A Season of Wolves, page 1
part #2 of Rangers of Walden Series
A SEASON
OF WOLVES
K.M. CANNON
A Season of Wolves is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
© Kristan Cannon (K.M. Cannon) 2015
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced by electronic or printed means without express written permission by the author.
Published by Studio 465 - October 2023
www.studio465.ca
www.kmcannon.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cannon, K.M., 1980-, author
The last iron horse / K.M. Cannon.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
LAC Entry Pending
Also by K.M. Cannon
The Rangers of Walden Series
Ashes in Winter
A Season of Wolves
The Last Iron Horse (forthcoming)
As Eve Morrison
The Dana McIntyre Series
Lilies for the Reaper
A Season
of Wolves
K.M. Cannon
To Uncle Steve;
The original Garrett. Live forever in print
1954-2017
Spring.
A season that meant new beginnings—fresh starts. The snow melts and reveals grass, flowers, and the beginning of planting if you’ve a mind to garden or if you farm. New life as the trees bud and grow leaves again. The days get longer, and the nights warmer.
That first spring meant everything to us.
It was definitely a new beginning.
For everything.
For us, it was a whole new world and meant forging at least a new path as a… well… back then we didn’t think we would forge the path for a whole new nation on the ashes of the old that had died during the winter that we barely had time to acknowledge its passing.
Like that raft caught in the rapids, all we could do was hold on and hope for the best.
And spring brought swift waters indeed.
It also brought the wolves to our doorstep…
—from the diary of the Regent of Walden.
Chapter One
Winter ended the same way it started.
It had been so long and cold, and the days so dark and gray that it seemed it would never end. And then, as if someone had snapped their fingers, the rain and snow vanished.
Instead, bright sunlight flooded the end of the bed that morning.
Derek’s eyes opened a crack, wincing as sunlight pulled him out of sleep, and he kicked the covers off his feet. Sucking in a breath, his eyes blinked as they adjusted. The sharp bite from the chill air that had been a constant companion through the winter was absent. The room was quiet—lacking the crackle of a fire. It was warm enough to let the fires bank back to embers instead of burning them at night.
He breathed a sigh.
That’s the one thing about using fire for heat, he thought. Sure, you’re warm, but not much good it will do you if the house burns down around you.
This, of course, meant that there were other issues to address.
When Derek descended the stairs, Marissa was already up and deep in discussion with Sheridan and Shiloh.
“The problem is that now that massive wall of snow will turn into water. It’s already losing structural integrity,” pointed out Shiloh. “The best thing would be to get up there with shovels again and scatter the snow to make it melt off faster and more evenly. While a few teams do that and dig a trench for the run-off to follow, we need to send other teams to scour the countryside for rocks and logs to build the permanent wall.”
“How fast will we need to do this?” asked Sheridan.
Derek stopped mid-step as the problem at hand sunk in fully. The problem was all this work needed to be done by hand rather than with heavy equipment. While many hands make light work, as that old saying goes, he thought. How many will we need? Who can we send?
“As soon as possible,” answered Shiloh. “Once the snow melts, it’ll be like a sudden cascade of failures in its structure. We will soon have an open road and a weak northern perimeter.”
“The ground is still frozen,” pointed out Derek as he walked up to them, accepting a coffee, or a coffee substitute, from Lorraine. “That will make digging anything extremely difficult.”
“We’re going to need some real digging equipment,” said Shiloh, with a short barking laugh. “Considering how many mines and industries are around to support the mining, it shouldn’t be too hard. The hard part is finding the fuel and getting the equipment here.”
Derek snorted as that very thing had been at the front of his mind before being handed his coffee. He then blinked and stared at Shiloh with his head tilted. “That George fellow had pole drivers and the equipment in his shop.”
“That’s a start,” said Sheridan, and she turned to Shiloh. “I get the feeling you already have an idea of what you need to do and who is the best suited for it.”
“I do,” she answered. “I’m guessing we should get on this right now.”
Sheridan nodded, and Shiloh left the living room with a slight wave. Derek pulled in a long breath as a breeze blew through the room. In the winter, this would have caused a shiver. Now, though, he smelled only fresh but wet grass in the air, and the crisp morning air was welcome.
“I have things I need to attend to as well. I think I’ll borrow Terrence’s old drafting room, Sheri,” said Marissa, touching her husband on the shoulder as she got up and handed her cup over to Lorraine.
Sheridan sighed and nodded softly. Derek stared at Sheridan for a moment before he sat down across from her.
“How are you holding up?” asked Derek.
“I have a funeral to plan now that things are thawing out,” Sheridan answered as she returned his gaze. For the first time in weeks, he saw a shadow of the spark she had before Terrence had passed away. “The better question is, how are you doing?”
On the other hand, Derek had found his experience from his former life as a sales consultant less than helpful in this new world. No one had access to money, and so his career suddenly found itself shut out.
Thankfully, his skills as an outdoors person had literally saved him—numerous times, in fact. If he had had his sales skill only to lean on, he would have been the same as the others.
Here on the sufferance of Sheridan.
As kind as she was, it was not something he wanted. He had been raised to walk on his own two feet and earn what was given. Still, though, this was not his home. Not originally. It was now, but the house he had left behind with all his mementos and family photos may as well be on the other side of the planet. He felt bereft… like he was floundering.
How was he holding up?
On the outside, he supposed he looked like he was just fine. The reality was that he was not sure just how well he was really—truly—holding together.
“As well as can be expected,” he answered finally, not noticing as Sheridan looked not at him but past him. “Now that you have my answer… answer my question.”
“Far better than you,” Marissa answered.
Marissa had silently walked back into the room behind him, and her sudden appearance made him jump as he turned to face her. ‘‘Oh?”
“Let me see if I can sum this up. You’re homeless now, even with a roof over your head. Everything that you held dear, outside of Marissa, is unreachable. What defined you no longer can,” Sheridan said. “And yet you feel that you’re in a far better position than others simply because you were lucky to know us.”
He was quiet for a moment, then chuckled, but without any sense of humour. “Isn’t that the case?”
“No,” answered Sheridan. “Everyone here, even you, is as rare and valuable as gold. More so because you still breathe and still can make a difference. That’s the most important thing right now. You don’t know if everyone is dead. While you still breathe and live, they have a real chance of finding you. I guarantee you that out there somewhere is someone just as worried that you’re dead as you fear their deaths. That we all still live and survive is a victory, not a failure.”
She flicked her long hair over her shoulder and then squeezed his elbow. “Come on, I have just the task that will make you feel better.”
Derek looked at her sideways while remembering the trip out to the Fire Hall before following Sheridan out to the barn.
“Speaking of that funeral you have to plan,” he pressed. Sheridan sighed and continued walking toward the barn. “Oh no, you are not getting off that easy. Deflecting the attention back to me isn’t going to work.”
He jogged to catch up and darted through the doors into the barn. The main barn was the closest, even if not the largest, and held Sheridan’s prized personal stock of Friesians.
One of these horses was the prize of the entire ranch—and the horse he had ridden while leading Cecelie on a chase through the woods before taking off on her in the winter—and his eye went to the tall mare as she was exercised in the indoor ring. Living work of art, he thought. And I’m no horse expert, but even I can see it.
* * * * *
Gina knew she was in trouble when her quinsy—the shelter she had built herself over the winter out of piled snow left to harden before burrowing into it—began to melt an
A week later, her old camp was under a foot of water. She rested above a rocky crag blasted barren by wind and blackened from old damage from the smelter where trees and grass had not quite regrown.
Her new camp was colder, thanks to the wind, but with the changing season, she could live with that.
It just happened this day that she had left the camp and what she could carry on without being weighed down by it all, to find food.
The day was beautiful and warm for once. The sun warmed her back and head, and she could breathe without the air sending icy needles into her lungs. The smell of wet wood and swamp surrounded her, which was different from what she was used to, but it felt natural and right.
What surprised her the most was the noise. Spring in Australia was also noisy, but nothing like the chaos of birds and small rodents screeching at each other as they woke from their hibernation.
Or, it was the difference between the silence of winter just making it seem much more noisy.
Gina hopped from rock to rock, noticing where tree lines were submerged and where they would return to normal as the spring melt subsided into the dryer summer.
Like Australia, Canada had a hot, dry summer.
A water bomber had been created by Canadians for a reason—and as a firefighter, it was something not too far from her mind. But now, with the water soaking everything and the low valleys flooded into lakes instead of low grassland, it was hard to imagine anything but this as, for the third time, her foot slipped in the muck. She heard the squelch of yet another soaked foot.
She sighed, then. Not a damn thing, she thought. Everything is too wet or not grown into itself enough to eat yet. At least, nothing I’m familiar with.
Gina began the long trek back to her camp, feeling like her spirits had descended through her now-soaked boots. Her clothes, while warm and great for winter, did nothing to keep out the melted snow and water. She half crawled and half clawed her way back up to her camp.
With another sigh, she flicked her gaze to the lean-to and promptly froze.
A large, and thankfully inattentive as it hadn’t spotted her yet, black bear was rooting through her camp and making a meal of what little food she had left. She stifled the whine of frustration as everything she had was in that camp. Gina paused, thinking hard for a moment.
Bears were like crocodiles, or so she’d heard. She did not want to tangle with them as she would come out the loser—and likely its next meal. Then there would be a bear with a taste for humans and no animal control to quell the threat.
Unfortunately, her luck ran out again as the wind shifted, and the bear sniffed the air as it homed in on her. Gina slid down the incline, not caring that her landing put her knee deep in water.
The bear stopped at the top of the ridge, but Gina chose to not stop hoping to put some distance between her and the bear.
A part of her felt this was a dumb idea, but so was staying. With any luck, she could use an abandoned car or other item on the road for a weapon or shelter.
The bear didn’t take long to decide to chase her. Although she snorted at this, it stopped when it hit the water and looked down at its feet as if just as shocked as she had been at how cold the water was. Moments later, it let out a groan mixed with a yell, standing on its back feet before dropping back down.
The sound of splashing water told her everything she needed to know. When her feet hit the gravel, she ran as fast as her legs could carry her toward the shadow of a transport semi-truck in the distance, not daring to look back.
Chapter Two
His limbs, breath and even heart felt like they had been cast in ice, even as he was weightless. The water loomed below and was rushing to him too fast. All Garrett could do was brace against the impact as even water could be hard as a rock when dropped into it from a height, and High Falls definitely qualified as a great height.
The flat crack of him hitting the water as it parted around him stole his breath away. The current swept him away while he flailed his arms and legs to gain some sense of up and down.
His hand brushed against a rock, and he could push himself up. As his head broke the water’s surface, he gasped and sucked in a breath of air.
Some of the panic dissipated with that breath of air as his mind caught up with the fact that he had not only survived the fall but could now breathe—drowning not being an immediate issue but one a little further away. Not that it was still a real danger, it was, but not quite as immediate as it had been only moments before.
The cold was now the more significant threat, and if he didn’t get out of the water soon, then hypothermia would take him, and he would drown.
He had always been a strong swimmer. His family had often joked that he spent more time in the water or around it than he did on land if given half the chance to swim or go boating.
This saved him as he could control his breathing and conserve his heat and energy to cling to a chunk of wood and pull himself out of the water and onto the still solidly frozen mud. His teeth chattered as he rubbed his arms and stumbled into the woods, throwing a wary glance upriver and the still-visible dam and control house.
Once he could no longer see the dam and had climbed up and away from the rushing water below, he finally allowed himself to take a breath and pat himself down. While everything had for survival from the truck in the winter was still at the dam, he kept a few things in his pockets just in case as well as the knife he kept on his belt and another on his other leg.
I’ll need fire, he thought. I might be out of the water, but I’ll still freeze to death if I don’t dry off and get warm.
As he went, he broke off dry branches from trees until he had an arm full of kindling. Once he was sure that he was out of sight of the dam, even at night, he quickly found a small clearing still dry from the spring melt just beginning. The exposed rock was flat, and digging around it revealed sandy loam. He sighed in relief. This meant dry ground instead of swampy. He set the kindling in a jagged impression in the rock like a rough bowl and pulled his smaller knife out, striking it against the stone. He had only used this technique once in his entire life to make a fire and hadn’t been that successful.
He kept at it, careful to not hit the stone with too much force to risk the knife breaking but still enough to make sparks. Finally, the bits of dried moss, bark, and some of the insulation from his jacket started to smoke, and he blew on it, encouraging more embers as he fed it more bark. As this caught after what felt like hours, he slowly put the other bark around it, surrounding it with kindling.
He nearly cried in relief when the fire flickered to life and started to burn through the small sticks, enough for the larger kindling to burn. He fed branches that would take longer to burn as he broke a fallen tree, using the rock for leverage, into two and put the log into the fire.
He sat on the rock, holding his chilled hands over it as this log burned slowly, the fire now established and hot.
He still shivered, but not as violently. He wasn’t tired—but he was hungry.
First, you can survive without food for a bit longer but without shelter or water... I’m as good as dead, he thought. Not to mention the wet and cold clothes need to dry.
He snorted as he stripped down as much as he could. His coat, surprisingly, had already dried in the time it took to get the fire going, so he wore it as the rest of his clothes dried from where he had hung them close enough to the fire to keep warm but not so close that they would also end up part of the fire.
It didn’t take them long to dry, not with him wringing them out and constantly turning them so that each side spent the same amount of time around the fire.
He heard a snap from behind him, and the makeshift trap had fallen.
But it still moved.
He sucked in a breath and looked up at the sky, thanking whoever had been watching over him that his luck had continued to hold.
