Chapter Forty-Eight
Jackson
We move like a blade through snow — deliberate, edge-first, taking the shortest line between two truths: where he is, and where he thinks he can control us. The storm is no longer an element; it is our teammate and our enemy. It erases scent and sight, muffles sound and gives him the grace of anonymity. It also hides our tracks if we are careful. We move carefully.
I check the Sig P320 at my hip as if to reassure myself it’s there. It’s light, familiar, fitted to my hand. Not everything here is solved by a firearm, but a reliable pistol is comfort in an ugly world. Linc is ahead to my right, the long barrel of his scoped .308 a dark line through the white. Dal moves left, lever-action braced against his chest like he’s carrying a weathered old friend. Behind us is the channel: Bos holding the shelter line, Caleb watching cover. Brooklyn is being held under Bos’s wing; she’s wrapped like a rumor in a heavy coat, breathing shallow and steady. We’ve got a perimeter and a plan.
We’re not charging. We’re learning him.
Tracking in a blizzard is less about footprints and more about how the world is different where a person has been. Snow compacts differently under weight, under a pause, under pacing. Branches that are brushed in a straight run show a hurried path. Pine needles scattered with the bias of a passing shoulder tell you direction. The hunter in me reads these like sentences.
“Dal,” I whisper. “Any sign on your side?”
“Few prints,” he answers low. His voice is rough with wind and concentration. “Outward-facing, like he checks the slope. Pattern’s deliberate.”
Linc ticks his jaw. “Elevation control. He’s using the high ground to observe. Does not want to engage. Wants to keep eyes.”
Good. Predictable. Dangerous.
We bend our route toward a dry wash where the ridge provides cover. It’s lower ground, choked with old growth and boulders — the kind of place that breaks line-of-sight and spoils elevation advantage. That’s where we want to force him: where his vantage is less valuable, where he must move, where he becomes visible.
We move in three-man geometry: me center, Linc wide right, Dal wide left. Communication is a set of slight gestures, a tilt of the head, the lift of a hand. We’d trained for silence long before this. In other lives — far from this one — that training was for stalking game. Tonight, it’s for saving a life.
The wind slams into us, dry and immediate. Snow batters faces like thrown pebbles. Our breath comes thick and loud in the open; we compensate, slow it, keep it measured. If you let breath run hot and fast up here, it betrays you quicker than any footfall. We are moving with the patience of men who know what patience costs.
Linc pauses, setting the bipod and scanning with his scope. Even in the white, his eye finds patterns where mine see only blur. He murmurs, “Shadow ridgeline, fifty yards. Two spots of darker density—movement or cover.”
“Range?” I ask.
“Seventy to the nearest,” he replies. “Visibility crap. We need to narrow it.”
We close deliberately. The net tightens by inches. The storm does us favors and inflicts penalties; the math is simple. He thinks the weather favors him — that he can hide. He is partially right. He’s also fallen into a routine. He likes to watch. He likes to feel the hunt like a slow burn. That gives us a rhythm to bite into.
We cross a small run-out where the wind has scoured the snow. The ground here smells faintly of wet stone and pine pitch. Dal’s boot compresses the melt into the white and the sound of it is a soft, honest thump — the kind an animal makes when it’s tired. He signals left; I shift my weight and keep my sights low. We move under a ragged curtain of juniper and drop into a shallow bowl carved by thawed summer rains.
He has been here. The snow in the bowl is tamped down, a deliberate footprint interrupted by human hands. Not a struggle — not fresh enough for that — but deliberate checks: a bent sapling used as a sightline, a small stack of stones aligned toward the water below. He likes patterns.
“Marker,” Dal says. He coughs, wind stealing the last syllable. “He leaves marks. For himself, or for the sake of control. Either way, we got his writing.”
Linc scans high again. “He’s working these lines,” he says. “He moves the same way as our prints — not random. He’s comfortable in the cold. He wears old leather.”
I take that in. Leather is silent when it’s broken-in. New synthetics squeal. Leather whispers. I like the whisper.
We move slow around the bowl edge. Each footfall is placed. Each movement measured. You’d think methodical tracking in a storm would be about finding him. It’s not. It’s about not giving him what he wants — reaction. He baits. He watches reactions like a scientist. So we control what he sees; we control our faces and our breathing and our cadence. We make the storm the thing he must account for.
A sound — nothing like wind, a small and considered rasp — comes from upslope. Linc freezes, palms hovering at cheek level. Dal goes stone-still too, like a statue made from muscle. The world truncates to the small space between us and that noise. It could be anything: a branch relaxing, an animal, a trick of snow collapsing. It could be him. It could be nothing.
I breathe in, count, and exhale slow. “Hold,” I tell them, a word and not a command. A shared intent. We wait until the noise ebbs, or answers itself. It does not.
Linc speaks through his teeth: “He’s testing. Nut-pick. Throws a sound and watches for flinch. Psychological probe.”
Dal’s response is a soft snort. “We don’t flinch tonight.”
We close. The ridge tightens into a spine of rock and twisted timber. Snow clings to the lee side like moss. Visibility drops to a pale smear. The shapes of trees become a crowd.
I scan, watching the ground, the branches, the small ways a person moves through trees different from an animal. Humans manage space; we invent whitespace as we move; animals slip through the green undetected.
There — a break in the branches to the left. A silhouette, folded low against the ridge line. It could be a rock. It could be a stump thick with snow. But a shadow becomes a shadow because of how it holds itself. This one holds like a human. Tall, but hunched. A shape that breathes too even for the weather.
Linc brings the rifle up, eye to scope, but does not settle on a target. He breathes and calculates and breathes again. He checks wind deflection in his mind, calculates drift for a seventy-yard shot in snow. He squeezes so slowly the world could fall over and finish spinning and the break in his focus would still be clean.
Dal angles his body to close the net. He’s the kind of hunter who knows what to do when the long sight has to make a short shot. His lever action is ready for a slug. But we do not shoot the silhouette. Not yet.
It’s a person. I know that like I know my own name in the dark. But no identity, no recognition. Just posture, clothing that reads as dark against white, a movement that is more confident than stealth. He is comfortable up there. Comfortable enough to be a hazard.
Linc whispers, “Two shapes. One kneeling, one standing. Standing’s got him.”
I look and see it: another fold, another dark arc of cloth. Two bodies, or one with a pile of gear. The storm is a poor recorder; it tells us fragments. But fragments are what hunting is made of.
“Hold,” I whisper. We back off on measured feet. We don’t break stride. We reverse-sweep the line to force the silhouette’s eyes to calculate our rhythm anew. If he thought he had control, that calculation is wrong now.
We feed the silhouette a steady rhythm — not a panic, not an assault. A slow, organized approach that tells him we are not prey to be shepherded.
As we reposition, Dal murmurs, “He’s moved the marker. He’s changing the trail.”
We adjust.
My boots sink in powder. The bones in my feet thrum with cold. The cold is a constant bother, but not the urgent threat. The hunter we track is a larger problem. He tests, he studies, he waits for us to make the error that gives him license to act.
We push a final ridge and the storm opens—briefly, as if the sky permits a lens—and there he is. Not close. Not clear enough to see a face. Just a silhouette against a line of pines. He is standing, turned slightly away, one shoulder higher, as if he had been watching us and decided to let us come to him.
He is alone up there. For the moment. For now.
I feel the cold in my bones but not the cold of winter. I feel the cold of recognition: a shape that matters and can slip away. We have a shape to name. We have a place to wedge into our plan.
“Two o’clock,” Linc says, barely a breath.
I answer with a nod and a steadying breath.
We haven’t seen his face. We haven’t heard his name. We only have a silhouette on a ridge and a pattern that means he’s here and he enjoys this.
We close the distance by measured increments—methodical, patient, wearing him down by being relentless in calm.
He’s on the ridge, and he knows our net is tightening. He will leave, or he will stand. Either way, he will choose the path we force him down.
Tonight, we’ll watch which choice he makes.
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