The snow on the Great Plains always came late and left late. Only as spring drew to a close did the frost finally begin to melt into the earth, coaxing pale green shoots up through the soil — though the air remained bitterly cold.
The grasslands stretched endlessly in every direction. At dusk, the sun dropped straight below the horizon like a stone falling into still water, and with it, the warmth and harmony of daylight vanished. Darkness rolled in, and the long, treacherous night began.
Ada Clara sat on a boulder, jabbing frantically at her phone screen as she tried to place call after call. The signal flickered and died, flickered and died — dozens of attempts, not a single one connected.
Two short chimes rang out. Fifteen seconds until shutdown.
She let the phone fall and collapsed onto the ground, staring blankly at the darkening sky. I could die out here and no one would even know. She had only meant to photograph the steppe at golden hour and make it back to Uncle Zhate's home before nightfall. Instead, she'd twisted her ankle on the uneven ground, and now her foot had swollen to the size of a steamed bun, every step a white-hot stab of pain. As if that weren't enough, she'd left her backup battery behind — a small oversight that had cost her everything. Dozens of calls, and not one had gone through before her phone died.
The sky was nearly black now.
It looked like she would be spending the night in the wild.
Uncle Lawson had warned her before she left — warned her over and over again, with the gravity of a man who knew these lands. The steppe at night belongs to the wolves. Get back before dark. No exceptions.
The last ember of color faded from the western sky. Ada Clara swallowed her despair, hauled herself upright, and began to move. Her camera equipment dug into her back with every step. Desperate to close the distance to the nearest settlement, she gritted her teeth and jammed her brand-new tripod into the ground like a crutch, hopping forward on one foot toward the distant cluster of herders' homes.
The grassland, unlike a rugged mountain forest, seemed manageable at first — but the low hills rolled on and on without end. She hadn't made it far before she lost her footing and tumbled down a hillside, face-first into the frozen earth. As if that weren't humiliation enough, her already-swollen ankle cracked against a stone on the way down. The pain detonated up her leg with such force she nearly blacked out.
Darkness swallowed the steppe whole.
Ada Clara dragged herself upright once more and pressed on, inching forward with the tripod, slow as a snail fighting the tide.
Then she heard it.
"Aooo — wuuu——"
Before coming to the grasslands, Ada Clara had only ever heard a wolf's howl through a television speaker. She had never truly imagined hearing it in the open air, raw and real and close. Every night since her arrival, those howls had drifted in from the dark beyond the settlement — and every night they had seeded a cold dread in her chest, following her into dreams where she was hunted, cornered, and devoured.
Inside the settlement, with the herders nearby and their hunting dogs and Tibetan mastiffs standing guard, with rifles leaning against doorframes — she had told herself she was safe. The howls were distant. She was protected.
There were no walls here. No dogs. No rifles.
Just her, alone, in the open dark — and a wolf pack calling to one another somewhere out in the black.
Panic drowned out the pain in her ankle. She pushed harder, faster, limping with reckless urgency toward the distant lights she prayed were still there. But as the sky pressed lower and blacker overhead, the howling grew closer. She was sure of it.
They can smell me.
Wolves possessed a sense of smell that bordered on the supernatural. No prey could hide from them — not in the dark, not in the cold, not on open ground.
Ada Clara cast her eyes upward. The stars stared back, indifferent and brilliant. Making it back to the settlement was a fantasy now. Her only chance was to find cover — somewhere to wait out the night until dawn made the world safe again.
Wolves were sensitive to light. She dialed her flashlight down to its dimmest setting, casting just enough of a pale glow to see a few feet ahead. A low hill rose from the ground nearby. She turned toward it and began to climb.
Fortune favors the desperate.
Near the base of the hill, she found a narrow earthen hollow — shallow, dark, barely large enough to crawl into. A smell hit her before she even reached the entrance. Thick, rancid, animal — the stench of decay, so powerful it made her stomach heave.
But the howling was closer now. Much closer.
Ada Clara pinched her nose shut, dropped to her knees, and crawled inside.
The tunnel went deeper than she expected. The smell intensified with every inch. Her outstretched hand closed around something solid — hard, irregular, unmistakably bone-like.
She raised the flashlight.
Oh god—
A wolf's carcass lay before her, half-decomposed and stiff, its hollow eye sockets staring at nothing.
Her blood ran cold.
She hadn't found shelter.
She had crawled directly into a wolf's den.