Chapter Four
NASH
Two nights in the backcountry, three days out of Misty Meadows—the wilderness stretches endlessly ahead of us as we push deeper, and Dr. Aris Thorne is finally starting to relax behind me.
Her grip on the side handles has steadied from yesterday's white-knuckled terror, and when the terrain gets rough, she holds onto my waist without the same resistance she showed before.
The contact feels different now, less desperate, more trusting, and she adjusts her weight in the turns without being told, learning to work with the machine rather than fight it.
We'd set up camp twice now—once in the lee of a hillside, once in a spruce grove that broke the wind.
The first night I'd had to walk her through every step: stakes angled into the snow, the fly tensioned tight, the two-person shelter pitched because two separate tents would freeze a body faster than one shared one.
She picked her side and kept to it. By the second night she had her half up before I'd finished mine.
She's a quick learner. She stopped complaining about the sleeping bag the second time too.
She's adapting faster than most academics I've guided, though that's not saying much considering most of them spend the first three days complaining about everything from the cold to the lack of cell service.
But Aris is different. She's paying attention, learning, trying to understand rather than just endure.
The snowmobile cuts through powder that reaches my knees in some places, the engine's steady roar the only sound in the vast quiet.
Towering spruce and white pine stand sentinel along our route, their branches heavy with snow that hasn't seen sunlight in weeks.
The GPS coordinates I've loaded show us tracking toward the basin where Aris believes Waldo might be heading, but out here, technology takes a backseat to instinct and experience.
I ease off the throttle as we approach a steep section, feeling Aris adjust her position without being told.
Good. She's starting to read the machine's movements, anticipate the terrain changes.
When I glance back, I catch her scanning the tree line the way she scans her data, no longer just hanging on for dear life but actually observing the country we're moving through.
"Fair weather activists," I'd mentioned to a client last winter, talking about the eco-terrorists who'd been sabotaging hunting camps during the warmer months.
"They seem to avoid the real cold." The comment had been casual, almost throwaway, but it occurs to me now that Dr. Aris Thorne doesn't fit that category.
She's here in January, in conditions that would send most environmental protesters running for heated hotel rooms.
I slow the machine and kill the engine at a natural clearing where animal tracks crisscross through the snow like highways. The sudden silence presses in around us, broken only by the whisper of wind through pine boughs and the distant call of ravens.
Aris climbs off the snowmobile with movements that are steadier than yesterday, though I can see the cold and the ride have taken their toll.
She pulls her pack around and retrieves that expensive-looking tablet, handling it the way someone holds a piece of equipment that cost a year of grant proposals.
"What do you see?" I ask, watching her study the tracks with growing confidence.
She kneels beside a set of prints, her gloved fingers hovering over the impressions without touching them. "Caribou, definitely. These look recent." She glances up at me with excitement bright in her dark green eyes, and my next breath comes in slower than it should. "How recent?"
"Yesterday morning, maybe the night before. You can tell by the way the edges are defined—if they were older, wind and temperature changes would have softened them."
She nods, making notes on her tablet without looking up.
I watch her as she catalogs each track, measures stride length, documents everything in clean, ordered notes.
Whatever else I might think about Dr. Aris Thorne, she approaches her research with a thoroughness that builds trust. She's not playing at fieldwork; she understands that details matter.
"See how the tracks move through here?" I point to where the trail curves around a stand of birch. "They're not running, not stressed. Moving at a steady pace, probably foraging as they go."
"Which direction?"
"Northwest, toward the higher elevations. Makes sense if they're looking for wind-swept areas where the snow's not as deep."
She captures photos of the tracks from multiple angles, her tablet beeping with each image. The sound seems too loud in the wilderness quiet, but she's so absorbed in her work that I don't think she notices.
"How many animals?" she asks.
I study the overlapping prints, counting distinct patterns. "Four, maybe five. Small group, which could mean they split off from a larger herd, or they're scouts looking for better grazing."
"Waldo travels with a small group," she says, and the excitement in her voice is unmistakable now. "He leads them away from the main herd when resources get scarce."
I know that look. It's the one I get when tracking becomes personal, not work anymore but obligation.
I pull protein bars and trail nuts from my pack, offering them to her. "You should eat something. We've got hours of tracking ahead."
She reaches for the offered food, then stops, her hand hovering in the air. I watch her face cycle through a series of expressions—hunger, consideration, then something that looks like her principles reasserting themselves.
"I have my own trail mix," she says, retrieving a bag from her pack that's labeled with some organic brand name I don't recognize.
I watch her examine the contents—dried fruit, nuts, seeds, granola—then take a measured portion. It's factory-produced health food, probably triple the price of my homemade mix, and it's missing the protein that provides sustainable energy for this kind of work.
"That's not enough protein for what we're doing out here," I say, keeping my voice neutral.
"It's fine," she replies, but there's a defensive edge I'm starting to recognize.
I hold up one of my protein bars. "Beef jerky, almonds, dried fruit. Designed for extended wilderness work."
She shakes her head, and I catch something almost pained in her expression. "I can't watch it happen."
"This isn't wild meat. It's made from ranch-raised beef."
"You hunt animals. I can't …" She trails off, color rising in her cheeks, making her look younger and more vulnerable.
The logic gap opens up between us, and I'm starting to understand the moral framework she's operating from.
She'll eat factory-farmed beef dried into jerky and pressed into a protein bar, but she draws the line at anything that comes from someone who actually harvests their own meat.
It's a boundary city folks create to feel better about their choices, arbitrary lines that let them maintain their principles without examining the actual consequences.
"So you eat meat from animals that lived in feedlots but not from animals that lived free in the wild," I say, genuinely curious about how she reconciles this.
"That's different."
"How?"
She struggles with the question, her jaw working like she's trying to find words that make her position make sense. "Those animals were raised for food. They wouldn't exist otherwise." It's the same line she used over the stew, and from the way her mouth tightens, she hears it too.
"And the deer I took last fall lived his entire life free, ate what he wanted, went where he wanted, until I gave him a clean death that lasted seconds instead of the slow starvation or predation that kills most wild animals."
"And the tags in your pocket?" she fires back. "The quota that decides how many bulls this valley can lose without collapsing? A scientist counted that. Someone like me sat in a cold office with bad coffee and made the math work so there would still be caribou for your grandkids to track."
That stops me. I think about the harvest reports I file every season, the population surveys that set the limits I live by. I've never once thanked the person who ran those numbers.
"Fair," I say. And I mean it.
Discomfort crosses her face, then anger, then something that might be unwilling recognition. She knows I'm right but admitting it would mean reconsidering everything she's built her worldview around.
"I can't," she says finally, and there's honesty in her voice that I respect. "I know it doesn't make logical sense, but I can't."
At least she's admitting the hypocrisy instead of trying to defend it. Most people would keep arguing, trying to justify the unjustifiable. Her acknowledgment that her position isn't logical earns her points, even if it doesn't solve the practical problem of keeping her fed out here.
"You're going to get weaker," I say, watching her portion out another small handful of trail mix. "This climate burns calories fast, and you're not taking in enough to sustain the work we're doing."
"I'll manage," she says, but I can already see the effects of inadequate nutrition in the way she moves, conserving energy she's not sure she has.
I shoulder my pack and check the GPS coordinates against the terrain around us. "We'll follow the tracks for another hour, then we need to find a place to set up monitoring equipment. Weather report shows a front moving in tonight."
She nods, packing away her tablet with movements that are slower than this morning. The hunger she's fighting is starting to show, and it'll become a safety issue if she doesn't adapt. But pushing her harder right now would only make her more defensive.
We remount the snowmobile and continue deeper into country that doesn't care about principles or moral positions. The tracks we're following remain clear and consistent, leading us up a gradual incline toward a ridge that will give us a view of the valley beyond.
"Hold on," I call back to her as we approach a steep section.
She tightens her grip around my waist and leans into the climb, and I'm struck by how natural the contact feels now.
Less than twenty-four hours ago, she was grabbing my jacket like it might contaminate her.
Now she's holding on like she trusts me to keep her safe, and that shift means more than it probably should.
The machine responds smoothly, tracks digging into the snow as we ascend through stands of pine that block out most of the winter light. At the top, the wilderness opens up into a panorama that never fails to remind me why I chose this life over everything else the world had to offer.
The valley below stretches for miles, a white expanse broken by dark patches of forest and the silver thread of a frozen stream.
Mountains rise in the distance, their peaks sharp against the pale sky.
It's country that's remained unchanged for thousands of years, where the only sounds are wind and wildlife, where a person can still measure themselves against something real and enduring.
I kill the engine and we sit in the sudden quiet, both of us caught by the view.
"It's beautiful," Aris says, and it might be the first time she's actually looked at the wilderness as something other than a hostile environment she has to survive.
"It's honest," I reply. "No games out here. Things are what they are."
She climbs off the snowmobile and moves to the edge of the ridge, scanning the valley with binoculars.
I watch her work, noting the way she's learning to read the terrain, to see patterns and possibilities instead of just white emptiness.
Whatever else she might be, Dr. Aris Thorne understands observation, and she's adapting to this environment faster than I expected.
"Movement," she says, excitement clear in her voice. "Two o'clock, near the tree line."
I follow her gaze and spot them: four caribou moving through the snow at the far edge of the valley. Even at this distance, I can see they're alert but not panicked, feeding as they travel.
"Could be them," she says, adjusting her binoculars.
"Could be. We won't know until we get closer."
She lowers the binoculars, her face flushed pink from the cold. When she looks at me, it's like she's revising something she decided earlier.
"How do we get down there without spooking them?" she asks.
"Carefully. We'll have to circle around, use the tree cover to mask our approach. Take us most of the day."
"Then we should get started."
She's already swinging a leg over the snowmobile before I can answer. She's tired, hungry, running on stubborn will and academic caffeine, but she's not backing down.
I start the snowmobile and begin the slow descent toward the valley floor. She's already got her tablet out, reading coordinates, already in the next ten minutes before we've left this location.
Three years chasing one animal. A tight window to finish the job. I've guided obsession before, but usually it's about the trophy.
Hers is about a promise.
I leave it at that.