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In the rain Julie can’t quite make out the skin color of the creatures she sees watching her from between the trees, but they look slightly peach. That’s good. It means they’re juveniles. Not yet skilled at the hunt. It’s the dark burnt orange ones, the adults, that Julie has to keep ahead of. They’re busy now, tearing, ripping, eating—but for how long? She keeps on running. Hard.
It’s mid-July, but up this high in the Wind River Mountain Range in Wyoming, above eleven thousand feet, it’s as if it’s early spring. The pale green grass coming up on the meadow is slick beneath Julie’s boots. Until the rain, the day was warm and fresh and the woods smelled like pine.
Then everything went to hell.
Julie finishes racing across the meadow and hits the game trail just inside the woods. It th
