Never Say Die by Will Hobbs

rustling its fur, its curious eyes still taking me in—kind of shook me to the core. This was the most magnificent animal I had seen in my life. I remembered Jonah saying that nobody knows why they don’t hunt us when they could, like bears do once in a while, especially polar bears. Wolves won’t kill you for the meat on your bones, but they’ll help themselves if they come across your dead body. Why is that?
    I trusted that the wolf meant me no harm, and it turned out I was right. I even spoke to the animal, and it perked up its ears and listened. I told the wolf how hungry I was, and how grateful I would be if it would bring me something to eat, only please don’t swallow it first—I wasn’t partial to throw-up. I really did say all of that and more. I was half out of my mind. It kept me calm, and the wolf seemed to find it of interest.
    The wolf decided it had seen enough of me. It turned and trotted off. When it turned and looked at me again, I called, “Thanks for not ripping my throat out.” The wolf trotted away, this time without looking back.
    On the spot I decided I would never shoot another wolf.

12
YOU HAVE TO BE PATIENT
    I n the wake of the wolf, I went to the edge of that shelf of tundra above the river and took a look down. The river was back down to what it had been before the big rainstorm. The deluge that drowned all those caribou had flushed on through. They should have waited before trying to cross. Like Jonah always said, they’re great swimmers but don’t always make good choices.
    And now I found myself on Ryan’s side of the river, the western side. I tilted my head back and scanned the slopes above, treeless here. He wasn’t up there. Ryan had said to look for him at the first obvious place for him to get down. This wasn’t it—far too steep and rugged. I had to go farther downstream to find the place where he would come back to the river.
    I got going, with no choice but to cross slopes that fell steeply into the river. Sometimes I had to crab-walk across tongues of loose, sliding rock in order to continue. One thing was for sure: I wasn’t going to swim the river to get back to easier walking on the other side.
    Midmorning the next day, the mountains finally pulled back from the river. I walked the falling spine of a ridge onto flat ground, a bright green tundra bench that sat just above the river. There was one just like it across the river from me. Here was that “first obvious place” for us to get back together.
    There I waited, out in the open with my bright orange life jacket draped on top of a lone, spindly spruce. Maybe Ryan had already swum the river, like he said he was going to, to get back to “my side.” If so, he would easily spot the life jacket and me over here.
    As the sun made its big circle around the sky, I gathered firewood, made a fire, and laid on lots of green branches. Might as well make sure he doesn’t miss me, I figured. My smoke signals didn’t reel him in. I thought of moving on but decided that would be a huge mistake. Without a doubt, this was the first obvious place.
    You have to be patient , I could hear Jonah saying, and I remembered the time we went out on the sea ice together to hunt seals the way the ancestors had, and his father still did when Jonah was young. I was only nine, still a hyper kid, but I loved hunting. Jonah had been taking me out with him since I was five.
    We didn’t have a dog team like my great-grandfather did to get us out onto the Beaufort Sea—we went on Jonah’s snowmobile—but we did make an igloo three nights in a row. Instead of netting the seals under the ice or stalking them with a rifle from behind a white blind like we do these days, Jonah was going to try to take one at close range like it used to be done.
    When we finally found a breathing hole—small and glazed over, as difficult to locate as a needle in a