As time went by, Catherine was able to relax a little bit. Her thoughts and memories didn’t seem to be going anywhere, which meant she could actually start to appreciate the body she had ended up in. Her aching muscles suddenly felt a lot better - she now realized that the agonizing pain she had been going through for the past several days, which she had chalked up to the grueling hike across the tundra, was mostly coming from her reshaping bones and migrating organs, and now those changes were done. She felt newly energetic, and her previously slow progress accelerated as she dashed across the ice at nearly a full sprint, held back only by the supplies she dragged behind herself. Now her only concern was how to identify herself when she got back to the base.
The base. Catherine suddenly realized that she had been tracking a scent with her more powerful sense of smell just as much as she was following the sled tracks. It was a familiar scent, even as she perceived it in an entirely new way - a mixture of her human self, her dearly departed sled dogs, and the supplies they had carried on the outbound journey. It occurred to her that the human smell was so much more distinct now that her own body wasn’t giving it off. She was following the scent trail “backwards”, so to speak, but the residual remnants of it that still clung to the otherwise undisturbed snow were more than enough to point her straight back to where she had come from.
From that point on, everything seemed so much easier. That sense of relief really helped to take Catherine’s mind off the much greater concerns that still lay ahead of her - namely, the open question of whether the other scientists would be able to turn her back. For now, she could convince herself that she didn’t care. She was just experiencing the Arctic - a place that had fascinated her for as long as she could remember - the way it was meant to be experienced. Au naturel. A perspective that the documentary filmmakers could only dream of.
With time, Catherine was even starting to think more like a wolf. Her appetite had come back with a vengeance, but she rarely found herself dipping into the provisions she had saved. For one thing, despite her best efforts, the packages of meat were frustrating to open without hands. But she didn’t even need to. There were plenty of opportunities to nab a hare or another small animal and swallow it whole, raw, bleeding, still shrieking for its life. It was very different from hunting with a gun and a cooking fire, and it was strangely satisfying.
And so what if the chase took her a mile or two off the trail? She knew she would have no trouble finding her way back. There were times when she considered just leaving the sled behind and just running all the way back to base with nothing but her own four paws. She knew she would make it there in half the time, if not less. But she also knew that when she did get back, she would need all the help she could get to prove that this wolf was actually Catherine - and to convince them not to shoot on sight.
By the time the tin roof of the base camp she called home half the year started to peek up above the distant horizon, Catherine had spent days working out a plan. She had covered herself in the human clothes that no longer protected her from anything. She scrawled the word “HELP” into the snow, hoping it would actually come out legible. And now she was trying to figure out how to set off her flare gun, to alert them that she was here, without a trigger finger. If her plan worked out just right, her coworkers would probably understand what happened to her, or at least hold off on shooting the dangerous predator at their door long enough to put two and two together. Then again, she knew from firsthand experience that no plan survives contact with reality...