Nine

She did not have to go very far. The weather was cold and dry and his tracks were easy to follow. Still, progress through the dense snow was slow and difficult and it took her the better part of an hour to reach him. He had sought the cover of the trees, deep inside the forest, and lay curled up at the base of three tall pines that half encircled him. She hurried towards him, struggling through the drifts. He did not look up.

She knelt by his side and examined his eyes. He was alive, but barely. He had visited her to say his last farewell. She fought back the tears. Now was not the time, she told herself. Now was the time to focus, think and act.

That night she had been groggy and half asleep. She had just stroked his head and face, but he had whimpered. Now she examined his neck, his shoulders and his back. She found deep gashes and savage wounds unhealed and infected. She did the best she could with the first aid kit, but a feeling of helplessness was overtaking her.

“I need to get you back to the cabin, Mark. Can you walk? Can you even hear me?”

He opened his eyes. They were dull and lifeless and she knew he was telling her to leave him to die. She sighed. “That’s not the way it works, pal.”

He closed his eyes again and rested his head in the snow. She stared at him. He must weigh a hundred and twenty pounds if he weighed an ounce. There was no way she could carry him and there was no way he could walk. Her only option was to go back for the snow mobile. The thought gave her a deep sense of foreboding. The noise would broadcast her presence far and wide, and if Mark had tracked her to Alaska, what were the chances Sylvia and Cún were looking for her here too?

But she had no choice. It was the snowmobile, or Mark would surely die out here. She took out her flask of tea and spilled some of the hot, sweet liquid onto his mouth. It seemed to revive him a little and she gave him some more. She stroked his face.

“I’m going to get the snowmobile. I’ll be back in just over an hour. I’m going to fix you up, OK? Stay strong.”

Was that distress she saw in his eyes? She knew it was, and she knew why. Sylvia and Cún were on her trail. But she would have to cross that bridge when she came to it. Right now her priority was to save Mark’s life, and nothing was going to prevent her from doing that.

She tramped back to the cabin, and was exhausted by the time she got there, but she had no time to rest. She found the keys to the shed, hauled opened the doors, filled the gas tank, hooked up the trailer and fired up the engine. Then she was away, speeding over the snow like a skipping stone over waves.

She made it back to him in about ten minutes, and every one of those minutes she was aware of the tremendous noise she was making, echoing from hill to hill and across the forests, shouting her presence to the four winds.

She gave him a little more tea and that seemed to revive him enough to coax him into the trailer, where she covered him with a blanket and started the slower, more careful journey home. Twenty minutes later she had managed to get him from the trailer into the cabin, and he was lying on the rug in front of the fire. She cleaned his wounds, gave him a shot of antibiotics and spoon fed him a beef broth, then allowed him to sleep.

She sat with him throughout the day, tending to him and occasionally feeding him more rich broth to build up his strength. His wounds healed with extraordinary speed, but he remained weak and listless, and she felt she was losing him. She knew she was missing something and that as she was sitting watching him, so he was slipping away into the eternal darkness. As night closed in, she laid her bed next to his on the floor and fell asleep holding him. The answer came to her in her dream.

There was a vast, silver moon beaming down on the luminous snow. The sky was very black. She was sitting at the top of a small hill. Mark, the wolf, was lying sleeping in front of her. He was dying, slipping away. Mark, the man, was sitting opposite her, watching.

She said, “What can I do to save him?”

He said, “The wolf must die.”

“No.”

“If the man is to live, the wolf must die.”

She looked up at the great, luminous orb of the moon and realization entered her mind like light.

“When you are dying, you revert to wolf form. But you are hard-wired to that, and once the process has kicked in, the only way to save you is to shut down your wolf DNA and trigger your human DNA again.”

He stood and the moon bathed his skin in silver light. The wolf stirred and rose, and began to move away, over the snow, towards the black shadows on the forest.

He said, “You haven’t much time. The wolf must die.”

She awoke with a start and a gasp. She sat up. His breathing was shallow and quick. She knew exactly what she had to do. She scrambled into the lab area, found a syringe, fitted a needle and took a large sample of her own blood. It was in the proteins. It was the proteins that were triggering and enabling the genes. She had to isolate the right proteins and trigger their production in his system. As she worked she realized that at some unconscious level, all the while she had been there at the cabin, she had been doing that very work without realizing it.

She labored feverishly for twenty minutes, aware that with every passing second the great wolf was approaching its end. She could not, she told herself over and again, she could not have got this far just to see him die. He must live. She could save him. The dream had told her so.

Finally the serum was ready. She knelt by his side, stroked his great head, thrust the needle into the base of his skull and injected the concoction into his brain.

His eyes opened with a start, his whole body shuddered as though with a great spasm. He raised his head and looked at her. His mouth opened, as though her were trying to say something, trying to tell her something. Then his eyes glazed, he gave a deep sigh and he died.

She watched in horror. She cried out, wept and shook him, calling his name, begging him to return to her. It was too cruel, too unfair to have had him return when she believed him dead, only to lose him again, having killed him with her own hands.

She curled up and sobbed, lying by his side, by the dying light of the fire. Outside the icy wind howled, and far off the wolves bayed at the silver moon.