The Lone Wolf

Chapter 4: The Shelter of the Red Bluffs Satiated for the first time in five days, Kazan dragged the remainder of the carcass beneath the shelter of an overhanging granite ledge. The blizzard broke at midnight with the fury of a thousand screaming engines. The spruce trees bent double, groaning under tons of packed powder, while the drift roared over the rimrock like white smoke. Curled tightly into a circle with his bushy tail shielding his sensitive nose and paws, Kazan slept the deep, restorative sleep of the predator. Inside his thick underfur, the heat of digested meat burned like an inner furnace, defying the sixty-below-zero frost that turned living trees into exploding splinters of ice.