Shiver

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Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

A girl named Grace is taken from her tire swing in the dead of winter and nearly eaten by wolves. One with beautiful yellow eyes seems more like it cares for her than wants to eat her. It snuffles its nose into her palm as she stares into its yellow eyes. The wolf backs away, shuddering, and the other wolves snarl. It stops the others from devouring her and carries her away.

Since then, Grace has been low-key obsessed with the wolves, especially the one with yellow eyes. They have a sort of connection. The wolf disappears every summer so Grace has to wait until winter year after year for her wolf to return. She watches it, staring into its yellow eyes, and it always stares back. 

In summer, several years after Grace’s attack, she goes into a bookstore with her friends. She doesn't notice the boy working the register, but he notices her. She doesn't even look his way even though he really wants her to. If she did, she would surely recognize his yellow eyes.

Grace helps her mom cook dinner one fall night and is sick and tired of hearing the news repeating the same story over and over again — Jack Culpeper was attacked and killed by a pack of wolves. Grace's mom flits off to her upstairs art room as Grace continues dinner. Her friend Rachel calls while she's cooking and they talk about Jack for a few minutes and then Rachel insists that Grace and their other friend Olivia come over to help her plan a winter getaway the next day. Grace is preoccupied with wolf thoughts but agrees. 

While cooking, Grace sets aside some meat and takes it outside, planning to give it to her wolf. She sees him and notices blood on his snout. Unafraid, she approaches and asks if her wolf was the one who killed Jack. She knows he didn't. She buries her face in the wolf's musty ruff and then feels him growling. Looking up, Grace sees another wolf, a white she-wolf, staring at her angrily. Her wolf growls back and then Grace goes inside. The white wolf eats the meat she brought outside.

Grace finishes up dinner as her mom paints upstairs and then her dad comes home, announcing he got a raise at work and with the raise, Grace can get a better car and her mom can rent an art studio space. After dinner, Grace goes to her room and hears clicking on the patio. She looks out the window to find the white she-wolf staring in. Surprising both the wolf and Grace herself, she lifts her lip, exposing her teeth, and snarls. The white wolf backs away. Grace's wolf meanwhile wants nothing more than to be close to his girl, but with the boy who was just attacked, that's probably not a good idea. 

A police officer comes to Grace's school the next day to tell the teenagers to stay out of the woods to avoid being eaten by wolves like Jack was. Another student points out that Grace was attacked too, but that was six years ago. The officer seems to want to keep everyone safe, including the wolves, which Grace appreciates. Rachel cancels her plans with Grace and Olivia so they decide to go to Grace's house instead, but on their way out of school, they see Jack's younger sister Isabel. She's like a Barbie doll with a purse dog that matches her outfits and she seems perfectly fine after the death of her brother.

At Grace's after school, Olivia shares some photographs she's taken recently, some of the girls together being cute, but, more interesting to Grace, some of her wolf. Olivia tells Grace she can keep those after noticing her daydreaming when looking at one picture in particular. Olivia’s brother arrives soon to pick her up and he kind of flirts with Grace, which Olivia does not appreciate. Grace thinks about her dinner alone (because her parents are the literal definition of YA parents) as she steps out on the patio, wolf on the brain. And then the screaming starts.

She dashes into the woods using what she stops kidding herself and knows to be heightened wolf senses, enhanced hearing and smell, and hears who she thinks is Jack Culpeper saying help, help and then sees the white wolf and a black wolf, the pack leader she knows after years of watching, attacking another wolf, one with hazel eyes, just like Jack's. The white she-wolf glares angrily at Grace.

After school ends the next day, Grace tells Olivia about seeing the wolves and the one that looks like Jack and hearing Jack's voice and Olivia shuts her down. These are just wolves, Jack isn't a werewolf, none of the wolves are werewolves, you're not thirteen anymore, give the creepy obsession a rest. Grace is shocked at how mean Olivia was just then, but Isabel walks up and tells Grace that a hunting party is going out to kill all the wolves right now so she doesn't need to try to protect them anymore. Grace flips out and leaves. 

Her car, still not replaced with the newer one her dad promised, stalls out as Grace nears the woods and sees the hunting party. She hears gunshots go off and spots the police officer from school the other day overseeing the hunting and begs him to make the hunters stop, telling him that a friend of hers is in the woods taking photographs. Several more shots go off and Grace rushes into the woods. Luckily these woods are the same woods in her back yard so she's not too far from home. She tries to get the hunters to stop, but is afraid it's too late. Her wolf meanwhile has flashes of visual communication between the other wolves as they run through the woods and are herded toward a lake. He does not go that way. 

After running into more hunters and finally convincing them to stop, Grace tromps home. On the patio, she sees a naked boy covered in blood. This boy has the same yellow eyes as her wolf and she knows what she's always known deep down inside. He is a werewolf. Grace gets the boy inside and tries to clean him up and learns that his name is Sam. She tells him she's going to take him to the hospital. He tries to object, but he's not quite his human self yet.

In the hospital, Grace stares at her wolf who is now a boy. A nurse comes in assuming Sam tried to shoot himself which Grace immediately shuts down. The nurse isn't so sure and points out big healed scars running up and down his wrists. Grace is sure though. Sam finally wakes up and Grace asks why he's here but he doesn't quite understand just yet. She asks him if it takes awhile to understand after being a wolf. Yes. He answers that he's here because it's spring and when it's warm outside, he becomes human, and when it's cold, he is a wolf. Grace tells him it's not spring, it's September, which Sam doesn't understand. The timing isn't right. Was he a wolf longer than he was supposed to be this time?

Sam needs to leave the hospital before they realize he's a freak, which Grace doesn't understand, other than the werewolf part. He removes the bandage on his neck from the gunshot and it's completely healed and scarred over. She doesn't think they'll let him leave because of his self-harm scars, but he tells her he didn't do that, his parents did, in a bathtub right after he was bitten and now he's afraid of baths. Yikes. Grace faints but recovers quickly and she uses the fainting to their advantage. Since Sam's naked and can't exactly walk around like that, Grace convinces an orderly that she peed and/or pooped her pants when she fainted so he gives her some scrubs. Sam puts them on and they are able to walk right out of the hospital. He's afraid of the cold so Grace gets the car heated up and they drive back to her house.

It's very late at night and Grace's parents aren't even home, they're at some art gallery thing and they haven't bothered to even let Grace know about it, so they definitely won't notice a young adult male suddenly being there. Sam asks why Grace didn't turn into a werewolf when she was bitten when she was younger, but she doesn't know. She convinces him to sleep in the bed with her and it's nice and safe and PG. 

Sam wakes before Grace the next morning and hears both her parents leave without saying anything to their daughter. He leaves the house for clothes and supplies that he and some of the other wolves keep stored in a shed and while he's out, the white she-wolf, Shelby, approaches him. She's disgusted by his Grace-smell but you know what? She can get over it. Sam is happy that he still smells like Grace. He also encounters Paul, the black wolf pack leader, but Sam doesn't think there's enough human left in wolf Paul for him to recognize him. He hurries back to Grace's house where he cooks her breakfast and they kiss. It's a cute first kiss scene, complete with clumsy kitchen skills. The immediate second kiss is six years of pent up longing that they both enjoy.

They go out car shopping and find a nice Bronco that Grace likes. She has her dad's checkbook and her parents are oblivious, so it only makes sense that she will buy a car without adult supervision. They talk about the temperature change making Sam shift and he describes his parents trying to kill him in the bathtub thinking he was possessed and how they are in prison for life now, thank goodness. Talk then turns to why Grace didn't change. She said she was bitten and was sick for a long while afterward, like the flu, which also happened to Sam. She went grocery shopping with her father but she was tired because of the flu so she stayed in the car. And then he left her in there when he got home. She remembered waking up in the hospital later with nurses telling her parents she should have died because of the heat in the car. Stellar parenting. After some sweet hand holding and car buying, later that night, snuggled in bed with her human boy, Grace wishes for a cure.

Sam drops Grace off at school the next day where she learns that there was a wolf prowling around school the day before and she knows it must have been Jack. Olivia was freaked out by the wolf and Isabel made a scene, according to Rachel. Today, Isabel stares somehow knowingly at Grace. When she's back with Sam after school, she tells him about seeing Jack, which spurs in him a memory of Beck, the person who became like his dad/wolfdad. There was a wolf, Christa, who clearly was unhappy with being a wolf. She attacked people and Beck had to put her down. Is Sam going to have to do that with Jack? He wishes that Beck was around, but he might not be able to turn back into a human again this year.

The next day, Sam finds the wolf pictures that Olivia gave Grace. He has a lot of complicated memories that he explains to Grace about Beck and Ulrik and Paul and Salem and Shelby, all the wolves in his pack. She seems to understand and tells him he smells just like his wolf self even though he's human and that makes him unbearably happy. He can be himself with her. He doesn't think he should be allowed to be with her, but she makes him know that it's okay. While Grace is at school that day, he goes to Beck’s house, where he would normally live when human. No one is there, so he starts tracking Jack. He ends up breaking into Jack's house, but he's not there anymore. There are a lot of creepy trophy animals though.

The next day is a Saturday and Grace sees her dad for all of three minutes in the morning, her mom already gone doing artist things. She learns in the brief moments with him that he needs to return the gun cleaner he borrowed from Tom Culpeper when they were all out shooting at wolves the other day. Grace is disgusted at her dad and wonders what he would do if he knew about Sam.

They go to Beck's house to see if Jack has shown up but really, Sam wanted to bring Grace to a special place in the woods near his place to see if she would recognize it. She definitely does and she loves it. Right after she was bitten, Sam waited on Grace to change, watching her, and tried to show her with his wolf-speak-image-thinking where to go to be safe if she changed and he wasn't there. Grace always dreamt of the place he has brought her, so he tells her that she might not be able to change, but she is more like him than she knows. 

They have to go inside because it's starting to get cold so they go back toward Beck's house and Grace's Bronco where she remembers that she accidentally locked her keys inside. Sam is starting to shiver and change, so they have to get inside Beck's house, quick, hoping that the power is on. Thankfully it is but the heat isn't on, so, as Sam fights the change, Grace does the fastest thing she can think of to warm Sam up. She puts him in the bathtub. He flashes back to his parents trying to kill him and suffers, but he doesn't change.

After they get dry and Sam unfreaks out, Grace cooks canned soup in the kitchen but spots recently expired milk in the fridge, so someone has been there. They talk about photos hung up all over and Grace learns that Shelby, the white she-wolf, is obsessed with Sam, but not in the way that Grace is. Grace tells Sam about the milk before they use a tool Beck has to unlock her car and they go back home. Sam almost stays at Beck's, but Grace convinces him to come back with her. Her parents are shockingly home when they get back but they sneak Sam in no problem. Sam feels closer to Grace after she helped keep him human, and he can smell that she feels the same way about him. 

The next day at school, Rachel jumps into Grace's Bronco before Sam leaves, so she finally gets to meet him. When the girls walk into school, Rachel tells Grace that a wolf left claw marks on Olivia's front door and she wishes they were on speaking terms so they could talk about it, they are the wolf-girls after all, but they haven't spoken since Olivia told Grace to stop being werewolf obsessed. Isabel pulls Grace aside and tells her that she saw Jack that morning, actual living human Jack, but he started shaking and had to leave immediately. Grace tries to convince her that her brother is dead, but Isabel knows something is up and thought Grace could help.

While Grace is at school, Sam goes to the post office to check Beck's mailbox to find someone has recently emptied it. Beck? He has a lot of memories growing up with him and the pack. Beck homeschooled him and the other older wolves taught him things they knew, and then they collected Shelby who didn't want to learn anything and only wanted to be a wolf. Sam didn't want that life, and Beck didn't want that for him, but everyone else seemed resigned to enwolfening and eventually being unable to become human again.

After school, Grace wants to go by Olivia's house but they see Jack's wolf along the way and Sam leaps from the Bronco to try to catch him. Jack gets away as Grace gets a shivering Sam back inside. What was he thinking? What was he going to do if he caught him? Sam decides he needs to look for Beck instead of chasing after Jack. Someone has recently gotten his mail and bought milk at his house. He's got to be human still.

When Sam gets to Beck's house the next day, he finds him there but with a trunkload of kids he's taken to create new young werewolves. Beck says it's probably his last year to be able to turn human, and unfortunately it's probably Sam's last as well, so he's got to create new wolves for the pack. Sam is disgusted and goes back to Grace. Beck gives him a cell phone before he leaves with his number programmed in it, just in case.

Sam takes Grace on an actual date the next day, wanting them to feel like regular teenagers instead of a werewolf obsessed with a girl obsessed with a werewolf. They go to a bookstore where Sam reads poetry and Grace cries and then outside they run into Olivia and her flirty brother. Olivia has her camera and Sam shies away, trying to shield his obviously yellow wolf eyes from her, but she sees them and asks about contacts. Yes, it's contacts. (It's the fluorescence.) Olivia apologizes for their fight about Grace being werewolf obsessed and they promise to talk on the phone later. Grace tries to call later but Olivia is never available. 

Sam has a dream that night about when he was a kid asking Beck to teach him how to protect himself from their neighbor who has big scary dogs. To skip the gruesomeness, he learns and has to use what he learns on the dogs. Sam realizes that Shelby released the dogs, trying to get them to kill the older werewolves so she and Sam would be the only ones and would be together. Shelby has been obsessed with Sam for probably as long as Grace has, but he only has eyes for Grace. Shelby peeing on Grace's house doesn't help.

A few days pass and things go the way they do every day. When the weekend arrives, Grace and Sam are on the couch watching a movie when her parents come home. Instead of Sam hiding away in Grace's room, she makes him stay and meet them. Grace's mom is weirdly flirtatious and her dad is happy to see a boyfriend because he didn't think she was into that stuff, whatever that means. Sam is polite and asks about Grace's mom's art and goes to see her art room. There, she asks if she can paint him because of his eyes and he reluctantly agrees. There is a guitar in the room and he plays around on it while she is painting. He sings a song that he wrote for Grace and it is so sweet it gives Grace's mom goosebumps. Unfortunately, that's when the screaming starts. 

Sam rushes downstairs to find wolf Shelby attacking Grace. He fights her off and then Grace's dad shoots her. Sam starts shivering from Shelby breaking in and also seeing his wrists covered in blood like when his parents tried to kill him in the bathtub. Clearly he's freaking out but everything is surprisingly fine. They go to the hospital and get rabies shots and it's… fine. As they leave the hospital, a nurse says a girl is going crazy and Grace swears she sees Olivia's mom, but they leave right after that.

The next day, Grace asks Sam if he thinks there is a cure and if werewolves are science or magic. If they are science, then there has to be a cure. He doesn't know what they are and doesn't think there's a cure, but there has to be some reason why Grace didn't change. Her dad comes in then and Grace asks what he did with the body of the wolf. He didn't do anything with it. He assumed her mom called animal control, but we ALLLLLL know that would never happen. Shelby is still out there somewhere. Sam tried to track her but he can't find any trace of her or Jack. He hopes they just died or went away, but that's unlikely and he knows it. 

At school the next day, Olivia is absent and Grace asks Rachel if she's seen or heard from her, but no. They decide if she's still absent at the end of the week, they will try to find her, but Grace ends up trying to call her house at lunch anyway. No one answers. Isabel finds Grace then and shows her some pictures that she said Olivia dropped. One in particular is of Jack, human, naked Jack, and another is of his wolf. Isabel asks for help again and Grace gives her her number. Later, she tells Sam about Isabel and the photos and he wants to meet her to see if they should help.

Grace, Sam and Isabel make quiche after school and he and Grace are dancing to Mariah Carey on the radio when Sam decides he can help Isabel. They discuss all the werewolf stuff, the temperature changes and how long they have until they are always wolves. Isabel doesn't seem to really want to find Jack because she knows he's not a nice guy, but he is her brother. She asks Sam why they don't just move to a warmer climate, but he explains that some tried it. They lived in Texas for several weeks and never changed, until the air conditioning was too cold and then boom, instant wolf, and then boom, animal control. Good thing it's almost winter and Jack will stop changing. Yeah, good for Jack but not for Sam.

Grace sees Olivia the next day and she accuses her of taking her photographs of Jack, but that was Isabel. Olivia explains that while she was taking photos, she saw Jack change from wolf to human and then tried to help him. She washed his clothes and fed him, but when he started talking about a cure, specifically about Grace being bitten but never turning, they fought and she hasn't spoken to him since. Olivia didn't say anything to Grace, or anyone else, because Jack told her she couldn't. Grace feels a little uneasy around Olivia, wishing she would apologize, and when Olivia invites her to come to her house later, Grace gives a maybe. 

Sam takes Grace to the city on a date that night because, surprising no one, her parents are out fraternizing with friends and ignoring their daughter. Sam takes Grace to a candy shop and leads her into using her wolf senses to sniff out all the flavors surrounding her. She really does seem like a wolf on the inside. They enjoy hot chocolate and leave, but outside, they see empty clothes and footprints turning from human to wolf in the light dusting of snow on the sidewalk. 

On the way home, Sam gets a call from Beck but ends the call quickly, still mad at him for wolfnapping children. They discuss when Sam was turned and how Beck is basically his father, but as they discuss it, Sam realizes that he was likely hunted and taken just like the kids. He was in the city, after all, not in a wooded area. He waits for Grace to make that connection but they get back home and go inside without her saying anything. That night, they have sex for the first time. 

Overnight, the power goes out and Grace wakes to Sam's phone ringing. It's Beck again. She puts the phone on speaker and Beck tells Sam that Paul was attacked by a wolf, but not one of the new wolves because they are still trapped inside. Who was it? Beck asks for Sam and Grace to come to his house. Grace wants to go.

While Grace is at school the next day, Sam goes to Jack's house again. He overhears Jack apologizing to Isabel for eating her pet fancy dog and then telling her there's a cure. Sam knows he's talking about Grace and also knows that there is no cure. When Isabel leaves, Sam approaches Jack to tell him there is no cure but he doesn't believe him and comes at Sam with a knife. Jack changes into a wolf and runs away, deeper inside the house, and Sam goes after him.

Grace waits after school for Sam to pick her up but he's late. He's never been late before, so of course she gets anxious about it, but then her Bronco appears. Unfortunately, Jack is driving, not Sam. He has done something to Sam and won't tell Grace where he is unless she gives him the cure. She tries to tell him there isn't one but Jack refuses to listen and is unhinged. Grace calls Beck, luckily having memorized his number, and pretends that he has the cure. Luckily he goes along with her and tells her to bring Jack to his house. Sam meanwhile wakes up, locked in some sort of tool shed.

Jack shivers into a wolf as soon as they get inside Beck’s house and Beck comes running over to help, grabbing Jack by the muzzle and asserting himself as alpha, or at least asserting that Jack is much, much lesser than he is. They manage to get wolf Jack locked in the bathroom and then they worry about Sam. With Jack in wolf form, they won't be able to learn where he is. Beck calls the phone he gave to Sam, Grace not having his number, and he answers, but the connection is bad. Grace understands that he's in a shed on the Culpeper property so she immediately calls Isabel who goes out looking in their six outbuildings. Luckily she finds Sam and he's still human, for the time being.

Grace rushes to the Culpeper house and finds that Isabel has built a fire to keep Sam warm. He's been sick and is teetering ever closer to shivering into a wolf. Grace tells him that she thinks she didn't turn into a wolf because of the really high fever she got after being trapped in the car by her idiot father. He starts to object about the others going to warm climates, but this is different. She thinks the high fever burned her up from the inside out and stopped her change from happening. She wonders if there's a way to induce a fever high enough to burn out the change in him and the others, which is when Isabel chimes in. Her mother works at a clinic and just saw a patient with meningitis who had a fever of 107°. He died of course, but maybe a werewolf wouldn't? Before they can discuss this idea more, Sam asks to go to Beck's house, to see him probably for the last time.

On the drive to Beck's, Sam tells Grace he's willing to try her idea for the cure, even getting meningitis if that's what it would take, because he doesn't want to turn into a wolf and have to watch her living her life without him. He thinks he'll have to be human to try it, though, which is probably going to be the most difficult part, but he'll do it because he wants to be with her if she'll have him, and of course she will because she loves him and tells him so. And that's when they hit a deer and the Bronco is totaled. They are both okay after the accident, but the car no longer runs and the windshield is cracked, so it's getting colder and colder inside. They call 911 first and then Beck. Both Sam and Beck apologize for hurting each other and Beck tells Sam that the kids he took and turned knew what was going to happen to them. He didn't do to them what he did to Sam and he's sorry for it. Sam can't resist the cold anymore and shivers into a wolf, running away. Grace is alone when the paramedics arrive.

A few days pass and Grace is overwhelmingly sad about Sam howling in the distance, but then Olivia calls her and confesses that Jack bit her and she's currently fighting off the shivers. Grace convinces Olivia that she's not afraid of her or seeing her shift and that she should come to her house. Beck calls and asks Grace to come keep an eye on Jack who seems to be stable in human form right now, but Beck knows he's almost out of his human time and needs her help. While she's talking to Beck, Isabel calls her to let her know that another meningitis case came in and she snuck three vials of the patient's blood, one for Jack, one for Sam, one for Olivia. Grace wants her to meet them at Beck's.

Once there, Olivia goes to throw up, Isabel goes to see Jack who is human but could possibly shiver to a wolf at any moment, and Grace talks to Beck. He shares about his time as a wolf, nearly 20 years, the loss of his wife and his changing of Sam. He saw Sam as a kid with his, as Beck describes them, vapid parents and knew he could do better. He has regretted changing Sam every day since. Grace assures him that even though Sam hates being a wolf, he loves Beck, which he seems to appreciate. Grace then tells him about her being bitten and trapped in the car and never changing and the cure theory. He thinks it might work and offers to help. They plan on drugging some hamburger meat with Benadryl to make wolf Sam too sleepy to do anything and taking him to the clinic, hoping it will be warm enough there for him to change back human one last time. Both Sam and Beck believe that for the fever to kill the wolf, you can't be a wolf, so it won't work if he can't change back.

Beck calls for Sam but shivers into his wolf for the last time. Luckily Sam comes at his call, eats the drugged meat, and they are able to get him in Isabel’s SUV and they all, minus wolf Beck, go to the clinic. They get Sam into an exam room and then focus on giving Jack and Olivia their infection injections. Jack goes first, Grace injecting him, but then when it is Olivia's turn, she changes her mind. She wants to see how it goes for Jack first which is reasonable. If he is okay, she will let them change her when she turns human again in spring. Now it's time for Sam.

They go into his exam room and Sam is, just as Grace knew he would be, still a wolf. She asks him if he wants to try for the cure and he whimpers, but then she has an idea. Grace tries to communicate with Sam as a wolf would, like he did for her with their wolf-speak-image-thinking when he showed her the safe space in the woods. She thinks of all their kisses and all the times she was wrapped in his arms and how she feels safe with him. He backs away and peels out of his wolf form and becomes himself just long enough to get half of an injection before shivering back into his wolf. Grace is certain that she's killed him.

Isabel hears Jack coming so she leaves while Grace remains, sad, and then Jack comes into the room to get Grace because Olivia isn't doing well and they need to leave, so he's come to help her carry Sam out, but Sam is gone. He must've slipped out the door somehow without them noticing. Grace runs outside, yelling for him but she knows he won't come back. Isabel drives up, Olivia changing and Jack starting to shiver, and begs Grace to get in the SUV. She sees Shelby’s white she-wolf glaring at her smugly from the edge of the parking lot, but Sam isn't anywhere to be found.

A few days pass. Isabel is with Jack at Beck's house, but he's definitely dying, though once his fever started, he stopped shivering and hasn't become a wolf since. Grace and Olivia go to see them, and while they are there, Olivia gives Grace a note to give to her parents, telling them she's run away. She strips off her sweaters and is a wolf before she makes it out of Beck's back yard, frolicking with happiness, it looks like. Grace wishes she would have changed too, so she could be with her wolf. She assumes Sam is suffering somewhere like Jack is. She goes to check on him and give him some old pain medicine she found in the medicine cabinet and convinces Isabel to take him to a hospital even though he's supposed to be dead. They decide they'll figure out something to say about Jack not actually being dead on the way, but unfortunately, Jack really does die before they are able to leave.

A bit of time passes and it's almost Christmas break and Grace and Rachel will be going on Rachel's planned trip soon. Isabel takes Grace from school and they go in their shared sadness to the bookstore because Isabel wants to buy cookbooks so she can learn to get fat. Grace goes to the little nook where Sam read her poetry and smells all the smells in the bookshop, catching a lingering of Sam. She buys the poetry book he read from and Isabel buys a cookie cookbook and they go to Rachel's and make way too many cookies.

It's almost Christmas. Grace is going away to Florida with Rachel soon, hopefully having fun and not dwelling on her lost wolf. She steps outside to fill the bird feeder, wishing she would see her wolf waiting in the woods, watching her like he always does at Christmastime. She doesn't realize it, but he is there, watching, and then Sam, human Sam, steps from between the trees.