“The dogs okay?” Peyton stood at the potbellied stove, shoving in a few of the logs they’d split earlier. She wore her snow pants and a white turtleneck, her curly black hair pulled back in a harsh ponytail, a white wool headband over her ears.

Echo’s gaze crept over her sleeping team. Tucked away in the snow, the dogs had been fed, their feet checked, and now they slumbered in peace as the night kaleidoscoped around them. It had stopped snowing, the storm having passed over them, but a terrible wind howled through the trees.

Not a great night to be out in the rough.

She went inside.

From his place on the floor, Granite whined, but she held out her hand. She knew he wanted to be outside, but she worried for him. He seemed depleted after today’s run, and rightly so. He might be her lead, but he wasn’t the strongest dog in the pack anymore. Soon she’d have to retire Granite and move Maverick to the front.

Besides, she liked having Granite in with her to alert if something threatened her dogs.

“The wind is really whipping up.” Peyton stirred the pot of hydrated stew on the stove. “And it’s getting cold.”

“Maybe our last big freeze,” Echo said as she shut the door. “The wind will die down by morning—it’s just the tail end of the storm. You kids from the Lower 48 are such cake-eaters.”

Peyton laughed. Never mind that she’d grown up in the bush just south of Copper Mountain. “Going to university in Seattle doesn’t classify me as a cheechako.”

Echo walked over to the table and picked up her new Nikon D500. She scrolled through the photos on her viewfinder. “I’m glad we stayed until dark. You should see these shots of that grizzly tearing into the moose kill the wolves brought down.”

They’d spent the morning checking on Peyton’s wildlife cameras, the ones she’d set up to capture the mating and den habits of a pack of wolves she tagged a few years back. The pack had returned to the same den for the past three years, and Peyton’s study focused on the long-term mating patterns of two wolves in particular named Sheila and Hugh.

They spent the rest of the day sitting on a snowbank above a riverbed, watching the wolves—Hugh and his two underlings—take down a thin bull moose. The battle ensued for an hour, and she’d caught most of it on film, both video and in photos.

“I have a great shot of Hugh standing on that outcropping, watching the other two wolves eat.” He was black, with a strange, yellowish streak behind each shoulder, as if he might have wings. She zoomed in. “Did you know he has a wound over his shoulder? It looks healed, but the hair around it is rusty and white.”