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you’re using a 12 gauge, you don’t need pinpoint accuracy to hit your target. Just point and pull the trigger. I knew enough about guns to see that it was pump action, which meant I could shoot it several times before reloading. Being shortened as it was made it a good weapon for close-range action.
    â€œYour Grampa Spotted Horse was a big man,” Lenard said.
    Aunt Mary handed me a box of shells. They were double-aught buckshot, with enough stopping power to knock down most big game. I slipped shells into the gun, jacking one into the breach so I would have a full six shots. Then I stuck a dozen more shells into the pockets of my down vest. I wasn’t happy about the thought of having to shoot at anything, even a firewolf, but I guessed I was ready.
    â€œPlan?” Aunt Mary asked.
    â€œWind is blowing down the trail,” Lenard said. “So they’ll know you’re coming. Me, I circle around, come at them from upwind.”
    Lenard jerked his chin toward me. “Rose, you keep time.” He knelt, picked up one of the hundreds of pebbles scattered along the trail, and then carefully placed it on the bare earth in the middle of the path. “You do this, same speed as I just did. When you got two hundred stones in the pile, that is when you and your Aunt Mary start down the trail. Just walking normal. Okay?”
    Then, before I could nod, he slid back into the brush without a sound and was gone.
    â€œStart counting,” Aunt Mary said.

CHAPTER SIX
    T wo hundred,” I said, dropping a stone that glittered with quartz on top of the little hill I’d built in the center of the path.
    â€œAdd fifty more,” Aunt Mary said. “You were counting a little fast.”
    I was glad she said that. Fifty more stones meant I had fifty more seconds to live. One firewolf would have been bad enough, but the thought of five of them waiting for us made it seem hopeless, even with Crazy Dog helping us.
    Firewolves were just about — though not quite — the worst of the creatures around the Ridge that hunted human beings. I’d seen viddys — back before all our screens went blank — of other things in other districts that looked awful, like hundred-foot-long snakes and giant predatory birds as big as the airbuses that used to cross the skies. But around here, the firewolves were pretty much the top of the food chain. Us people were much lower links on that chain.
    The stories people told about firewolves, people who’d survived them, about their thick skins and superfast reflexes and razor-sharp teeth and claws, those stories flashed through my head so fast I almost lost count of the pebbles.
    â€œRose, honey,” Aunt Mary’s voice cut into my increasingly panicked thoughts. “That’s fifty. Fifty-five, in fact. Time to go.”
    I stood up, hefting the sawed-off shotgun and wondering if it was going to be any more effective than those little pebbles I’d been piling.
    â€œReady?” Aunt Mary said.
    â€œReady,” I replied, a little surprised at how steady my voice sounded. But not that surprised. Even though just about everything we had to deal with these days tended to make me terrified, when I finally had to face up to it, a kind of calm would come over me. When it came time to do what had to be done, I would just do my best to do it. I may have been afraid of trouble, but I’d never run away from it. At least not when I had had no other choice. When I knew I couldn’t outrun it.
    â€œLead,” Aunt Mary said.
    I nodded. She followed close behind, watching out for anything that might try to hit us from the back.
    I walked at a regular pace. One step at a time. That’s all it takes to climb a mountain. Or walk into an ambush. My feet thudded against the ground. I was not trying to walk quietly. That might have given away the fact that we knew we were about to be attacked. If the firewolves