She was fifteen days late. As Hannah set her plane down in Denali, excitement pulsed through her. And fear.
What if Hunter didn’t come? What if he had given up and gone to another part of the vast parklands? What if he had followed the wolves to some faraway corner of the wilderness? One she would never find?
It was almost dark when she landed, far too late to go trekking up the mountain in search of Hunter’s cave.
She unloaded her gear and set up her tent, all the while searching the woods for any signs of him. By the time she had finished setting up camp, she was exhausted.
Her mother had thought it was too soon to come, that she needed to wait another week in order to be stronger. But Michael had said, “It’s all right, Anne. Hannah wouldn’t be leaving unless she knew she could make it.”
Her dad had been right. She’d known she could make the long trip. In order to see Hunter again, she would walk through fire and flood.
A sound caught her attention. A twig snapping? A footstep on the forest floor?
Hannah whirled toward the deep woods and squinted into the gathering darkness. There was nothing except the long shadows of trees.
She ate beans cold out of the can and drank plenty of water, then fell into her sleeping bag with the thought that he might come to her at night, that he might stand watch from a distance for old time’s sake.
She woke up at dawn and, wrapping a quilt around herself, hurried outside. There was no sign of him. If he had come during the night, she hadn’t heard him. Her sleep had been too deep.
It was almost sunset when Hunter heard the light plane. He and the wolf pack were miles away in a high mountain meadow, teaching two young wolves to hunt small game. The two youngsters had chased rabbits all day without any success, and the leader of the pack was chastising them for not taking their lesson seriously.
The resulting squabble was so loud that at first Hunter wasn’t certain of what he’d heard. He raced across the meadow, scrambled to the top of a bluff and strained his eyes upward. There. A tiny silver speck.
As the plane came closer, the droning of the engine grew louder. Was it Hannah? At this distance it was impossible to tell.
Hunter didn’t wait for confirmation. He couldn’t wait.
His heart hammering, he set out running. If he paced himself he would be back at his cave by morning.
Everything looked different clothed in green. Was she on the right trail? Hannah wasn’t going to start second-guessing herself. If she did she would lose confidence, and perhaps even lose her way.
She climbed steadily upward, stopping every now and then to catch her breath. While she rested she wished all sorts of calamities on the disease-carrying mosquito that had temporarily robbed her of her stamina.
In spite of her frequent rest stops, she arrived at the cave shortly after sunrise. Hannah let out a whoop and raced toward the mouth. Dense growth made a green curtain that almost obscured the opening.
“Hunter?”
She called his name and waited for a response. There was nothing except a vast and empty silence. Should she go in or wait outside?
Wait, she decided. “Hunter? Are you there?” Why would he be waiting in the cave after two weeks? It was too much to hope for.
“I’m not going to panic,” she said, then she sat down on a medium-size boulder to wait.
Perhaps he had gone to the stream to bathe. Or maybe he was out hunting. There were any number of reasons why Hunter was not there.
Time inched by. Hannah tipped her canteen up and took a long drink of water.
What if something had happened to him? Something terrible? Or what if he had decided to remain in the wilderness? What if his answer was no?
Leaving her backpack beside the cave, she skirted the area looking for a sign. Hadn’t he said he’d leave her a sign? Hadn’t she said, If you choose to stay, I don’t think I can bear to face you.
What sort of sign would he leave? Obviously it would be near the cave. Or perhaps even inside.
She had to go in. Taking her flashlight from her backpack, she knelt in front of the opening and pushed the curtain of tangled vines aside.
“Hannah.…”
Suddenly he was there. She looked up into the amazing silver eyes, and lost her breath.
“Is it really you?” he said, then knelt beside her and caught her shoulders. “I can’t believe it.…” He traced her eyebrows, her cheekbones, her lips. She wanted to revel in his touch forever.
“I thought you weren’t going to come,” she whispered.
“I’ll always come to you, Hannah. No matter what.”
He didn’t ask why she was late. He didn’t ask for explanations. He merely devoured her with his incredible eyes.
“If you hadn’t come, I was going to walk out of the wilderness to find you,” he said.
Yes, she exulted. Yes! Sometimes the angels smile.
She held her breath, drowning in him. “Come,” he said, and she followed him into the mouth of his cave.
It was colder inside the thick rock cavern, and when the ceiling opened up, she wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. Hunter pulled her into a warm embrace and held her for a very long time. They didn’t talk, didn’t move; they absorbed each other.
At last Hunter said, “I have something to show you, Hannah.”
He led her to a far corner of the cave, then holding her from behind, he turned the beam of her flashlight onto the wall. The last of the cave drawings ended, and a large block of text began.
It was a while before Hannah could make sense of what she saw, and then she began to make out the words. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.…”
It was all there, every word of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love sonnet.
“I started carving that about a year after the crash,” he said, reading her mind. “It was the poem my father quoted to my mother.”
“Amazing.”
She fell silent as he read the rest of the sonnet aloud. She imagined him as a young boy chipping away at the rock, bit by laborious bit preserving a part of his past.
“I was afraid I would forget,” he said. “I was afraid the wilderness would steal my memory of and my capacity for love.”
He tightened his hold on her. “In a way, it did. As the years went by I stopped reading the sonnet, and then the memory of words faded altogether. Along with the memory of that kind of love.”
She felt the tension in him, the passion. But there was something so sacred, so beautiful about his confession that she didn’t want to interrupt. Hardly daring to breath, she waited.
“When you first came to Denali, I was more wolf than man…but you loved me anyhow. You gave yourself freely to me, Hannah, nothing held back, nothing required.
“You gave it all back to me,” he added, “the words, the memory. But most of all love.” He turned her in his arms and cupped her face. “I love you, Hannah, and I want to be with you for the rest of my life if you’ll have me.”
It was more than she’d ever hoped for, more than she’d dreamed. If he had said, “I want to mate with you for the rest of my life,” she’d have been happy. But to have love, too, was almost overwhelming.
In spite of her independence, in spite of her freewheeling lifestyle, she’d had a secret dream all her life: to find the kind of love her parents had. Never mind all the trappings. She just wanted the love.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll not only have you, I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. Wherever you are, whatever you want to be, I’ll be there at your side. Loving you, Hunter. Always loving you.”
He picked her up and carried her to the bearskin pallet, and there, surrounded by the evidence of his life as a wolf-man, they came together as a man and a woman who truly love.