The sound of his own ragged breathing filled his head. The darkness hung heavy, moonlight vanishing, and his vision blurred again as he swung his head to the left and saw trees looming there, though not the same woods where he had hidden before. He had left those behind. How far had he run? Half a mile, at least, yet he could still hear the snuffling and growling of the Wendigo.
The roar swept over him like a gust of wind, far closer than half a mile back…and he knew the Wendigo had abandoned the camp. Jack pictured that black maw, stained with gore, and opened his mouth in a silent scream.
Run, boy, run! he thought. And it did not escape him that in the grip of utter terror he had for a moment lost the sense of himself as a man and fallen back upon the perceptions of the rest of the world, whose eyes looked upon him and saw only his age. Just a kid.
And he rejected it.
He had defied the wild, died in its embrace and yet lived, challenged it to do its worst and yet survived. In the combat of man versus nature, Jack had snatched victory not from the jaws of defeat, but from the grasp of death. He was no mere boy.
On he ran. The night closed in and then retreated, again and again, as he passed through shadows and into moonlight. Branches whipped at his face when he found himself in woods, and on rocky slopes and ridges he stumbled more than once—the stones hammering at his knees and scraping his hands—knowing even as he rose that the smear of his blood would leave a scent trail that the Wendigo would easily follow.
Yet he did not stop, and if he slowed he barely noticed. The frigid night soaked into his bones; his empty stomach tightened to a painful clenched fist; his cracked ribs grated and set his jaw on agonized edge. And when at last he heard the Wendigo roar again—or perhaps only the howl of a whipping wind—it seemed farther away.
Always, the wolf raced ahead or darted back. It nipped at his hands when he faltered and the darkness at the edges of his vision flooded in. Three times he staggered and swayed, head bowed, body shaking, and three times the wolf snatched his right hand in its jaws, fangs pinching skin, waking him, tugging him onward until he stumbled into a jostling, bone-jarring run again.
How far had he come? Miles, at least, and in no discernible direction.
And then, eyes half lidded, he lost track of the wolf for a moment and aimed for the low, golden eye of the moon. One foot in front of the other—left, right, left—until the ground vanished beneath him. His right foot came down, but the ground had fallen away. His heel found purchase a foot lower than anticipated, but too late. Momentum carried him over the edge of a gully and he tumbled, limbs flailing, down the rocky slope until he came to rest at its base.
Jack tried to rise, but this time his body would not obey. Chill wind whipped along the gully and he shivered, but then he lost even the capacity for such involuntary functions.
He heard the wolf’s howl nearby but could not respond to the call of the wild. Not this time. He listened for a roar that might signify the Wendigo’s reply, and so listening, he drifted. Darkness coalesced at the edges of his vision, and he could do nothing but surrender to its embrace.
He woke to pain. Unlike a hundred other times when he had come slowly from an injured or drunken sleep to find a sense of dislocation, he recollected everything the instant his eyes opened. Pain had kept his memory fresh. So clear were his thoughts now, so devoid of the disorientation he had felt all during his flight from the Wendigo, that for a moment he thought he had never fallen unconscious at all.
And then he saw the girl, and the world tilted yet again.
He felt soft fur against his cheek, but it was not the sleek coat of the wolf upon which he lay. Rather, he had been swaddled like a child in the warmth of animal hides, the fur plush around him, gentle on his bruised and battered form. A quartet of trees created a silent audience, and through their branches he saw the promise of dawn lightening the sky.
Beside one of the trees there stood the girl, watching him as shyly as a child hiding behind its mother’s apron. Her black hair hung past her shoulders, fine as spun silk, and in that first hint of morning, her almond-shaped eyes gleamed like copper pennies amid the elegant lines of that exotic face. She wore boots akin to those favored by the local tribes and an ivory-hued cotton dress, but nothing else. Despite the cold she had no jacket, and though she breathed, he could not see the plume of her breath upon the chill spring air.
In all his life, he had never seen a more beautiful girl. She might have been sixteen or twenty—he had no way to gauge—and the sight of her made him question the clarity of mind he had felt grateful for only moments earlier.
His breath came slowly and easily, and though he was aware of the pain in his cracked ribs, it felt distant to him. A strange taste filled his mouth, and he ran out his tongue only to find some kind of earthy grit upon it. Jack spat, and a rich odor filled his nostrils as he tasted herbs.
The girl cocked her head with birdlike curiosity, and he understood that this was something she had done—put these herbs in his mouth—perhaps as some sort of remedy. Or had someone else done it? Surely she couldn’t be alone out here in the wilderness, a beautiful young girl…astonishingly beautiful, stealing his breath…without even a coat?
He tried to raise himself up enough to look around but did not have the strength. His arms would not hold him, and his racked, beaten body sang an anguished song of protest at the merest effort. For a moment his eyelids fluttered, but he forced them open, refused to relinquish consciousness again now that it had been returned to him.
On his side, he let his head loll back, scanning the trees and the landscape beyond for some sign of other members of the girl’s tribe or family, but he saw no one.
“Who are you?” he croaked, his voice ragged. “Did you”—he ran a trembling hand along one of the furs that covered him—“did you do this, bring me here?”
Twenty feet away, the girl moved fully out from behind the tree, though she kept one hand upon its bark as though it comforted her. When she smiled, he saw such natural innocence in her that his heart broke just from looking at her, and he cursed his weakness and injuries for preventing him from rising that very moment so that he could be closer to her.
Jack had no touchstone by which to recognize love. He had been infatuated before, and fascinated, and even mesmerized by girls once or twice, but he had never been in love. Still, he did not think what he felt in that moment was love. It felt more like sheer wonder.
He had to blink to clear his mind of her smile, and in that instant when his eyes were closed, he thought of the wolf, the spirit animal he considered his guide. The wolf had led him to safety, but now, as the eastern sky chased away the indigo night with the first light of morning, the beast was nowhere to be seen.
Only the girl. And it struck him again how odd it was that she had no coat, only that dress and her boots, and for a moment he stared at her and wondered if somehow his mind might not be as clear as he had thought. Were his perceptions skewed? Could the girl and the wolf be one and the same?
She laughed softly, raising a hand to cover her mouth, as though she had read his mind or at least seen the question in his eyes.
Jack felt himself fading, his awareness slipping. Whatever she had given him could not compensate for the exhaustion that drained him, for the need his body felt to rest and recuperate from the beating he had taken. He had heard of horses ridden too hard for too long that had simply collapsed and died, and he knew sometimes people went the same way. He did not feel death hovering nearby, but his body seemed weighted with surrender. Without help, without food, exposed to the elements, he would die out here.
Or not, as the girl and her tribe saw fit.
Yet there seemed to be no tribe.