terrain we trekked across was often slanted. Downhill, I could sometimes smell people and machines, smoke and food. There might be a town on the wind, or just a cluster of a few people near an open fire. Downhill meant humans. Uphill was only the pure, feral smell of rock and ice. Big Kitten always chose up, and I always followed.
I was even more frustrated when I smelled us. Big Kitten and I were crossing our own trail, not doing Go Home but just looking for prey, even if it meant wandering over the same land.
The storms seemed to make hunting easier for her, for some reason. My belly full, I took stock of where we were, which was so high on the mountain that the trees were sparse and the terrain sloped steeply down away from me as far as I could see. Big Kitten had returned to our sleeping spot for the day, but I was out trudging through the unbroken white, sticking to the trees, bent on proving that I could be an equally effective hunter were the situation more favorable.
And then I froze at the barest suggestion of a scent on the cold air.
Dog.
Without hesitation I turned toward it, though this meant struggling uphill. The signs were elusive at first, and while I was searching for them I picked up something else: humans.
This gave me pause. I had not seen a person for a long time, not since before the first snow. Big Kitten’s wariness around even the slightest hint of humans had given me an instinctive sense that I shouldn’t approach them, a sense reinforced by the tendency of even nice people who gave me food to want to lead me away from Lucas.
But to see the dog I would have to move closer to the human, because canine and man’s comingled bouquet was wafting down to me from up high. I could smell two other humans, also male, well off to the side.
When I stepped out of the trees and looked up, I saw a sheer white wall lifting steeply toward the sky. Way, way up there, a dog and a man were trudging through heavy snow just below where the hill ended in a ridge. A wall of snow sat heavily on the top of the ridge, curled over in a massive overhang. The man was wearing very long shoes and clutched poles in his hands, and I could smell that the dog, whose head was above the man’s hips, was a male. I did not know why anyone would lead his dog so far up a mountain, but humans are in charge of dogs and I was sure the faraway canine was happy—in fact, I could see a certain joy in his bounding gait.
“Stop! Hey!” someone yelled. Startled, I whirled my head to look all the way to the other side of the slope, where there was no ridge but just a rolling mountaintop. The two other men, so far away they appeared very small, had their hands to their mouths.
“Get out of there!” one shouted.
“That’s not safe!” the other one cried.
“Avalanche zone!”
“Stop!”
The men sounded scared and angry. The man high up the hill kept walking, but the dog halted and turned, and I knew he had heard the voices. Then he stared in my direction because he had picked up my presence as well.
Though he was very far away, this canine interaction caused me to wag my tail. I played with Big Kitten every day, but right now I longed to wrestle with a dog.
“Get out of there!” both men off to my side screamed with joined voices.
The dog barked and lunged a few steps downhill toward me. Almost involuntarily, I shoved my way into the thick snow in his direction, wagging even more furiously.
“Dutch!” the man with the dog shouted. “Get back here.”
The dog glanced back at his person, then leapt forward again. The pitch was so steep that he was able to travel a considerable distance in just a few bounds. He was wagging, too. The man lifted his long shoe and stomped it down on the snow. “Dutch! Come here!” he commanded.
“Look out!”
There was an odd, low noise, like when Lucas would toss a pillow at me and it would hit the wall. The curl of snow atop the ridge fragmented and fell. The man below it jerked his head around to stare as a rumble, loud as a truck, shook the air. He fell, tumbling, as the