Chapter 14
Jack
The trail off the road was narrow and ungroomed, nothing like the packed surface they’d been traveling on for hours.
Steph went first, and he followed her as closely as he could, but the snow was unpredictable in the trees.
Knee-deep in some places, crusted and breakable in others.
He punched through twice in the first hundred yards, then pulled his leg out each time and kept moving.
“Does this happen during the race?” he asked.
“It can. They groom the trail, but conditions change. There could be drifts, bare ground, ice. Depends on the year.” She punched through on the left side and pulled free without breaking stride.
“Some years it’s bone-chillingly cold. Negative temps and too much wind. Some years it’s almost reasonable.”
“And the course conditions change with it.”
“Everything changes with it. That’s the point.”
The trees thinned ahead, and he could see the meadow opening up, the snow catching the ambient light from the overcast sky.
It was broader than he expected, a long, flat stretch bordered by dark timber on three sides, the kind of place that would be beautiful in daylight and was quietly unsettling in the dark.
Steph moved to a flat section near the tree line, set her pack down, and started pulling out her stove.
He watched how she set it up, the order of things, the efficiency of it.
She had a small pad she set the stove on first, insulating it from the snow so the heat didn’t melt through and destabilize it.
Smart. The kind of thing he wouldn’t have thought of.
He got his own stove out and followed her setup as closely as he could.
“Altitude affects the flame,” she said, not looking up. “Up high, the burn is different. I want to know my stove works the way I expect it to before I’m depending on it at hour thirty-five in a whiteout.”
“Makes sense.” He had the stove assembled and lit. The flame came up clean and blue in the dark. He cupped his hands around it briefly, not for warmth exactly, but for comfort.
“I always change my socks here,” Steph said. “Eat something warm. Rest a bit. Then head back.”
“It’s a good idea,” he agreed. That was when he heard it.
A low mechanical sound, distant and then less distant, coming from beyond the far tree line. It took his brain a moment to sort it out of the ambient winter quiet.
“Snowmobile,” Steph said before he could.
He looked up. Through the trees on the far side of the meadow, lights moved. Not on the main road—he could orient himself well enough to know the road was behind them—but somewhere beyond the meadow, deeper in.
“What’s out there?” he asked.
“More trails.” She was watching the lights too. “Hiking trails during the summer, but they aren’t usually used during the winter. The snowmobiles mainly stick to the road, though I guess they could use the two-tracks that are set up for access and forest breaks.”
“But there’s one out here? In the middle of the night.”
She glanced at her watch. “It’s not exactly the middle of the night. Could be camping or . . . something.”
“Could be,” he agreed, but didn’t think so.
“Silver Mane’s Lodge doesn’t run night tours as far as I know.” Her voice shifted. Not alarmed exactly, but the tone of someone who has noticed something that doesn’t fit and is deciding what to do with it.
The engine sound peaked and then began to fade, moving away from them through the trees.
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
The stoves burned quietly. The snow around them was blue-white in the headlamp, and everything beyond the meadow was dark. Jack looked at the place where the lights had been.
Something felt wrong. He couldn’t have said exactly what it was or why he was certain of it.
He’d learned over the years to pay attention to that particular feeling, the one that didn’t announce itself with specifics but simply presented as a wrongness.
He’d ignored his gut before and paid the price for it. Not only him but someone he loved.
“We should probably pack up,” Steph said, only she wasn’t packing up.
“Yeah.” He wasn’t packing up either, but he knew they needed to.
She looked at him. He looked at her. The stoves burned between them.
“It’s probably nothing,” she said.
“Probably.” He scanned the area where the light had been. “Still, we should let someone know, maybe make a few calls when we get back to the lodge.”
“No service there.”
“Okay. When we get back into service, then.”
“I’d hate to say anything if it’s just someone doing some winter camping.”
Somewhere in the trees behind them, something shifted, snow falling from a branch, a small noise. Normal. Completely normal.
“It’s probably campers,” he agreed, though he didn’t believe it.
“Or . . . ” she dropped her voice to a whisper. “It might be the poachers.”
“All the more reason to call it in.”
She looked at the far tree line. “A snowmobile would make sense. Get in fast, get out fast.”
“But not silent. You’d think they’d need to be silent if they are hunting.”
“Yeah. Maybe the hunt is over, and they’re . . . ” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Cleaning up?”
It made sense. Hunt until dark and then do the skinning and everything else.
He turned off his stove. “We’d better head out.”
“Let’s take a look,” she suggested.
Jack shook his head, a tight knot forming in his stomach. “It doesn’t concern us.”
“I never said it did. But I’m going to take a look.”
“Steph.” He touched her arm. “Let’s head back. Move fast. Get to the cars and a place we can call someone. You probably have the sheriff’s private number, right?”
“It’ll be two in the morning before we get back into service. I’m not calling him unless I know for certain what I’m reporting.”
There was some validity to her idea, but he hated it. “We need to be smart about this—don’t get too close and make sure we stay out of sight.”
She knelt and killed the flame on her stove. “Bring your backpack,” she said, already reaching for hers.
He pulled his pack from the sled. The pistol was still in the chest holster where it had been all night. He didn’t touch it, but he was aware of it in a different way than he had been before.
She patted the chest pocket of her jacket. “Do you have a beacon?”
He shook his head. He’d meant to get one but spaced it and figured he’d be fine for tonight.
Steph carefully set the stove onto her sled, then took hold of the sled’s edge. “I’d feel better if this wasn’t out for everyone to see.”
They both spent a few minutes moving the sleds into the trees before heading in the direction the snowmobile had gone.
“There,” she whispered as she lifted her chin.
The snowmobile track was fresh, pressing a clear line through the unbroken snow beyond the meadow’s edge. He could see where it had come in and curved around through the trees. He followed it with his headlamp and looked at Steph.
She was already following the track with her own lamp.
“Quarter mile,” she said. “Maybe less. Then we turn around.” She switched off her headlamp. “No lights.”
“Agreed.”
They went single file through the trees, using the snowmobile track to avoid the deepest drifts, moving quietly and slowly while their eyes adjusted to the dark.
Jack suspected they’d gone considerably farther than a quarter of a mile, but he had no desire to turn around. He couldn’t hear the snowmobile, but he knew there was something out there. Someone out there.
The trees opened slightly, and he saw the orange flicker first. Firelight, low and partly shielded, the kind of setup made to be minimal and not easily spotted from a distance.
Then the shapes materialized around it. A structure—not a tent exactly, more of a tarp strung between trees—and beneath it the dark bulk of equipment he couldn’t immediately identify.
He touched Steph’s arm, and she stopped.
The firelight was enough to see the snow in front of the camp.
A dark stain spread across it, wide and irregular.
The pelts were stacked across some sort of rack made of deadfall limbs.
Several of them, thick and dark. Three snowmobiles were parked nearby, and a large outfitter’s tent sat about fifteen feet away.
The voices reached them. Low, male, and more than one. Coming from somewhere behind the tarp.
Jack looked at the camp. At the blood in the snow. At the pelts.
He looked at Steph.
They needed to hide. Right now. Before whoever was in that camp came around the tarp.