The trail she chose wasn’t kind. Scout—though I didn’t know her name yet—threaded between pines along the old logging road, weaving through drifts and deadfall like she’d walked it a hundred times in the dark. Every twenty feet she stopped, glancing back with eyes too human, breath puffing out like little ghosts that refused to rise. My lungs burned; my knees screamed mutiny; once, when the wind knifed through my coat and memory whispered that nobody waited for me anywhere, I almost turned back. Each time I faltered, she returned, pressing her bony side against my leg until I moved again. A mile and a half in, the trees opened on a sagging lean-to of branches and blue tarp beside the frozen creek, a shelter built by someone who’d given up on walls. Under it lay an old man in a torn Army field jacket, leg twisted wrong, beard frosted, lips the color of ash. Around him, scattered in the snow and tangled in his whiskers, lay crumbs of my biscuits—eleven days’ worth of stubborn devotion. Scout curled against his chest like a furnace running on faith. When I touched his cheek, he shivered and whispered one word nobody had called me since I was ten: “Bir… Continues…