“They quit,” she said.
“Quit?”
“The wolves. They’re quiet. They quit howling.” When he stepped back and glanced around, the breath whooshed out of her lungs. “I don’t see them. Do you think they’ve left?”
“No. They’re around. But since they’ve moved out of sight, they’ve apparently made up their minds to behave. Which leaves me with a tricky decision,” he murmured.
Again, his eyes peeled on her. Again, she felt a curling sensation, as if her whole body was warmer than buttered toast. Foolishness. She was wrapped in double layers of down; naturally she was hot. It had nothing to do with the way he was looking at her. “What’s this tricky decision?”
“I’m not about to leave you alone,” he immediately reassured her. “I have a pickup over the next rise, about a quarter-mile walk from here. I’ll take you home. But it would help a lot if you wouldn’t mind sticking with me for a few more minutes.”
“Sticking with you?”
“I’m in a bind,” he admitted. “When I first heard the wolves kicking up a fuss, I was halfway through feeding the pups. There’s seven of them, a couple I left hungry. It would take time to drive you home and get back here. It’d just be a lot easier to finish the job right now, but I don’t know how shook-up or scared you are—”
She could have told him how scared and rattled she was. The instant she got home, she fully anticipated indulging in a nice long case of the shakes. She loved cats. She loved schnauzers. But this singular experience with wolves had permanently cured her of any desire to be anywhere near this particular animal again in this lifetime.
But damn. He’d saved her behind. Twice now. And he’d mentioned the pups, but she hadn’t made the connection that he had anything to do with them. The debt she owed him sat on her conscience like guiltladen lead, and geesh, what was a few more minutes of heart-hammering terror? “It’s not that I’m shook-up,” she assured him, and then had to clear her throat. The giant lie had almost caught in it. “But you’re the one who needs to get out of the weather. You have to be freezing without your jacket. You’ll catch cold.”
Over his jeans, he was only wearing a gray alpaca sweater. The garment stretched over his muscular chest, a thick-weaved, scratchy wool, practical and warm enough for a dash outside but hardly for working in these temperatures. “I’m cold,” he admitted, “but the pups are real young. So young that their survival at all is real iffy.”
“So it could matter, if they were fed right this instant, huh?” She gulped in another guilty breath. Babies were babies. How could she be responsible for babies going hungry? Still, she’d only asked him a question. She hadn’t said yes, sure, I’d love to stick around and risk my life for another few hours. Yet his response to her single hesitant comment was a devil-slow masculine grin.
“I could have guessed you’d say yes. Nothing much throws you, does it? And it’s possible that we’re pushing our luck, but I don’t think so. White Wolf wouldn’t have backed off if he hadn’t made his mind up about you. Still, we’ll just take this slow and easy. Have you ever seen baby wolves?”
No, she’d never seen baby wolves—or ever planned to. For two exhilarating seconds, her fragile ego basked in his respect for her courage, but that soaring sensation didn’t last long. He was so totally mistaken. She hadn’t earned that respect. She had no guts. She’d just never managed the assertive art of saying no—a personality flaw that had majorly contributed to her landing in hot water in the past.
She’d never been in hot water quite like this, though. Quicker than a smile, he’d taken her hand. Before she could draw a nervous breath, they were crossing the white sugarcoated valley. In the open. Easy prey for wolves or bears or anything else. He’d scooped both her skis and his gun under one arm, so it wasn’t as if he could aim that rifle quick, even if he had to.
They climbed a ridge, ducked around a stand of white pines and scrambled down a knoll. The new snow layer was fluff, but beneath that lay an ice crust, tricky footing in just her ski boots. Even though he had to be freezing in just that sweater, he never moved fast and he never loosened his grip on her hand. The thick gloves prevented any personal contact, but his secure hold felt like being plugged into a direct socket of strength. He wasn’t going to let her fall.
He kept talking in that lazy, calm baritone of his. Talking was a necessity, he told her. Wolves had acute hearing. Talking let the animals know where he was, who he was, and a steady, soothing tone helped communicate that he meant them no harm. Wolves were nervous by nature. They had reason to be.
Mary Ellen had no idea if he was successfully calming the beasts, but his low, husky voice was working an unwilling magic on her. He didn’t talk about anything but the wolves. She wondered if he realized how much he was revealing about himself.
Isle Royale, he told her, was less than a thirty-mile stretch across Lake Superior from here. Since the late fifties, the island was one of the few places on the continent where the endangered species of gray wolf was protected. A few years ago, though, the species had started dying out. Numbers dropped from fifty to eleven. No one could pin down the problem. The wolves had an ample food supply; the winters weren’t that harsh; neither disease nor age seemed to be the contributing factor. They simply weren’t breeding. The best theory seemed to be genes—that the three surviving packs were too inbred. The wolves needed a new gene pool if they were going to survive.
“So two years ago, I flew in White Wolf. He’s from Alaska—where I was working then. Carried him, his best girl and two more from that pack, and settled them on the island. They seemed to be doing fine. They mated and bred, and everything was going hunky-dory—until this winter.”
Normally the icy waters of Lake Superior created a formidable barrier between the island and the Upper Peninsula. But that stretch of lake had frozen before, in winters as violently cold as this one. “The damn doofuses walked across on the ice floes. They got it in their heads that they wanted to set up housekeeping on this side. Not a brain in their idiot heads.”
It was hard for Mary Ellen to think of wolves in affectionate terms like “doofuses,” but clearly Steve did.
“No one wants them. No one’s ever wanted wolves. People don’t mind a romantic story about them, like Jack London wrote or Walt Disney filmed, but find one in your backyard and that attitude changes real quickly. Man has always been afraid of wolves—it’s as simple as that, and no laws have ever protected them from being hunted down. They need to be taken back to the island, partly because the whole species isn’t going to make it—not without this new blood—and partly because their chance of surviving here is worse than a bookie’s odds. So that’s what I came here to do—transport them back to the island. Only damn, I hit a little snag I never expected.”
“A snag?” She couldn’t imagine what he’d consider “a little snag.” He mentioned rounding up the wolves and transporting them to the island as if this were an ordinary project for him. Even trying to picture the act boggled her mind.
“White Wolf’s mate was shot several days ago. And unfortunately, she’d just given birth to a litter of pups less than ten days before that.”
“Someone shot the mother?” Her voice was small. Minutes before, she’d been in a bloodthirsty rush for him to aim that gun and shoot to kill. That white behemoth of a wolf—and his cronies—had terrified her. Still did. But she hadn’t thought of the wolves as vulnerable then. She hadn’t pictured a young mother hunted down, leaving a nest of helpless newborn babies. “I guess I should have expected that something had happened to the mother. I mean, obviously you wouldn’t have any reason to be feeding the pups if the mom was alive.”
“Well, normally if a mother wolf dies, another female in the pack will take over. She’ll bond with the pups and start producing milk. Only