PROLOGUE
ON THE DRIFTED SNOW of a lake in the tundra a wolf lies dying. Blood splotches her trail down a bluff, out onto the lake. Her punched tracks zigzag. She lies on her side, panting, one eye open to the sky. A ski plane soars against the blue. It swoops low, a giant buzzing eagle coming to pluck the wolf away. The tundra glares brighter and brighter in the wolf’s eye until land and sky have no detail, and then a wing slides to a stop over her. Its shadow is black. The buzzing is insane now, a tiny angry blizzard, drifting snow. It stutters to silence. In the silence the wolf hears her pups of the spring, their howls yipping mournful and confused, across the land, and the distance of death.
Two humans bend over her. The larger one is dressed in down overpants. A down parka spans his barrel chest and stomach. A wolf ruff is sewn on his hood. Moosehide mittens hang from wool strings around his neck. The female beside him wears caribou mukluks with ugruk bottoms, and she too has a strip of wolf fur on her parka. She is skinny, her hair black and her face gaunt. Her eyes shift and water, and flick south to the orange horizon, impatient to climb back into the sky, to escape to lands the sun doesn’t abandon.
The man leans and touches the wolf’s eye. “She’s dead.” The eye doesn’t blink but the man wonders if she can still see out. He’s wondered about other wolves, hundreds. He scratches his throat. He pulls a down engine cover from the fuselage and toggles it over the cowling. “Long flight ahead. Don’t got room for you and this hundred-twenty-pound animal. Best skin her.” His glance runs along the skyline, and then over at the woman. He flicks open a knife. “Coupla’ more days, sun will be gone. Then the damn Darkness.” He bends and slits the wolf from front foot to elbow and across the chest.
The woman turns away, uninterested in him or his commentary. She thinks it ironic that this man named for the coldest month of the year, with a home at the northern tip of a free country, should complain about winter. She’s shivering. She jogs across the lake to keep from freezing while he skins. Her steps crunch in the snow. She hates snow. She pulls back her hood, holds her breath, listens a last time—she hopes—to the tundra.
To her surprise, she hears wolves. She sees specks, running and stopping. Young wolves, waiting for their mother. A sob catches her unaware. Her heartbeat roars in her head. She runs, back toward the dot of the ski plane, her only doorway to civilization here on a planet of wilderness, cold, and encroaching night. She hums, to keep from hearing their cries, and, instinctively, to protect the wolves from the pilot. Far away the narrow shapes turn north and run.