Bad had just gone to worse: the GPS screen was smashed. She guessed the EPIRB function was still okay, but had no way of knowing without setting it off. She slipped it into a pocket, glad she had also brought the old-fashioned laminated map and compass, and she slogged onward.
As she reached lower and lower down the mountain, the snow was thinning, in increasing spots fingering itself out to rock and hard, bare dirt. She sped up; not too fast, since it was still icy and she was fretful of her arm, steering away from stray branches, especially as waves of occasional dizziness washed over her.
The map showed that Major’s Creek was coming up and she became tetchy about crossing it. Would it be frozen solid, or would the cover merely be a deceptive skin of easily cracked ice? She needn’t have worried, not about that, since pretty soon it was clear she wasn’t even close to Major’s Creek.
Under her flashlight, she carefully checked and rechecked the map. Where had she gone wrong? She trudged on another few hundred feet; still no creek. She went back, at least she thought so, but the ground was starting to rise when it should have been falling.
Her arm was pounding and her head was no better, but she had enough sense to take another pause. She slung her pack to the ground, parked herself on it and, under the side flap, her fingers felt around for two Mars bars and one of her bottles of water. Steady methodical chewing. It was calming, but only until her mind was sucked back to Ed’s betrayals.
She leant her head back to take a swig of water.
He must have been at this for months, she thought, the two-faced… Isabel replayed the sick, depraved banter in her mind.
She was lost, that was obvious to her. Three hours she’d been going and she didn’t have a clue where she was. She knew she’d been crazy to try this at night. But should she have stayed up at the shack, set off the EPIRB and waited? More importantly, should she do that now? She slipped it out of her pocket and looked at the shattered screen as though it would reply for itself.
It was 8:15 PM. Yet even with the wrong turn she’d obviously made somewhere, she was sure she’d get herself back on track, just like she’d done with her life. If she triggered the EPIRB it would take Search and Rescue at least the three hours she guessed she still had to go—but there was a good chance they would wait till daylight—and she needed to keep moving, not to stay stuck in this frozen, godforsaken spot.
Isabel ate a second snack bar and stowed her trash, slipping the empty bottle into the mesh pocket on one side of her backpack.
Calmer, she studied the map and, after about five minutes of mental backtracking, she calculated there was a good chance she was near Potter’s Mound, and if she simply headed west a little, she’d find a stand of black spruce.
SHE was right. Unfortunately.
She could smell the familiar earthy, sweet spruce perfume even before she saw them. Potter’s Mound was smack in the centre of the wolves’ urine-marked territory, and Andy Goodman’s prize female had been out on the prowl for a couple of hours, always keeping close to the den she’d established for when her litter came. Gretel was big. Nose-to-tail, she was five feet long, last time weighing in at 120 pounds though she was undoubtedly heavier now.
Gretel whipped her tail out from behind an old hemlock and her glossy black nose sniffed out something tempting. Near to the ground, she stalked forward and a few shards of broken glass flashed the moon into her yellow-green eyes.
She drew up to the log and started to paw at the alien shiny parka material but drew back sharply… her paw had been cut. She spied the stains on the snow but knew instinctively they weren’t hers, even before smelling them. Ignoring her paw—she’d had worse—Gretel’s snow-white snout dropped back down and sniffed around the strange bloodstains. Her ear brushed against the torn piece of sleeve hanging from the branch and she twisted up to inhale its scent. Her long back arched and, with her good front paw, she jabbed at the spatters of blood in the snow. She seemed to make a decision and turned, low to the ground, making a slow, stealthy pace toward the stand of black spruce, a blood-spotted track trailing behind her.
Halfway along, she stopped dead. Her head lifted and she sniffed the air.
She pulled her lips back to bare her teeth and her menacing, guttural growl cracked the silence.
60