Grit Hardwicke buried what was left of his family in three shallow graves and swore he would kill the thing that made them. The graves were small. The ground was frozen. He was six foot six and had cracked frozen dirt with his bare hands until they bled. Now he stood over the mounds with a rifle on his back and enough ammunition to fight a war. But a war needs a target. Grit had never seen the killer's face. He'd come home to the blood and the wreck of his cabin, and no clear track to follow. A scruffy bear cub trailed behind him, patchy fur crusted with snow. Grit had found it orphaned near the same slope. He fed it scraps because leaving it felt too much like leaving his own. The cub whined at the fresh graves. Grit did not answer it. "You'll walk right into its teeth," a voice said. "Hunting blind." Grit turned. A short, thick man leaned against a dead pine, one sleeve pinned flat where an arm should be. Grit knew him. Gideon Blackwood, the trapper who ran lines on the far ridges. The only man Grit had ever heard speak of surviving the thing that stalked these mountains. "You lost that arm to it," Grit said. Gideon nodded once. He held up his good hand and spread the fingers wide. "Claws this far apart. It walks on two legs, then four. It don't leave clean prints. It drags a foot." He tapped the frozen ground with his boot. "You looking for a bear or a wolf, you'll die. It's neither." Grit's jaw tightened. For three days he'd hunted a shadow. Now a man was handing him the shape of it. "Show me," Grit said. Gideon led him back to the wrecked cabin. He crouched at the treeline, studying the churned snow Grit had trampled and dismissed. With one finger he traced a mark near a broken fence rail. A long print. Then a smear beside it, where something heavy dragged. "There," Gideon said. "You stepped over it twice." Grit stared at the drag mark. It ran east, toward the high timber, plain now that he knew to see it. His hands stopped shaking. He finally knew what he hunted. Gideon stood and brushed snow from his knee. "It circled back after," he said. "They do that. It's watched you dig those graves." Grit looked at the trees. The cub pressed against his leg and growled low at nothing he could see. "Then it knows my face too," Grit said. "It knows more than that." Gideon started back toward his own ridge. "It knows you're coming. And now it's got a head start into country you don't." Grit shouldered his rifle and followed the drag mark east. The hunt had a shape now. So did the thing waiting at the end of it.