Nicole was nervous about the first hunt away from the cabin. Hardware Jack had taught her about rifles, and Link had worked with her on her aim relentlessly, but until now, she’d only taken birds and snared rabbits alongside her mate. Everything else had come from the grocery store or Link’s meat cache from his cabin. But she should be a part of this. She’d grown up thinking that red meat just came from a grocery store, but it didn’t. There was a process to getting it from the animal to the table, and she wanted to learn about respectfully and legally taking an animal. She’d taken her hunter safety course in Mission and even bought herself a hunting license, but a part of her had never really believed she would use a single tag. However, now when she thought about it, it was almost laughable that she’d expected to live out in the Alaskan wilderness and not learn this essential part of life here. Plus, she was mated to a werewolf, and unless she wanted to become some coddled, kept woman, she needed to learn to keep up.
As she adjusted her goggles and thick winter hat and pulled the green scarf tighter around her face, she suddenly realized that not a single Silver had asked or even stared at her birthmark. She’d forgotten about it completely for the first time in her life.
“Link?”
He ripped the motor and twisted around in his seat in front of her as the exhaust from the snow machine surrounded them. “Yeah? Here, let me help. You’ll get frostbite if your cheeks are exposed.” He pulled her scarf higher to cover everything up to her goggles.
“Did you tell the Silvers about my birthmark?”
“No. Why would I? You’re beautiful.”
Heat crept into her cheeks at his unexpected compliment. “Well, they didn’t ask about it.”
Link frowned and slid a pair of sunglasses over his sparking eyes. “Why would they? It’s just a mark. Elyse has a big scar down her face, and no one cares about that either. The Silver brothers are covered in marks from enforcer jobs and from fighting other bears. I have scars from wolf fights and friggin’ Vera the Chompy Fox. Who cares about perfection? It’s the imperfections that give you character out here.” He kissed her over the scarf until she giggled, and then he pulled her arms around his waist and hit the handlebar throttle.
Stunned, she turned and waved to Vera and Tobias, who stood on the front porch seeing them off.
“Bring us back a yummy roast!” Vera called and blew tiny kisses with her fingertips.
As the cabin disappeared through the blurring trees, another layer of belonging slid over Nicole’s shoulders. Now she did really want to have a successful hunt because she could give Tobias and Vera part of the meat as a thank you for last night, for this morning, and for Vera working to save her mate. It wouldn’t be just a trinket or useless gift either. It would be something that would aid in their survival. Now she understood why Elyse ran cattle, and why everyone around the homestead helped maintain the herd, even Elyse’s brother, Josiah. Out here, the best thing you could do for loved ones was keep them fed, keep them from hard times, and keep them healthy.
Buck—er, Dad—had done that for the people he cared about.
Nicole hugged Link’s waist tighter and rested her cheek against his back as the wind whipped the untucked end of her green scarf around her.
It was incredible getting to know her father in this way. She’d come to Alaska so scared that she would eventually go back to Kansas disappointed and have no better idea about where she came from or about the man who had been there when she was a baby. But instead, she got tiny, daily glimpses of him from the people around here and from Link.
Forty-five minutes of snowy driving later, and Link stopped the snow machine and pointed to a towering tree with a charred split in the middle from lightning. “This is the beginning of Buck’s trap-line.”
“It is?”
“This is Fire Tree, the very beginning of the line. I’m going to take you along it so you can see what Buck did for work. You’ll see where he spent his days and the woods he loved. He sold and traded fur during the winter, and that’s how he took care of Clotilda, and when you were a baby, it’s how he took care of you and your mom.”
“Link,” she said on a breath. “I was just thinking about him.” It was as if he’d been reading her mind, and now he was giving her another present—another piece of her dad.
“Trap lines are passed down from generation to generation. This one has been in your family for a hundred years. Clotilda maintains it now.”
“She’s a trapper, too?”
“No, she is a fisher. She uses traditional Yupik methods to bring in protein, but she told me she is maintaining it for you in case you want to claim the line someday. If she let it go to ruin now, someone else would take over the territory, or you would have to re-cut the trail.”
“She’s doing that for me?”
Link nodded and took off slowly, pointing out each place Clotilda trapped and each set of animal prints that crossed their path. He told her what they were and how to identify mature animals and scat.
And when the line was through, he sped off to continue their journey to caribou territory, closer to the mountains.