The high register of a howl erupted in the dark—long, sad, and beautiful.
Devlin looked up from the game. “Was that a wolf, Dad?”
“I think so.”
“That’s the loneliest sound I’ve ever heard.”
Devlin lay in her sleeping bag, snuggled between Kalyn and her father. They’d turned the flashlight off, and it was black and soundless except for the pattering of snowflakes falling on the rain fly.
“Dad?” Devlin said.
“Yeah, honey.”
“Kalyn?”
“What?”
“Just wanted to see if you two were still awake.”
“Not for much longer. What’s wrong? You scared?”
“No. Well, a little.”
Kalyn said, “We aren’t going to let anything happen to you, all right?” Devlin felt Kalyn kiss her cheek, savoring the warmth of this kind woman beside her.
Devlin woke to the familiar noise of her father’s quiet snoring. Both he and Kalyn had slung their arms over her. The darkness was complete, without the slightest trace of light. She thought about the wolf, wondered if it was sleeping in a warm den or still tramping somewhere out there in the snow. She hoped it wasn’t lonely.
Her nose was cold, but the rest of her body felt comfortable and snug in the sleeping bag. Even her toes were warm. She wiggled them and shut her eyes, fell quickly back to sleep.
Devlin’s eyes opened. Still in the tent, buried in the warm sleeping bag.
She heard whispering, and it took her a moment to recognize Kalyn’s voice.
Devlin sat up. It wasn’t as dark as before, and she thought perhaps it was dawn already, until she saw the spill of light on her father’s sleeping bag.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing, I just have to pee,” Kalyn said. “Will, I can’t find my boots.” He shone the light into the corner of the tent, spotlighted the muddy pair they’d borrowed from Buck. Kalyn laced them up, and in the semidarkness, Devlin heard the soft rip of a zipper.
“Do you need to go, Dev?” her father asked.
“No.” A waft of bitter cold swept into the tent.
Kalyn took the flashlight from Will and climbed outside, zipped the tent back up. Devlin heard her say, “Man, it’s snowing out here.” Devlin listened to Kalyn’s footsteps trail away—muffled squeaks in the snow. When all was silent again, she lay back down and closed her eyes.
She woke some time later to movement inside the tent, asked, “What’s happening?” A headlamp blinded her, and when her eyes adjusted, she saw her father lacing up his boots. She glanced at the sleeping bag on her left, back at her father, said, “Where’s Kalyn?”
“She hasn’t come back yet.”
“How long’s she been gone?”
“I don’t know. Longer than she should have. I fell asleep.” She saw that he held a gun in his trembling hands. “I have to go out there, see what’s keeping her.”
“Why are you taking a gun?”
“Just to be on the safe side. I’ll only be gone a—”
“No!”
“Devi. You remember our talk in the hotel? Now is not the time to argue with me. Do not leave this tent no matter what.”
THIRTY-NINE
The beam of Will’s headlamp cut through the onslaught of snow, and aside from the wind, it was stone-silent. He followed Kalyn’s footprints away from the tent. Her tracks headed down through the meadow, and as he walked, his headlamp seemed slowly but steadily to dim, until he could barely see anything but the ankle-deep snow at his feet.
The headlamp winked out. He reached up, tapped the bulb. It flickered on and off, then on again. He went on in the snow, the coldness of the flakes nicking his face like shaving cuts.
As he came to the collection of boulders where he’d cooked supper, his light winked out again. He tapped it. Nothing. Just darkness, cold, and snow.
He called Kalyn’s name and waited, kept thinking his eyes would adjust, begin to pick out things in the dark, but they didn’t. Though he knew the general direction of the tent, he hated the prospect of having to stumble back to it, sightless in the storm.
The snow let up.
A fingernail moon glanced over a cloud, and the world appeared before him out of the void.
The snowpack glowed. Will could see his breath in the eerie light, the profile of trees, the tent forty yards away at the opposite end of the meadow.
He looked into the woods—mostly dark there, save for where beams of moonlight slanted through the spruce, lighting random patches of snow.
Kalyn’s tracks veered into those woods.
Everything began to darken. It snowed again. The moon vanished and the world returned to black. He fiddled with the headlamp, but it was dead.
In the dark, arms outstretched, he started back for the tent.
. . .
Devlin had pulled the sleeping bag over her head, and she was trying to return to a beautiful dream—back at her home in Colorado, a cool summer night, crickets chirping, purr of the river coming across the pasture and no moon, but a million stars. She was walking toward the farmhouse, where her father and Kalyn sat on the back porch, drinking wine, laughing. She opened her mouth to speak, to tell them how happy she was.
Will was working his way through profound darkness, trying to find the tent, confident he was headed in the right direction, but soon his hands were touching the snow-glazed bark of spruce trees, and he realized he’d wandered out of the meadow, back into the woods.
He should have stopped right there, but he kept plodding forward, no sense of sight, everything else in overdrive, his ears picking up the steady thudding of his heart, the dry-grass scrape of snow falling on the hood of his parka, his nose detecting the sterilized odor of snow-rinsed air.
The world blinked—a strange electric blue. He saw trees, his footprints.
Darkness again.
It thundered.
He imagined where the tent stood, saw it in his mind’s eye, assured himself he hadn’t veered that far off track.
He started to call out for Devlin, let her voice guide him back to the meadow. But what if she couldn’t hear his words, just heard him yelling? She might leave the tent, strike out into this darkness by herself, lose her way.
The forest lighted up again. He corrected his bearing and kept going, fighting off the first needling tinge of panic as he stumbled along in the dark.
