Free Wilding by Erika Masten

CHAPTER ONE
     
     
    H e was perfect in every way:
bigger, stronger, faster, smarter than he had any business being. The ultimate
male specimen. Kim couldn’t stop watching him; she was making a career of it,
quite literally. Of all the absurd things to do…. She had fallen in love with a
wolf.
    Okay, well, not in a weird, bestiality kind
of way, thank heavens, Kim thought as she lowered her heavy, Forest
Service-issued binoculars to scribble a few hurried notes onto the hardbound
notepad she always used in the field. And damn but it was a good day for it,
being out in the rocky, wooded Sierra Nevadas, on the western slopes where the
trees grew thicker and taller and greener than on the Mojave side. Between
about six thousand to ten thousand feet in elevation, a girl could have
forgotten how much of Central California was a baking hot, scrubby desert made
fertile only through impressively extensive irrigation canals distributing the
lifeblood of dying glaciers farther and farther south.
    Catching movement from the corner of her
gray eyes, Kim brought her binoculars up again quickly. Her free hand steadied
her teetering notebook and pen on her bare knees. Had to love a job that let
her wear shorts on the days she wasn’t confined to the ranger station doing
paperwork or helping out with staffing the permits desk. The olive green cargo
shorts might not have been the best color or style for a girl on the heavier
side, but her wolf didn’t seem to mind. These days, he seemed to watch Kim as
much as she watched him.
    Like he was doing right then. The movement
she’d seen, making her wonder if he was done devouring the hare he’d caught
that morning and was ready to go hunt down another, had actually just been the
massive gray wolf stretching out on a huge slab of granite for a rest.
    “You’ve earned a little laze, haven’t you,
217?” Kim muttered under her breath, then lowered her binoculars just long
enough to puff out her bottom lip and blow back the loose wisps of wavy brown
hair that had escaped her ponytail and her uniform cap. “You ran three miles
catching that meal.” Most wolves wouldn’t have chased small prey more than a
mile, mile and a half. Any wolf but 217 would have lost that hare once the
element of surprise was gone—a quick kill or no kill at all.
    Wolf A217, that was his name, or the name
hikers and tourists and biologists like herself had for him from North Carolina
all the way to California. He had roamed hundreds of miles since the first
report of the huge gray wolf a few months back, earning something close to
urban legend status for his size and the wide dispersal of sightings. More than
a few of her fellow biologists disregarded the accounts from citizens of a
two-hundred-pound lone male wolf trekking westward across the United States
like some kind of canid retiree seeing the sights. After all, people
exaggerated, didn’t know their directions, mistook colors in twilight or from a
distance, and had a hard time judging size without manmade standards of
comparison on hand. Kim had been expecting to see a wolf maybe fifteen or
twenty percent larger than normal, at best, if Wolf A217 wandered into
Kingswood National Park at all. And when he did…. Wow. He was twice the wolf he
was supposed to be.
    “If you were only a man.” She chuckled. “If
only, if only.” As a human, he’d have been over six feet tall, surely, with the
musculature of a triathlete, considering the normal routine of a
wolf—running up scree-covered slopes, swimming rivers, hunting all manner
of prey as the apex predator he was. Despite Wolf A217 being an oddly luxurious
dark gray—and not all gray wolves were—Kim always imagined Man A217
with brown hair, a little on the longish side, trailing wet down the back of
his neck as he strode naked from the river.
    A cracking twig behind Kim made her jump.
She bonked herself in the brow with the binoculars as she looked down just as
her notebook and pen slid off her lap.