The Devil's Own Luck

In a blinding blizzard, a trapper finds his wounded rival near death, forcing a terrible choice in his isolated shack.

“You have the devil’s own luck to be found by me.”

The words were a plume of vapor, snatched away by a wind that had teeth. Rick felt them tear from his throat, a raw and bitter pronouncement against the screaming white chaos. The sound was swallowed whole, as insignificant as a single snowflake in the maelstrom. It didn’t matter. The man half-buried in the drift before him wouldn’t have heard it anyway. Probably. The wind was a physical presence, a bully that shoved and clawed and stole the breath from a man’s lungs before he’d had a chance to properly use it. It drove the snow not down, but sideways, horizontally, in stinging, blinding sheets that scoured the landscape into a featureless void. There was no sky, no ground, only the churning, roaring abyss of the blizzard.

Rick leaned on his rifle, the wood of the stock a brutal cold against his cheekbone even through his scarf. His own survival was a minute-by-minute calculation. Two miles back to the line shack. Maybe less. In this, it could be a hundred. Every step was a gamble against the drift, against the directionless fury of the storm. He’d been checking the north traps, a fool’s errand he’d known was a fool’s errand when he’d set out, but the gnawing in his belly had been a more immediate tyrant than the threat on the horizon. Now the horizon had swallowed him, and the gnawing was still there, a cold, hard knot of hunger and regret.

And then he’d seen it. A patch of darkness in the suffocating white. A disruption. Not a rock, not a fallen pine. The wrong shape. He’d stumbled closer, his snowshoes clumsy anchors against the gale, his eyes slitted against the ice-shard wind. It was a shoulder, he realized first. A shoulder clad in a fine wool coat far too expensive for this godsforsaken frontier, now plastered with snow and frozen mud. A dark stain, almost black against the white, blossomed from somewhere beneath the shoulder, marring the purity of the drift. Blood. He’d known who it was before he even saw the face. There was only one man fool enough to wear such a coat in this territory.

He kicked at the snow with the toe of his boot, a hard, angry motion. More of the man was revealed. A leg twisted at an unnatural angle. A gloved hand, fingers curled uselessly. And then the face, turned to the side, cheek frozen to the snow. A spill of dark hair, usually so meticulously styled, was now a mess of ice-caked strands. The pale, sharp profile of Ed. His rival. The man who’d undercut him on pelts at the trading post, who’d laid traps just over the line of his territory with a smile and a silver-tongued excuse, whose very presence was a burr under his saddle. Ed, the eloquent, educated man from the East who thought the frontier was a stage for his own grand performance.

Rick’s first thought was a savage, ugly thing. *Good.* Let the wind have him. Let the cold perform the final, silent act of a feud that had simmered for two bitter seasons. It was justice. The frontier had a way of sorting things out, of stripping away the fancy words and the fine coats and leaving only the hard, unvarnished truth of a man’s competence. And Ed, for all his talk, had failed the test. Rick could turn around, right now. Walk away. In an hour, the snow would cover him completely. By morning, he’d be a part of the landscape. No one would ever know Rick had been here. He would have more food. More firewood. More life.

He took a step back. The wind shrieked, a high, keening sound like a predator’s cry. He imagined his shack. The small, cramped space. The meager pile of split pine by the hearth. The three tins of beans and the last strip of jerky on the shelf. It was a precise, brutal arithmetic. Enough for one man to maybe, just maybe, last until the storm broke. Not enough for two. It was not a question of morality. It was a question of mathematics. Two into one doesn’t go.

But his feet wouldn’t move. He stood there, frozen in place as surely as Ed was frozen to the ground, and stared. He saw the faint, almost imperceptible flutter of breath at Ed’s lips, a tiny cloud of vapor instantly annihilated by the wind. The man was alive. A stubborn, tenacious fool, but alive. And Rick had seen it. He had borne witness. The knowledge was a weight, heavier than his pack, heavier than the rifle in his hand. He could walk away, but he would carry the image of that small, fleeting breath with him for the rest of his days.

“Damn you,” Rick snarled, the words for himself this time. “Damn you to all the hells.” He dropped to one knee, the cold instantly seeping through the thick wool of his trousers. His fingers, already numb in their leather gloves, fumbled as he brushed the snow from Ed’s face. The skin was corpse-cold, waxy. He pressed two fingers to the man’s neck, under the jawline, searching for the faint, thready beat of life. It was there. A slow, stubborn pulse. A drumbeat of inconvenience. A demand.

Getting him out was a battle against dead weight and the storm’s relentless opposition. Ed was not a small man, and unconscious, he felt like he was filled with lead shot. Rick grunted, heaving, his muscles screaming in the cold. He had to break the frozen seal that held Ed’s cheek to the snow, the sound a sickening little tear. He managed to roll him over. The source of the blood was clear now: his left leg was a mess. The pant leg was shredded, and a crude, blood-soaked bandage was wrapped around his calf. A trap, Rick thought with a grim twist of irony. Caught in his own, or one of Rick’s. It hardly mattered. The leg was bent wrong below the knee. Broken. The man had tried to splint it himself, it looked like, before he’d collapsed.

Rick slung his rifle over his back and worked his arms under Ed’s shoulders. He braced his feet and pulled. Ed’s body slid a few inches, a dead weight plowing a furrow in the deep snow. The effort sent a lance of fire through Rick’s own back. This was impossible. He couldn’t carry him. Not two miles. He would die out here with him, a monument to a single moment of stupid, pointless conscience.

He stopped, panting, his lungs burning with every frigid inhalation. He looked around, but there was nothing to see. The world had been erased. Just the howling white. There was no choice. He couldn't carry him, but he couldn't leave him. He had to drag him. It would be slower, harder. It would drain every last ounce of his strength.

“All right, you son of a bitch,” Rick muttered, grabbing the collar of Ed’s fine wool coat. “You wanted a piece of my territory. You’re about to get intimately acquainted with it.” He set his jaw, leaned back, and began to pull. The journey back was a series of small, agonizing eternities. Each step was a plunge into the deep, clinging snow. Rick’s thighs burned, his back was a solid wall of fire, and the wind was a constant, malevolent force trying to push him back, to trip him, to freeze the very marrow in his bones. He didn’t walk. He plodded. A beast of burden tethered to a corpse that wasn't quite a corpse.

He pulled Ed by the collar of his coat, the man’s head lolling, his heels carving two parallel grooves in the snow. The world shrank to the view at his feet: the churning snow, his own boots appearing and disappearing, and the dark, inert shape of the man he was dragging. His thoughts were a low, grinding litany of numbers. Firewood: maybe enough for two days, if he was careful. Three, if he kept the fire low. But now, with wet clothes to dry, with another body sucking heat from the small room, that was two days. Maybe. Food: three tins of beans. Half a bag of dried oats. A handful of coffee beans. One strip of venison jerky. For one man, that was a week of grim, hungry survival. For two, it was three days of starvation. The math was relentless. Every foot he gained toward the shack, he was losing days of his own life.

The wind was his primary enemy. It howled in his ears, a maddening, ceaseless roar that vibrated through his skull. It changed direction without warning, blasting him with needle-sharp ice from the left, then the right, forcing him to turn his face away, to squint until his eyes were watering and nearly frozen shut. He navigated by instinct, by the faint, almost imperceptible slope of the land, by the memory of a particular stand of pines he knew had to be somewhere to his left. Or was it his right? In the whiteout, certainty was a luxury he couldn't afford.

Ed was a silent, heavy burden. Occasionally, a low groan would escape the man’s lips, a sound of pure misery that cut through the wind’s howl. Each time, Rick’s jaw would tighten. The sound was an accusation. It was a reminder that this was not a sack of flour he was dragging, but a man. A man who was stealing his heat, his food, his future. Resentment was a hot, bitter coal in his gut. It was a fuel, of a kind. He hated Ed for his weakness, for being here, for forcing this decision upon him. He hated him for the smooth, condescending tone he used at the trading post, for the way he held his teacup with a pinky slightly extended, a gesture of effete civilization in a place that had no room for it. He hated him for the simple, infuriating fact of his continued existence.

And yet, he pulled. He pulled until his shoulders screamed and his legs felt like stone. He wrapped the end of his scarf further around his face, the wool freezing and stiff with his own breath. He could feel the cold seeping past his layers of clothing, a deep, invasive chill that felt like it was settling on his bones. His mind started to drift. He thought about the warmth of the fire. Just a small, controlled blaze in the stone hearth, but in his memory, it was a bonfire. He could almost feel the heat on his chapped skin, see the dance of the orange flames. The image was a torment, a paradise he was now forced to share. He thought about the jerky. The salty, smoky taste of it. He’d been saving it. A reward for finishing the trap line. A small measure of comfort in a world that offered precious little. Now it was just another item in a dwindling inventory.

The shape of a tree, a skeletal pine, loomed out of the white murk. He recognized it. The one with the split trunk. He was close. Maybe another hundred yards. The knowledge sent a surge of something—not quite hope, but a grim determination—through his exhausted limbs. He lowered his head, a bull leaning into the yoke, and pulled harder. The shack appeared as if by magic, a low, dark rectangle coalescing out of the swirling snow. It was less a building and more a slight interruption in the landscape, its roof heavy with a thick blanket of white, snow drifted halfway up its only door. It was ugly, it was small, it was barely a shelter. And it was the most beautiful thing Rick had ever seen.

Getting the door open was another fight. He had to drop Ed’s collar, the man slumping into a heap at his feet, and use his shoulder to shove against the door while digging at the drift with his boot. The wood groaned in protest. Finally, it gave way with a crack, swinging inward into the darkness. A wave of relatively warmer, still air washed over him. It smelled of pine smoke, stale sweat, and solitude.

He didn't waste time. He grabbed Ed again, the dead weight of him an obscenity now, and dragged him over the threshold. The man’s boots caught, and Rick had to curse and heave to get him fully inside. He slammed the door shut against the storm, the sound a dull thud that seemed to seal them in. The sudden, profound silence was deafening. The howling wind was gone, replaced by a muffled, distant roar. Inside, the only sounds were his own ragged, painful breaths and the faint, almost inaudible hiss of the dying embers in the hearth.

The shack was a single room, barely twelve feet by twelve feet. A rough-hewn cot was shoved against one wall, covered in a pile of beaver and wolf pelts. Opposite it was the stone hearth, a bed of gray ash with a few glowing red coals at its heart. A small stack of firewood, his precious, meticulously rationed supply, sat beside it. On a crude shelf nailed to the wall were his provisions: the tins, the sack of oats, a battered coffee pot. A single, grimy window, no bigger than a dinner plate, was a pale grey eye in the wall, showing nothing but the swirling white outside. This was his world. His entire, self-contained, solitary world. And now it was invaded.

Rick stood over Ed’s prone form for a long moment, chest heaving. The man lay sprawled on the floorboards, a mess of melted snow and encroaching misery. Rick’s first instinct was to leave him there. Just let him lie on the cold floor. But the wet clothes would kill him, if the cold hadn’t already. The damp would leech the last of the heat from his body. It would seep into the floorboards. It would make the entire cabin colder, more miserable.

With a sigh that felt like it was scraped from the bottom of his soul, he knelt. The work was grim and intimate. He pulled off Ed’s gloves, revealing long, pale fingers already stiff with cold. He unbuttoned the fine wool coat, his own clumsy, half-frozen fingers struggling with the elegant buttons. The coat was heavy, soaked through. He peeled it off, dropping it in a wet heap by the door. Underneath, Ed wore a sweater of some soft, dark blue wool and a linen shirt. More finery. Rick worked with a brusque, impersonal efficiency, unbuttoning the shirt, pulling it off the man’s surprisingly lean torso. The skin was cold to the touch, gooseflesh rising in the cabin’s chill air. He averted his eyes, a strange, unwelcome feeling twisting in his gut. It felt like a violation. He was stripping his enemy down, exposing his vulnerability, and the act gave him no satisfaction. Only a weary, profound sense of trespass.

The trousers were next. He had to be careful with the injured leg. He used his knife to slit the fabric from ankle to thigh, laying the wound bare. It was ugly. A deep, jagged gash in the calf muscle, the flesh around it swollen and purplish. The crude bandage was frozen stiff with blood. He gently worked it loose. Below the wound, the leg was definitely broken, the bone creating an obscene angle beneath the skin. Rick was no doctor, but he knew it was bad. Infection was almost a certainty. Without proper setting, the man would be a cripple, if he lived at all.

He stripped the rest of the wet clothes off, leaving Ed in nothing but his smallclothes. He dragged him closer to the hearth, arranging him on the floor not two feet from the glowing embers. Then he took one of his own spare wool blankets from the foot of his cot—a thick, scratchy, but dry thing—and draped it over the man’s shivering body. The act felt like a concession. A defeat.

Now for the fire. He added two precious logs from his pile to the embers. He watched them, willing them to catch, holding his breath until the first, tentative licks of flame curled around the dry pine. The fire was life. It was the only thing holding the lethal, crushing cold of the outside world at bay. And he had just fed it a significant portion of his reserves. He got to his feet and went to the shelf. He poured a measure of whiskey—medicinal, not for drinking—from his flask onto a relatively clean rag. He returned to Ed’s side and, without ceremony, began to clean the wound. Ed gasped, his back arching off the floor, a strangled cry catching in his throat. His eyes flew open. They were a startling, lucid blue, and for a second, they were filled with nothing but pure, animal pain. Then they focused on Rick’s face. Recognition dawned. And with it, a familiar, infuriating spark of intellectual arrogance.

“Ah,” Ed breathed, his voice a dry, theatrical rasp. “So the beast of the wilderness plays the good Samaritan. To what strange providence do I owe this… unfortunate rescue?”

Rick said nothing. He just dabbed at the wound, his movements firm and efficient, ignoring the way Ed flinched. The man’s words were like gravel in his ears. Even half-dead, he was performing.

“Silence,” Ed murmured, his eyes closing again for a moment. “The preferred parlance of the stoic frontiersman. You convey so much with so little. One must assume this is an act of charity, then? Or have you merely dragged my carcass here to gloat before the end?”

“Shut up,” Rick grunted, pouring a little more whiskey directly onto the gash. Ed hissed, his whole body going rigid. “You’ll need your strength.”

“My strength?” Ed’s eyes opened again, sharp and fever-bright in the flickering firelight. “And what, pray tell, is your calculus in this? You preserve my strength for what purpose? A man like you, Rick, does nothing without a clear accounting of profit and loss. So, tell me. What is my value to you now? Am I to be your winter’s entertainment? A captive audience for your monosyllabic pronouncements?”

Rick finished cleaning the wound as best he could. He found two small, straight branches in his kindling box and a roll of clean cloth he’d been saving to patch his shirt. He set to work creating a crude splint, binding the branches tightly against Ed’s shin. His fingers brushed against Ed’s skin, which was now radiating an unnerving heat. The fever was setting in. He ignored the man’s prattling, focusing on the task, on the wrapping of the cloth, on the simple mechanics of the work. It was easier than thinking about the words. The words got under his skin. They accused him of the very things he was accusing himself of. Every question Ed asked was one he had already asked himself in the howling wind.

He tied off the splint and pulled the blanket back up to Ed’s chin. He rose and went to his cot, stripping off his own damp outer layers. He worked methodically, his back to the man on the floor. The cabin was small, too small. Ed’s presence filled it, his breathing a shallow, ragged counterpoint to the crackle of the growing fire. The space felt charged, the air thick with unspoken history and the raw, immediate tension of their predicament. Rick could feel Ed’s eyes on him. He could feel the weight of his judgment.

“You have not answered me,” Ed said, his voice weaker now, but no less precise. “A curious omission. Is it that you do not know your own motives? Or that you are loath to confess them? Perhaps you saw me in the snow and thought of all those beaver pelts I so skillfully acquired from under your very nose, and you imagined a winter of servitude as repayment. ‘Fetch my wood, cripple. Skin my kills, debtor.’ It has a certain… feudal poetry to it.”

Rick turned around slowly. He walked to the hearth and picked up the poker, jabbing at the logs. Sparks flew up into the chimney. He stared into the flames, watching them consume the wood, turning his carefully gathered fuel into heat and light and, ultimately, ash. “You talk too much,” he said, his voice low.

A dry, rustling sound that might have been a laugh came from the floor. “And you, my dear Rick, talk far too little. It creates a vacuum. One is forced to fill it with speculation. And my speculation, at present, is that you have made a grievous mathematical error. You have added a variable to your delicate equation of survival that it cannot sustain.” Ed coughed, a wracking, painful sound. “Tell me, have you taken stock of your larder? Have you counted your logs? Or did some uncharacteristic sentimentality overwhelm your famously practical mind?”

Rick placed the poker back on the hearthstones with a metallic clang. He did not look at Ed. He looked at the shelf. At the three tins. At the single, dark strip of jerky. He looked at the woodpile, which was already visibly smaller than it had been that morning. The man was right. It was a grievous error. A fatal one, perhaps.

The next day passed in a blur of gray light and howling wind. The storm did not abate. If anything, it intensified, the wind shrieking around the corners of the small cabin like a banshee. Snow piled up against the door, sealing them in completely. The world outside had ceased to exist. There was only the room. The room, the fire, and the feverish man on the floor.

Ed drifted in and out of a delirious state. In his lucid moments, his tongue was as sharp as ever, a scalpel picking at Rick’s motives, at his silence. He would pontificate on the nature of mercy, on the irony of their situation, his voice a theatrical whisper in the confines of the shack. He would quote poets Rick had never heard of, his words painting pictures of worlds far beyond this frozen, desperate reality. Rick found it both infuriating and, to his deep shame, vaguely mesmerizing. He had never known a man who used words like that, as if they were tools, or weapons, or pieces of art.

“It is a stage, is it not?” Ed murmured once, staring at the soot-blackened ceiling. “This little box. We are players in a drama of the absurd. The taciturn brute and the fallen orator. A morality play for an audience ofnone. What, I wonder, is the lesson? That man is a wolf to man? Or that even in the deepest winter of the soul, a spark of... something... remains?” He coughed, a weak, wet sound. “I confess, I find the script lacking in clarity.”

Rick tended to him with a grim reluctance. He melted snow for water, forcing spoonfuls of it between Ed’s cracked lips. He checked the splint. He listened to the man’s breathing. He fed the fire, log by precious log. Each action was a chipping away at his own chances. He felt his life being consumed along with the firewood. He tried to ignore the eloquent, fevered ramblings, but the words echoed in the small space, impossible to shut out. They forced him to think, to examine the thing he had done. Why *had* he brought him back? It wasn’t pity. He didn’t think he had any of that left in him. It wasn’t kindness. It was… something else. Something he couldn't put a name to. A stubborn refusal to let the storm win? A need to prove something to himself? Or, most disturbingly, was it a need to prove something to Ed?

He ate a single tin of beans, cold, scooping them out with his knife. He ate standing by the dim, grey window, watching the endless swirl of white, trying to create a sliver of distance between himself and the man on the floor. But the space was too small. He was aware of every breath Ed took, every rustle of the blanket, every pained sigh. The cabin, once his sanctuary of solitude, had become a cell for two.

On the evening of the second day, the fever seemed to spike. Ed’s skin was dry and burning to the touch, and his shivering became more violent. His words dissolved from theatrical pronouncements into fragmented nonsense. He spoke of cities with gaslights, of libraries filled with leather-bound books, of a woman named Annabelle. Rick listened in silence, piling another blanket onto the shivering form. He was watching the man's life flicker, just like the flames in the hearth. And he found, to his astonishment, that he did not want it to go out.

The realization was a shock, cold and sharp as the wind outside. He had dragged this man back to his home, had tended his wounds, had listened to his fevered dreams, and somewhere in the process, the abstract calculation of survival had become complicated by the concrete, undeniable reality of the person lying on his floor. He was no longer just a rival, an inconvenience, a drain on resources. He was Ed. A stubborn, infuriating, dying man whose life was now, somehow, tangled up with his own. The feud over trap lines and beaver pelts seemed a thing from another lifetime, a petty squabble between two fools who had not yet understood what real trouble was.

The fire was burning low. Rick looked at the woodpile. It was frighteningly small. Maybe enough to last the night, if he was careful. The last of the beans were gone. All that was left was the oats, the coffee, and the single strip of jerky. His jerky. He reached for it, his fingers closing around the tough, dried meat. His stomach clenched with a fierce, possessive hunger. This was his. He had earned this. It was his reward. His fuel. His best chance.

He looked down at Ed. The man was quiet now, his breathing shallow. In the low, flickering firelight, his face looked younger, stripped of its usual mask of irony and condescension. He just looked like a man in pain, a man at the edge. Rick thought about the two of them, trapped in this shack, a tiny, fragile bubble of warmth in an ocean of lethal cold. If one of them died, the survivor would be alone again. But the solitude that had once been a comfort now seemed like a curse. The silence would be absolute. The cabin would feel vast and empty.

He stood there for a long time, the jerky a leaden weight in his hand. The fire crackled, spitting a shower of embers. The wind moaned, a low, mournful sound. He was holding his life in his hand. Or half of it, anyway. He tore the jerky in two. The sound was loud in the quiet room. It was a tough, fibrous thing, and it took all his strength to rip it apart. One piece was slightly larger than the other. He looked from one piece to the other, then back again. A long, silent debate.

With a grunt of resignation, he knelt by Ed’s side. He put the larger piece of jerky in Ed’s hand, curling the man’s limp, hot fingers around it. “Eat,” he said. The word was a croak. He didn’t know if Ed could hear him, or if he even had the strength to chew. It didn’t matter. The choice was made.

Then he did something else. He shifted Ed’s body, sliding him carefully, gently, across the floorboards until he was in the prime spot before the hearth, where the heat was most concentrated. The space Rick himself usually occupied. He took the colder spot for himself, his back against the rough wood of his cot, and began to chew his own, smaller piece of jerky. The taste was overwhelming. Salty, smoky, intensely savory. It was the best thing he had ever eaten. And it tasted like ash in his mouth.

He finished the small portion and sat watching the man by the fire, watching the slow, almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest. He had shared his food. He had given up his warmth. He had risked everything on a man who was his enemy. He had made a grievous, irrational, mathematical error. And for the first time in two days, the cold, hard knot in his gut began to loosen.

He turned his attention back to the hearth. He had one log left. One. It was a decent size, thick and dense. It would burn for a few hours. It would get them through the worst of the night. He rose, his joints stiff and aching, and placed the final log onto the glowing coals. It settled with a soft thud. He watched as the flames licked at its sides, slowly, hesitantly at first, and then with a growing, hungry confidence. The log caught, the fire swelling, casting dancing shadows on the walls of their tiny prison.

That’s when he heard it. It wasn’t the wind. The wind was a constant, mindless roar. This was different. It was a sound that cut through the storm’s noise, high and sharp and mournful. A howl. Distant, but clear. Rick froze, every muscle in his body going rigid. He strained his ears, listening past the fire’s crackle. There it was again, closer this time. And it was answered by another. And then another. A chorus of hungry, hunting predators.

Wolves. A pack. Drawn by the smell of blood, or perhaps just by the sheer, desperate chance of finding shelter and prey in the storm. Rick’s eyes darted to the thin plank door, now little more than a suggestion of a barrier against the fury outside. They were trapped. Wounded. With a dying fire. As the dreadful harmony of the wolves rose outside, a sharp, cracking sound echoed from the hearth—the sound of his last log beginning to split apart in the heat.