Reindeer Games

Alaska, 1974.Zoologist Evelyn Crane sets out to track a migrating caribou herd along the Dalton Highway.She never returns.Her sled dogs come back alone. Her cabin is left untouched. And at the site where she vanished, searchers find something impossible—a spiral of tracks where the herd appears to have turned inward, closing around a single point.No body is ever recovered.The case fades.But the pattern doesn't.Decades later, a graduate researcher uncovers Evelyn's lost field notes buried beneath thawing tundra. The sketches inside don't match any known species. Antlers bend into unnatural shapes. Eyes stare back from within them. And the final entry suggests something far more disturbing than a migration study.The herd isn't just moving.It's learning.As the discovery spreads, the wilderness begins to change. Water carries unfamiliar growth. Air thickens with a scent that doesn't belong. And those who follow the herd too closely begin to feel something shifting inside them.A rhythm.A direction.A pull upstream.Reindeer Games is a slow-burn horror novella about adaptation, identity, and the terrifying possibility that humans are no longer the observers of the natural world—but part of something larger moving through it.The herd isn't being tracked.It's tracking back.