Brandon Thornridge had six hours of light left to build a shelter, or the arctic night would kill him. He knew this the way he knew his own hands. He was thirty miles from the nearest road, alone, with an axe, a coil of rope, and one goal that had pulled him north for years: a homestead deep in this frozen country where no storm could reach him. He'd pictured a cabin with a stone hearth, a fire that never died. Right now he had a snowfield and a wall of black spruce. He worked fast. He felled four young trees and dragged them against a granite outcrop. The rope bit through his gloves. Wind pushed the temperature down until his breath froze on his beard. He leaned the trunks into a slant and packed the gaps with cut boughs. It wasn't the cabin he wanted. It only had to hold until morning. Then the light failed faster than he planned. Clouds swallowed the sun. The cold turned mean. His fingers went stiff on the last knot, and he knew the boughs alone would not stop the wind that was coming. Something moved at the treeline. A wolf stepped out of the shadows. It was lean, gray, and thick-coated, and it watched him with steady yellow eyes. Brandon froze, axe in hand. The wolf did not attack. It padded to the far side of his outcrop, sniffed, then lay down in a hollow beneath a leaning slab of rock. Brandon studied where the animal had chosen to rest. The hollow was deep, walled on three sides, sheltered from the wind. He had spent his hours building against the wrong face of the stone. The wolf had found the right one in seconds. He did not argue with it. He hauled his boughs to the hollow and worked beside the animal as dark closed in. He built his lean-to over the sheltered gap, weaving branches into a low roof. The wolf lifted its head, then settled again. By the time he struck his fire, the flames held. The wind hit the granite wall and broke around it. Warmth crept into the small space. He was alive, and he would still be alive at dawn. In the firelight he saw them. A cluster of flowers grew from a crack in the rock, bright petals open against the snow, red and blue and yellow, untouched by the cold. Brandon stared. Nothing should bloom here. Flowers meant water close to the surface, and shelter from the wind, and ground that did not freeze all the way down. He had come north to build his homestead anywhere he could survive. He now knew he had been surviving in the wrong place. This hollow, warmed by hidden ground, guarded by stone, was where his cabin belonged. The wolf slept a few feet away. At first light, Brandon would stop running and start building for good.