Capturing the Alpha (Shifters of Nunavut Book 1)

Shifters of Nunavut, Book #1

Viola Rivard

Copyright © 2016 by Viola Rivard
All rights reserved.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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“The hour is 14:00 and it’s currently –20°C. I’m anticipating sunset in approximately two hours, and then it’ll be another…thirteen hours until morning. It’s difficult to express how cold it is here, especially considering my more equator-centric background. The sun doesn’t burn here, the air does. The wind is like needles, and even when I’m shielded behind a tent at night, each breath is like a hard drag on an unfiltered cigarette. In the darkness, I often question why I’m here and what I’m doing. As the daylight returns, I crawl from my shelter, and I’m greeted by sights like this…”

Ginnifer turned the camera, pointing it out over the valley below. Orange sunlight reflected off the lightly agitated surface of the sea. Bordering the water was an expanse of tundra, and she zoomed in on her latest objects of fascination.

“Despite reaching sizes of up to a meter and a half, ringed seals are actually among the smallest subspecies of seals. Their size makes them ideal prey for this hungry mother.”

At the end of a trail of blood and blemished snow, the female polar bear picked the seal carcass apart with indiscriminate voraciousness. Her two small cubs had their heads stuffed beneath her belly. Contentedly nursing, they were oblivious to their mother’s feast.

“Given the time of year, it’s likely that this mother polar bear just emerged from her maternity den, where she’s been waiting out the winter in a unique form of prenatal hibernation. These cubs would have been born about three months ago. At their birth, during which their mother remained hibernating, they were smaller than the average Labrador puppy.”

Ginnifer carefully panned the camera to the left as she caught sight of a fox. Still sporting its fluffy winter coat, the arctic fox would have blended in perfectly with the snow, if not for its black muzzle. It kept low to the ground as it approached, its steps slow, but deliberate.

“Arctic foxes are skilled hunters, but they’re not above scavenging when food is scarce,” she said, resuming her commentary. “This fox must be quite hungry to be trying to scavenge an active kill. Mother polar bears are renowned for their protective instincts, and have been known to challenge even the much larger male bears if they come near their young.”

She felt herself tense as the fox crept closer. The bear appeared to be aware of him, but too focused on her food to pay him much mind. In a remarkable show of fearlessness, the fox dashed in and quickly snatched a chunk of meat from the seal carcass. Her personal space violated, the mother reared up, rising onto her hind legs. But the fox had already darted away. It stopped several meters from her, and the two stared at one another for a few seconds. Then, the mother resumed eating, presumably deciding that the fox wasn’t worth the effort. Recognizing that he was in the clear, the fox boldly lay down and began to tear away at its prize.

The footage was incredible, and even without reviewing it she knew that it would make the final cut. She continued to film them, grinning from ear to ear as the bear cubs broke away from their mother to begin frolicking in the snow.

Loud crunching sounded behind Ginnifer, alerting her to Boaz’s approach. She snapped her head around, holding up a finger to shush him. He stopped mid-step, his skinny arms outstretched as though he were planning on taking flight.

“You have to come see this,” he said in a whisper that may as well have been spoken into a microphone. “I found one!”

Ginnifer cast him a stern look.

“You’re going to scare off my bear,” she said in a hushed tone.

Boaz motioned for her to follow him. “Unless your bear can turn into a human, then forget about it.”

Ginnifer glanced back at the valley. Her heart sank as she saw the mother bear urging her cubs away from the area. The enterprising fox had already begun chowing down on the abandoned seal carcass.

Boaz was already at the foot of the hill by the time she clicked her video recorder off. Ginnifer honed in on a spot in the small of his back, where she focused her glare as she descended after him.

It’s just going to be another grey wolf
, she thought miserably.

This would make the fifth time in a week that Boaz thought he saw a werewolf. Three of them had been regular grey wolves—one had been a wolf-shaped rock. To make matters worse, he seemed to always spot a werewolf at the most inconvenient times, typically right after she’d fallen asleep.

At least this time he isn’t trying to hide
.

She caught up with Boaz as they passed the pitched beige tent at their campsite. While they’d begun their expedition with their own tents, sharing one small tent had become more practical. Sharing body heat had proven vital for getting through the nights, even if it did make for awkward mornings waking up in each other’s arms. Thankfully, they wore enough layers of clothing that Ginnifer could pretend she didn’t feel his morning erection poking her belly.

“I can tell you’re skeptical,” Boaz said, his green eyes brimming with excitement. “But this time, it’s for real.”

“How are you so sure?”

“It’s huge,” he told her. “Well, at least, it’s bigger than any wolf I’ve seen.”

His enthusiasm rubbed off on her, but she tried to keep her expectations in check. “Are you sure it isn’t just a large male? They’re bigger than the females, you know.”

Boaz shook his head. “No way. You’ll see.”

They trekked across three dunes, which might as well have been mountains. Even walking on flat ground was arduous in the deep snow, and for the thousandth time, Ginnifer wished she hadn’t left her dogs with Rita.

Her bubbly intern had arrived with them at Rankin Inlet a month ago. Within a week of being out in the wilderness, Rita had developed frostbite and an upper respiratory infection. Even with all of her time abroad, Ginnifer still took the US highway system for granted. When they finally managed to reach a village, the locals had no resident doctor and they had to send Rita on sled to the nearest town. They’d already lost several days, and Ginnifer had made the call to continue the expedition, rather than traveling several more days to get the dogs back.

Without the sled dogs, the journey often bordered on unbearable, and only the hope of finding a real werewolf kept them pushing onward, deeper into the wilderness.

“After we film this guy, can we go home?”

They were trekking up the fourth dune now, and Boaz’s breath was coming out in heavy pants. Snow was caked on his boots and trousers, all the way up his short, skinny calves. A few flecks of snow clung to his curly, unevenly distributed beard hair.

“We’re not going to film one werewolf and then bail,” she said. “You know we’re here for more than that.”

“And here I thought you’d brought me out here to seduce me,” he cracked a grin, revealing twin rows of perfectly straight teeth, the kind that only came from an adolescence of wearing braces. Ginnifer flashed him a similarly arrayed smile.

“In your dreams.”

“Can’t say it’s not,” he mumbled, his cheeks reddening.

As they reached the crest of the dune, Ginnifer’s smile faded and her mouth dropped open. With the setting sun to their backs, the dune cast a grey tint over the canyon below. The snow lay largely undisturbed, save for the center, where it had been violently molested and stained with splotches of red.

“What did I tell you?” Boaz asked, his hands on his hips. “Tell me that’s not a werewolf.”

Amidst the upturned snow was a wolf with wavy chestnut fur. It had long, slender legs and a sleek body, and would have appeared petite, if it didn’t stand nearly as tall as a full-grown man. A chain was staked deep into the earth, and attached to it was a steel trap that held the wolf’s left hind paw in its jaws. The tall wolf struggled against it, alternately whimpering and growling.

“Oh, that’s a werewolf, all right…” she breathed.

Boaz had already crouched down. He had his camera in hand, preparing to film the wolf’s struggle. “You think poachers laid that trap?”

“Who else?” Ginnifer asked, laying down beside him. She opened her Canon, but her finger hesitated over the record button. “You think they’ll come back?”

“I don’t know,” Boaz said. “If they do, it’ll make for a damn good shot. And with this bad boy—” he waved his 16mm camera, “we’ll get clear shots of their faces. Can you imagine a better shot?”

She couldn’t. If they were able to film poachers skinning and scraping a live werewolf, the public outcry would be deafening. Canada, like most developed nations, had laws against poaching shifters, but they were loosely enforced, mostly because the shifters inhabited the arctic, where the massive expanses of undeveloped land and the brutal cold made policing almost impossible. Nearly all poaching prosecutions came after the fact, when the poachers tried to unload their spoils onto the black market. And they were getting smarter.

Teeth, pelts, and bones—particularly the skulls, were worth tens of thousands of dollars. A season in the arctic could net a small crew upwards of a million dollars, almost twice that if they caught a bear or two. In the past, the black market would become flooded at the end of each spring, and the poachers were easy to trace. But lately they’d learned to bide their time, selling their ill-gotten gains in small quantities over diverse markets throughout the year. The new methods didn’t raise flags with law enforcement, and frankly, werewolf poaching wasn’t high on their list of priorities. As it stood, the public just didn’t care.

Yet
.

Footage like this, that showcased the atrocities of the poaching industry, was exactly what was needed to galvanize the apathetic masses. And that was exactly what Ginnifer thought as she pressed down on the record button.

Ginnifer fastened her facemask over her mouth and nose, and then set a timer on her digital watch. She and Boaz filmed, as a half hour turned to an hour, and an hour turned to two. As the sun disappeared, the full moon took over, casting an eerie glow over the tundra. The aurora whipped through the sky, but for once, it failed to captivate her.

Her heart ached for the wolf, as its cries grew weaker. Occasionally it would lie down, and Ginnifer and Boaz would exchange glances, wondering if it was the end, but then the wolf would surge forward with renewed vigor, struggling against the trap and further injuring its foot in the process.

“Why doesn’t it just shift?” Boaz whispered. It was the first thing he’d said in a long while.

Ginnifer shook her head. “I’ve been wondering that the entire time.”

The traps were designed for humans to be able to open them, so surely a werewolf in its human form could do so.

“Maybe he isn’t able to,” Ginnifer mused. She didn’t know how shifting worked, but she imagined it might be difficult, or even dangerous to do so with a steel trap around your foot.

A short while later, the wolf slumped over onto its side. It let out a heavy sigh, and then closed its eyes. This time, Ginnifer kept her gaze on the wolf, watching its chest rise and fall with shallow breaths.

Before she could talk herself out of it, she stood. “I’m going down there.”

Boaz scrambled to his feet, and managed to grab onto her jacket. She lurched forward and then jerked back.

“Are you crazy?” he asked in a harsh whisper. “You know that’s not what we do. It’s unethical.”

“I didn’t see you moaning about ethics when Rita chased that cobra away from those lion cubs,” Ginnifer hissed, yanking her arm free.

“Yes, but you never let her hear the end of it,” he shot back. “You harped on her about the circle of life for the rest of the trip, ranting about how those cubs could grow up to kill baby antelope and—”

“This is not an animal,” Ginnifer ground out, pointing in the direction of the wolf. “Beneath that fur is a person, just like you and I. We don’t leave people to die.”

The words had been building inside of her for the past two hours, and it felt cathartic to finally get them out. She understood Boaz’s point. During her summers in Africa, she had been fascinated by big cats, and as such, had stood by filming while countless animals had suffered and died.

Her most famous piece, the one that had made her a household name for a couple of weeks, had dealt directly with poaching. She and Boaz had hidden in the brush, their hearts pounding and sweat pouring down their faces as they filmed the brutal poaching of one of the last northern white rhinoceros.

“We film nature, Gin. We don’t play God.”

She shook her head slowly and stuffed her camera back into her pocket. “The only ones playing God here are the ones that put that awful trap down in the first place. If we’re doing anything, we’re restoring order in the universe.”

Boaz blinked a few times and scrunched his face. Ginnifer took the opportunity to make her descent, and before he could try to stop her, she was gliding down the eastern side of the dune.

Their arguing had finally drawn the wolf’s attention, and by the time Ginnifer reached the bottom of the dune, it had lifted its head and bared its teeth. The gleaming white fangs gave her pause, but she shoved fear aside, reasoning that if it really was as human as she’d just argued, then it could be reasoned with.

“Hey there,” she said in a soft, soothing voice. “I’m here to help.”

Ginnifer had positioned herself outside of its reach, but the wolf nonetheless snapped its jaws at her. It propelled itself forward, but recoiled as soon as the chain pulled taut, letting out a sharp cry of pain. Ginnifer made a point not to react, though the move had caused her adrenaline to spike.