We climb the ridge in silence, the only sound the crunch of our snowshoes and the rhythmic huff of our breath. Nash stops at the crest, dropping low to a crouch behind a screen of dwarf willow. He motions for me to join him.
I crawl up beside him, ignoring the cold seeping through my pants. We are shoulder to shoulder, close enough that I can see the individual snowflakes caught in the fur of his parka hood.
"Valley floor," he whispers, his voice a vibration I feel more than hear. "Eleven o'clock. By the frozen stream."
I raise my binoculars, my hands shaking slightly. I focus the lenses, scanning the white expanse.
Nothing. Just snow, trees, shadows.
"Look for the color difference," Nash murmurs, leaning closer. His hand comes up, pointing, and his arm brushes mine. "Caribou winter coats are lighter, almost white, but their legs are dark. Look for the vertical lines."
And then I see it.
Something moves. A ghost detaches itself from the tree line. Then another. And another.
A group of five animals moves slowly along the creek bed, their heads low as they shovel snow with their massive hooves to reach the vegetation beneath.
"Is it them?" Nash asks.
I hold my breath, adjusting the focus until the lead animal fills my view.
He's magnificent. Even from this distance, his size is imposing, a tank of an animal with a chest like a barrel and a neck thick with winter muscle. But it's the antlers that stop my heart.
They are massive, sweeping back and up in a chaotic, beautiful architecture of bone. But the defining feature, the one Thaddeus noted in his field journals three years ago, the one I've memorized from grainy trail cam photos, is the left brow tine. It's deformed, curving sharply downward like a hook instead of shoveling forward.
"The brow tine," I whisper, my voice choking. "The left one. It hooks down."
Nash raises his own binoculars. A long silence stretches between us, heavy with three years of searching.
"I see it," he says softly. "Distinctive hook. Heavy palmation on the right side."
"That's him," I say, and I'm crying. I don't even realize it until the tears freeze on my cheeks. "That's Waldo."
I lower the binoculars, turning to Nash. I expect him to be impassive, professional. The guide who got the client to the target.
But he's grinning.
It's real, a blinding, boyish expression that crinkles the corners of his eyes and remakes his entire face, nothing like his usual charming, client-managing grin.
"You found him, Aris," he says.
"We found him."
"No." He shakes his head, lowering his glasses. His hazel eyes lock onto mine, intense and warm. "You did. You tracked a ghost across five hundred miles of wilderness on a hunch and a promise. I just drove the sled."
The validation hits me harder than the cold. After a last year of fighting to keep this project breathing, of being dismissed by the department as sentimental, of doubting my own sanity, here is this man, this hunter, looking at me with absolute, unadulterated respect.
"I …" My voice fails.
Impulsively, driven by the adrenaline and the overwhelming relief, I reach out and grab his arm. "Thank you. I couldn't have … I wouldn't be here without you."
Nash looks down at my hand on his arm, then back up to my face. The air between us pulls taut, an electric tension that has nothing to do with caribou.
"You're freezing," he says, but he doesn't pull away. Instead, he covers my gloved hand with his own. His hand is huge, warm, engulfing mine. "Let's get the data. Then we celebrate."
He turns to the valley, but the moment lingers, a physical sensation on my skin.
We spend the next hour in a fever of productivity. I set up the spotting scope, while Nash helps me calibrate the telemetry equipment. We're too far to dart him today. The wind is wrong,and we need to study the herd dynamics before risking a capture attempt, but we can get the baseline data we need.
