby, cut cleanly in half.
DAREDEVIL MOVED CAUTIOUSLY, hunting only in the shadow hours of the day, nursing his wound frequently, following the gray Chitina River as it flowed lazily southeast. In two days’ time he climbed through a pass beneath Castle Peak and worked his way toward the small settlement of McCarthy until the man-scent drove him south again into the shadows of Sourdough Peak. He forded the Chitina River there and continued south toward the remains of the abandoned Bremner Gold Mine, giving wide berth to its dilapidated wood-frame buildings and rusted-out Ford trucks, and turned east again, toward the distant Bagley Icefield, its sea of snow and ice glowing a crystal blue in the summer light. Three hundred miles from his natal pack he stopped west of the Chitina and Logan Glaciers, the Yukon Territory stretching to the east, British Columbia to the south, and began to urinate on trees, defecate on rocks and rub his sleek body against prominent landmarks to create scent posts that would mark his new territory—his new home.
He stood in the shade of birch trees, protecting himself from the building heat of the morning sun and surveying the grassy meadow in front of him, his yellow, slyly curved eyes blinking with sleep. Once assured that he was safe, he walked along the fallen birch trunk he was standing on, stepped off it and began to search for a shaded spot to lie down and sleep.
His bed once selected, he stretched his forepaws in front of him and moved them close together, lowered his front shoulders until his keel-like chest rested on the grass. He let out a low grunt as he stretched his long frame and then turned in a tight circle a number of times and lay down. For a moment he closed his eyes, his tail folding the grass as it swept slowly from side to side, and then he rolled over and pushed his legs stiff above him, the wound on his foreleg a hairless, glossy pink where the torn skin had begun to grow together. He worked his muscular frame against the ground to scratch his black and buff, thickly furred back. With each turn of his body he uttered a guttural grunt of ecstasy and finally raised his head and pointed his throat and muzzle toward the snow-capped mountains in the distance, opened his large jaws and howled one husky, resonating howl. Lonely but determined, he was calling for a companion to help him in the hunt, to couple with him and start their pack. He listened for a far-away answer, but the meadows, streams, forest and mountains were silent, and he curled into a tight ball and went to sleep.
4
WEDGED INTO a cramped canvas seat of a de Havilland Beaver, Carrie adjusted a pair of olive drab earphones, careful not to disturb the dark glasses nestled on her tight blonde curls. She stared out the airplane’s window, half-dazed, half-amazed by what she was witnessing. She was being transported to the Alaska bush and beginning the adventure with the man she thought—finally—might just be the man she’d so desperately been looking for.
As the Beaver’s powerful engine droned on, Carrie looked down at a frozen river that shimmered like a silver ribbon on the blackening valley floor as it wandered beneath jagged mountains that climbed above her, their glaciers turning from white and watery blue to copper as the sun settled behind their peaks. Through her headset she heard Bart’s reassuring voice: “That’s the Chitina River.”
Once again it was as though he sensed what she was about to ask, and once more Carrie wondered how this relationship would work out—living with a man who always seemed to know what she was thinking—when Bart pointed to the mountains within her view. “Some of those peaks are 16,000 feet high.”
She said it was beautiful and slipped back into her trance until they passed over a small cluster of buildings and, a moment later, over another. She straightened in her seat and tapped a freshly manicured fingernail against the window, her black down mittens swinging freely from the snaps on her parka sleeves. “Bart, what are those?”
“That’s the Bremner gold mine right below us. It’s been abandoned for years. The bigger settlements were mining towns. They’re mostly ghost towns now.”
“People actually lived there?”
He turned to her and nodded. “Some still do.”
Carrie shook her head in amazement. He had to be kidding; no one could survive out there no matter how badly they wanted whatever it was they were after—gold or no gold.
It was with this thought that she finally began to understand what it was she was undertaking, and her conviction that she was doing the right
