One dead wolf. And not far from it, several wolf pups — each no bigger than a fist — their small bodies already crawling with maggots. They had been dead for some time.
"Ugh—"
The stench combined with the horror of the scene finally broke her. Ada Clara retched, then vomited. Instinct drove her backward toward the entrance — but the howling outside stopped her cold.
Two choices. Crawl out and be torn to pieces. Stay in and be slowly suffocated by the smell of the dead.
She stayed.
The rotting carcasses might work in her favor — the overwhelming stench of decay could mask the scent of a living human. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was the only one she had.
Survival has a way of sharpening the mind. Wedged inside the narrow hollow, Ada Clara shrugged her backpack off her shoulders and dug through it until she found a packet of tissues. She rolled two into makeshift plugs and stuffed them into her nostrils, then lay still, ears straining against the darkness, listening to every sound beyond the earthen walls.
Then — from somewhere inside the den — came a sound.
"Mmm…"
Faint. Barely there. Animal.
Ada Clara froze. She thought she'd imagined it. She snatched up the flashlight and swept its beam across the hollow.
"Mmm… mmm…"
Near the mother wolf's carcass, one of the pups — lying rigid and motionless among its dead siblings — gave a weak, trembling twitch.
Ada Clara stared.
The mother showed no visible wounds. Poison, most likely — either illness or something a herder had laid out. The six pups would have starved without her, or drunk from her toxic milk. Either way, they should all be dead.
And yet.
She hesitated for a long moment, then edged forward, nudging the mother's stiff body aside and reaching past it to close her fingers around the surviving pup. It was newborn — eyes still sealed shut, body no larger than her fist, and ice cold to the touch.
"Mmm…"
Its will to live was extraordinary. The moment its muzzle grazed the warmth of Ada Clara's palm, its stiff little jaw cracked open and it began to suckle with desperate urgency.
Something stirred in her chest — an emotion she couldn't quite name.
She rummaged through her bag and found a bottle of nutrition drink, pouring a capful and tilting it toward the pup's mouth. The pup jerked its head, knocked the cap sideways, and drenched itself. Ada Clara exhaled, poured another capful, dipped her finger in, and let the pup nurse from her fingertip instead. It latched on and sucked with everything it had.
She felt herself smile.
"You stubborn little thing," she murmured. "I'll give you credit — you held on long enough for someone to find you."
She fed it for the better part of an hour. By the end, the pup had drunk its fill — but the cold was unforgiving, and the icy liquid pooling in its tiny stomach sent it into shivers. A thin trickle of white foam appeared at the corners of its mouth.
Please don't let me have fed it to death. Ada Clara pulled out a tissue and dabbed its muzzle clean. "All that effort and you go and spit it straight back up."
Outside, wolf howls rose and faded at intervals. There was no question now — she was going to spend the entire night in a den full of corpses. She could live with that. What she could not live with was one of those wolves deciding to come home.
The pup retched twice more, then curled into itself, trembling. With its mother gone and the cold closing in, food alone wouldn't save it.
Ada Clara let out a quiet breath. She unzipped her down jacket, tucked the pup against her bare stomach, and zipped it back up around them both.
"Your den shelters me for one night," she told it softly, "and my body keeps you warm. Fair trade. We leave each other in peace."
The flashlight flickered and dimmed — the battery nearly spent. She switched it off, replaced the tissue plugs in her nose, curled herself against the cold earth, and closed her eyes.