She let Barry’s words drift through her head and stir up that long hour she’d sat in the snow with her dogs after the grizzly attack, trying to doctor the wounds of the two dogs who’d lived, crying over her dad, huddling with the animals, as scared as she was, as the shadows fell.

The bear’s body had lain just a few feet away, and she’d kept her eyes on it, afraid it might suddenly shudder to life.

She’d finally heard the Sky King plane rumbling overhead, but it passed her three times before it touched down in a field nearby.

And then, somehow, Dodge was there, dropping to his knees in front of her. Grabbing her up to hold her as she wept.

“My point is that we found you. Practically a miracle.”

Or just desperate luck.

She and the team now came out of the woods, and the trail fell down the ridge, opening into a valley below, another tributary of the river, although larger. The great Cache Mountain range rose in the distance.

She yipped to the dogs as they ran, following the snow machine tread toward the vast riverbed.

In the distance, she spotted an eagle, who soared low then landed on a brown mass on the ground. It scared away what looked like a wolverine, which clawed at it. The eagle took to the air again, a piece of meat in its beak.

Echo slowed the dogs, then pulled out a monocular.

A moose lay dead on a hillside, as if it had been running to escape to the nearby woods. Brown-red blood stained the ground, the kill relatively fresh. The cavity of the body was open, animals eating at it. The snow around it had been trampled, and snow machine tracks, as well as wheel tracks, circled it.

And then she saw why—the moose antlers had been shorn from the head.

Poachers. They’d killed the moose, harvested the antlers, and left the meat to rot.

Illegal, and disgusting.

She routed her dogs into the valley, away from the kill, and ran along the river’s edge, upstream.

Maybe her dad had seen the moose and lit out after the poachers—she wouldn’t put it past him, really, and the thought turned to a fist inside her.

She headed across the great white valley carved out between sloping foothills, toward the giant V in the land where the river narrowed. Here, the wind had swept the ice clean.

She didn’t like to travel on water, especially rivers, this late in the season. The warm snap and the snow could insulate the ice and turn it brittle, creating thin ice that a team of dogs could fall through.

As they came closer to the V, she made out running water and shouted to turn the dogs away from the crusty, snowy bank.