When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

“What is going on with you tonight?” Jonathan asked, his hand moving through his hair, nervously.

“Nothing,” she responded, a little too quickly. Steve would have shrugged and moved on. Started kissing her neck, trying to close the widening gap between them physically. But Jonathan, as she had come to find, was not Steve.

“I don’t believe you,” he said, as he adjusted his head to look more fully in her eyes. Nancy hid them from him, certain he could read the emotions on her face. “Nancy, tell me,” he pleaded.

“I saw you,” she started, unable to meet his gaze. “Yesterday. With Chrissy Cunningham. You took her photo in the hall by your lockers and she beamed at you. You smiled back at her as you clicked away.”

Her words hung in the air for a moment, the jealousy on them apparent, before he snorted and laughed.

“You think me and…Chrissy Cunningham?” Jonathan asked incredulously. “Because I took her picture? For the yearbook, like she asked me to?”

“Why is that so absurd?” Nancy asked in response, her arms flailing. “She’s single and so are you, and you’re both good looking..”

The words spilled from her mouth before she could even think about them. Jonathan stared at her like she had two heads.

“I’m Jonathan Byers,” he emphasized, despite the blush that Nancy saw creeping up his neck. “Even if I wanted Chrissy, which I don’t, I’ve got no shot.” He ran his hand through his hair, again and chuckled mirthlessly. “I’m like slightly more popular than the stomach flu that burned through school a few months ago. Most would rather be seen with that than me.”

He turned from her and looked down at his blanket. “You being the exception.”

She sat on his bed next to him with a pathetic plop and picked at his blanket. “I’m pretty sure I’m not the only exception. That goth girl senior, Samantha, asked me about you last week. Wanted to know ‘what your deal was’ and said ‘that shirt is really doing him all the favors.’” Nancy couldn’t help the pout that formed on her face, despite how childish it made her feel.

A bashful smile crossed Jonathan’s face. “What shirt was I wearing?

“The blue Henley,” Nancy admitted.

“The one you got me?”