Chey staggered through the trees, drawn by the smell of cooking. Animals didn’t cook their food. Wolves especially didn’t cook their food. Her ankle hurt like hell and a bright light went off behind her eyes every time she stepped on that foot, but she didn’t much care. There was someone nearby, somebody human. Someone who could help her, someone who could save her.

Her bad foot got her to the edge of a clearing and then gave up, spilling her across moss and snow. She raised herself up on her arms and looked around.

The clearing was no more than ten meters across, a raised bit of earth overlooking a thin stream. A campfire had been built at its high point and a black iron skillet sat smoking in the coals, strips of what looked like back bacon glistening inside. It was enough to make her mouth water.

By the fire sat a man wearing a fur coat. No, that was giving the coat too much credit. It looked like a man covered in a pile of ragged furs, brown and grey like the colors of the forest. The man was short, maybe shorter than Chey herself.

“Hello,” she croaked, and brushed dead leaves off her face.

The man turned and Chey let out a strangled yelp. At first his face seemed featureless and raw. Then she realized he was wearing a mask. It was painted white and it had narrow flat slots where his eyes and his mouth must be. Stripes of brown paint lead upward from the eye slots.

The man reached up and pushed the mask up, onto the top of his head. Beneath his face was wide and round and very surprised. He rose from where he’d been sitting by the stream and came toward her, his furs swinging as he walked.

“Dzo,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Chey told him, shaking her head. “I don’t speak Inuit.”

“Neither do I,” he said, in English. “The nearest Eskimo is over in Nunavut, the next territory over. The people around here are Sahtu Dene nation. That’s if you want to get particular, which I normally don’t. Dzo.”

“Dzo,” she repeated, thinking it must be a traditional greeting.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

Chey squinted in frustration. Dzo must be his name, then. It sounded a little like “Joe” but just different enough to be hard for her to pronounce. Without offering her a hand up he went back to his fire and sat down. He lay food carefully in the skillet, not even looking at her. She painfully rose to her feet and then sat down on a rotten log next to his fire. The warmth it gave off flowed through her, almost painful as it thawed out her frozen joints, but welcome all the same.

For a while she just sat there, hugging her knees, glad not to be walking anymore. Dzo didn’t seem to mind her presence, though he didn’t offer her food or ask if she was okay, either. If she was going to be rescued by this guy it looked like she would have to do all the work.

“Wolves,” she said. “They nearly got me. One kind of did. There was this pack of wolves—they followed me—”

“No worries there,” he told her. “A wolf will never attack a human being. You just don’t look like their food. Most likely they were just curious.”

Her leg was proof of the opposite, she thought. But then again—it hadn’t been a normal wolf that got her, had it? She thought about trying to explain what had happened but she wasn’t sure he would believe her. “I’m still lost,” she said, finally.

“You’d kind of have to be,” he told her.

She nodded, uncertain of what he meant. “I’m in trouble,” she added. “I’m hurt.”

Dzo looked up as if he’d just realized she was talking to him. “Oh, boy,” he said. “Now you’ll forgive me, I hope. I don’t meet many new folks up here. My whatchamacallems—my social skills, are a little rusty, yeah?” He rested one fur-gloved hand on her shoulders and she almost sank into the touch, she was so glad for a little human contact after so long alone in the trees. The hand lifted away immediately, though, and then patted her shoulder two or three times. “There, there,” he said, and looked away from her again.

Was he mentally handicapped, she wondered, or just unbalanced from being alone in the woods for so long? Her immediate survival depended on this man. She was pretty close to despair. Struggling with her emotions she dragged up the story, the one she’d practiced so many times she half believed it. She used recent real events to flesh out the bare bone details. “I was heli-hiking out of Rae Lakes. It was a ‘North of 60’ adventure package, and when we were done they would fly us to Yellowknife for a spa day before we had to head back to civilization. For the first couple of days of hiking it was okay, I guess. I mean I was having fun even if it was way too cold. Then out of nowhere it went to utter hell. I got separated. From the rest of the group. I got lost.”

She closed her eyes. Clutched herself a little harder. Went on.

“I was climbing up this valley and then there was just all this water. I was carried away and my pack was—anyway, I washed up a little way downstream with no gear and no way to contact the helicopter to come pick me up. I knew they would send helicopters to look for me but this part of the world is just too big and too empty. They were never going to find me. If I wanted to live I had to walk out of there.”

Dzo nodded but he was watching his frying pan.

“I had to find other people, people who could get me back to safety. I had lost my good map in the river but I still had a brochure from the heli-hiking place with a sort of map on it. It said if I walked due north I would eventually come to a place called Echo Bay.”

That got his attention, though no necessarily in the way she’d hoped. Dzo let out a booming laugh. “Echo Bay? Why’d you want to go there, of all places?”

“It was the only town on the map,” she insisted. “It’s on the shore of Great Bear Lake, on the eastern shore—”

He held up a hand to stop her. “I know where it is, and I know you’re orienteering skills are crap, lady. You overshot your mark by a couple hundred klicks.”

“What are you talking about? It was due north of my position.” She grabbed the compass on her zipper pull and waved it at him. “I followed this every step of the way.”

“That puny thing?” He started giggling. At her. “That thing points at magnetic north,” he told her. “You wanted true north. Maybe down south where you come from nobody’s ever heard of the difference. Up this far you always have to correct when you’re using a compass. You keep following that you’ll end up in Nunavut. Wow, lady, it’s kind of a miracle you survived this long. Considering how stupid you’ve got to be.” He winced when her face darkened in anger. “Hey, hey now, I’m sorry, like I said I’m no good with people. Lucky for us both I’m better with a compass.” He laughed again and pulled a strip of something pale and greasy out of his skillet. “Here, eat this,” he said, nearly dropping it in her lap. “I’m sure you didn’t bring enough food, either.”

“Thanks,” she snarled, but she bit into it. It wasn’t meat, whatever it was—it had barely any taste at all. “What is this?” she demanded, even as she took another bite.

“It’s the inner bark of the lodgepole pine tree,” he informed her. He smiled very wide when he said, “I’m a vegetarian.”