The black trees stood up in random directions, at angles to the earth. The ground rose in sharp hillocks and sudden crevasses that hid glinting ice. Chey’s feet kept catching on exposed roots and broken rocks. She could barely walk any farther, not after days of this with nothing to eat but energy bars, no real sleep, no shelter except the fleece lining of her torn parka.

Between two of the trees a pair of yellow eyes flickered into glowing life. They caught the fish belly-white moonlight and speared her with it. Froze her in place. Slowly, languorously, they closed again and were gone, like embers flickering out at the bottom of a dead campfire.

“Oh, shit,” she breathed, and scratched at her prickling armpits. Slowly she turned around in a circle. Were there more of them? Was there a pack nearby?

She heard them howl then. She’d heard dogs howl at the moon before but not like this. The howling went on and on and on with new voices jumping in and following, a sound almost mournful in tone. They were talking amongst themselves and she figured they were telling each other where to find her.

She lacked the energy to go another step. Her face contracted in a grimace of real terror. Then she dug deeper inside of herself, deeper than she’d ever been before, and she ran.

The trees flashed by her, leaning to the left, the right. The gnarled ground tore at her feet, made her ankles ache and burn. She kept her arms up in front of her—despite the half-full moon she could barely see anything, and could easily collide face-first with a tree trunk and snap her neck. She knew it was foolish, knew that running was the worst thing she could do. It was the only thing she could do.

To her left she saw flickering gold. The eyes again. Was it the same animal? She couldn’t tell. The eyes bounded along side her, easily keeping up with her pace. The eyes weren’t expending any effort at all. The feet that belonged to those eyes knew this rough land by instinct, could find the perfect footing without even looking. The Arctic belonged to those eyes, those feet. Not to human weakness.

To her right she heard a wolf panting. More than one of them over there, too. It was a pack, a whole pack and they were testing her. Seeing how fast she could run, how strong she was.

She couldn’t compete with them in their own environment. Nature, red in tooth and claw, was going to beat her. She was going to die here, as far from civilization as anyone could ever be. She was going to die.

No. Not quite yet.

Evolution had given her certain advantages. It had given her hands. Her distant ancestors had used those hands to climb, to escape from predators. She needed to unlearn two million years of civilization in a hurry. Ahead of her a tree stood up from the leaning forest, a big half-dead paper birch with thick limbs starting two meters off the ground. It rose five meters taller than anything around it. She steeled herself, clenched and unclenched her hands a few times, then dashed right at it, her aching feet catching on the loose bark that pulled away like sloughing skin. Her hands reached up and grabbed at thin branches that couldn’t possibly hold her weight, twigs really. She shoved herself up the tree, a wave of ripped bark and crystalline snow boiling across her face, her mouth. Suddenly she was holding on to a thick branch three meters above the earth. She pulled herself up onto it, grabbed it with her whole body.

Looked down.

At the bottom six adult wolves stood staring back up at her. Their golden eyes were placid and content. She could almost see laughter there. Their long sleek bodies gleamed in the half-light. They had their tails up and wagging.

“Go away,” she pleaded, but their leader, a big animal with a shaggy face, leaned backward, stretching out his forelimbs, and sank to lie down on the carpet of musty pine needles and old brown leaves. He wasn’t going anywhere.

One of the others, slightly smaller, raked at the birch tree with its claws. The wolf’s tongue hung out of its mouth as it reached higher and higher. It opened its mouth wide as if yawning and let out a devilish screech that elongated into a full-blown howl. The others added their voices until Chey vibrated on her perch, feeling as if they could shake her out of her refuge with nothing more than their yowling.

From deep in the forest another call came. Instantly the wolves were up and looking from side to side. Their tails went down and they glanced at each other as if to ask if they had all heard it. They all had.

The new call came again. It was unlike the sad moaning of the wolves. It was more wicked, more chilling. It was hateful.

The wolves beneath Chey’s branch scattered, disappearing into the darkness as if they’d been candles and they’d been snuffed out. The new cry came a third time, then, but from much, much closer by.