Catherine would have gladly stopped her changes there - if she had any idea how to. She had fully expected the middle stages of her transformation to be the worst part, leaving her as an unsightly mishmash of two completely different genomes impatiently waiting for the next spurt of growth. But, somehow, the retrovirus had better sense than that, and right now she had the best of both worlds - enough fur to keep her warm in this inhospitable wasteland, teeth and claws sharp enough to protect her from any predator that might cross her path out here, but still retaining the ability to grasp things with opposable thumbs, and to walk upright, and most importantly, to reason with a fully human mind. But as the changes continued, Catherine grimly wondered which of those things she would start to lose first.
To her surprise, she kept shrinking. The wolf whose DNA she had sampled was the biggest she had ever seen - he probably weighed almost as much as her. She had assumed that the treatment would make her into an exact copy of him - sheath and all. But now, before the changes had even finished, she was already on the smaller side for a wolf, and her fur was a noticeably lighter grey. There was clearly a lot to learn about just how this whole thing worked - as if she needed to be reminded of that.
The hours and days blurred together under the pale but never-ending light of the midnight sun. Whenever she took a rest break, she couldn’t tell if she had closed her eyes for a minute or slept for 12 hours. Each time she got back onto the trail her sled had left on its way out from the base, it was a little more awkward to get up from her hands and knees and a little bit easier to just stay on all fours. Eventually she stopped trying - she could tell that her limbs just couldn’t move that way anymore. It was difficult to really look herself over, but she knew her body had to be fully wolf at this point.
And that left only the part she really dreaded. She was sure that her brain would be the last thing to go. Admittedly, she only needed to remember one thing - follow the tracks to the base - simple enough for a wolf to understand. Her hope was that the other researchers could still figure out what happened and restore her humanity. Even so, the idea of losing her mind unsettled her deeply. What would that feel like? Would she even be able to understand what was happening to her?
With nothing else to occupy her time, Catherine repeatedly tried to test her own memory. She recited to herself her full name, her date of birth, her social security number, the last conversation she had with her husband before she left on this research trip - all things she knew by heart and could only forget if something was really wrong with her. She ran through them all anxiously, over and over, waiting with bated breath for the moment that she started to struggle with them.