First, she needed to hike up the ridge that the car had slid down. The road was slippery, and her boots were old and the traction was worn down, so she had to concentrate to keep from slipping and falling. She grabbed onto tree branches when she could to help haul herself up.
She reached the top...and surveyed the road going down, leading into what looked like an endless series of dim, snowy twists and turns.
She looked back over her shoulder. For some reason, it seemed like it would be safer to go that way, even though she knew there was nothing there.
No, she had to go forward, where there was a chance she could find a gas station or someone’s rural home. “Onward, adventurers!” she said in a cheerful voice to Emily, whose eyes were starting to droop with the rhythmic walking.
She hoped Emily fell asleep. She didn’t want her to be scared or upset during the cold, dark walk ahead. She wanted her to wake up somewhere warm and safe. Leah was going to make that happen for her child.
She marched determinedly forward.
***
Jeff had run a long patrol circuit along the road just south of the park. It took a while; the road wound around the mountains with very little in the way of towns, gas stations, or rest stops, so he wanted to do a thorough job of checking it out.
He didn’t know why it felt so urgent to him tonight. There’d been plenty of storms around here before, and he usually wasn’t so...anxious. Jeff normally prided himself on being calm in a crisis. He wasn’t one to get worked up about what might happen.
But it didn’t hurt to check. And his leopard was happy to prowl through the forest by the side of the road, keeping an eye out for any prey as well as any drivers in trouble.
Jeff wasn’t worried about being seen if there were any drivers, either. His leopard form was perfectly adapted to blend in with a snowy, mountainous environment. If he stopped moving, he’d become essentially invisible to human eyes. Snow leopard camouflage was the best of any of t
he big cats—hardly any leopards had ever been spotted by humans, even where people knew to look for them.
Cal’s rangers were always careful to stay human where people might see them in the park, but they knew that if they had to shift, the environment was on their side. Glacier National Park was one of the absolute best places for a snow leopard to live in the United States, in terms of climate and of camouflage, and therefore it had the largest concentration of snow leopard shifters that Jeff knew of.
Tonight, though, he was patrolling the road alone. A couple of hours passed without any sign of human activity anywhere, but Jeff’s leopard was not satisfied.
Keep going, it insisted. Trouble.
He knew better than to ignore his leopard’s instincts, so he kept going.
After hours of patrolling through the snow, he was far enough from home that he was going to be low on sleep, because it would take him until after midnight to get back. He hadn’t seen a single soul in trouble. But for some reason, he still couldn’t turn away.
Finally, though, he saw something.
It was a car. It had crashed into the trees—slid back from the top of the steep hill, Jeff’s expert eye determined. He trotted over to it, but there was no one inside.
The left rear window was shattered, but there was no blood. Jeff figured that the driver hadn’t wanted to stay with the car, even though that was the best solution in a situation like this, because there was no way to stay warm with the broken window.
Then he noticed that in addition to shattered glass, the backseat also contained a car seat.
Jeff’s blood ran cold. Could there be a parent and a baby out here in this storm? Please, please let the baby not have been in the car, he thought.
But there was a diaper bag in the backseat. Actually, the car was packed absolutely full of stuff—blankets, pillows, bags, and there was a cardboard box full of dishes sitting in the footwell.
It looked like the car was packed to move house. And there was no way the baby wouldn’t have come along for that.
He leaned in, careful of the remains of the window, and sure enough: he could scent the baby in the car. The baby, and what had to be the baby’s mother—a feminine scent, mixed with the milky scent of her child.
The only possible conclusion was that there was a mother and her baby out in the freezing night somewhere.
Jeff looked back. He’d come from that direction, and he’d been looking for anyone in trouble. He definitely hadn’t seen anyone trudging along the road with a baby.
So he turned ahead, and started running. He was going to find this woman and her baby before it was too late. There were no other options.
***
It hadn’t taken long for Leah to lose track of time. The scenery stayed the same, the road looked the same, and after a while she stopped getting colder, as though her body had quit processing the temperature. She didn’t want to stop walking or lose any focus on the road, so she didn’t bother checking her phone.