Training to become a game warden, I learned that a corpse will sink before it rises, that the human body loses buoyancy after our last breath leaves us. Half-dead, I float. With almost no help from my dangling arms and legs, I rise toward the surface, only to knock my skull against the drifting ice. I have been carried past the hole made by the Jeep.

All day, I’d been following the half-frozen Androscoggin, observing the wide river with no expectation of having to rescue myself from it. I recall stretches of open water disappearing and reappearing from beneath vast silvery sheets of ice. I recall steam rising, because the air is so much colder, through the ragged gaps.

I’m trapped and out of oxygen and caught by the current.

Swept along by the river, I repeatedly bump my head against the impenetrable ceiling. Even if I had the strength to scramble along, feeling for a hole to admit me into the December night, I probably wouldn’t find one.

This is the way it ends for me, I think.

Maybe Shadow found his way out. It makes it easier to believe he did.

My eyes close.

My bobbing skull strikes the ice again, bounces off, rises one last time. And somehow my face has found its way above the surface. I choke out river water, take the biggest breath I have ever taken, and look up at snowflakes blowing like feathers across the sky.

2

Early that morning, my best friend brought his daughter to my house to see the wolf.

Billy Cronk lived with his large family in a small house down the road from mine, in Ducktrap Village. I had asked him to help me load the crate into my Jeep because it was a two-man job. I had also wanted to ask his advice about a sensitive personal matter. He had surprised me by bringing along little Emma.

When I’d first met Billy years ago in the black forest of Down East Maine, I was convinced I’d run into a lost descendant of the Norsemen who had briefly invaded North America during the time of Leif Eriksson. He stood six feet five inches tall with a golden beard and blond braids. And he possessed some of the weirdest eyes I’d ever seen in a person—the disquieting ice blue of a sled dog. That day like most days, he’d worn a hunting knife in a sheath on his belt that could have served most people as a machete.