Maya pressed her back against the cave wall, listening to the storm rage outside. Three days into the mountain crossing, and her supplies were nearly gone. She could feel the frailty in her legs — the trembling weakness that came from too little food and too much climbing — and she fought to ignore it.
"Keep moving," she whispered to herself.
Her torch flickered against the stone walls as she pushed deeper into the cave system, hoping it connected to the valley beyond. The maps she'd studied had been old, drawn by hands long dead, but they were all she had.
Then she heard it — a low growl echoing from somewhere ahead.
Maya forced herself to stay still and observe rather than run. She watched the shadows shift, tracked the sound as it moved left, then right. A wolf, she decided. Young, judging by the pitch. Probably just as lost as she was.
She rounded a corner and found it — a grey wolf pup wedged between two boulders, one paw twisted at a wrong angle. It snapped weakly at the air when it saw her.
"Don't look at me like that," she said softly. "I'm not the enemy."
It would have been easy to call the creature pathetic and move on — a small, wounded thing that couldn't even free itself — but Maya saw something different. She saw herself, three days ago, standing at the base of this mountain and trembling.
She set down her pack and began working the smaller boulder loose.
Some adventures, she thought, weren't about reaching the destination first. They were about who you chose to carry with you.