They were halfway through breakfast when Rime said, “We hunt today.”
He said it like weather—flat, inevitable. His tail thumped once against the chair leg, then stilled.
Holt looked delighted. “Finally.”
Gabriel peered into his mug. “Please say this hunt involves coffee.”
Rime considered. “No.”
Mark raised a brow. “Define ‘hunt.’”
Kade leaned back against the counter, easy grin showing a little fang. “Not bullets. Not trucks. Just us and the world. We go north, and learn again.”
Thane wiped his hands on a towel and glanced across the room. Varro, who’d been quiet near the window, looked up with interest that had nothing to do with violence. “You mean a feral training day,” Thane said.
“I mean being wolves,” Kade corrected gently. “Not talking about it. Doing it.”
Holt pointed a spoon at Thane, then at Gabriel and Mark. “We teach. You three listen. No arguing.”
Gabriel sighed dramatically. “This already sounds like a terrible idea.”
Thane’s mouth quirked. “We probably need it.”
Holt clapped once, sending a little stew across the stove. “No packs. No radios. No guns. Only claws, teeth, and brains. Also no shoes,” he added with a grin. “Always no shoes.”
Thane’s eyes flicked to Kade, who nodded. “Powerful paws, powerful you,” Kade said, amused. “You told me that.”
Thane laughed. “I did.”
“Then you follow it,” Kade said, mock-serious. “No cheating, Alpha.”
“Fine,” Thane said. “We’ll go light.”
Gabriel tipped his mug toward Kade. “If I get eaten by a bear, I’m haunting you.”
They left late morning, when the frost had stopped biting and started shining. The sky was clear and huge, a blue so sharp it felt like it had opinions. They went barepaw, claws clean, pads tough and honest against the cold earth. Thane felt the immediate, remembered rightness of it—a reminder that no matter how many doors he’d learned to open, the ground under him still wanted to know him by touch.
Holt took the lead with Kade; Rime ghosted the right flank. Varro moved ahead just enough to read air and ground the way a mathematician reads equations. Thane, Gabriel, and Mark fell in behind them like students late to class.
Two miles out, Holt stopped, put both hands on his hips, and turned around with the kind of grin that meant the fun was about to start for him and not at all for anybody else.
“Test one,” he said. “You walk loud. Fix it.”
Gabriel looked around theatrically. “We’re in a forest.”
Rime tapped the side of his snout. “Forest not problem. You are.”
Kade padded back and reached for Thane’s shoulder. “Your weight’s off. You’re landing on your heel — like you’ve got boots on. The ground hears that.” He pressed his palm against Thane’s sternum and gently pushed; Thane’s center dropped half an inch, the ground’s give changed, and suddenly the sound under him felt quieter. He exhaled, surprised.
“Better,” Kade said, nodding. “Keep it bent, not crouched. Let your hips move. Stay loose through the spine.”
Varro pointed with two claws at Mark’s feet. “You place flat. Don’t. Touch with outside edge first, then roll. Listen for sticks with your skin.”
Mark tried it. The first attempt sounded like a trash bag of pretzels. Varro winced. Holt actually wheezed laughing.
Holt recovered, held up both paws, and demonstrated, placing down slow and deliberate, outside edge catching the whisper of grass before the full pad committed. “Feel first,” he said. “Decide second.”
Gabriel tried and immediately stepped on a branch the size of a rifle. It cracked like a cartoon.
Rime covered his eyes. “You walk like fridge.”
“Thank you,” Gabriel said dryly. “I was going for ‘elegant mountain cat,’ but sure.”
They practiced. Thane adjusted posture and weight until the ground stopped talking so much about him. Mark found his balance and, after ten minutes, stopped sounding like dropped cutlery. Gabriel learned to watch Kade’s shoulders and place his paws where Kade’s had been two breaths earlier; the forest rewarded him by not announcing his arrival with an insult.
Kade nodded once, satisfied. “See? The world is not trying to fight you. You just need to stop stepping on its nerves.”
Holt sniffed the air, eyes bright. “Lesson two. Wind.” He flicked his muzzle to the left. “Smell that?”
Gabriel inhaled, squinting. “Uh. Pine. Snow. Regret.”
Rime pointed north. “Deer. Two. Maybe three. One old. One yearling. One more small.”
Thane’s nose found it then, late but there—warm weight in the air under the crisp cold, faint and honest. “Got it.”
Varro crouched, brushed a claw along a tiny scrape low on a trunk. “Rub line, old—see the sap. They’ve been circling the meadow bend for water. We won’t hunt food today,” he added, glancing at Thane. “Not needed. But we hunt pace.”
Kade nodded slightly. “Chase the silence,” he said. “When you find it, hold it—and pass it on.”
Gabriel’s mouth tilted. “You make it sound like a hymn.”
Kade shrugged. “Maybe it is.”
They moved again, and this time Thane felt the difference settle around them like a tuned instrument. Conversation dropped to hand signs and ear flicks. Holt’s size stopped being big and started being a moving shield. Rime’s motion barely existed. Varro’s head turned and stopped with precise purpose, correcting course by inches. Kade grinned every time Thane adjusted without being told.
They crossed a stream by stepping stones, claws clicking softly; Gabriel almost went in, saved by Holt’s quick hand on his elbow. Mark murmured a thanks when Rime caught his shoulder at the last second before a low branch could rake his muzzle.
A mile later, on a slope that hid a small clearing, Varro lifted a hand and everyone sank to a knee in the same breath. It felt good—not military, not forced, just aligned.
He pointed at a stand of alder, traced a path in the air with a claw—downwind, low, fanning around the far side of the clearing where the deer would pass if spooked.
Thane nodded, then realized Kade was watching him watch Varro, pleased. The old heat of being taught and not resenting it warmed him in a different way than the sun.
They slid into place. And then Thane stepped where Kade had told him not to.
The snow concealed a low, hollow drift along the edge of a deadfall. It gave all at once, and Thane went down past his forearms with a hissed curse and a muffled whumph that startled a dozen birds into calling him an idiot.
He spat out snow. Holt covered his muzzle, shoulders shaking. Rime stared in horrified delight. Varro just blinked, then offered a hand like nothing was funnier than everything and nothing at all.
Thane took it, pulled free, and shook snow from his fur.
Kade leaned close, voice a whisper that didn’t mock. “Field lesson number one: where the land looks too smooth, it’s lying.”
“Noted,” Thane said, dry as the pines.
They stayed until the wind changed. The deer lifted their heads and moved off with unbothered grace, tails flagging once like punctuation. No one pursued. That wasn’t the point. The point was the moment when Thane, Mark, and Gabriel felt themselves part of the forest’s sentence instead of an aside.
When they finally stopped, Holt announced, “Lunch,” and produced nothing at all because he had brought nothing at all.
Gabriel stared. “What are we eating, the concept of humility?”
“Snow,” Rime offered. “Very filling. Full of… snow.”
Thane snorted. “We’re not starving. We’re practicing.”
Varro pointed to the shadowed base of a spruce, dug his claws into the snow, and pried free a small cache he’d buried on the way up—jerky wrapped in cloth, pine nuts in a little burlap pouch. He set it down like a magician revealing a trick.
Kade grinned. “Pathfinder.”
Varro shrugged, pleased but casual. “You don’t learn to be generous by going hungry. You just learn to be mean.”
They ate. Jerky chewed like leather and tasted like salt and smoke and gratitude. The nuts cracked into sweet, clean pockets. The sky wheeled along toward afternoon.
“Camp before dark,” Rime said. “Teach den.”
“Lead the way,” Thane said.
They found it where Rime always found it—where wind broke and wood remembered warmth. A long-fallen hemlock lay heavy on its side, roots fanned like the ribs of a sunken ship. Holt stamped down snow in a wide oval while Kade cut fir boughs in precise lengths. Varro wove boughs crosswise and jammed them into the windward side like he’d built these a thousand times. He had.
Gabriel tried to arrange a nest and made an art installation. Rime looked at it, looked at him, and without changing expression turned the worst of it into something survivable.
“Thanks,” Gabriel muttered.
“Do not die,” Rime said. “Hard to teach dead.”
Mark gathered dead twigs and found a flattish stone. Varro produced a scrap of tinder from a waterproof pouch, looked meaningfully at Gabriel, and stepped aside.
“Radio wolf make fire,” Holt said, grinning. “Funny world.”
Gabriel flint-sparked like a man with pride on the line. It didn’t catch. He cursed under his breath, slowed, reset his hands. On the third try, a little thread of smoke sighed into flame. He looked up, triumphant.
“See,” Holt began, “now if only you could—”
Rime blew once and triplesized the flame. “Teamwork,” he said, deadpan, and everyone laughed.
They sat close once the fire settled into a steady, breathy burn. Sound fell away except for the occasional pop and the quiet shift of someone finding a better angle. The air smelled like resin and thawing bark and the animal honesty of six wolves who had earned their sleep.
Kade tipped his chin toward them. “You don’t talk like wolves. You don’t move like them either. You forgot how.” He gave a small, knowing smile. “Too many doors between you and the dirt.”
Gabriel rubbed a hand over his face and grinned. “We got soft.”
“Soft not bad,” Varro said. “Soft is burnable. If forget which end of you is wild.”
Thane stared into the fire, the heat painting his scars an old bronze color. “We did forget. A little.”
Holt nudged his knee with a knuckle the size of a river stone. “Only way to remember is to be out here. Not thinking. Not calling it a lesson. Just moving.”
Mark leaned back against a log, exhaled. “You know the funny part? I’m more tired than after any generator rebuild.”
“Different muscles,” Kade said. “Different brain. The one that knows when to stop making noise.”
They let the fire talk for a while. Varro told a story about winter winds up north that froze your fur so stiff you could hear it crack if you moved too fast. Kade told his first memory of sleeping under pine boughs as a kid and understanding they bent because that’s what strong things do. Holt told an entire saga about a rabbit he swore had outsmarted him for a month straight. Rime interjected only to say, “Rabbit was smarter,” and Holt almost fell over laughing.
Thane didn’t tell a story. He just listened, soaked it in, filed it where he kept the things that mattered.
When dusk finally climbed into the branches, Rime looked at the others and lifted a hand—short, quick signals: shift right, hold, breathe together. They rose, one by one, bodies suddenly different—elastic, intent, all edges tucked in no matter how big those edges were.
“Not for meat,” Kade said. “For us.”
They slid into the trees and moved like a word being pronounced correctly for the first time. Holt’s bulk didn’t push; it flowed. Mark stopped counting his breaths and matched Kade’s instead. Gabriel forgot jokes for a solid ten minutes and forgot to be proud of it. Thane stopped planning around the next worry and let his lungs make decisions his mouth didn’t need to.
Something—deer, probably—flickered at the far edge of vision and kept going, unspooked by whatever they weren’t. Rime’s hand opened and closed once. Let it go. They did.
They returned to the den space in a loop that felt closed, not aborted. Kade’s smile had changed—it sat deep, not wide. Varro met Thane’s eyes and didn’t need to say anything. Thane nodded anyway.
“That,” Kade said simply, “was right.”
“Felt like quiet,” Mark said softly.
Rime lay down with a satisfied grunt that could have been a blessing. Holt sprawled like a boulder that had learned contentment. Gabriel flopped onto his side and laughed at nothing until he stopped. Thane sat with his back to a tree and looked at the sky.
Stars came out in phrases. The cold grew honest without turning mean.
Holt rolled his head toward Thane. “Alpha fell in snow,” he announced to the group, because kindness without teasing wasn’t Holt’s religion.
Thane flicked a pine cone at his shoulder and hit him square. Holt gave a theatrical yelp. “Assault. Abuse of power.”
“Document it,” Gabriel said. “File a complaint with—who, exactly? Rime’s Department of Natural Grievances?”
Rime didn’t open his eyes. “Rejected.”
They lay in the comfortable after-sound of wolves who had moved as one and found it tasted better than supper. After a long time, Gabriel hummed something vague and friendly. It wasn’t even a song at first—just a tone to show the night he wasn’t afraid of it. Kade matched without thinking. Rime picked the third above like he’d been born to do it. Holt found the low that made the fire seem deeper. Varro’s voice slipped in last, thin at first, then strong—an old northern line given a new place to land.
Thane listened, then added his own line across the top—steady, unadorned, the kind of tone that makes a group decide to stay together. The sound threaded the trees and came back gentled by bark and snow.
When it faded, Kade said, “That is it. That is the sound we hunt.”
“The sound of silence,” Thane said.
Varro smiled in the dark. “And we finally caught it.”
Sleep found them in layers. It had the flavor of safety—the rare kind that doesn’t have to be earned every minute to be believed.
They came down out of the trees at dawn, covered in pine needles and smelling like smoke. Libby looked back at them like a living thing that had learned to trust its own heartbeat. Frost clung to fence wires and then let go, sparkling in the first sun. The gate guard waved, not even pretending to be surprised when Holt blew him a kiss.
Marta saw them first from the square, lifted a hand to shade her eyes. “Rough night?”
Thane grinned. “Stayed up late, learned to walk.”
She laughed, relief and affection wrapped into a single sound. “I like you better when you remember what you are.”
“Me too,” Thane said.
They peeled off—Holt toward the kitchen, loudly announcing his need for six breakfasts; Rime to check the river line because habit lived there; Gabriel to the radio shack for a quick equipment check; Mark to put hands on a generator purely because he liked machines to know he still loved them.
Kade and Varro stopped with Thane at the cabin door. They didn’t go in right away. Morning light turned the porch boards into something warmer than wood.
Kade leaned on a post, satisfied the way a craftsman gets when a tool finally fits another hand. “You remember now,” he said.
Thane nodded. “I do.”
Varro looked between them, something like pride seating itself in his chest without asking permission. “You didn’t need us to teach you.”
“Yes we did,” Gabriel called from inside, because of course he was listening. “We absolutely did. I would still be faceplanting into the snow.”
Thane smirked. “We needed you,” he told Kade and Varro, meaning it. “Not just for the tricks. For the reminder.”
Kade smiled a little. “We’ve got the sky. You’ve got the walls. Together, we make a pack.”
Varro studied Thane for a long second, then asked without ceremony, “You ever tire of carrying this?”
Thane looked past them at the town waking up—kids’ laughter, clank of a pan, the pulse of a place that didn’t know it was being guarded and therefore was being guarded right. “Sometimes it’s heavy,” he admitted. “But it’s never lonely.”
Varro exhaled, slow. “That’s new. For me.”
“It won’t be,” Thane said.
Rime returned then, as quiet as he’d left, and dropped a little pinecone into Thane’s palm like a medal. “For not dying in snow.”
Thane held it up. “I’ll cherish this.”
Holt barged back in with a platter the size of a manhole cover. “Eat. Celebrate. I declare Wolf Brunch.”
Gabriel peered around him. “Absolutely not. You burned water last week.”
“Today I burned it with style,” Holt said.
Mark slid past with a stack of cups. “I’ll make coffee.”
“Bless you,” Gabriel said.
They crowded into the cabin, a physics problem of claws and shoulders, jokes and elbows. The room felt different—not bigger, not cleaner, just looser, like they’d taken a tight belt off the day and remembered how to breathe around a full stomach.
Thane stood a second at the threshold and looked at them—Holt pretending competence, Rime pretending not to smile, Gabriel pretending not to be moved by anything, Mark pretending not to be proud of how the generator purred, Kade pretending he hadn’t just remapped how Thane moved, Varro not pretending anything at all for once.
“You were right,” Thane said, more to the memory of night than to the morning. “We forgot how to listen.”
Rime handed him a mug. “Now you remember.”
Kade raised his own. “To silence.”
Varro clinked his against theirs. “To hearing it. Together.”
They drank. Outside, the day did what days do when they’re allowed to—ran itself without asking permission. Inside, the pack did what wolves do when they’ve remembered their shape—lived.
And up in the trees, where last night’s breath still hung in the bark, the quiet they’d hunted lay down and stayed awhile.