The road they were following had more tracks than usual for this time of year-probably because of the Search and Rescue people. He hoped he and Anna wouldn't run into any of them.
The calls he'd had Heather make this morning should result in no more untrained volunteers and amateurs out in the woods, at least. He had wanted to limit the damage the rogue wolf might do as best they could.
Heather had, at his request, pointed out that the man they were looking for had been missing for too long. They were probably only looking for a body, so there was no sense in risking additional lives. She'd told them about Jack-though she'd blamed a cougar-and pointed out that a storm front was moving in.
The few searchers remaining were concentrating their efforts about twenty miles west of Jack's encounter with their rogue wolf-near where the missing man had left his truck, well away from any of the places the rogue werewolf had made his appearances. Charles and Anna shouldn't encounter the searchers at all.
They were climbing now. The Humvee's tires made a continuous crunching, moaning sound as they cut through the deepening snow. To the left, he occasionally caught a glimpse of the frozen creek, though mostly it was hidden by the thick brush choking the valley bottom. To the right, high-tension electrical wires ran between stark metal towers down a barren swath cut clear through the forest. Those wires, and the occasional need to maintain them, were the only reason for the lonely service road they followed.
Heat poured out of the Vee's defroster. The warmth of the vehicle's interior made the winter lands they drove through seem almost surreal, something separate from him. And as much as he usually hated that particular effect, he'd spent too much time in the snow and cold on horseback or on foot to dismiss the advantages of driving in as far as they could.
The climb got steeper, and he slowed the Vee to a crawl as it bounced and rolled over rocks and holes hidden by the snow. The wheels started to slip, so he slowed down and pushed the button to lock the axles. The resultant noise startled Anna awake.
Sometimes the extra width of the Humvee wasn't as useful as it might have been. He was forced to put his left tires up on the bank to keep his right on the road, such as it was. The resultant tilt of the vehicle made Anna take one glance out her window and close her eyes, shrinking in her seat.
"If we roll, it probably won't kill you," he offered.
"Right," she said in a snippy tone that delighted him for its lack of fear-at least fear of him. He wished he could tell how much of that was the wolf and how much Anna. "I shouldn't worry about a few broken or crushed bones because I probably won't die."
"Maybe I should have brought Tag's old Land Rover," he told her. "It's almost as good in the rough country, and it's a lot narrower. But it has a rougher ride, an unreliable heater, and doesn't quite get up to highway speed."
"I thought we were going to a wilderness area," she said, her eyes still tightly shut. "Aren't motorized vehicles restricted? "
"That's right, but we're on a road, so it's okay."
"This is a road?"
He laughed at her wry tone, and she made a rude gesture at him.
They topped the rise, and he managed to creep through the trees another couple of miles before it became too rough to continue. Someone had been out here in snowmobiles- probably the Search and Rescue-but most of the automobile tracks had disappeared a mile or more ago. The last set ended ten feet from where they sat-Tag's, he assumed.
* * * *
"How long are we going to be out?" Anna, adjusting the pack, asked, as they left the truck.
"That depends upon our quarry," he told her. "I've packed for four -we'll be walking in a loop that'll lead us back here. If he doesn't find us by then, we'll quit trying to be human and go hunting him." He shrugged. "This mountain range covers over two thousand square miles, so it might take us a while to find him if he's trying to hide. If he's guarding his territory and thinks we're human intruders, he'll hunt us and save us a lot of time and effort."
* * * *
Anna had been on a couple of camping trips with her family in Wisconsin while she was growing up, but nothing as isolated as this. The air froze her nostrils together when she breathed in too hard, and the tips of her ears got cold before Charles had pulled her hat down farther on her head.
She loved it.
"We need to keep our speed down," Charles told her. "So that we look as human as we smell." But the pace he set seemed pretty brisk to her.
Walking with snowshoes wasn't as bad as she'd expected. When he'd tightened her straps to his satisfaction, he'd told her that the old beavertails or bearpaws had been almost as much trouble as help. The new snowshoes were one of the few inventions of modern life that he seemed to thoroughly approve of.
She had to scramble a bit to keep up with him. If this was slow, she wondered if he normally ran when he was in the woods, even in human form. None of his wounds seemed to be bothering him much, and there had been no fresh blood on his bandages this morning.
She pulled her thoughts away from why she'd had such a good look at the bandages this morning. Even so, she couldn't help but look at him and smile, if only a little to herself. Out in the snow and covered with layers of clothing and coats, she felt insulated from the terrors of intimacy and could better appreciate the good parts.
And Charles had a lot of good parts. Under his coat she knew exactly how broad his shoulders were and how his skin darkened just a little behind his ears. She knew that his scent made her heart beat faster, and how his weight anchored her rather than trapped her beneath him.
Traveling behind him, safe from that penetrating gaze that always saw more than she was comfortable with, she could look her fill.
He was graceful, even in the snowshoes. He stopped now and then and stared into the trees, looking, he told her, for any motion that was out of place. In the woods, the wolf was closer to the surface. She could see it in the way he used his nose, sometimes stopping with his eyes closed to take in a breath and hold it. And in the way he communicated with her more with gestures than words.
"We'll see more game down here than we will later, when we get higher," he told her after pointing out a buck who was watching them warily from behind some heavy brush. "Most of the bigger animals stay down here, where it's not as cold and there's more food and less snow."
And that was all he said for a long time, even when he stopped and gave her a bit of this or that he expected her to eat, mutely holding out jerky or a small package of freeze-dried apples. When she refused a second handful of the latter, he'd tucked them in her pocket.
Though she was usually more comfortable with conversation than silence, she felt no impulse to break into the sounds of the forest with words. There was something here that demanded reverence-and it would have been hard to talk and pant at the same time anyway.
After a while, she began to find the atmosphere a little spooky, which was pretty funny considering that she was a werewolf. She hadn't expected the trees to be so dark-and the shadow of the mountain made it seem much later than it really was.
Sometimes she felt a little deja vu. It took her a while to pin it down, but then she realized it felt like walking down in the Chicago Loop. Though the mountains were taller than the skyscrapers, there was that same odd sense of claustrophobia as the mountains ate into the sky.
Charles's big, bright yellow backpack, selected for maximum visibility like her own neon pink one, was somehow reassuring. Not just the hint of civilization it carried with it, but that the man who carried it was as comfortable out here as she was in her apartment. The matte black rifle wasn't as friendly. She could handle a pistol-her father used to take her to the shooting range-but that rifle was as far from her father's.38 as a wolf was from a poodle.
The first time they climbed a steep section, it took her some time to figure out the best way to negotiate it in snowshoes. It was slower going and began to make her thighs burn with effort. Charles stayed beside her the whole way up. They climbed like that for over an hour, but it was worth it.
When they topped a ridge and briefly stood above the trees, Anna stopped dead, staring at the terrain below. The valley they'd been climbing, decked in white and bitter green, flowed away from them. It was spectacular...and lonely.
"Is this what it used to look like everywhere?" she asked in a hushed voice.
Charles, who was ahead of her because he'd only stopped after she did, glanced out over the wilderness. "Not everywhere, " he said. "The scrublands have always looked like scrublands. This spring I'll take you out into the Missions, and we'll do a little technical climbing. If you're enjoying this, you'll love that." He'd been watching her, too, she thought, if he'd seen how much fun she was having.
"The Missions are even more spectacular than these- though they're pure hell if you are really trying to cross them. Straight up, straight down, and not much in between. Not that this is going to be easy, either. By the time they started setting aside wilderness areas, the only wild country left was pretty rugged."
He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a granola bar. "Eat this." And he watched until she pulled off a glove to rip the package open and gnaw on the carob-coated bar before starting on one for himself.
"You're a bit of a mother hen," she told him, not sure whether to be irritated or not.
He grunted. "If you were human, you'd be feeling this cold. It's only a little below freezing now, but don't underestimate the weather. You're burning a lot of fuel keeping warm, and you aren't up to fighting weight to start with. So you're stuck with me shoveling food down you as fast as I can for the duration of this trip-might as well get used to it."
Chapter EIGHT
"We started later than I thought we would," Charles told Anna. "But we've made pretty good time anyway. Baree Lake is still a mile or so away, but we'll make camp here before it gets dark. The wind's blown most of the last snow off the trees, and the branches will shelter us from any snowfall tonight."