She has just slowed down to walking speed when Dakota comes to another abrupt halt, forcing Kirsten to jig slightly to the left to avoid a collision. “What is—?”

“Shh.”

Kirsten looks on, slightly annoyed, as Dakota cocks her head in that increasingly familiar listening posture of hers, and stiffens. It’s obvious she hears something, though Kirsten, who knows by virtue of her implants that her hearing is at least five times as acute as a normal human’s, can’t hear a thing.

Of course, I don’t know I’m listening for, she consoles herself, not quite sure why it suddenly matters so much.

A whispered word to the beast on her shoulder, and the hawk flies off to God-knows-where, leaving Kirsten even more annoyed than before. Why am I the only one who’s flying blind here?

She didn’t ask for your help, that more rational part of her brain reminds her. You more or less forced it on her, so don’t be getting all pissy when she doesn’t recite her intentions to you chapter and verse.

Dakota utters a small, soft, whining sound that has Kirsten looking on in amazement. Instinctively, she knows that she has not just heard a human imitating a wolf’s call, but rather a wolf making that call.

Will wonders never cease?

Then she hears it. A soft, almost inaudible cry off to her left. Koda repeats her call, and the cry is likewise repeated. Kirsten stands unmoving as Dakota plucks a blanket from her hands. “Stay here unless I call you.”

Kirsten simply nods and watches as Koda heads with silent steps to the medium-sized rock outcropping ahead and to the left.

With twilight rapidly deepening into night, Koda senses the den’s entrance more than sees it. It’s small and narrow, forcing her to drop to her knees, then to her belly in order to squeeze her way inside. Before moving, she stuffs the warm blanket into her jacket and removes a small, but powerful, flashlight from a pocket and switches it to “wide beam” before clamping it between her teeth and beginning her trek inside.

The rocks brush hard against her broad shoulders and, though not one prone to claustrophobia, she feels the weight of the entire formation pressing in on her from without. It’s not an entirely pleasant feeling, but she shuts her mind to it and continues on, using her elbows to propel herself forward.

The stench of putridity and decay is indescribable, but it’s something she’s well used to, given what she does—or did, she doesn’t know anymore—for a living. Still, she finds herself mouth-breathing to keep the smell from burning itself into her sinuses.

Approximately two bodylengths from the entrance, the den widens, becoming a more or less circular structure surrounded by solid rock on all sides. In the center are the pups, or what remains of them. There were four in the litter—five if she counts the obvious stillbirth remains she’d come across earlier. Only one still lives, clinging to that life by the meagerest of threads. The others are long dead, their bodies cold and stiff; maggots already beginning their gruesome work on the corpses.

Attracted to her living warmth, the pup lifts his shaking head, blindly groping for her, struggling beneath the weight of its dead siblings.

Gently grabbing the pup by its ruff, Koda tenderly pulls it from its macabre nest. The pup hands limp from her hand, and she absently checks its gender before she bares her teeth in an unconscious and soundless snarl. With a soft cry of revulsion mixed with anger, she uses her free hand to pluck the squirming maggots from his living flesh, crushing them between her fingers and flinging them away.

Task complete, she pulls out the blanket and wraps the pup carefully within its folds, murmuring nonsense words to him in Lakota. He whimpers softly, oh so softly, and collapses against her, completely spent. She feels frantically for a pulse, and sags in relief when it is there—too weak, too thready, but there.

“C’mon, boy,” she whispers, tucking the final fold about his tiny, defenseless body. “Let’s get you home to your Ina.”

*

Kirsten stands outside of the den, eyeing the helter-skelter jumble of boulders with deep suspicion. Her dream (and what else could it possibly be? She refuses to entertain the notion that even her hallucinations would feature a talking raccoon with an attitude problem.) comes back to her in soft-filter, like the camera lenses they used to use on movie stars. Back when there were movie stars.

“She needs your help. Go to her. Go to her now.”

She eyes the rockpile again. Is that a rumble she hears? A shifting of stones presaging a total collapse of the structure? Is this why she is needed?

“No,” she whispers, horrified.

Another image flashes before her, this one in sharp, stark lines and bold tones of red and black.

The outcropping is collapsing, drawing down unto itself in cracks of thunder and stifling dust that chokes her as she screams Dakota’s name into the blackness of the night.

Her hands. Blood on her hands. Her palms scraped raw, flesh hanging in tatters as she desperately pulls rock after rock away this charnel house.

“She needs your help.”

Her voice, hoarse and ragged, screaming Dakota’s name over and over and over again.

“Go to her.”

Her lungs. On fire. Sending out pluming jets of vapored, panicked breath.

“Go to her now.”

Her heart. Thundering in her chest. Fear and a savage, piercing grief fueling its frenetic pace.

“No,” she whispers. And “no” again.

And almost launches herself to the moon as Dakota materializes in front of her like a wraith from the mist.

Her face is still harsh-planed, but her eyes have softened a bit from their earlier rage. Kirsten suspects—when she can think again—that that softening is a result of the tiny bundle she holds so tenderly in her large hands.

Her heart rate slows, though grudgingly. She doesn’t like shocks. Never has. And she’s had more than enough to last several lifetimes. Somehow, though, she doesn’t think Dakota will appreciate the sentiment. She’ll have to remember to tell her later.

“How—how many?”

“One,” Koda replies tersely. “The rest were dead.”

“Oh god…I’m so sorry.”

“’s alright. Nothing anyone can do about it now.” Though her words seem offhand, her tone is clipped, each word as precise as a knife cut.

“Still….”

Dakota’s eyes harden. “Let’s get this one back to his mother.”

The pair takes only a couple of steps before a screeching call splits the silence of the night. Both look up, two pairs of keen eyes tracing a shadow against the shadows, flying low over their heads and landing in a tree some forty yards distant.

Kirsten finds herself suddenly cradling the tiny wolf pup as Koda stares deeply into her eyes. “Go on ahead. I’ll be there shortly.”

“But—!”

She finds herself talking to air.

Dakota has disappeared.

“Oh no you don’t, Ms. Bossy,” Kirsten mutters half under her breath. “You forget who you’re talking to here, I think.” She looks down at the bundle in her hands. “Hang on for a little longer, little guy. I have something I need to do.”

*

The deep black of the night parts like a cloak before her. She sprints, full out, toward the tree, keen eyes already spotting the thick chain wrapped around its gnarled base. Wiyo screeches again. Koda looks up at her briefly before rounding the broad trunk, intently following the chain links as they stretch off to a shadowed spot not ten feet away.

A thick, frost tipped pelt comes into view, and her heart shudders in her chest. “Oh no,” she moans, low and deep. “No. Please, Ina, no.”

Her soft prayer goes unheeded, as she knows it must. Tears sting her eyes. She wipes them away with a savage swipe of her arm, not noticing the pain as the stiff cloth of her jacket rakes across her wind-chapped cheeks.

He lays there in his own filth and blood. The one her brothers call Igmu Tanka Kte — “Cougar Killer”— for his fierce defense of his pack from a hungry mountain lion slinking down from the hills in search of easy prey.

The one who has visited her dreams and visions for years.

Who has shared with her bits his life and his ways.

The proud Alpha.

The one she calls Wa Uspewicakiyapi.

Teacher.

His rear left leg, half gnawed through in a desperate bid for freedom, is caught in a steel-jawed trap—the kind that has been illegal for decades. His soft underbelly is flayed, the skin hanging in flaps, blackened from frostbite and infection. His ruff is spiky with dried blood and she can only imagine the terrible wounds hidden from her view beneath the thick pelt.

He is mortally wounded, and yet lives still, bound to life by some strength of will that she can only wonder at. His chest moves weakly, sporadically, pulling in air he soon will no longer need. When she squats carefully by his massive head, he looks up at her through eyes that are glassy and exhausted and utterly calm, as if her presence by his side had always been expected.

Perhaps even anticipated.

“Hello, old friend,” she murmurs in the language of her ancestors, reaching out to gently stroke his proud muzzle. “I’m so sorry.” Tears fall now, and she allows their passage, watching as his image trebles before her, fracturing even as her heart fractures. “So…so sorry.”

Feeling the tentative, weak touch of his tongue on her hand, she shakes her head, blinking away the tears and clearing her vision. His eyes, likewise, have cleared, and she finds herself drawn into them, drawn as if bound by a puppeteer’s strings.

In those eyes, she can see visions; bits and pieces of his life, and hers, and the bond that draws them together closer than kin.

She slips free of herself, and for the last time they run together, unfettered and uncaring, into the nightwind, into the hills and valleys of the home they share as the moon, ripe and full, watches on from her perch above. They run for the joy of running, for the freedom of their souls, for their fierce love of the Earth and all who live upon it.

Then, at last, after what feels like hours, she finds herself gently released and in her own body once again.

Breaking herself free from his gaze, she leans down and touches a soft kiss to his head, then whispers into his ear, “Tóksha aké wanchinyankin kte. Wakhan Thanka nici un.”

And, not allowing herself to think, she moves her hands to his now-fragile neck, and twists.

His spine snaps. His chest settles slowly, and his eyes grow distant and fixed to a point only he can know.

All of her grief, all of her rage, washes through her with the force of a tidal wave, bowing her back and arching her neck to the uncaring sky. She howls in a voice that none would recognize as human, and all would fear.

Still howling, she jumps to her feet and pries the brutal trap from his leg by brute force. Grabbing the chain, she hurls the trap against the tree again and again and again, screaming incoherently, eyes flashing, glowing as if lit from the internal fires of her rage. The tree shakes, bark flying from its trunk in great spraying chunks.

Kirsten, who has forced herself to stand by and watch even as tears stream down her face unnoticed, finally breaks free of her paralysis, and steps forward. Only to dance back as the trap comes perilously close to bashing her head in. She stands for a moment, undecided, her lower lip caught pensively between her teeth. “Dakota,” she tries softly. And then louder, “Dakota!”

Dakota stills abruptly and turns to face the intruder, murder in her eyes. Her lips spread in a snarl as feral as any wolf’s, and Kirsten steps back again, fear delivering a jolt to her heart and belly.

“Nituwe he?” Koda demands.

“I—I’m sorry, I don’t—.”

“Iyaya na!”

“Dakota, please. I don’t understand—.”

“Letan khigla na!” Winding up the chain, she slams the trap against the tree. “Iyaya na!!” And again. “Iyaya na!!”

And again.

And again.

And again.

Every single instinct inside her is clamoring for her to flee, to seek refuge far away from the madwoman Dakota has become. And yet, something even stronger compels her to stay. Some internal voice that she cannot shut off, cannot turn away from, no matter how much she might wish it. Gathering up every shred of courage she possesses, she steps forward, deliberately into the line of fire, and speaks, “Dakota. Please. Listen to me. I want to help. Please. Tell me what to do.” Her tone is as calming and as soothing as she can possibly make it, and she senses, through blind instinct, that it is somehow getting through to the grief-stricken woman.