Evangeline watched, paralyzed, as a fourth wolf, black as Big John’s cookstove, streaked across the snow from a nearby stand of timber, its tongue lolling, its demonic yellow gaze fixed on Scully’s back.

She scrambled and groped for her voice, found it after what seemed like an eternity. “Scully!” she screamed. “Behind you!”

He whirled, sighted in on the attacking wolf, and fired. The animal flew into a series of yelping spins, head over haunches, then regained its footing and fled like a cannon shot toward the woods, leaving no trace of blood in the snow as it went. It was only frightened, then, and not wounded. Scully pulled the trigger again and, out of the corner of her eye, Evangeline saw the other three creatures splinter off in every direction, like sparks thrown from a match-tip.

Scully turned slowly to look at Evangeline, his chest rising and falling visibly as he breathed. Even from that distance, she could clearly see the blue fire blazing in his eyes.

“I thought I told you to stay inside,” he said. His voice was low, but the words reached Evangeline anyway, wafting toward her, acrid as the smell of wood smoke on a dry-cold day.

She glared at him, hugging herself against the cold, feeling sick to her stomach because she’d nearly witnessed the gruesome death of another human being. Because even in her most reckless conjectures she had never even begun to imagine the true wildness of this foreign place. “Please do not presume to give me orders!” she blustered, consumed by the effort not to sink to her knees in the hard snow, wailing and sobbing that she wanted to go home.

He stalked toward her, huffing steam like a railroad engine running unchecked along a downhill track. “I had my hands full with those damn wolves,” he snapped. “I sure as hell didn’t need some fool woman stepping in my tracks and making things worse!” Reaching her at last, he grasped her by one arm and propelled her toward the cabin. She stumbled and nearly fell, tried to jerk free and failed.

At the door, he released his hold. “I don’t want to upset that little girl in there any more than necessary,” he informed Evangeline in a raspy hiss, his nose an inch from hers. “She surely heard the shots, and she might have looked out a window in time to catch sight of those wolves. She doesn’t need to see us doing battle on top of all the rest.”

He was right, and Evangeline was more than slightly chagrined that he’d had to tell her something she should have thought of on her own.

“I was only trying to help,” she said, somewhat lamely.

Scully looked almost as grim as before, in the dooryard, when he’d first turned to confront her. “Don’t,” he said, in a clipped tone. “Help, I mean. When I need you to look out for me, Mrs. Keating, I’ll see you get proper notice of the fact!”