Tia and I smiled. “No,” I said, “we wouldn’t want to get lost.”
John walked over to the door. “You sure you want to go?” he asked.
“Yep,” I replied, “I need to see this.”
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll be waiting here by the door for you.”
“Thanks,” I replied. “See you in a little over an hour.”
We worked our way through the thicket down to the small path that led to the rock outcropping. Ed pulled out two glow sticks, broke and shook them. The green glow was brighter than I expected it to be.
“How long do they last?” I asked.
“Three to four hours,” Ed replied. “Plenty of time for our mission.”
“Mission, huh?” I said.
“Seems like it is to you,” Ed replied. “That’s enough for us.”
I looked over at Tia. She smiled. Ed dropped the two glow sticks in the path by the large tree so we knew where the end of the path was. As we walked, Ed took more glow sticks out of the satchel, broke and shook them and dropped them on the path, spread out enough where we could see the next glow stick from the one in our current position.
We climbed up onto the rock outcropping and settled in to wait for the meteors. We didn’t have to wait long. The sky was clear, as usual for this time of year. On the horizon, small streaks of light began moving down and disappearing behind the curvature of the earth. As the meteors moved closer, we began to see more of them. The edge of the meteor storm was thin, with the meteors appearing higher in the sky. As the storm progressed the meteors became more abundant, filling the lower part of the sky with more and more streaks until the very lowest point of the sky turned a solid red color. The closer the meteor storm got, the higher the solid red portion of the sky moved up. It now looked like a solid wall of fire falling from the sky.
Ed checked his watch. “Time to go,” he said.
We climbed down the rock and headed back to the cave, the glow sticks guiding our way. We were about five minutes from the cave when Tia stopped.
“What’s that?” she asked, shining her flashlight further down the path.
It was hard to make out exactly. Small yellow dots were spread out across the path ahead of us. I put my hand in front of Tia’s flashlight. The yellow dots disappeared. Both Ed and I adjusted our flashlights from wide angle to spot focus and pointed them down the path.
“Animal eyes,” Ed said.
We moved slowly forward to get a better view of what was ahead of us on the path.
“Guys?” Tia said. “Are they?”
“Wolves,” Ed replied.
“I thought wolves were more like German Shepherds,” Tia said, “you know, sixty to seventy five pounds. These are…”
“Yeah,” Ed replied, “a lot larger.”
The wolves were at least waist high and were clearly one fifty to two hundred pounds each.
“We should have brought a gun,” I said.
“I did,” Ed replied, “but I don’t think it’s going to do us much good.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I’ve read about these. I just never expected to actually see one,” Ed replied.
“If we just shoot the gun, won’t they run away?” I asked.
“Not these,” Ed said. “I’ve got seven shots in the gun and seven in another clip. That’s fourteen shots. I count more than twenty pairs of eyes.”
“How many of these wolves do you think it would take to get us?” Tia asked.
“One,” Ed replied.
The wolves started moving closer to us. We could see them licking their chops.
“Oh man,” Ed said, “it just occurred to me. John’s been sedating the deer and Elk and moving them into the cave. These guys probably haven’t had anything to eat in the last week.”
“And we’re what… dinner?” Tia shrieked.
I swung my flashlight around and looked at the trees.
“Shit,” I said. “There’s nothing we can climb. All of the trees are at least twenty feet up before you get any branches.”
We heard noises moving on both sides of us.
“They’re flanking us,” Ed said.
“We should run,” Tia said.
“No!” Ed shouted. “These are predators. When you run, you act like prey. That triggers an attack.”
“And just standing here doesn’t?” Tia shouted in return.
“Calm down,” I said, “I’ve got to think.”
The wolves were closing in. We could see them more clearly now.
“These are like Frankenwolves,” Tia said. “How did they get so big?”
“They’re not natural to the area,” Ed said. “They’re a hybrid between Canadian Gray wolves and Alaskan Timber wolves.”
“And they what? Walked here?” Tia asked.
“They were planted here for biodiversity,” Ed explained.
“By…?” Tia asked.
Ed looked over at her.
“No. Don’t tell me,” Tia replied. “A government program? You have got to be kidding me.”
“Sorry,” Ed said.
The wolves walked closer to us. They formed a circle around us about twenty feet away. Ed drew his gun and pulled the slide back and released it, loading a round into the chamber.
“I’ll get as many as I can,” Ed said. “But…”
They were all still licking their chops.
I heard a whoosh and the snapping of several tree branches as a meteorite hit the ground to the left of us with a loud thud. Immediately fire broke out where the meteorite hit. The wolves looked over at the fire and then back at us. They didn’t move. I heard another whoosh and more branches breaking, followed by another heavy thud to the right of us. A second fire started. The wolves looked at the second fire and then back to us. Again, they didn’t move.
A third meteorite crashed through the trees and hit the ground behind us, starting another fire. The entire pack of wolves bolted into the forest and was gone in a matter of seconds.
“Now we run!” Ed shouted.
We raced up the path toward the cave with our flashlight beams swinging wildly in front of us and meteorites crashing to the ground all around us. A golf ball sized meteorite glanced off a tree and careened diagonally in front of us. The glow sticks were getting harder to see because of the increasing amount of red light from the fires behind us. We reached the large tree that John showed us and scrambled through the thicket.
John was standing in the doorway to the cave waving us in. “What happened?” John asked. “I expected you much earlier.”
Once we were inside, John closed the rock door. All three of us were out of breath.
“Wolves,” Tia managed to say.
“What?” John said in a loud tone. “I’ve never seen any wolves around here.”
“Well,” Tia said, “they’re here now.”
“I thought Carl had this new sense of intuition going for us,” John said.
“Yeah, Carl,” Ed added.
Tia looked at me. “So what the hell happened? Why didn’t it work?”
“Well,” I said sheepishly, “it did work. I just wanted to see the meteor storm. Besides, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal.”
“Carl!” Tia complained.
“Tell you what, buddy,” Ed said, poking his finger into my chest, “from now on you tell us about everything, no matter if you think it’s no big deal, so we can decide for ourselves.”
Tia was fuming. “Everything,” she stated emphatically.
“Okay, okay,” I said, “I’ll let you know about everything.”
“Good,” John said, “now that we have that settled.”
“Almost getting eaten by a pack of Frankenwolves and it’s no big deal,” Ed said as he walked away shaking his head.
“Ya gotta share, Carl,” Tia stated as she also walked away.
John looked around. “Well,” he said, “that went well.”
I headed for my personal enclosure without saying a word.