Page 40 of Recipe for a Curse

Chapter 16

Making massive amounts of food didn’t help my anxiety, but it kept me occupied. The snow began to fall after lunch, another batch of giant fluffy flakes, and I wanted to scream. No sign of Rio. Zach’s texts had been odd.

Only tracks near the trailer are wolf,Zach had sent me.

Did that mean wolves had taken over his trailer? I worried since Rio hadn’t been back, that he’d be stuck in some frozen hollow somewhere.Like a pack of them?I sent back, worried Rio would be overwhelmed or attacked if he did go home.

Just one.The three-dot note appeared for a while as though Zach were typing some long message, but finally all that appeared was,He’ll be fine.

Rio? Or the wolf?

Will Rio go back to his trailer?I sent back.

Maybe?Zach sent back.It is his land, and there are bears to the north of the manor, so he’s unlikely to head that way.

My heart leapt into my throat. Bears?You found bear tracks?

Yes. A while back, after first snow, pretty far north, but they still come looking for food.

Don’t bears hibernate?

Yes and no.Zach sent.It’s a bit more complicated than the childhood cartoons lead us to believe. Let’s just hope Rio stays south.

As if I didn’t have enough anxiety. Now I had to worry about Rio meeting bears. And a wolf was stalking his place. Could he use the place at all? Maybe if he cleared some of the roof and propped up a bit of it around the fireplace. I hadn’t seen the inside after the collapse, not like Zach had.

I focused on making canned soups, so if anyone needed something separate from a regular shared meal, they had options. I also baked bread and sticky buns until I worried I’d run out of flour. Dinner was ready to go, something more elaborate than I’d originally planned, but Ana was taking over for me. She wrung her hands as I packed up supplies.

“Wait for Zach,” she said. “It’s still snowing.”

“I’m just going to drop food at Rio’s house. I won’t even leave the car until the snow stops,” I said. As soon as the snow stopped the cold would drop. Which meant I had to get there fast. I filled every thermos I could find with hot cocoa, coffee, and tea. The food was another story. I had a half dozen loaves of bread, four pounds of bacon, two dozen hard boiled eggs, deviled as Rio really seemed to like those, a jumbo broccoli salad, and an entire pan of sticky buns, ready to go.

“Then wait for Zach and go tomorrow.”

“It’s fine,” I said. Zach had texted to say he’d be late to dinner. He’d gone down to the city after checking at Rio’s place, to order groceries sent up from one of the bigger chains. He wouldn’t be back until late, and it was already growing dark. “Just make sure dinner is on the table.”

Ana stared at me with worry as I loaded up the wagon and began dragging things out to my car. I folded the back seat down and loaded in everything, filling it up like a Tetris puzzle. I even found a tent tucked away in the side of the garage, and a portable propane grill with what appeared to be a couple of full canisters. There was also a can of bear spray, which when I read the back of, sounded like a really good idea, so I added that to the pile too.

I really hoped the new snow tires helped on the roads because when I backed the car out of the garage, the driveway was a slippery mess of growing snow piles. At least the temperatures were warm enough that it wasn’t freezing to solid ice right away.

As I drove toward Rio’s house, I gripped the steering wheel, white knuckled as the car slipped a little, right and left, even though I kept my speed down. It was terrifying, like driving on an ice rink, not that I’d ever done that either. I could hear the tires crunching through the snow, feel them help the car from spinning out or completely sliding off the road. And it took more than an hour to get the handful of miles to Rio’s.

The little off-road section appeared to have been plowed quickly, a haphazard shove of the snow toward the trees. Probably Zach’s work with the plow on his truck rather than anything the state might have done. The path hadn’t been cleared, but I pulled off into the parking area hoping I wouldn’t get stuck. I bundled up and pulled out the shovel Zach had left me. I didn’t plan to shovel the entire walk to Rio’s place, but use it more like a plow, pushing show aside to let me walk more freely. I was thankful the splint for my ankle fit under my Ugg boots as I hoped to keep my feet as warm and dry as possible.

Shoveling was exhausting. Even if I was just letting the snow fall to the edges of a narrow path. There appeared to be a dozen or so crossings of the wolf tracks. I didn’t know enough about them to determine if they were from multiple wolves or just one. On TV wolves were always shown to survive in packs. I knew the perpetuated culture of “alpha males” in wolves had been disproven, and they were a more social society, protecting the weak and elders, the pack led by more of a council of females than one young brash male. It made sense really, certainly more sense than one super strong male somehow having the knowledge and willpower to take care of an entire pack by himself, but it made me wonder about lone wolves too. What did a lone wolf do without a pack? How did it survive? Wolves were pack animals by nature, needing their community to build a solid structure and even to hunt most of the time. Did that mean if this was a lone wolf, it was out there hungry and alone?

I shivered, the chill settling in more at the thought of being attacked by a wolf than the cold. The narrow path I’d dug made it easy to get to the trailer. And the path didn’t feel so long now that the snow had already faded. Though I could tell the cold was settling in.

I dug the wagon out of the car, thankful it was one of those little fold up kinds with sides that popped up. It took three trips to get everything to the trailer. I tugged at the trailer door, pulling it open. I couldn’t see anything inside, not even with a flashlight. I set up a little area beside the trailer, cleared away some of the snow to create a ring, and built a fire once again thanking the survival classes I’d taken at the manor.

The fire melted the snow near it, and I set up a tarp a few feet away to unload all the supplies and build the tent around it. Hopefully the fire would keep the wolf away. I put together the tent, though it was smaller than I had hoped. The windows zipped shut against the wind, and the door seemed much the same. It was pretty high end from what I could tell, and when I pulled out a box of blankets and those thermal foil looking things, I hoped it would be enough. The idea was that if Rio showed up, he’d have not only the fire for warmth, but the tent filled with blankets for a windbreak.

The fire burned pretty steady. The wood Rio had around his house a bit wet on top, but once I chiseled that first piece out, the rest seemed fine, so I added logs to keep it going, and to create a little seating area outside the tent. The heat was delightful, and since I was tired and a little sweaty, I kept close to it, hoping that Rio would see the smoke and come home.

The wind settled, for which I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d only gotten the tent stakes so far into the ground, so I kept worrying that the wind would grab it, and fling it. I’d stacked the food inside to try to keep it down. The towering trees helped as a windbreak, but I could hear the howl of it pick up every once in a while. When it fell completely still, I relaxed a little. The darkness was unnerving. Even with the fire in front of me and the frozen trailer behind me, I worried something was out there. Even felt a bit like I was being watched.

I focused on how I was feeling physically. Cold? Numb? Not really. Close to the fire I was warm and my tummy rumbled with hunger. Since I was camping in the cold, I decided to make a normal camping thing. That meant hot dogs on a stick. I dug out a pack and found the metal sticks that had been tucked away in the garage near the propane stove.

The first hot dog I burned. Hmm. Some chef I was. Burning hot dogs. The second took a long time because I worried it would burn. But I ate it finally, finding it cold in the middle. At least they were precooked so I didn’t have to worry about bacteria.