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trip.
    Carpenter had brought his youngest son that time. The trip was a family ritual by then—a rite of passage, and even though this third son of his had been less than enthusiastic about hunting in general and scornful about this expedition in particular, Morgan had never been one to turn down the solid reality of bills in his wallet.
    It was understandable, bringing your sons out to take a beast as a ceremony to mark the transition from boy to man. He admired it. But this trip was different, and he had protested until Carpenter won him over with extra cash. Women had their own rites to mark entrance into adulthood, and they damn well shouldn’t have anything to do with guns and killing.
    This was no place for a girl, especially a girl with night-dark hair and eyes of a brown so deep you could barely see the pupils, a girl self-contained and light-footed and too goddamned capable for her thirteen years. She’d kept up easily on the hike yesterday, had carried her own pack, never made a single sound of complaint.
    Morgan scowled at her, sitting motionless on an upended chunk of a log, gazing into the fire as though she saw secrets there. Grace had been like that, always looking into the depths of things and keeping what she learned locked behind an impassive face and unreadable eyes.
    Grace was not safe to think about.
    “We start at first dawn,” he said, needing to get the girl out of his sight. “You might want to turn in.”
    Carpenter sniffed the air. “Temperature’s dropping—frost by morning.”
    “Good hunting weather,” Jenn said. Her voice was deep for a girl, slow rolling, like a shallow river over stones. She turned to her grandfather. “Which rifle will I carry?”
    “The Winchester.”
    “I like the AK.”
    “The tradition is the Winchester, Jenn. That’s what your dad used.”
    “You just want to use the AK yourself.” She smiled at him, a slow smile that made her eyes even darker.
    “Your dad got his bear with the Winchester.”
    “Lucky shot,” Morgan grunted. “Boy couldn’t aim and was shaking like a junkie.”
    Carpenter’s white teeth gleamed in the firelight. “The girl’s a crack shot, Morgan. Takes after her grandpa, not her old man. Wait and see.”
    Morgan snorted. “In my experience, the apple don’t fall far from the tree.” It was an insult to Carpenter, but he couldn’t abide the way Jenn occupied her own skin, eyes measuring him up with an expression that bordered on disdain.
    Not often he thought about his appearance, but those eyes made him remember that it had been a few years since he’d cut his hair, that his beard was untrimmed and bushy, that the flannel shirt he wore was overdue for a wash. Not that he cared what she thought about anything, her or any human creature.
    A sound startled all three of them into stillness, a sharp retort, almost like a gunshot.
    Only one thing made that sound in the forest: a tree, breaking under stress, branches cracking and rustling as gravity pulled it down to the earth. But trees didn’t fall randomly on quiet nights. They broke in high winds. Or when something big enough pushed them over.
    Morgan picked up his shotgun, chambered a shell. Carpenter was a few seconds behind him, the girl even quicker.
    It took a pretty big critter to break a tree. A grizzly might do it, if the trunk was rotten or not too big around. And there were strange creatures out here in this forest, not registered in any
Hunting the Northwest
guidebook.
    Twenty beats of his heart, and then a sudden onrush of wind that brought down leaves and set the trees to keening. A shadow blotted out the stars overhead, a sinuous, long-necked shape. And then, as suddenly as it began, the wind was gone, the sky was clear, the normal forest sounds returned.
    “What the hell was that?” Carpenter’s useless gun was still trained on the empty sky; might just as well try shooting at the stars.
    “Freak burst of wind, I reckon,” Morgan lied. “One of those dust