Chapter Thirteen
ARIS
Today the forest's silence feels heavy, like a held breath waiting for bad news.
We've been moving for three hours, breaking trail through a dense stand of black spruce Nash calls "The Tangle," the branches woven so tight they catch at our packs. Nash stops suddenly ahead of me, raising a hand, and I pull up beside him, legs burning, cold seeping into my boots.
"What is it?" I whisper. "Wolf sign?"
"No," Nash says. "Smell that?"
I inhale deeply. At first, all I smell is pine resin and cold air. Then, beneath it, I catch something faint and sweet-sick. It smells like decay, like wet fur and old meat.
"Carrion?" I ask, my stomach turning slightly.
"Not quite," Nash says. "Come look."
He leads us into a small clearing where the snow has been trampled down into a hard, dirty pavement of ice and droppings.
I stop dead.
It's a graveyard. Or a hospital ward where everyone is terminal.
A group of about twenty caribou is huddled here. But they don't look like Waldo. They don't look like the magnificent animals I've been tracking in my mind for three years.
These animals are ghosts. Their coats are patchy and dull, the fur rubbing off in clumps to reveal raw, irritated skin.
Their ribs are visible through their winter coats, a biological impossibility for a healthy animal in January.
They stand with their heads low, listless, barely acknowledging our presence.
"My god," I breathe, stepping closer. "What's wrong with them?"
"Starvation," Nash says quietly. "And disease. Probably brucellosis or chronic wasting."
I watch a calf try to nurse from a gaunt female. She kicks it away weakly, having nothing to give. The calf stumbles, its legs trembling, and sinks into the snow.
"But … why?" I look around the clearing. "There's lichen here. I see browse."
"Look closer at the browse," Nash says, pointing to the willows at the edge of the clearing.
I walk over. The branches have been stripped, but not just the tips. They've been chewed down to the thick, woody stems. The bark is gone as high as they can reach.
"Overgrazing," I say, the realization hitting me.
"They've eaten everything." My hands are already reaching for my pack.
I pull collection tubes and gather scat samples from three different spots at the edge of the clearing—disease documentation, the one thing I can do when I can't do anything else.
"Too many animals in too small a range," Nash confirms. "They didn't migrate. Maybe the snow was too deep, or they got hemmed in by predators, or they just made a bad choice. They stayed here, ate everything, and now they're starving."
He walks over to a young bull that has collapsed near a tree. The animal's breathing is shallow, a rattling sound in its chest. It doesn't even try to stand as Nash approaches.
"This is what 'natural' looks like, Aris," Nash says. He's not being cruel. There's no "I told you so" in his voice. Just a sad, heavy resignation. "City folks think nature is a Disney movie. They think if you leave animals alone, they live happy lives and die of old age in their sleep."
He gestures to the suffering animals. "Nature doesn't do old age. Nature does starvation, predation, and freezing to death. This herd? They're going to die slowly. It'll take weeks. The wolves will come eventually, but until then … they suffer."
I look at the dying bull. I look at the calf shivering in the snow.
I think of the deer head on the wall in Nash's cabin, the one I judged him for. I think of his story about his grandfather tracking that bull for three days, taking one clean shot, using every ounce of the meat.
A life is a life, he'd said.
But watching this, the equation shifts in my head.
"This is worse," I whisper.
"Yeah," Nash says. "It is."
He crouches beside the fallen bull, his hand resting gently on its neck. The animal flinches, then settles, too weak to fight.
"If this area had been managed," Nash says softly, "if a few of these animals had been harvested in the fall … there would be enough food for the rest. The population would match the carrying capacity of the land. The survivors would be strong."
My ecology textbooks talk about "carrying capacity" and "population dynamics." I've written papers on it. I've made graphs.
But a graph doesn't rattle when it breathes. A graph doesn't look at you with clouded, fearful eyes while it slowly freezes to death.
"Thaddeus talked about the balance," I say. "He hated hunting, but he understood the math. He just … he never wanted to look at the subtraction part of the equation."
"Subtraction is the only reason addition works out here," Nash says.
He stands up, knocking the snow off his knees. He looks at me, and his hazel eyes are searching.
"You asked me once how I could kill something I respect," he says. "I do it because I respect them enough to want them to be strong. I take one, so the herd survives. I take the old, the past-prime, so the calves have grass."
He looks back at the dying bull. "I don't enjoy the kill, Aris. Nobody with a heart does. But I'd rather be the reason an animal dies clean and quick than watch this happen."
The truth of it settles into me, cold and hard and undeniable.
I've spent years judging men like Nash from the comfort of a heated university office, eating my soy bars and pretending that my hands were clean because I didn't pull the trigger.
But my hands aren't clean. My "hands-off" philosophy, the one that lets nature take its cruel course, is just violence in slow motion, passive and indifferent.
Nash's way is harder. It requires blood. It requires looking death in the eye. But it's honest. And looking at this graveyard of a clearing, kinder, I think. Kinder than what most of us do.
"Can we help them?" I ask, already knowing.
"We can't feed them," Nash says. "Their digestive systems have already shut down. Even if we gave them hay, they couldn't process it."
"So we just leave them?"
Nash is silent. He looks at the fallen bull, then at his rifle scabbard on the sled.
"We leave them," he says, and I hear what it costs him. "We don't have enough ammo to put them all down, and we can't risk the noise drawing the pack to us. And … it's not our place. The wolves need to eat too."
"The wolves," I repeat. "The pack that's hunting us."
"Yeah. This herd is a buffet for them. It might keep them occupied for a few days. Buy us some time."
It's a brutal, pragmatic calculation. It makes me sick. And it makes perfect sense.
"Okay," I say. I turn away from the clearing, unable to look at the calf anymore. "Let's go. Please."
We walk away in silence. I don't look back, but the smell of the sick herd follows me for miles.
We camp early that evening, finding a spot near a frozen waterfall where the ice creates a natural windbreak. The mood is somber. The playful energy from the shooting lesson is gone, replaced by the heavy reality of what we saw.
Nash sets up the stove. He pulls out a vacuum-sealed bag from the food crate. It's dark red meat, venison steaks, flash-frozen and kept cold by the ambient temperature.
He usually cooks this when I'm busy with data, or he eats it quickly while I stick to my stroganoff. He's been careful not to push it on me since that first night.
He puts the meat in the pan. The smell of searing protein fills the air, rich, iron-heavy, wild.
Usually, I'd wrinkle my nose and make a comment about "Bambi." I'd eat my processed noodles and feel superior.
Tonight, my stomach growls. A deep, primal demand.
I watch Nash flip the steak. He cooks it simply: salt, pepper, a little dried rosemary. He treats the meat with that same reverence I noticed with the fish. He doesn't waste it. He honors it.
He plates it for himself and reaches for the bag of freeze-dried pasta for me.
"Nash," I say.
He stops, holding the bag. "Yeah?"
"I don't want the noodles."
He looks at me, surprised. "You want the rice instead? We have the teriyaki—"
"I want the meat."
The silence stretches between us, filled only by the hiss of the camp stove.
Nash slowly lowers the pasta bag. He studies my face, looking for … what? A challenge? A trick?
"It's venison," he says. "Sitka Black-tail. From the fall."
"I know."
"It was wild, Aris. It had a life."
"I know," I repeat. I look him in the eye. "And it died fast. It didn't starve in a clearing. It didn't freeze to death slowly."
I take a breath. "It kept you alive. Tonight I'd like it to keep me alive too."
He holds my gaze for a long moment. Then he nods, once.
"Okay."
He puts a second steak in the pan.
He doesn't say anything triumphant. He cooks the meat, turning it carefully, letting the fat render.
When he hands me the plate, the steak is sizzling, dark on the outside and pink in the middle.
I pick up my metal spork. My hand hesitates—the fish was one thing, but this is the calf in the snow. This is the honest, brutal mercy of a clean shot.
I cut a piece. I put it in my mouth.
It tastes … wild. Gamey, which shocks me at first, but then rich and complex. It tastes like the spruce forest and the cold air, like energy.
I swallow. It settles in my stomach, warm and heavy and right.
"It's good," I say softly.
Nash is watching me, his own dinner untouched. There's a look on his face that I haven't seen before, deeper than respect, like something between us became permanent.
"Thank you," he says.
"For eating?"
"For understanding."
We eat in silence, but it's a companionable silence, the best kind.
When we're done, I feel stronger than I have in days. The protein feels different than the soy bars. It feels like it belongs here. Like I belong here.
"You were right," I say as we're cleaning up. "About the ecosystem. About the participation."
"It's a hard lesson," Nash says, scrubbing the pan with snow. "Most people go their whole lives without having to see it."
"I needed to see it." I look at the dark wall of the forest. "I think Thaddeus would have approved. He always told me he respected hunters who took what they ate. I just had to see it before I believed him."
"He loved the idea of them," Nash corrects gently. "You love the reality of them. That's different."
He stands up, drying his hands. "You're a good scientist, Aris. But you're becoming a hell of a woodsman."
"Woodswoman," I correct automatically.
He grins. "Woodswoman."
He moves to check the solar panel, and I watch him go. The resentment I felt in the beginning, the moral superiority, the judgment, is completely gone. In its place is a terrified, overwhelming clarity.
I respect this man. I trust him with my life.
I am falling in love with him.
And unlike the starving herd, or the wolf pack, or the freezing cold … this is a variable I have absolutely no idea how to manage.