Ren Frost's Arc

Chapter 2 of 13

Ren drove home with the deed in her glovebox and Jason's voice still in her ear. The talk would wait. Sixty animals could not. By midnight, her rental pens were failing. A heat lamp shorted. A tarp tore loose. The baby fox shivered against her chest, white fur dim with sleet. She made a choice. Tonight. All of them. To the new land. She hitched the old cattle trailer to her truck. The tires were soft. The axle wore a thick crust of rust. She loaded kennels two high, checking each name in her notebook as she went. Fox. Fawn. Owl. Cub. Sixty lines, sixty checkmarks waiting. Three trips through the dark. Snow fell heavier each hour. Her hands cracked on the latches. The notebook pages curled with damp, but she marked every animal in and every animal out. Forty. Fifty. Fifty-six. The last trip held four. The trailer groaned up the long drive toward the cabin. Then a sound like a gunshot. The axle snapped. The trailer tipped sideways into the ditch, kennels sliding, the fox screaming a thin sharp cry. Ren crawled into the wreck on her elbows. She pulled each kennel free, one by one, and carried them through the snow to a small weathered shed near the cabin. The door hung crooked. The roof held. She stacked the last four kennels inside and opened her notebook with shaking fingers. Sixty checkmarks. All sixty alive. She sat on the shed floor with the fox in her coat and watched dawn turn the pasture pink. The animals were home. The trailer was scrap. Her phone buzzed against her hip. Jason. She let it ring once, twice, then pressed it to her ear.