Exactly seven days later, I headed back into the taiga to check my traps, convinced that the encounter had been a one-time miracle. But the weather in Siberia is a fickle beast, and it turned on me within the hour.
A sudden “black blizzard” rolled in, erasing the horizon and burying my tracks in seconds. I was five miles from my cabin, and in this visibility, I could have been walking toward the edge of a cliff and never known it. Panic is a cold, heavy weight that settles in your chest when you realize you’re walking in circles. My fingers were turning numb, and the familiar landmarks of the forest had become a maze of identical white walls.
I collapsed against the trunk of a massive cedar, my core temperature dropping as the wind screamed through the branches. That’s when I saw the first pair of glowing eyes.
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