Chapter Eight
NASH
The tent had felt too small after the intensity of the day, or maybe just too intimate. The air inside had been thick with the smell of damp wool, down sleeping bags, and the undeniable awareness of the woman sitting cross-legged next to me.
So, after the hot chocolate and the freeze-dried stew I rehydrated over the fire, neither of us had been ready to sleep.
We'd moved outside, dragging the heavy log rounds we used for seats closer to the fire pit I'd dug into the snow.
We used the snowmobile sleds as a windbreak, creating a small, sheltered pocket of warmth in the middle of the vast, freezing valley.
Now, with our bellies full of the freeze-dried stew that tasted like gourmet cuisine after twelve hours of breaking trail, the silence of the wilderness has settled over us again.
The fire is a living thing between us, snapping and popping as it devours the dry spruce I gathered earlier.
Sparks corkscrew up into the black sky, joining the millions of stars that clutter the darkness above the high country inland.
The aurora is out tonight, faint ribbons of green dancing on the northern horizon, a silent light show that feels like it's just for us.
It's a perfect night, cold enough to freeze your breath in your chest the second it leaves your lungs, but still and silent in that heavy, bone-quiet way that only happens after a major storm.
Across the flames, Aris is staring into the fire.
The orange light dances over her features, softening the fatigue lines around her eyes and casting shadows in the hollows of her cheeks.
She's wrapped in her heavy parka, her hands cupped around a mug of tea to steal its warmth, looking small and fierce and beautiful.
He's real. Not a satellite ping. Not a data point.
A living animal I watched through the scope until the light gave out.
He's moving again now, somewhere ahead of us.
I can feel it in my bones, an instinct sharper than any GPS reading.
The tracks we found before we made camp were fresh, less than six hours old. The scat was unfrozen.
I should be feeling professional satisfaction. The job is almost done. Now it's just data collection, patience, and waiting for the right conditions for the capture. Standard operating procedure.
But as I watch Aris, I'm not feeling professional. I'm feeling something that sits heavy in my gut, a mix of pride and a gnawing, hollow ache that I know from experience means trouble.
She hasn't said much since we ate. The high of the tracking has worn off, replaced by a quiet introspection that I'm trying not to interrupt.
She's probably thinking about her data, or her next grant proposal, or whatever it is academics think about when they're not fighting for survival in sub-zero temperatures.
"You told me the shape of your family. Not why you all stayed. That's a different story," she says suddenly, her voice cutting through the crackle of the fire.
I look up, startled from my own thoughts. "Here? In the valley?"
"Here, in this life." She shifts on the log, tucking her legs under her to keep them warm.
"You're not like the other guides I've met.
I've worked with dozens of them across the Yukon and Alaska.
They usually talk about trophy scores, inches of antler, and how fast they can get a client tagged out. You talk about … balance."
I poke the fire with a stick, sending a fresh shower of sparks upward to die in the cold air. "I'm not a guide because I like killing things, Aris. If that's what you're asking."
"I don't think that. Not anymore. I see the way you move through the woods.
You don't fight it." She hesitates, and when she looks at me, her eyes are direct, stripping away the layers I usually keep between me and the clients.
"I want to know who you are, Nash. Not the 'Wilderness Logistics Expert' on the brochure. You."
The question hangs there, demanding an answer I don't usually give.
My history is usually something I keep locked up at the lodge, buried under logistics and schedules.
But looking at her now, with the firelight catching the stray strands of hair escaping her beanie, I find I don't want to shut her out.
"I ended up here because it's the only place that ever made sense to us," I say finally. "My parents built a good life out here. Raising five boys and a daughter on an island in the middle of nowhere wasn't easy, but they loved it. They loved us."
I lean back, looking up at the stars, letting the memory wash over me.
"The kitchen in the house we grew up in …
it used to smell like yeast and sawdust and wet dogs.
It was loud. Constant noise. Five brothers—Kane and Finn, me and the twins—who counted as a riot all on their own.
We fought over everything. The last biscuit, the best fishing rod, who got to ride shotgun in the boat. "
"It sounds chaotic," Aris says, like chaotic is the best thing a family could be.
"It was. But it was good." I pause. "My parents parceled the land out to all six of us.
Finn got the Crystal Creek piece, and the whole family helped him raise the lodge on it, board by board.
My mom was … she was the glue. She was this incredible force of nature.
She could field dress a moose in the morning, clean up, and teach us Shakespeare in the afternoon.
She taught us that being strong didn't mean being hard. "
Aris is watching me intently, her tea forgotten in her hands. "What happened to her?"
The question is gentle, but it still lands like a blow.
"Cancer," I say, the word still tasting like ash. "Ovarian. We got it late—the kind doctors in Anchorage shrug at by the time they see it. We had her for the year of the fight, and then we didn't."
I take a breath, the cold air stinging my lungs. "Dad did everything he could. He fought for her. He burned through savings, flew her to specialists in Seattle, tried every treatment. But it was a losing battle. He loved her so much it practically burned him up watching her fade."
"I'm so sorry," Aris whispers.
"Yeah. She made us promise to stay close.
To keep the land. Said this place was in our blood.
" I look at the fire. "Dad found his way back to the Hollister house, the one he built with her, still walking the rooms like he's looking for her.
He's working through it the only way he knows. We let him."
"So you all stayed? To help him?"
"We stayed because it's who we are. Each of us found the piece of it that fit. Mine was the field—the cold, the tracks, the hours you can only fill with your own thinking. Misty Meadows was the piece nobody else wanted. It was the piece I couldn't let go of."
I was the slow one. It took me longer to find solid ground.
The winter after Mom died, I put a snowmobile through the ice on the Blacktail River.
It was February, when the ice was already going rotten.
I went through up to my shoulders, the current pulling at my boots, the ice breaking apart every time I grabbed for an edge.
Kane hauled me out. He didn't say a word about it. Just built the fire back up and sat with me until I stopped shaking. It was a long time before I stopped dreaming about falling.
"And your grandfather?" she asks. "The one who taught you to hunt?"
"Granddad Silas," I say, and the name lands with a heavy warmth.
"He was the reason we knew what we were doing before we could shave.
He'd taken us upriver every summer since I could walk, taught us to read weather off the water, to name the trees, to skin a rabbit without flinching.
By the time we lost him, the lessons were already ours. "
I nod toward the darkness beyond the firelight, toward the invisible peaks of the mountains. "That caribou on my wall? That was his last lesson. He was dying too, his lungs were failing him, but he insisted on one last trip. He wanted to make sure I understood the weight of it."
"The weight of what?"
"Of taking a life," I say softly. "He told me, 'Nash, you don't pull that trigger unless you're willing to carry the responsibility of it. You take the meat, you use the hide, and you say thank you. Because that animal is giving up its future so you can have yours.'"
Aris holds her silence. The fire snaps, a log collapsing into glowing embers, sending a pulse of heat against our faces.
"He sounds amazing," she says finally.
"He was. He taught us that survival isn't about fighting the world, it's about understanding your place in it. You don't dominate nature, Aris. You participate in it."
"Participate," she repeats, testing the word like it's fragile. "Thaddeus used to say we were observers. That science required distance to be objective. That if you got too close, you compromised the data."
"Thaddeus was wrong," I say gently. "You can't understand something if you're standing outside looking in. You have to be part of the cycle. That's why I hunt. Not for the trophy. But because it keeps me connected to the reality of keeping myself alive."
She wraps her arms tighter around her knees, rocking slightly.
"I feel like I'm failing him sometimes. He had this grand vision.
He thought Waldo was the key to saving the species.
And I'm just … stumbling around in the snow, eating fish I swore I wouldn't touch, relying on a man I judged before I even met him. "
"We're going to release that collar, Aris. You didn't fail. We're miles from civilization, in conditions that would break most people, and you're still standing."
"He died alone," she says, the words rushing out like they've been dammed up for a long time. "I was at a conference in Seattle presenting a paper on migration corridors. He was at his desk in the university lab. A janitor found him the next morning."
Her voice cracks, and the need to go to her hooks in behind my sternum, almost overpowering.
"I should have been there," she whispers, wiping a tear from her cheek before it freezes. "I was his student. His legacy. And I was … I was networking while he was dying."
"You were doing the work he taught you to do," I say firmly. "You can't guilt yourself for living your life, Aris. He wouldn't want that."
She looks up, her eyes wet and shining in the firelight. "That's why I can't leave without the collar, Nash. It's not just the data. It's … it's the only way I can say goodbye. If I finish this, if I prove his theory … then maybe I can let him go."
And there it is, the naked, bleeding heart of the matter. She's a grieving daughter in every way that matters, a scientist second, trying to settle a debt with a ghost.
I stand up and walk around the fire. I don't think about it; I do it. I sit down on the log beside her, close enough that the nylon of our parkas brushes with a soft swish.
"He knows," I say quietly. "If he was half the man you say he was, he knows."
She turns toward me, and the vulnerability in her face hits me like a physical blow. She looks stripped raw, defenseless, my protective instincts flaring hot and fierce.
"I was so wrong about you," she whispers. "I came here thinking you were the enemy. The obstacle to my research."
"And now?"
"Now I don't know what I'd do without you."
Something between us draws tight, the pull we've both been ignoring since the storm. The rest of the world—the snow, the wolves, the cold—fades away until it's just the two of us in this small circle of firelight.
She's looking at my mouth, and I'm looking at hers, and every alarm bell in my head is ringing.
She's leaving, the voice in my head warns, sounding suspiciously like Finn. In three weeks, maybe four, she gets on a plane. She goes back to lecture halls and coffee shops and conferences in Seattle. She goes back to a world where you don't fit. Do not start this.
But my body isn't listening to the logic. My body remembers the feel of her holding onto me on the snow machine, the smell of her hair in the tent, the fire in her eyes when she spotted the herd today.
"Aris," I say, and my voice sounds wrecked to my own ears.
She leans in, just an inch. It's a question. A permission.
I could answer it. I could bridge the gap, pull her in, kiss the sadness off her mouth. It would be easy. It would be good. And it would be the biggest mistake I could make.
Because if I kiss her, I won't stop. And if I don't stop, I'm going to fall in love with her. And when she leaves, because she will leave, it won't be like a client waving goodbye at the dock.
It will be like losing a limb.
I clench my jaw, forcing the control Granddad beat into me to take the wheel. I pull back, just slightly, but it feels like miles.
"It's getting cold," I say, the words going flat in my mouth. "The fire's dying down. We need to be up at dawn if we want to catch the herd moving."
She blinks, absorbing the rejection. A flush rises on her cheeks that the fire can't account for. She pulls back, straightening her spine, the vulnerability vanishing behind a wall of composure.
"Right," she says. "Of course. Dawn. The data comes first."
She stands up quickly, brushing at snow that isn't there. "I'll … I'm going to turn in. Goodnight, Nash."
"Night, Aris."
I watch her duck into the tent, the zipper hissing shut like a barrier sealing her away.
I stay by the dying fire, staring into the embers until my eyes burn. I add another log, watching the flames catch and climb.
I told her the truth about the hunting. I told her the truth about my family. But I lied about the cold.
I'm not cold. I'm burning up. And the terrifying thing is, I think she is too.
We found the herd today. We crossed the big hurdle. But sitting here alone in the dark, listening to the woman I shouldn't want breathing softly in the tent behind me, I have a sinking feeling that the real danger out here isn't the weather, or the wolves May warned us about.
It's the fact that for the first time in my life, I'm looking at something wild and beautiful and thinking about trying to keep it, when I know damn well that wild things always have to go free eventually.
I kick snow over the fire, drowning the light in a hiss of steam, and sit in the darkness, letting the cold seep in where it belongs.