Just yesterday, two hormone-driven twenty-year-olds had decided to have sex on one of the ski lifts. Because they were also idiots, they had the safety bar up so that when a gust of wind came along, it swept the poor pantsless girl off the lift, down thirty feet to a—luckily—soft berm of snow. She’d lived, though she’d do so with frostbite in some pretty private places. Her boyfriend, of course, hadn’t fallen, had retained his pants, and had reportedly dumped her in the hospital due to the humiliation.

The story made the news, but sex on a ski lift, stupid as it was, continued to happen at least once a season. And that wasn’t even close to the most dangerous thing to have happened this week. Yesterday he’d caught a shift at the station, covering for a fellow officer who’d been out with the flu. A burglary call had come in. An eighty-year-old man said someone was in his kitchen eating his brand new raspberry tarts. And he’d been right. There’d been someone in his kitchen eating his raspberry tarts—a 350-pound bear, roughly the size of a VW Bug, had been sitting at the guy’s bar calm as you please.

Call him jaded, but Hud usually operated from the place where he was pretty sure nothing could surprise him.

So when he skied off the lift and found a girl sitting just off-center at the top, her skis haphazardly stuck into the snow at her side, he didn’t even blink.

Or at least he assumed she was a girl. Her down jacket was sunshine yellow, her helmet cherry red. She sat with her legs pulled up to her chest, her chin on her knees, her ski boots as neon green as neon green could get, staring contemplatively at the admittedly heart-stopping view in front of her.

Hud stopped a few feet away.

She didn’t budge.

He looked around. Sharp, majestic snow-covered peaks in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vista. They were on top of the world.

And quite alone.

Not smart on her part. The weather had been particularly volatile lately. Right now it was clear as a bell and thirty degrees, but that could change in a blink. High winds were forecasted, as was another foot of snow by midnight. But even if a storm wasn’t due to move in, no one should ski alone. And especially no one should ski alone on Devil’s Face, a 2,800-foot vertical run that required technical expertise and nerves of steel. There was a low margin for error.

As in no margin for error. One little mistake was a guaranteed trip to the ER. As skilled as he was, even Hud made sure his brothers knew where he was and that his radio was in good working order.

“Hey,” he called out to the girl. “You okay?”

Nothing.