"You are certain," he had asked her one night, during the storm, "that when you see them, you will be able to kill?"

"Yeah," she'd said, looking away. "If what you say is true, then ..."

He'd nodded and put a gentle hand on her arm. "They are killers. Each of them. Between the three of them they've slaughtered hundreds of innocent human beings."

So it wasn't like she was drawing down on people. These were monsters. Even the government had decided they had to die, for the common good. How could she refuse that kind of public service? "And you say I won't have to shoot them when they look human. Just when they look like wolves."

"We will complete the hunt before the moon goes down," he'd said. He'd been very clear on that part.

He'd walked her through every piece of the operation, from the planning stage to the kill. He'd shown her maps and satellite data the Canadian government had given him, tracking every move the lycanthropes made. He'd shown her the guns they would be using, and the silver bullets. Maybe she'd started getting a little scared, then, because he'd changed his tack. He'd told her about how important it was that the lycanthropes were put down-that was his term, put down, like what you did to a mad dog. He'd pointed out how it could be done mercifully, and without too much danger. Sharon had listened to every word. She'd even started to admire him for what he was doing. After all, the werewolves were heading right for the town of Umiaq, where all her people lived. If they weren't stopped now, who knew what they were capable of?

And yet ...

Now, when it was really happening, she had to admit she did have one doubt left. She had started to think that maybe Varkanin wasn't doing this just out of the goodness of his own heart. "You got a real hate thing going with these wolves, don't you?"

"I have a job to perform, just like you do," he said, with a smile. "You remember our agreement, yes?"

"Sure," Sharon said. "I still don't think it's smart, though."

He handed her a pistol loaded with silver bullets. She ejected the clip and took a look at them. She had expected them to be shiny, but in fact they were black with tarnish. "If the gray one or the big one, the leader, get close, I plug 'em. But the white one-"

"Is mine to put down," Varkanin said, nodding. "No matter the cost. If she attacks me, you are not to intervene. If somehow she injures me, you are to keep your distance until you are certain that I am dead. Only then should you engage her."

Sharon looked away. This guy called himself a hunter, but ... she knew about hunting. When she was a kid her mother had tried to teach her the arts-which in her town had largely meant sewing, creepy throat singing, and carving wood. She'd never been any good at that stuff. Her dad, who lived down in Yellowknife, had taken her hunting every summer since she was six years old. He hadn't cared if she was any good at it, because he said like anything important in life, if you did it badly long enough you'd eventually develop some level of talent. He'd been right, too. Now she was one of the very few Inuit women in Nunavut who actually made a living at it. She had a reputation for clean kills, for bringing back meat no matter how bad the weather was, and for not making stupid mistakes. Varkanin had told her that was why he had chosen her to be his second in command on this mission, and she'd felt real proud when he said that. Because he was supposed to be some big-shot hunter himself.

She'd had time to get to know Varkanin a little, now. During the storm they'd holed up in a one-room cabin plotting their strategy, and she'd seen something in him she didn't recognize. In her experience hunters killed because they needed to eat, or maybe because some southerner was paying them to help him take a moose head for his wall. Real hunters kept their cool and they never let the hunt mean anything personal.

She'd had time to see underneath his unnaturally calm exterior, though. She'd seen the hatred he hid behind his blue skin and his placid eyes. This Russian guy wasn't hunting today. He was here to do executions.

"Please remember not to underestimate them," Varkanin said. "If we stick exactly to plan, we will not be in any danger. But if we deviate-"

"I know! They're werewolves. They're crazy dangerous, sure," Sharon said. She slammed the clip back into her pistol and shoved it inside her coat, where her body heat would keep the oil in the gun's action from freezing. "We've got all kinds of stories about them. About how you never, ever mess with them. Some people over east of here, near Greenland, they say if you see a werewolf it means you're going to die. Over here we know better-we just run the other way, fast as we can."

"Yet you chose to join me, when I asked for your help."

Sharon shrugged. " 'Cause I figured you knew what you were doing. I'll keep my head screwed on straight, don't worry."

Varkanin gave her his chilly smile. She'd seen it a couple times before and she wasn't sure what to make of it. It was like he approved of her, sure, but also like he was remembering something very sad. There was a story there, but it wasn't one she wanted to hear.

The radio in Varkanin's hand crackled. It was Leonard Opvik, the crazy kid from Kugluktuk who always wanted the most dangerous job. Sharon figured he was compensating for something. "They saw me! Yeehaw, here they come!"

Varkanin laughed. "Good, it is beginning. But tell me, Ms. Minik, what does 'yeehaw' mean?"

"Probably something he saw on TV," she told him. Sharon gunned her snowmobile into life. "See you at the rally point, okay?"

"Remember what I said about being careful!" he shouted over the noise of her engine. Sharon was already gone before he could finish his sentence, though, glad to finally be moving. Excited, despite her doubts and fears.

This might actually be fun, she told herself.

The wolves weren't running as a pack anymore. They weren't animals living according to carefully maintained social rules. They had become plain and simple monsters. This was what the curse had been created for.

The gray raced to keep up with the white. The male was slightly off to one side, loping alongside them both. Ahead of them the human machine whined and belched hellish fumes in their faces. The driver kept looking back at them over his shoulder. He didn't look nearly as scared as he should be.

No matter. Jaws dripped with slaver. Lips pulled back from enormous, bone-crushing teeth. Claws dug hard into the snow to propel the wolves forward, faster, ever forward. They were gaining on the machine. Soon they would be upon it. They would pull it apart with their mouths, smash it with their paws. The driver would be shredded-his skin torn off, his vitals consumed and then, then, they would howl to the moon, offering up their blood sacrifice to something none of them understood. As it had always been, how it must be. Closer-they inched closer to the machine, until the snow it kicked up behind stung their noses and flecked their eyelashes. Just one more sprint, one more ounce of power dug up from inside their hearts and delivered straight to their legs, one more lunge and- The machine roared. The driver twisted his handlebars and smoke billowed out of the back of the machine. It shot forward over the snow twice as fast as before, much faster than the wolves could run. It tore a crazy zigzag path through the snow, cutting back and forth for no apparent reason.

The wolves followed, running as fast as their legs would carry them-straight into a minefield.

The first explosion caught the male, throwing him high into the air. Blood spurted from his throat and legs and he spun, flipping over twice before crashing back down to the snow. The white female skidded as she slowed down, trying to turn to see what had just happened. Her foot barely grazed another mine. It was enough.

Heat, light, and smoke washed over the gray like an avalanche, the pressure buffeting her ears. She curled around herself in midair, then slid across the packed snow of the machine's path, rolling on her side and wheezing as blood poured from her mouth and nose. She'd been at the edge of the explosion and still the blast had deafened and blinded her, completely thrown her mind off balance. She couldn't think, couldn't hear, couldn't get her feet underneath her.

When the ringing in her ears subsided she lifted her head and put her forepaws down on the snow. Slowly she rose to stand on all fours and look around. She saw the white wolf right away.

The white female was missing one foreleg, and most of her face on that side. She kept shaking her head and sneezing. Her remaining eye was rolling in her head.

There was no sign of the male.

Angry buzzing sounded from either side. The land rose in a mild incline to the gray's left. To her right it was flat and featureless. Humans on machines were coming from both of those directions. She thought her chances would be better if she took on the human on the flat stretch of ground, and turned to run that way-and then stopped.

She sniffed the air. It was foul with smoke and human stenches. She could barely smell anything under the snow. But there-yes, right before her, not three feet from where she stood-something hard and metallic lurked, just waiting for her to step on it. Now that she looked more closely she could see that the snow atop it had recently been disturbed, then smoothed back over by human hands.

She snarled and took a step back. The white, perhaps thinking she was trying to close ranks, trotted toward her, bobbing wildly up and down as she tried to move gracefully with only three legs.

The humans were getting closer. They had guns. The gray knew the smell of gun oil. She could smell silver, too. She could smell their silver bullets.

She backed up another step. And then realized there might be something buried in the snow behind her, as well.

There was no time to check. The humans and their machines were coming closer, coming toward her at full speed. This was where she would have to make her stand.

"Jesus," Sharon Minik said, looking down from the top of the hill. The two wolves standing there looked like they should be dead already. They were pinned down inside the minefield, both covered in blood. The white one looked like the only thing keeping her alive was sheer hatred and willpower. "They don't have a chance," Sharon said, taking the gun out of her parka. It was warm in her hand.

"Do not feel sorry for them," Varkanin said over the radio. "They would not show mercy if the situation were reversed. You must show none now. Close in. The gray female must be Cheyenne Clark, the youngest of the pack. Give her a quick death, please."

"Don't worry," Sharon said. "She won't suffer."

"I am less worried about this than I am of the belief that if it is not done quickly, we will lose our advantage." The Russian called out for Jimmy Etok and Leonard Opvik to check in. They responded instantly, as they'd been taught.

Sharon understood all the things that could go wrong on a hunt. All the different ways nature could make a joke out of your plans, especially up here where the weather was openly hostile to human life and the animals were all smarter than most people she knew. Still, this one looked like it was all over except for skinning the pelts. She had to admire Varkanin's planning. He'd thought of everything.

Sharon gunned her snowmobile into life and tore down the slope toward the mine field. The two wolves were back to back, turning slowly to face every possible angle of attack. They were smart enough not to move too far-Sharon hadn't expected them to figure out how mines worked so quickly, but it didn't matter. As long as they were trapped, and they knew it, it was going to be easy to just sweep in and pick them off.

"Who can see the male?" Varkanin asked, over the radio. "Where is he?"

"Looks like he landed in a snowdrift over here," Jimmy said. "He didn't look too good, last I saw him-maybe he's dead."

"No," Varkanin announced. "He is not. Be careful."

"Cover me," Sharon said. "I'm going in for the gray." With silver bullets you had to get close to be sure of a kill. Normal bullets, lead bullets, spun on their long axis as they flew through the air. It kept them flying straight. Silver bullets were different-they tumbled when they came out of a gun barrel. That meant they weren't as accurate as lead bullets, so at more than short range they were almost useless. She goosed her throttle and her machine covered the distance easily. Twenty meters away-probably still too far. Fifteen. She had to get as close as she could without actually entering the minefield. Theoretically she knew exactly where each mine was, but it would be far too easy to make a misstep and blow herself up.

On the other side of the wolves, she saw Varkanin moving in as well. She glanced at his hands and saw he didn't have his gun out. Instead he was holding a long, thin knife.

"Boss, what are you doing?" she asked. "You can just shoot the white, right now, and we're done."

"She needs to suffer, first," Varkanin said.

Sharon bit back the words that came to her mouth. That was a mistake, and she knew it, but she couldn't tell him that. Not when he was calling the shots. During a hunt, you never questioned authority. There was no time for thinking.

At ten meters away she killed her engine and jumped down into the snow. She knew there was a mine a few meters to her left, so she swerved a little out of its way as she closed the rest of the distance on foot. Five meters. Three. That was close enough.

"Got movement," Jimmy Etok said. "Something's coming out of the snow. Might be the male."

"I see it," Leonard replied. "I'm moving." Behind her Sharon heard the roar of Leonard's snowmobile. "Got you, dickhead."

Sharon lifted her gun and sighted along the barrel. The gray stared back at her with hate-filled eyes. The animal lowered its head and its ears swiveled back. Its paws stretched toward Sharon across the snow. It looked like it wanted to jump but didn't dare because of the mines.

Fear, real deep, made Sharon's head hurt. She knew that feeling, though-she'd felt it when hunting bears and even moose. This was a creature who could hurt you, even kill you, if you didn't respect it properly. If you didn't use your human brain to get the better of it. She had a perfect shot, though. This was over. She started to squeeze her trigger.

Behind her she heard Leonard Opvik scream. She heard it again in her ear, over the radio, and it made her wince. She dropped her arm and turned around to see what was happening.

She nearly dropped her gun.

It wasn't the male wolf. Sharon had no idea what it was, except that it was nine feet tall and covered in white fur. Or it could have been a fur coat. Its head was covered in a carved wooden mask studded with ivory spikes.

With a roar, it picked up Leonard's snowmobile with one hand and tossed it end over end.

The gray wolf stared up the mouth of the gun. She could smell the silver bullet in the chamber. She knew it was her death. Still her hatred of human beings would not allow her to surrender. She lowered herself into a crouch, the first step in launching a killing pounce. Every muscle in her body tensed, became a tightened spring ready to be loosed.

The human female started to fire-and then stopped.

So intent on her pounce, the gray wolf didn't see the thing that came out of the snow. When the human turned around to look, the gray jumped-all claws and teeth, all concentrated rage. She landed on the human's back and knocked her forward, sending her flying to the ground. The gray's claws tore through the human's parka and the layers of clothing underneath, ripping great gouges through the human's skin. The hit shattered some of the human's ribs and dug a deep groove into the pelvis. In time those injuries would be enough to kill any human being. Either the human female would bleed to death on the spot, or chips of bone, knocked loose by the impact, would enter her bloodstream and eventually her heart or lungs.

The gray was just getting started. She would tear the human female to pieces. She would swallow her flesh whole.

The blood fury inside her distracted her so much that she was barely aware of everything that was happening around her. It was chaos and fire, but her world had shrunk down to a narrow window. She could see nothing but her prey.

Had she been more aware of her surroundings, she might have seen the giant figure striding across the minefield, setting off explosions everywhere it walked. Smoke wreathed in the air; shrapnel cascaded down like vicious rain. One of the human males, the one who had been thrown off his machine in the moment the giant appeared, staggered up to his feet and fired his weapon again and again into the giant's face and chest. The silver bullets bounced off the white furs, the wooden mask. The giant didn't even seem to feel them.

Meanwhile the male wolf had struggled up out of the snow, lost in his own bloodlust. His body was ravaged, torn apart. One of his legs hung off his frame by tatters of skin. His viscera dragged steaming on the ground and all the fur had been scorched off his face. A piece of jagged metal protruded from his left eye.

It was enough to make him very, very angry.

Even on three legs the male wolf streaked through the minefield like a horizontal bolt of lightning. He intersected with one of the moving machines with enough force and speed to send it rolling across the snow while its human driver crashed with a thud to the ground. The driver tried to get up, but the male wolf tore him to pieces without wasting time to breathe. One of his arms came off-then part of his face. His hot blood hit the snow like acid, melting a great pool of it. The male wolf found his prey's heart and tore it loose, then gulped it down without chewing.

The white wolf had circled back along her own tracks-the only safe path, where there could be no mines-and had doubled around to where the giant had emerged. The sound of her footfalls was lost in the general din, so she was able to sneak up behind the other male human, the one who had tried to shoot the giant. She moved forward and nuzzled his calf, almost gently. He spun around and tried to shoot her, but by then his gun was empty.

The white female licked her lips.

Her prey threw down his gun, then raised his hands in surrender. Wolves cannot laugh. But they can smile. The white female took a step forward. Her prey took a step backward.

Right onto a concealed mine.

The explosion was loud enough to deafen the gray, but she was too fixed on her kill to care. She didn't need to hear her prey moaning for help or mercy. She wouldn't have understood the words it spoke, anyway. She padded closer and licked blood from the human female's back. She thought she would flip the prey over and tear its throat out. That would be enough to show her anger, wouldn't it? Perhaps she would urinate on the corpse afterwards.

She heard a buzzing sound behind her and for once it got through the red mist in her head. There was a machine behind her, and a human riding it. A human who smelled-wrong, somehow. Well, no matter. The human female on the ground before her wasn't going anywhere. She could be finished off at the gray wolf's leisure. First she would take care of this new threat. She whirled around and found herself face to face with another human.

A male. With blue skin. Her color vision was not as acute as that of a human being, but she knew that humans didn't normally come in that color. No matter. She reared up and lunged forward to bite his face off. He shoved a forearm into her mouth, as if he wanted her to tear him apart. Obligingly, the gray wolf bit down with all her bone-crunching strength. The muscles in her jaws and neck were capable of snapping through the femur of a caribou. One human arm would be nothing to even slow her down. Her enormous teeth sank effortlessly through the padded parka sleeve, the layers of flannel and thermal underwear beneath, even the plastic and metal of his wristwatch.

But when they touched his skin her teeth-shattered. She felt them collapse inside her mouth as if they'd been rotted through by decay. Where her gums and lips touched his skin they burned and shriveled away.

Gasping for air, the gray wolf pulled back, her mouth wide, her tongue lolling. She felt dizzy and sore and she could barely stand up. She could do nothing as she watched the blue human load the dying female human onto his machine and roar away.

"I'm going to die," Sharon Minik whispered to herself. She was bouncing along on the back of a snowmobile racing over the tundra, its suspension lurching every time it hit a buried rock or thick patch of snow. Her head kept colliding with one of the side panniers. It hurt, a lot.

But nothing could compare to the pain in her back. Her flesh there felt raw and hot and agony seared through her every time the wind touched her exposed wounds. She could feel sticky blood pooling under her clothes, could feel things tearing open inside her guts. "I'm going to die," she said again, because it didn't seem real. It didn't seem right. But she knew it was true. Nobody could survive what the wolf had done to her.

Behind them, as if in a dream, the giant was still chasing them. They were kilometers away from the minefield by that point, but still it kept after them. It ran on all fours, though she could see that its front limbs ended in hands, not paws. Its wooden mask was carved in the shape of a horribly grimacing human face. She had a pretty good idea what it was-who it was-but she didn't want to believe it. Like the mayor of the town of Umiaq, she believed wholeheartedly that such things existed. But you never actually saw one, not if you lived to be a hundred years old. And definitely none of them ever chased your snowmobile, clearly intending to kill you.

Perhaps it would be a mercy if it did, she thought. If it caught up to them and ripped them up like tissue paper, at least she would really be dead. She could stop waiting for it to happen. She could stop hurting so much.

Even that mercy was to be denied her, however. The snowmobile sped up and pulled away from the big thing's pursuit. It didn't stop chasing them, but little by little they gained ground until it shrank in the distance, still running toward them but barely visible.

Eventually she couldn't see it at all.

Sharon closed her eyes. She was crying, which was always a bad idea in the Arctic during the winter months. No matter how salty your tears were, when it was twenty below outside they could still freeze to your cheeks. She couldn't help it, though. As strong as she liked to think she was, as tough-and life had given her plenty of chances to prove that-knowledge of her impending death was the thing that had cracked her open like an egg and let all the insecurities and vulnerabilities come bubbling out.

"I'm going to die," she wept.

She felt one of Varkanin's hands reach for hers. He twined his gloved fingers through her own. "No," he said. "You're not. That's the problem."

Chey felt as if she were buried in layer after layer of gauzy cloth. She could almost see through it-though she couldn't make out any details she could sense light and shadows all around her. She tried to scrub at her eyes with her hands, thinking maybe she was just still bleary from sleep. She quickly realized that she couldn't feel her hands, or any other part of her body.

It was then she heard her wolf panting. The noise of it filled her head and made her want to scream.

That was when she realized she didn't have a voice, either. It wasn't her head she was in. It was the wolf's-she was just a passenger inside it.

There followed a long, confusing period where she tried to fight and break her way out of the wolf's head, a futile combat she would later be unable to explain in any detail. How did you smash at the walls when there were no walls, and nothing to smash against them with? No shoulders, no hips, nor arms or legs? How did you scream dire threats or shout commands when you could not speak? How did you struggle to maintain control when you had none to begin with?

When she realized she was having no effect she stopped fighting. It made a world of difference. The wolf didn't seem to mind her being inside its head, not when she couldn't do anything there. It let her be, and gave her a certain degree of freedom. It let her use its senses as long as she didn't try to direct them.

Slowly her eyesight sharpened, though still she couldn't make out many colors and details still eluded her. She was seeing things as the wolf did, through the wolf's eyes. She could not control where it turned its gaze, so she could only study the wall next to her, a massive construction of layered sod reinforced with giant bones. She wasn't sure if she was in a real place or some fantasy world concocted by the wolf-though she didn't know how a creature of such limited imagination could come up with that wall.

She could hear what the wolf heard, as well, though it was a maddening experience because the wolf's hearing was so much more directional than a human's. There were faint mutterings just on the edge of sensation that she would really have liked to explore. They sounded like human voices. But unless the wolf turned its ears around to specifically listen to those voices, she couldn't be sure.

She could taste what the wolf tasted, but this she did her best to ignore. The wolf's mouth hurt, a lot, and something was wrong with its teeth-they felt like they'd all been smashed in with a hammer. The pain was unbelievable, so she tried to distance herself from it, which kind of worked.

Eventually she was allowed to smell what the wolf smelled. And while that was the most beguiling of all its senses-her human knowledge of smells was so limited, so narrow, that she could identify only a tiny fraction of what she was receiving-it was also the most reassuring. She could smell the wall before her, smell the dirt and withered grass roots that comprised the sod, smell the ancient dry smell of the bones. She could smell dirty bed linen underneath her. This at least made her think she was in a real place, since she couldn't imagine the wolf dreaming of lying on a human bed.

Far more exciting to her were other smells. The smell of Dzo's wet furs. The smell of Lucie's clean hair. And the smell of Powell's skin, the musky scent of him, the smell of his flannel shirt and of his sweat, the smell of campfires they'd shared, the smell of his excitement the last time she'd seen him, when they'd kissed.