The snow was all around him. At his feet, his back, his sides; it pushed at him in erratic patterns as the wind swept its way along the ground of this lonely expanse of land.
These were whiteout conditions now.
Every direction he looked was the same as any other. Without his internal compass, the one that filtered sounds and smells and unconscious proddings inside his mind to find the pull of the direction he wanted to go in, Diego would have been lost.
He'd never been lost in his entire life. It simply wasn't possible. And even now, even though he was coming up empty of everything else, he did know where he was: the crest of the hill where he'd seen the humans the first time. The ice caves were to his left. There was a bulky, hunk of something there that told him what it was even though he couldn't see more than mere inches past his own nose.
Again, he tried to do a quick calculation in his mind. Without the snow, the path tracing backwards from the Pass should have been fairly clear, and it would have eventually led them to this spot. And if they traveled at a good speed – and Diego was fairly certain Manfred had sensed, as he did, the magnitude of the weather coming in – than they would have conceivably made it this far already.
Because there had been no sign of them at the entrance to Glacier Pass. Even the stark, grating human smell had been absent. The moment he'd turned to look back the way they would have gone…the valley floor had been almost unrecognizable. Great drifts of snow were pushed up against the steep sides, and weak sunlight through falling snow had screamed a very, very unhappy truth at him: he was too late.
And when Diego stood alone, facing squarely south, with Glacier Pass a shaky half mile behind him, he channeled all of his mental energy into picking up anything that he could. And eventually, a very faint hint of something that could have been Sid stuck out to him from the atmospheric smell of wet, too-cold snow.
So he'd followed it, grasping at any curve of scent the wind threw his way. Plodding along, nose in the air, or sometimes even to the snow to try to get to its lower layers, he'd subconsciously followed the well-known pathways beneath the snow.
The amount of ground he'd covered since then worried him. He hadn't even stopped to rest, and yet, there was no sign of them. Just…nothing.
But that didn't stop him from ignoring his instincts and always, in the back of his mind, waiting to run face-first into one of Manfred's legs or hear Sid's frightened yelp as he accidently tackled the sloth into the snow.
And it was in these tense, empty hours that he began replaying the fight in his mind. Saw his chances, the alternate ones hidden by blurry adrenaline in the moment, that could have prevented this. Soto had exposed himself in that stance, was slightly distracted after that offensive move, was off-balance in that split-second transition. Diego went through the options over and over, adjusting his own reactions to create a thousand fights over in his mind. Fantasy Soto went down too easily in a myriad of different, less-than-believable ways, and he began to wonder if it would have been better to come up with a different way to separate his pack at the outset.
In between refighting these Sotos, he refined his original plan compulsively, shifting his packmates around like icebergs eddying past each other on a thawing river. The timing had been surprisingly perfect for Manfred's part of the plan. That log had done its job. But, looking back, it was stupid not to lure Soto into the trap first. It would have been more difficult and almost impossibly riskier. But they might have avoided trying to fight the entire pack at once.
Because Diego knew that by the time they'd reached the apex of Soto's strategy for bringing down mammoths, it was too late. Nothing would have prevented Diego from jumping in front of Manfred. Not at that point.
More than anything, that was the single moment that defined it all. If he could have avoided that one move, everything would be different. Maybe not for Manfred and Sid, but it definitely would have found him elsewhere at this very moment.
As it was, he'd been out long enough to give them one heck of a head start. And from what he could see – which was basically nothing – they'd made good use of it. And of course, the small practical part of him that seemed to come out of every situation undamaged and clear-eyed whispered that it was probably better that he was the one stuck out here and not them.
If they were ahead of the storm, they'd have less chance of getting lost, whereas Diego could find his route either way. He'd run into them again at some point, it was inevitable. If he didn't catch them out here first, getting outside of the storm's path would allow him to pick up scents and tracks and more than likely, too-loud voices. It was just a matter of finding his way out of this mess.
000
He could feel his shoulder when he woke up. It was pretty much the only thing he could feel. Even breathing somehow made it hurt more, and he didn't dare stretch and aggravate the burning, stiff muscles that covered the joint.
The events from the day before weren't surprising or confusing. Despite the fact that he'd basically collapsed already half-asleep in a small shelter of rock partway between the ice caves and their first night's campsite, it wasn't a question how Diego had gotten there. He knew where he was. He knew what had happened. And he knew what he needed to do.
Whereas the day before, with its freezing wind and mind-numbing miles, had eased the sharp pricks and twinges that reverberated through the muscle cords, his body heat had let the wound thaw out overnight. And it hurt.
At first, he wasn't sure if he should even get up and walk on it. He'd never sustained an injury this bad before, and from the way it seemed to be burning right through him and making the rest of his body ache dully, Diego definitely had his concerns.
He'd covered a lot of ground yesterday, maybe taking a break for a day, or even half a day, to try and sleep some of this off was a better idea. He was already in the perfect spot. The orientation of the rocks had provided just enough of a shelter from the wind to keep him above freezing and prevent snow from piling on top of him. Now, a dull, emotionless screaming was coming from the other side of the formation.
Diego growled and carefully got his good paw underneath him and pushed up. Then, carefully, he let his right paw touch the ground. A spasm as the muscles moved and a headrush of dizziness as he looked around. He gritted his teeth and pressed it completely down. Then a little bit of weight. Then a little more. Then enough that he could support himself as his other paw swiped at the drifts to clear a path to the other side.
It hurt. It hurt a whole lot. But it was stable. And as blue, barely-there daylight hit his eyes on the other side, his heart sank. His vision wasn't swimming from pain, it was still snowing that hard. The wind, the screaming thing that he'd heard, blew right into his face, pushing the tufts of fur away from his eyes and forcing his ears to swivel down close to his head. For a moment, he wasn't sure what hurt worse: his shoulder or his whole body.
Resting here wasn't going to be an option, and as he climbed out into the snow, he was anxious to keep going. He had to get out of this storm, and he needed to do it before too much time passed. If only for his own well-being.
The joints in his shoulder moved and locked the way they were supposed to, and other than a searing, but otherwise monotonous, pain with the movements, the injured leg bore his weight.
So he kept going.
000
Diego wasn't sure how, but each blast of wind managed to cut at him just as badly as the one before. Even after hours. And hours, and hours, and hours.
He was shivery from more than just the cold, eyes slit against the oncoming snow, and exhausted from having to constantly reorient himself against the push and pull of the wind. His shoulder had melted into nothingness a good few miles back, and the only reason he knew it was still well enough to travel on was because he hadn't pitched sideways into the snow yet.
But sooner or later, that was more than likely what was going to happen.
He couldn't remember the last time he was this tired, and the slight hunger he'd been nursing since yesterday was making it harder to focus on anything other than keeping himself headed in the right direction. And even that felt surreal and more like second-nature taking over.
This storm had spread itself out farther than he'd expected, and the farther he went, pushing himself against the elements on a southeasterly route that ran vaguely parallel to their original course, the more worried he became. There was no sign of Manfred or Sid anywhere, and none of them had bothered to discuss where the mammoth and sloth were going to go once the baby was safely returned to his herd. Diego had assumed they'd simply retrace their steps south, so he'd unthinkingly picked this direction when he'd set out. But in reality, they could be anywhere. Anywhere.
It was like his entire life was melting away, and, in a horrifying second of clarity, he realized that it kind of already had. Maybe, unlike his original surety that he'd known exactly what he was doing, the reality of this situation hadn't truly hit him yet.
Yeah, he was alone out here and searching for ghosts in the snow. Yeah, he'd more or less effectively dismantled a pack. Yeah, he'd sided with prey. But he'd never really liked that pack anyway. And he'd fixed a situation that was more or less his fault, although Soto certainly wasn't innocent in all this.
No, it was where to go from here. Because this wasn't just leaving a pack or making some new…uh, friends? It was changing everything he was supposed to be, everything that he'd assumed he would be. This wasn't a rearrangement; this was destruction.
He didn't regret Half Peak. Not yet, anyway. But he didn't like the roiling, too-deep feeling the thought of the next day gave him. For a moment, his instincts whirled with the force of it. An empty sensation surfaced, and before it could overrun everything else, he forced himself to focus on what was around him.
A snowstorm. Possibly the worst he'd ever seen. And he was a single idiot out in it.
His mind slowly pulled its thoughts back together, and he was surprised at how hard it was to orient himself after a minute's lapse in concentration. His paws were sliding through the snow as the wind turned him around again and again, and that unfamiliar empty sensation came back for a moment as he realized he didn't know which direction he was facing.
Panic, sharp and precise rose from the deepening snow around his paws, sucking him down and obliterating any half-formed landmarks in the back of his mind. He'd subconsciously been clinging to the biggest one: that he knew the way out of this.
He suspected that thought was deeper than simply trying to navigate in a blizzard. But he couldn't bring himself to return to his earlier trail of thought. Not because he was scared. Of course not. He knew his own mind like he knew the miles of the pack's territory. Every trail, every narrow passage had been traversed until the way was worn smooth and mapped permanently in his mind. He knew who he was…who he had been a day, no, three days ago.
Diego dug his claws into the snow, defiance tightening the knuckles and cutting off the wind's course as it rushed around him. Everywhere he looked, with a slow, searching turn of his head, snow was coming right at him.
He took a deep breath, reaching beneath the numbness and the strange, unnamable feeling of something absent, until he found what he was looking for. Roused from its hibernation, determination gripped his mind right back with its usual force. He opened his eyes again and walked forward, letting the tilt of the land and a murky guestimate tell him where he was and where he was going.