Page 4 of Roar of the Wild

Field-dressing a bison is long work, and while the others set to it I walked the riverbank a little way, reading the water because I couldn't help reading the water. It ran high and fast, brown with churned silt, choked with slabs of rotten ice the colour of old bone that ground downstream and took chunks of the bank with them as they went. Meltwater, and weeks of it still to come before the high country gave up its winter. A man crossed this at his peril, and a man crossed it strung out and burdened at the peril of everyone he led.

Dev came to stand near me, favouring his mending leg, his breath clouding. He'd taken to seeking me out, the small dark carrier with the wry mouth, though we shared perhaps thirty words between his tongue and mine and made the rest up with our hands.

He nodded at the river and said something I didn't catch the shape of. Then he pointed downstream, then east, and made a gesture I'd learned meant Nathan, a flat, cutting motion, the man who decided things.

"The crossing, east, it's bad," I managed, in the handful of his words I had, and jerked my chin at the churning water to carry what the words couldn't.

"Bad," Dev agreed, and the weight he put on the one word carried further than any speech. Then he did a thing he did sometimes, pressing his own chest with his spread hand and then the air in Ellie's direction, and his face when he did it had gone grave. It had taken me a while to understand him. He carried something inside him, he and Ellie both, some weight the mission needed that he was frightened of spending. He held up his cupped hands as if they cradled water, then slowly turned them, letting the imagined water run out between his fingers,and shook his head hard.It's not enough, and if it runs out, there's no getting it back.

"Not enough," I echoed, to show I'd understood. He nodded, grim, then clapped my arm and limped back toward the butchering.

I didn't fully grasp what they carried. I grasped that it couldn't be replaced, and that Dev lay awake over whether they had all of it they'd need, and that a woman who held something irreplaceable inside her had no business being marched across a river that wanted to pull her under. That much I understood in my marrow.

By the time we'd loaded the meat and started back, the light was going amber and long. The smoke of the camp threaded up through the trees ahead, and beyond it, off to the east where the land dropped away, the pale broad scar of the crossing Nathan had chosen. Even from here I could read it wrong; the banks slumped and undercut. The current shouldered ice through the narrows hard enough to take a body's legs before the cold had finished stealing the wits.

Ellie came up beside me, following my line of sight, and her face set.

"He won't wait, will he?" she said, in the tone of a woman who already had her answer.

"No." I shifted the weight of meat across my back. "His kind never waits. He's decided, so it's already true to him, and the water's just a thing to be got through." I looked down at her. "You told him to wait for me."

"For all the good it did." She pulled her furs tighter against the failing warmth of the day, and something crossed her face, a flicker of that same nameless pull from the hunt, quickly smothered. "Rivik, that crossing tomorrow, tell me honestly what you make of it."

I could have softened it; I'd softened harder truths for gentler reasons. But she'd earned honesty over the winter, in blood and cold and the learning of a hundred small skills, and I'd not insult her with less.

"If we go careful, one at a time, roped, keeping to the shallowest reach, most of us make it across," I said, and let the wordmostsit between us, because neither of us was going to pretend it was a good word. "But it's the wrong crossing. Nathan chose it because it runs straight, not because it runs safe, and I've buried men who died of a leader mistaking those two things for each other."

She let that sit while, downstream, the river ground its ice through the narrows, patient as anything that's certain of winning.

"Then we make him do it carefully," she said at last. "Wisdom may be beyond the available materials."

I came close to smiling at that. She'd have made an alpha, this one, in another life, in a body the pack would have followed. As it was she'd have to lead the only way the world had left her, sideways, quietly, moving the men who thought they moved themselves.

We walked the last stretch to camp in the dark, and I let her voice run over the plan for the morning, and I didn't tell her that every instinct I owned was screaming that we shouldn't cross here at all. There'd be no unmaking Nathan's mind tonight. And the coal under my ribs, which cared nothing for rivers or crossings or the fate of the mission, burned only with the fact of her walking at my side in the dark, close enough to touch, and further from me than the far bank of any water in the world.

Chapter 3

ELLIE

The river was worse in the morning light than it had looked at dusk, and at dusk it had looked like something that wanted us dead.

We stood on the near bank in the grey before proper sunup, the six of us and the three Hanging Rock men who'd see us across before turning for home, and I made myself look at the water as Rivik had taught me to, not as a horror, but as a thing to be read. I was afraid of it, but fear wasn't the useful thing to feel; what mattered was reading it as a set of problems that had answers. The shallowest reach ran wide and braided here, split around a long shingle bar so the crossing came in two stages instead of one killing rush. Slabs of rotten ice shouldered down the main channel and broke apart against the bar with a sound like the world clearing its throat. The far bank rose low and slumped, undercut by the melt, fringed with willow scrub that hid whatever lay behind it.

Answers,I told myself.It's just a set of problems with answers, and Rivik has the answers, and you trust Rivik.

I did trust Rivik; that was the strange thing, the thing I hadn't examined too closely because examining it led somewhere I wasn't ready to go. Somewhere over the winter I'd started reaching for him without deciding to, the reflex of a falling body grabbing for a handhold, and it made no sense, Daska was my mate, my bonded, the warm sure centre of everything I'd let myself become. The pull toward Rivik came from nowhere I could name and shamed me every time it surfaced, because a woman who already had more than she deserved had no business wanting more, and because I knew exactly what it was to be wanted by a man who couldn't say so and I would not do that to Daska.

Later,I told the pull, as I told it every day.Not now, and preferably not ever.

Nathan was already directing things, of course. He'd rigged a line from the spare sinew rope, and he stood at the water's edge with it looped over one shoulder, laying out the order of crossing in the clipped tone of a man reading from a plan only he could see. Dev first with two of the wolf-men, his mending leg making him the slowest and therefore the one to get over while everyone was freshest. Megan would follow, then the gear, and the rest of us last.

"You're putting Dev in the water first," I said. "With the bad leg. In the fastest water of the day, before the sun's had a chance to slow the melt."

"I'm putting him over while we've got the most hands to catch him." Nathan didn't look up from the rope. "The melt doesn't slow till afternoon and I'm not burning the whole morning here. You want to be useful, translate, tell your bear and the others the order, and tell them to keep their mouths shut and their feet under them."

Your bear.I felt the old flinch start and killed it before it reached my face. He did it to needle me, the possessive, and the trick of it was that the word landed on the wrong nerve entirely, because Daskawasmine, the one thing in twenty-five thousand years and a whole lifetime before that had ever been unarguably mine, and I'd have worn the word openly if Nathan hadn't meant it as a leash. I translated for the others, leaving out the parts designed to wound, and Daska listened with that steady attention of his and then met my eyes across the little space between us, a question in them;All right?He always asked. He'd spent a winter learning the weather of my face as closely as he read the weather of the sky, and it still caught me somewhere unguarded, being read by someone who only wanted to know where it hurt so he could mend it. I gave him the smallest nod, because this wasn't the fight worth having, not here with the water waiting and everyone's life about to be strung out across it on a length of sinew rope.

And still, underneath the fear, beneath the cold arithmetic of it, some traitor part of me kept returning to Rivik crouched at the water's edge, to the set of his shoulders, to how he'd read this ground days before any of us and been overruled for it.Stop,I told myself, disgusted;You're about to cross a river that could kill you and here you are mooning over a man who isn't yours to moon over. Brilliant work, Ellie, the survival instincts of a lemming and the self-restraint to match.