"Because you have the data. You have the photos. You have the GPS tracks. You have proof that Waldo is doing exactly what Thaddeus said he was doing."
I hold her gaze, steady and level. "Let Reynolds pull the plug. Let him freeze the account. When you walk into his office and drop a hard drive on his desk with the most significant caribou behavioral data of the decade, he's going to look like a moron for firing you."
"You think?" she asks, a tiny glimmer of hope sparking in the misery.
"I know. Universities like money, right? And prestige?"
"They love prestige."
"Well, you're bringing them a gold mine. 'The Thorne-Brine Discovery.' You think he's going to throw that away because you missed a phone call?"
She takes a sip of the coffee, considering. "Thorne-Brine. I like that order."
"See? You're already branding it."
She lets out a shaky breath, the tension in her shoulders dropping an inch. "I just … I hate the feeling of them waiting. Of him sitting in his office, checking his watch, marking a red X next to my name. It feels like I'm failing."
"That's the trap," I say quietly. "That's how they keep you on the leash. They make you think the paperwork is the work. It's not."
I gesture to the frozen river, the endless spruce forest, the mountains rising in the distance. "This is the work, Aris.Tracking the animal. Surviving the cold. Solving the problem with a shovel when the tech fails. That's the job. The rest is just noise."
She looks at the landscape, really seeing it. "Thaddeus used to say that. 'The map is not the territory.'"
"Smart man. He'd probably tell Reynolds to shove his check-in schedule up his?—"
"Nash!" She laughs, startled.
"Just saying. Thaddeus sounds like my kind of guy."
Her face opens up, and the knot in my chest loosens. "He would have loved you. He would have hated your politics, probably, and he would have lectured you about lead ammunition, but he would have loved you."
"I use copper," I say. "Better for the scavengers."
"Of course you do." She shakes her head, looking at me with that expression that makes me want to do stupid, reckless things. "You always have the right answer, don't you?"
"I'm a guide," I say, standing up. "My job is to look like I know what I'm doing, even when I'm making it up."
She stands up too, finishing the coffee. "So what's the plan, Guide? We have no sat phone. We have limited power. And we have a wolf pack somewhere behind us.
"We can't do the full mission, can we?" she asks. "Without the generator. Without the sat phone to call in the airlift. Without the batteries we lost. Even with the darts, I can't safely immobilize a seven-hundred-pound caribou alone—not without a recovery team on standby. We can't do the capture. We can't put a new collar on him."
I don't answer right away. I let her work through it.
"So what can we do?"
"The plan just got smaller," I say. "We find Waldo. We trigger the release. You take home the year of stored data on theold unit. Waldo runs free. And you come back next season with a full team to finish what Thaddeus started."
"Without checking in?"
"Without asking for permission."
She nods slowly. "Okay. Without asking for permission."
"But first," I say, pointing to the solar array. "We need to wait for those batteries. We can't release his old collar if the trigger doesn't have full juice. If it fails, the collar stays on forever. We can't risk that."
"So we're stuck here today?"
"We're holding position. We can do some recon on foot, check for tracks, but we need to let the sun do its work."
