PRINCE OF WOLVES By Susan Krinard

Her brooding thoughts were interrupted by a pale flash of movement among the trees at the foot of the slope below. It wasn’t a deer—that much she was sure of—but it wasn’t something immediately recognizable to her unpracticed eye. She reached down to the binoculars at her belt. Fixing the location of the elusive shape in her mind, Joey unhooked them and focused on the blue-green blur of trees that marked the lower boundary of the meadow.

Close up, the details leaped to life in her vision: individual Douglas fir, spruce, and pine with a scattered understory of shrubs and brush. She almost passed over the pale shape the first time she caught it in her sights, hurriedly readjusting until she had it in focus again. Her breath tangled in her throat.

A wolf—a great gray timber wolf—stood absolutely still in the half-concealment of a larchberry bush. Joey’s hands tightened on the binoculars to steady them. Her first wolf. All this time in the mountains and she’d never seen one, though she’d heard them in the summer nights, shivering in spite of herself at their eerie chorus. She knew they were elusive, uncommon even in protected areas. But to see one here, alone, in broad daylight…

Joey studied the wolf intently. It was huge—even from this distance, she could tell that—and its coat was lush and heavy, pale on the belly and legs, shot with silver and gray and black across the back and masking the face. The triangular ears were alert, the bushy tail slightly raised. It seemed to be watching, or waiting. For prey, perhaps? Joey moved the binoculars to get a clearer look at the pale, tilted eyes. She nearly dropped them in astonishment. The wolf seemed to be staring straight at her.

Fascinated, Joey stared back. She knew it was impossible that the wolf could be looking directly at her through the binocular lenses, but the sensation persisted, all logic to the contrary. Perhaps it simply sensed her presence with the uncanny ability wild animals have. That seemed reasonable, but Joey wasn’t feeling very reasonable at the moment. Those eyes—pale and slanted and oddly intelligent—had a very strange effect. She almost got the feeling that the wolf not only saw her but was studying her in turn. The longer she looked, the stronger the peculiar feeling grew. Those eyes…

It took a long moment for Joey to realize she had been lost in that wild stare for a frightening length of time. Unnerved, she dropped the binoculars. She blinked as her eyes adjusted, and without intending to, she found herself searching the forest edge again for the pale shape of the wolf. For an instant she caught sight of it, its head still raised as if to watch her. And then it moved, disappearing silently between one blink and the next.

Joey bit her lip and hooked the binoculars back to her belt. She realized her back and arms were taut with tension. True, it was the first time she’d ever seen a wild wolf, but that was no reason to get quite so worked up. She knew healthy wolves weren’t dangerous to people, and that wolf had certainly kept its distance.

But she couldn’t quite shake the weird intensity of the wolf’s gaze, or the bizarre way she’d almost gotten lost in it. There was something in this mountain air and ancient wilderness that made a person feel not quite earthbound. But such flights of fancy were useless to her and could only distract her from her purpose.

Joey flipped her braid over one shoulder with an irritated toss of her head. She’d just have to make doubly sure from now on that she didn’t let this countryside hypnotize her into complacency—or turn on her with the treachery it had shown her parents.

Sighing deeply, Joey lay back and stretched out into the bed of grass and flowers, allowing the soft scent of crushed blossoms to soothe her. She concentrated on the distant chatter of birds from the trees at the meadow’s edge, the soft soughing of a breeze through the fir and spruce, drifts of air idly teasing the pale hair that had escaped her braid. She smiled experimentally into the sun, eyes squeezed shut, and decided to live for the moment—at least for a few minutes.

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