Page 23 of Wind Valley

He slowed down even further so he could look more closely at the tracks. “Look, I see blood drops.” The blood had been crystallized by the cold into tiny rubies. “This must have been him.”

“Good work. I wasn’t paying attention to anything except how fast we were going.”

“Don’t tell Gil. He hates it when I drive too fast.” He turned the handlebars to steer the snowmobile alongside the frosted tracks left by the skis, scanning for anything else the man might have dropped besides his blood.

“That’s funny, I would have thought he’d be the reckless one.”

“Oh, I’m not reckless. My brain is very good at calculating exactly what rate of speed will maximize the fun without increasing the risk to an unacceptable degree.” He shot her a sidelong glance, then grinned. “And yes, that’s exactly what I told my parents the first time I got a ticket for speeding.”

She let out a hoot of laughter. “Did it work?”

“Absolutely not. Strangely, the judge didn’t believe me either. It’s true, though. I’ve never had an accident. My brain does the calculations without me even thinking about it. If I hadn’t been obsessed with the natural world, I probably would have become a race car driver.”

He could feel the warmth of her body leaning closer to him, peering, like him, at the tracks. “I think you might be the most interesting friend I’ve ever had,” she said.

The word “friend” felt like a splash of cold water waking him up. Despite their moment of connection racing against the wind, nothing fundamental had changed between them.

“What’s that?” He pointed at something dark lodged in the snow a few feet from the ski tracks.

“A rock? Wolf poop? What does wolf poop even look like? Is it like dog poop?”

“It might be wolf scat. We’ll know as soon as we stop.” He slowed way down as they closed in on the dark object.

“Why?”

“Because wolf scat has a very strong and very terrible smell. It usually contains more bone fragments and hair than dog feces does.”

“Lovely.” She pulled a face, but leaned forward as they reached it. “I don’t think that’s any kind of animal poop.”

“Nope,” he said curtly. No animal had been responsible for this. It was human all the way.

It was a grenade.

Live? He couldn’t tell. But he wasn’t going to take a chance.

“Don’t move, please,” he said in the softest, most level voice possible. “Light breaths. Stay still.”

He didn’t know if she’d recognized the object or not, but she did as he said without asking for an explanation.

Slowly, he took out his phone and snapped a photo of the grenade, then another, zooming in as tight as possible.

Then he carefully pushed the button to put the snowmobile in reverse and slowly, ever so slowly, backed away until they were a comfortable distance away from it.

“Was that a…” she asked.

“Grenade. Yes. I think so. Impressive that it didn’t sink down through the snow, but I guess the surface has just enough crust.” He took another shot, wide enough to show the surroundings and make it possible to triangulate the grenade’s exact location. He didn’t trust the GPS on his phone to be accurate enough with the iffy service out here.

“So the man dropped it while he was running from the wolf, but it didn’t go off?”

“That would be my theory. It’s probably not able to go off unless someone pulls the fuse pin, but I don’t want to risk it.”

“Because you’re not reckless.”

“Right. Gil would know all about this. I say we take these photos to him and let him decide how to handle it.”

She looked back over her shoulder at the tracks extending into the distance. “You don’t want to keep following the tracks?”

“The Chilkoots have a lot of kids running around. I wouldn’t want one of them to run into that thing. Personally, I think that’s more important than satisfying our curiosity about the wolf bite. But what do you say? We’re in this together.”

---