Silver swiped the perspiration from her brow with the back of her wrist as she returned to the shade of the airstrip hangar for another load.
Although the night had brought fresh skiffs of snow to the high granite peaks, the mid-September afternoon had spiked to sweltering temperatures. Even so, it would be a mere matter of days before snow blew into the dusty streets of Black Arrow Falls itself, blanketing the small northern town for six months of long, dark and isolated winter.
Silver didn’t mind. She liked winter best.
That’s when her work at the hunting lodge was over. Time was her own, and she could run with her dogs.
But right now she was tired, and in need of a shower. She’d been tracking a large grizzly sow for the better part of the day, arising when the grass was still stiff with night frost and the trail easy to follow.
She’d set off at first light with her three favorite hounds, moving quickly, wanting to sight the grizzly one last time before nightfall.
Silver had encountered her quarry in a wide valley colored rust with fall berry scrub. She’d observed her bear quietly from up high on a ridge, downwind of the animal.
The omnivore was massive—maybe five hundred pounds, close to her peak hibernation weight, sunlight glinting on a majestic golden-brown coat that rippled over powerful haunches as she foraged along the valley bottom.
Within a week the bear would be digging a den oriented leeward of prevailing winter winds. She’d enter it a few days later when she scented the first winter storms in the air. Hopefully her troubles would then be over.
This grizzly had mauled a British hunter last week.
Silver had been contracted by the understaffed conservation office to hunt—and shoot—her.
But after tracking and watching the sow for the last three days, Silver did not think she was a predatory man killer. The British hunting party had alleged one story, but the tracks had told Silver another.
From the evidence around the attack site, Silver deduced that the men had encountered the sow shortly after she’d been injured in a fight with an aggressive and mature male grizz who’d just killed her male cub-of-the-year.
The sow had fought off the much larger male but lost her cub and a claw on her left front paw in the process.
From that point Silver had dubbed her Broken Claw, and as always, she began to emotionally connect with the creature she was tracking.
Injured and severely stressed, Broken Claw had been guarding her cub’s dead body when the hunters had startled her along a narrow trail high on the rocky outcrop. She had charged the group in an attempt to warn the hunters back. The men fled, triggering chase.
The grizz swiped at the last hunter who’d been spared death only because the power of her blow had sent him tumbling like a rag doll down the sharp scree of a narrow ravine; he’d later been airlifted out. This much Silver knew from the conservation officer’s report. The scuffs and tracks, the remains of the cub, told her the rest.
Retreating quietly from the rock ridge with her dogs, Silver had made up her mind this afternoon to let the bear be.
There was no way she was going to kill that bereaved mother to satisfy a misguided lust for vengeance. Things had played out as nature had intended. Wild justice, she called it.
Silver understood what it meant to lose a child to an aggressive male. She knew just how far a mother would go to eliminate a threat.
It didn’t make her a killer.
In a few days the healing snows would come, and Broken Claw would be asleep in her den.
She lifted another sack of horse feed from the airstrip hangar, lugged it to her truck, perspiration dampening her T-shirt as she launched it into the back. One more to go, and then she’d be done with the delivery Air North had flown in for her that morning.
But she stilled at the distant drone of a plane. Silver squinted up into the hazy sky and saw the small twin-engine prop used by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police emerge shimmering between gaps in the massive snow-capped peaks.
The new cop, she thought, shading her eyes, watching as the plane banked around Armchair Glacier, coming in for the steep descent necessitated by the valley formation and prevailing crosswinds.
In a community this small, everyone already knew the new Mountie’s name—Sergeant Gabriel Caruso. Big shot detective from British Columbia.
This would be the first time an RCMP officer with the rank of sergeant had been posted to this tiny self-governing First Nations community—one of the only two Yukon communities with absolutely no road access—and already everyone was wondering why the Mounties were sending a veteran homicide cop to Black Arrow Falls where nothing much happened beyond a marauding moose, an overturned snow machine, or a domestic spat spurred by bootleg liquor.
Harry Peters, chief of the tiny Black Arrow Nation for which the town was named, had explained to his people that the RCMP were enlarging what was traditionally a three-man detachment because of the new copper mine opening about 150 miles south of here. The new mine would bring a new road next summer. And more people to town.
More trouble, too, thought Silver.
The wheels of the plane touched dirt with a sharp snick, and the craft bounced along the gravel runway, trailing a cone of silt, coming to a stop across from her as the props slowed.
Silver leaned back against the warm hood of her truck, hooking the ankle of one boot over the other, swatting at a cloud of tiny black insects as she watched the cop alight from the plane. His formidable size and stature struck her instantly, and her pulse quickened.
He hesitated briefly at the top stair, taking in his surroundings, dark hair gleaming in the sun. Then he shouldered his gear, coming quickly down the rest of the steps and striding confidently toward the hangar where she was standing. She noticed that he favored his right leg slightly and was trying to hide that fact.
It spoke of pride, or vanity maybe. Or perhaps an unwillingness to admit weakness or failure.
Newcomers were always a diversion, and Silver studied this one unabashedly, reading his posture just as she read creatures in the wild. And as he neared, she could see right off that there was something different about this cheechako.
Something dangerous.
He telegraphed the classic command presence of a cop, walking with a tall, broad-shouldered gait, his spine ramrod straight, jaw held proud. But there was an additional edginess about him that the neat yellow stripes down the sides of his pressed RCMP pants, and the polished gleam of his weapons belt and boots, couldn’t quite hide.
Trapped inside that crisp Mountie uniform was a renegade, someone gone a little wild. Someone who might have a problem with authority.
The man was trouble.
If Silver were picking a dog for her team, she’d be leery of one with body language like his. He didn’t look like a team player. He looked unpredictable.
His rank and bio suddenly made sense—the RCMP had sent damaged goods. And what better place to dump a problem cop than the backwaters of Black Arrow Falls, just south of the Arctic circle?
A whisper of irritation and wariness laced through her instinctive interest in the man.
Silver had bad experience with the federal force. The Mounties had let her down when she’d needed them most.
And they had the power to put her away.
She turned away from him as he approached, ordering her dogs to sit with a soft whisper as she bent to lift the last feedbag into her truck. Her hounds regarded him warily as he neared.
“Need a hand?” His voice rippled like dark wild honey over her hot skin. Silver froze, startled by the shock waves he’d sent through her system.
Her