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“You sure about this?” Floyd asked.
“I’m sure.” Ellie took the leash from him.
“Wolf!” Alice cried out, running for them.
The wolf jumped at Alice, knocked her down.
“Are you going to bring him back?” Floyd asked, watching the pair play on the icy grass.
“I don’t think so. He belongs in the wild.”
Floyd’s gaze landed on Alice. “I wonder if he’s the only one.” Then he walked back to his truck and drove away.
Ellie looked down at her watch, then went to her sister, who stood alone now, staring into the forest. “It’s time.”
Julia closed her eyes for a moment and drew in a deep breath. Releasing it, she went to Alice and knelt down. “We need to go now, Alice.”
Alice pointed to the muzzle and the leash. “Bad. Trap. Smelly.”
Ellie exchanged a worried look with her sister. Last night they’d decided to use the wolf to help Alice find her way back to her old life. It had seemed less dangerous in the abstract.
“She needs him,” Julia said.
“Okay, but I’ve got to keep the muzzle on.” Ellie bent down and unhooked the leash. The wolf immediately nuzzled up against Alice.
“Cave, Wolf,” the girl whispered, and off they went, the two of them, toward the woods.
“Tell me that’s not a damned wolf,” George said, coming up to Ellie.
“Let’s go,” was Ellie’s answer.
By the time the sun crested the trees, they were so far from town that the only noise was their footsteps, crunching through the underbrush, and the silvery bells of the river rushing alongside them.
No one had spoken in more than an hour. In a ragged formation, with Julia and Alice and the wolf in the lead, they kept moving, deeper and deeper into the woods.
The trees grew denser here, and taller, their heavy boughs blocking out most of the light. Every now and then sunlight slanted through to the forest floor; it looked solid, that light, so dappled with motes that you weren’t entirely sure you could walk through it.
And still they went on, toward the heart of this old-growth forest, where the ground was spongy and always damp, where club mosses hung from leafless branches like ghostly sleeves. A pale gray mist clung to the ground, swallowing them all from the knees down.
Around noon they stopped in a tiny clearing for lunch.
Ellie didn’t know about everyone else, but she was uneasy out here. They seemed so small, this band of theirs; it would be too easy to make a wrong turn and simply disappear. The only noise now was the ever constant breeze. It brushed thousands of needles overhead. They heard the rustling long before they felt the cool touch of the wind on their cheeks.
They sat in a rough circle, clustered at the base of a cedar tree so big that they could all hold hands and not make a complete circle around its trunk.
“Where are we?” George asked, stretching out one leg.
Cal unfolded his map. “Best guess? Well past the Hall of Mosses in the park. Not far from Wonderland Falls, I think. Who knows? A lot of this area isn’t surveyed.”
“Are we lost?” George asked.
“She’s not,” Ellie said, getting to her feet again. “Let’s go.”
They walked for another few hours, but it was slow going. Thick undergrowth and curtains of hanging moss blocked their way. At a clearing beneath a quartet of giant trees, they made camp for the night, pitching their Day-Glo orange pup tents around the fire.
All the while, as they set up camp and cooked their supper from cans, no one said much of anything. By nightfall the sounds of the forest were overwhelming. There was endless scurrying and dropping and cawing. Only Alice and her wolf seemed at ease. Here, in all this green murkiness, Alice moved easier, walked taller. It gave them all a glimpse of who she would someday become, when she felt at home in the world of people.
Long after everyone else had gone to bed, Ellie stayed up. Sitting by the river’s edge, she stared out at the black woods, wondering how Alice had made this trek alone.
