She tucked the stuffed animal back in the box, closed the closet doors, and reached for the journal.
You were always an optimist, Mother. You always thought things worked out for the best. You even told me that the day before you died.
Maybe you were right. Things do have a strange sort of pattern. I found my profession after I lost you and Granddad and everyone else. Now I’m in the perfect place to carry out my research, right in the middle of wolf territory. Exactly where I want to be.
She closed the journal and set it on the beside table. She retrieved her suitcases, unfolded her clothing and stacked flannel shirts and wool-lined pants neatly in the chest of drawers. There wasn’t much to put away. She’d been traveling light for years. Everything she owned was practical and comfortable. Luxury was hardly essential in her line of work.
Essentials were really all that mattered.
Alex finished in the bedroom and hesitated in the short hallway, looking around the cabin. She had everything she could possibly need here, including privacy. Privacy and quiet and her work with no disruptions. Exactly what she wanted.
Out in the living room her own few boxes waited, the equipment she’d already half unpacked and books to occupy Granddad’s empty shelves. Every book on wolves that had ever been published, including those Mother had bought her before the accident.
There were books of fairy tales, too—the ones she’d loved as a child. The ones Mother had passed down to her and Granddad had read to her so many times. All in one box, still sealed with the same tape she’d used to close them up the week after her graduation from college.
She was almost tempted to open the box again. Maybe it would be… okay to do it here. But not now. Now there was a restlessness in her that would not be denied.
She flipped back the handmade muslin curtains from the living room window and stared out at snow that stretched across the clearing in a carpet of white, marred only by the tracks of her truck along the buried gravel driveway. She needed supplies in town, but there was something else she needed more.
Something that was waiting for her. Out there.
She shivered. Crazy, Alex. Nothing will be the same. Still, there was no good reason she couldn’t begin exploring the area this afternoon—and start her search for wolf sign. It was the middle of wolf mating season in Minnesota, and there’d be a few weeks at least before she’d meet the other members of the wolf research team; time enough to get familiar with the area again.
A flash of dark motion caught her gaze, vivid against the snow. She rubbed away the condensation of her breath on the glass. There it was again—a black blur too large to be a raven.
She’d seen that shape too many times to doubt it now. It was a wolf—a lone wolf, there one instant and gone the next. Right on her own front lawn.
She opened the door and stared out toward the edge of the woods. A bold animal, to be sure, coming so close to human habitation. Even Shadow had never been anywhere near the cabin. But it meant the wolves were very near, and she’d be able to track them, study them intimately as she longed to do again. Here, in her own place, where it had all started.
Mother would have said it was proof that things were going to work out. A burst of simple happiness caught Alex unawares. Maybe it wasn’t asking too much, to let herself feel it here. Maybe…
“Hello!”
Alex started. It was no wolf this time but a person, crossing the clearing on snowshoes. North, from the direction of the reservation.
The woman was Ojibwe. Alex had seen Indians before as a child; Granddad had pointed out the rough boundary where his land butted up against the reservation’s border. Mother had played with children from the rez when she was young. But Alex had never really talked to any of them during her summers here, not even in town.
“You’re the wolf lady, aren’t you?”