You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

make sense. Those shapes were familiar. She knew where she was. She recognized those shapes, even in the darkness. She had been here before. She’d spent a lot of time next to those two boulders.

Could it be? Were her eyes tricking her? Or was it just déjà vu? Her mom had said that was just some tickling in your brain that made you think you recognized something you didn’t.

No, those two boulders and that tree were totally familiar. She had been here before. With her dad. This was their place! The mouflon place! They’d come here a lot of times to photograph the most beautiful creatures in the park, the mouflons. Karin loved them the most. They were like sheep, or goats, but they had these crazy long horns that wrapped around in huge arcs, like long Princess Leia hair buns. They had white noses and white feet, and the rest of their bodies were brown. She and her dad had come here every year for a few years to shoot pictures of them in springtime, when there were new babies—they were called ewes and lambs.

Somewhere right here was…yes, over there, the bridge across that little stream, made from pine branches. It was the same. Even just in the moonlight, she recognized it. They always pitched their tent just near that leaning tree there. This was the place where they’d also had their last Veluwe camping trip together, just before Dad went back to Syria for the last time. Just before he was killed. This place was the reason she’d wanted to come back to the Veluwe.

She stopped and caught her breath. She knew where she was! Incredible! Glorious. She wasn’t lost, actually. Not that she was where she was supposed to be. But she was here. She was actually where she had wanted to be.

At almost exactly that same moment, and before she could truly celebrate, she heard a sound that made her shudder. It wasn’t close, because it was kind of soft, but it was definitely a sound she recognized: the howl of a wolf. It sounded like a creaky door opening, only very loud.

Oh geez, thought Karin. Can I really not catch a break?

It was almost, almost funny. Her mom had been reading her those articles all spring and summer, and Karin had been telling her there was literally no reason to worry. “It’s a huge forest,” Karin had said. “How likely is it that our group is going to bump into them?”

But now she wasn’t part of a group and now she could hear them. Not super near—but that was definitely the sound of a wolf, or at least one of them, howling. And that was pretty scary by itself.

The wolf howled again. It didn’t sound the way it sounded in movies, not so sharp and not so distinct, like “Awoohoo.” More like a series of dog barks and then a baby crying from a bad stomachache. Then came another howl, and then after that a second, a little bit softer, which had to be a reply. Which meant there were at least two wolves out there. Talking.

Karin felt a kind of fist clench in the pit of her stomach. She had no supplies at all now. Not a knife or a flashlight. Not even a spoon. What could she use to protect herself if somehow she actually bumped into the wolf her mother had been tracking all summer? She remembered Lotte’s words from hours ago—now it seemed like years ago: “So there’s a wolf pack out here?” Seven, she knew. Her mother knew.

She searched the ground around her, looking for a stick. At the very least, she could fend them off with a stick. Karin tried to remember what her mother had taught her about wolf encounters. Don’t turn you back on them and run away. Either move forward, flapping your hands, and yell at them, or walk slowly backward, also yelling. Yelling was important, because wolves were normally afraid of people. It wasn’t easy to find a good stick because everything around her was brush, heath. And anyway, what was she going to do—poke it in the eye?

There. There was one. It was about as long as her arm, and she could just swing it around, if necessary. That would work. She held it out in front of her as she walked. The howls came again, and this time they sounded closer, but she thought: They aren’t that close. That’s just my mind playing tricks on me. And then, with her fear getting the better of her, she really picked up her pace.

Karin tried to remember something else, to distract herself from the howling—which continued, like a song, call and response, call and response. More than one. More than a few. Her father. Their last trip here. Being with him in this forest.

The thing that popped into her head was that he had stopped off at the grocery store on the way to the park that night and bought a six-pack of those tall beers. She remembered it because those cans made so much noise when you opened them—the pop and then the hiss—which obviously was not good for watching wildlife. He had always been so careful about that. Before, when he did drink, it was something like scotch, out of a flask, but usually only on a cold night.

After he died, people said that he maybe had been careless in Syria. People on the news sounded like there was some chance he’d kind of brought the sniper attack on himself. People said such annoying things! Then the things they said got in your head and it was hard to get them out. People had said that her dad was a drunk, and that was totally not true. Her mom had told her to try to ignore all the rumors, “all that media nonsense,” and not even watch the news reports about her father’s death because all kinds of untrue things got said.

“But why