Augustine ran his mittened hands over the sleek machines. The keys were still slotted into the ignitions. He turned the nearest one to the On position and pulled out the choke, then gave the start cord a pull. The engine made a halfhearted groan but didn’t catch. Augustine kept pulling the cord, as hard as he could, until finally the engine turned over and the pistons started pumping on their own. Oily smoke billowed from underneath the hood, and the engine settled into a hesitant but steady beat. The smoke thinned and Augie gave the machine an affectionate pat on its shiny black haunch. There wasn’t anywhere in particular he wanted to go, but it was good to have an engine at his command. Perhaps they would ride back to the observatory. Augie grinned at the idea and wondered if Iris’s limbs were long enough to ride the other one, but when he saw her, he immediately forgot about the snowmobiles. The cold engine sputtered and died, and he barely heard it.
There was another shape on the runway. Augie squinted to make out its silhouette against the luminous blue of the snow in the fading light. It was on four legs, a grayish-white color that almost disappeared into the background. If Iris hadn’t been so entranced by it, Augie might not even have noticed. Iris moved toward the figure, scooting along the thin metal poles of the fallen staircase and cooing, singing that strange, guttural song he had grown accustomed to. The figure cocked its head. It was a wolf.
Without pausing to think, Augustine swung the rifle down from his back. The thick canvas of the strap buzzed against the windproof material of his parka, and he froze. The wolf swung its head toward him and growled, the scant light bouncing off its eyes, making them shine like marbles. The wolf took a step closer to the hangar. Augustine held his breath and waited. Iris was creeping closer and closer along the length of the staircase, reaching out her hand to stroke its fur. The wolf sat down in the snow and watched her, pawing the ground and pricking its rounded ears at the sound of her voice. Augie slipped off his mittens and flexed his fingers in anticipation. He hadn’t fired a gun since he was a teenager, hunting with his father in the woods near their house in Michigan. The two of them would wait in silence, father and son, and when the moment was right and something found its way into their crosshairs, they would aim their guns and squeeze. Augustine hated every minute of those trips.
He lifted the rifle and rested the butt of it against his shoulder. He found the wolf in the scope and trained the crosshairs on its shaggy head. Iris was still creeping closer and closer, shedding her mittens and outstretching her hands, making soft, sweet noises. Just as his finger found the trigger, the wolf moved. It threw back its head and howled, a mournful, lonely sound, then took another step closer to Iris. Augustine corrected his aim, the wolf stood up on its hind legs, raising its snout toward Iris’s tiny palm, and he pulled the trigger.
THE SOUND OF the shot must have echoed over the mountain range, bouncing from peak to peak, reverberating in the valleys, but Augie didn’t hear it. Everything was silent as he watched the wolf’s head snap back, the fine mist of red that fell on the snow as its body hung in midair, then collapsed onto the ground in a crumpled heap. When it was over, all he could hear was Iris screaming.
He loped toward her, the glowing flashlight forgotten on the seat of the stalled snowmobile. Iris had tumbled down from where she had been balancing on the stairs and landed face-first on the snowy runway. White powder clung to her hair and eyelashes, her nose and cheeks red from the cold, and she was still screaming. She threw herself on the body of the wolf, burying her tiny hands in its white fur. Augie struggled to move fast enough. He didn’t have the breath to call to her, the weight of the rifle slapping the leftover air from his lungs with each awkward stride. When he finally reached her he saw that the wolf was still alive, but just barely. He had caught it in the neck. As the blood soaked into the snow, the shallow heave of its belly slowed. Augie reached out to pull Iris away from the dying creature and he saw that it was washing the tears and the snow from her face with its lolling pink tongue, as a mother might do to her cubs.
The wolf’s blood was on Iris’s face, in her hair, and on her hands, but she didn’t seem to notice. The animal drew a few more ragged breaths, then expired, its hot tongue collapsing in its mouth, the gleam of its eyes clouding into darkness. The wind stirred the snow around them and sent the shards of ice sideways like a million tiny razors. Augie put his hand on Iris’s tiny, shuddering back. She let him keep it there, but she wouldn’t release the dead wolf’s fur, nor would she stop her low, keening moan. She kept her fingers knotted in its warm, shaggy coat as the snow stung their exposed skin.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought—” but he couldn’t finish. He tried again. “I thought—”
But he hadn’t thought. He had identified a target before thinking anything at all. And he knew, with a sinking burn in his gut, that he would do it again. He told himself it was to protect Iris. To keep her safe from the danger that lurked all around them. And perhaps that was true—wolves are not harmless creatures, after all—but there was something else. A primal taste, sour, like fear, rising in the back of his throat, or maybe loneliness. He looked up to the stars, waiting for them to dwarf the immensity of emotion welling inside of him, as they had so many times before. But it didn’t work this time. He felt everything, and the stars winked down on him: cold, bright, distant, unfeeling. He was filled with an urge to pack his suitcase and move on. But of course there was nowhere else to go. He stayed where he was, still looking up, still with his hand on Iris’s back, and he felt—for the first time in so many years, he felt: helpless, lonely, afraid. If the tears hadn’t frozen in the corners of his eyes, he might have cried.
THE FLASHLIGHT WAS lost, burned out and left in the dark hangar somewhere, so they made their way back toward the observatory in the dark, following the hulking black shadow of its dome set in relief against a starlit sky. Augustine had lost his ski pole as well, and he moved slowly without its support, his joints exploding in pain with each step. He shifted the rifle to the other shoulder. He wished he had left it on the runway. Wished he hadn’t thought to bring it at all. His spine and shoulder were bruised from where the heavy barrel had been knocking against him and his chest ached from the recoil.