Her teeth were chattering by the time she grabbed her towel and started to dry her hair, which took all of five seconds and was the only thing she liked about her new haircut.
Why on earth would anyone want to tamper with her traps?
All the ranchers she had met had been only too eager for her to catch any wolf that might be around. It didn’t make sense. Unless it was someone’s idea of a joke. She wrapped the towel around her and headed back to the cabin.
Once she was dressed, she made herself some tea then switched on her computer and logged the locations of the six traps she and Bill Rimmer had reset. She sat for a long time looking at the map of the canyon where they’d found the ones that had been most recently sprung. She clicked on the mouse to get the adjoining map. With her eyes still on the screen, she sipped her tea then took a bite of a big red apple that looked a lot better than it tasted. Then something on the map caught her eye.
On the south side of the canyon there was an old logging road she hadn’t noticed before. She always came from the north and hadn’t so far bothered to explore over there. She clicked again and zoomed wider to see where the road led. It snaked through the forest for about five miles, working its way down through a deep defile to a house high in the valley. She knew whose place this was, but clicked on it just to make sure. The words came up ‘Harding Ranch’.
It was odd that it hadn’t occurred to her before: perhaps it was those two boys who were playing tricks on her. Not that she had any grounds for suspicion, other than that they were by a long way the least friendly folk she’d met since she’d been here.
Half an hour later she was swinging the Toyota past a broken sign that said PRIVATE PROPERTY - NO HUNTING - KEEP OUT, and started to negotiate the potholes of the Hardings’ driveway. Buzz, bouncing beside her, looked almost as nervous as she was and soon she saw why. Two dogs about twice his size and ten times meaner came hurtling out of the trees toward the pickup, their hackles bristling like sharkfins. Buzz whimpered.
Helen parked beside a rusted cattle trailer that lay with several other pieces of antique machinery, stitched to the ground by weed and grass, along the edge of the driveway. She switched off the engine and sat for a moment wondering what to do.
She was good with dogs but there was something about these two that made her reluctant to push her luck. One of them reared up and put his paws against the side of the pickup, barking and snarling and salivating all at the same time. Buzz gave an unconvincing woof and lowered himself onto the seat.
‘Coward,’ Helen said. She looked toward the house.
It was a forlorn sight, little more than a shack that had been added to over the years, presumably as money allowed. Ugly, makeshift extensions sprouted from it like architectural cancer, unified only by a mildewed whitewash. The roof was patched with blistered tarpaper. Even some of the patches were patched. It huddled against a cliff of bare rock as if fearful of being swallowed by the wilderness.
There were two trucks parked nearer to the house, one of them the black truck the boys drove. But the dogs were the only sign of life.
The light was fading fast and inside Helen could see the flicker of a TV, the remote world finding its way to this outpost via a giant satellite dish, bolted precariously to the cliff face above. From a line strung between two dying fir trees, the pale shapes of old shirts and underwear hung unstirring in the twilight.
Suddenly Helen heard a shout and the dogs immediately stopped their barking and ran back toward the house. A torn screen door opened and Abe Harding stepped out onto the porch. He yelled again at the dogs and they cowered and circled below him toward the side of the house.
Helen expected Harding to come over toward her, but instead he stayed where he was, just stood there, looking at her.
‘Oh well,’ she said, under her breath to Buzz. She opened the pickup’s door. ‘Here goes.’
She swung the door shut and headed out over the weed-studded gravel toward the house. She had already worked out how to play it. There was no way she was going to start accusing anyone about the traps. She wasn’t even going to mention it. She was going to be sweetness and light.
‘Evening!’ she called out in her cheeriest voice.
‘Uh-huh.’ It was hardly friendly, but it was a start.
As she came to the foot of the steps that went up to the porch, one of the dogs growled invisibly from around the side of the house and without taking his eyes off Helen, Abe told it sharply to shut up. He was a gaunt, wiry man with eyes deep-set and troubled. He was wearing a pale, stained hat, jeans and a longsleeved undershirt. He wasn’t wearing boots and his toes showed through a hole in one sock.
Helen put him somewhere in his mid to late fifties. Ruth Michaels had told her that he’d bought this place after coming back from Vietnam. Whether it was the war that gave him his wary, hunted look, Helen could only guess. Perhaps it came from living cornered in this dismal place, his back forever to the wall.
Helen held out her hand. ‘Mr Harding, I’m Helen Ross, from the—’
‘I know who you are.’
He looked at her hand and she thought for a perilous moment that he wasn’t going to shake it. Eventually, as if it were against his better judgment, he did.
‘Pretty place you’ve got here.’
He sniffed his contempt. She didn’t blame him.
‘Want to buy it?’
Helen laughed, a little too enthusiastically.
‘Wish I could afford to.’
‘What I hear, you government people get a pretty good deal. All the tax dollars you squeeze out of folk like us.’
‘Yeah, I wonder who does get all that.’
Harding turned his head to one side and spat out a mouthful of black tobacco juice. It hit the dust beside the steps with a smack. Things weren’t going as well as Helen had hoped. He looked at her again.
‘What yer want?’
‘Mr Harding, as you know, I’ve been given the job of trying to catch that wolf who killed Kathy Hicks’ dog not so long ago and I just wanted to drop by, like I have with all your neighbors, and, you know, just say hi and introduce myself and . . .’ She felt so stupid. As if a drunken frog had taken over control of her tongue.
‘So you ain’t caught him.’
‘Not yet. But, boy, I’m trying!’ She laughed nervously.
‘Uh-huh.’
She could hear the sound of the TV from inside the house. It was a comedy show and, judging by the regular roars of studio laughter, a really good one. Helen suddenly became aware that she was being watched from inside. One of Harding’s sons was looking out from the screen window of what she supposed was the kitchen. Soon his brother joined him. She ignored them and soldiered on, as brightly as she could.
‘Obviously, to find out if he’s still around and what he’s up to—’
‘Feeding on our cows, up on the allotments, I imagine. Had one of Buck Calder’s calves already, I heard.’
‘Well, it wasn’t clear from the carcass—’
‘Shit.’ He shook his head and looked away. ‘You people.’
Helen swallowed. ‘Some of the other ranchers, including Mr Calder actually, have very kindly said they’ll allow me to go on their land. You know, to look for tracks, scat, things like that.’ She laughed, though why, she had no idea. ‘Provided, of course, I’m very careful, shut gates and so on. And I wondered if you’d mind if I—’
‘Come snooping around my land?’
‘Well, not “snooping”, but—’
‘Like hell, you can.’
‘Oh.’
‘You think I’m going to let the goddamn federal government go tramping over my property, poking their noses into my business?’
‘Well, I—’
‘You must be out of your goddamn mind.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Git out of here.’
The two dogs appeared around the side of the house. One of them gave a low growl and Abe told it to shut up. Out of the corn
er of her eye, Helen could see the two boys grinning on the other side of the kitchen screen. Helen smiled bravely at their father.
‘Well, I’m really sorry to have troubled you.’
‘Just git.’
She turned away and walked back toward the pickup. There was another roar of laughter from the TV set. Her knees were shaking. She hoped it didn’t show. Suddenly there was a scuffle behind her and, before she could turn, the first dog hit her. The impact sent her sprawling onto the dust.
Both of them were upon her, one at her thigh and the other at her ankle. They were snarling horribly, their teeth slashing at her hiking pants. She screamed and kicked out. Harding was running toward them, yelling, calling them off.
They stopped as suddenly as they started. They loped off guiltily. Harding picked up a rock and hurled it after them and one of them yelped as it hit. Helen lay for a moment, in shock. There was a rip in her pants but there didn’t seem to be any blood. She sat up.
‘You okay?’
The tone wasn’t exactly sympathetic. He was standing over her.
‘I think so.’
Helen got to her feet and brushed herself down.
‘You’ll be on your way then.’
‘Yeah. I think so.’
She walked to the pickup, all the way keeping an eye on the dogs. She didn’t feel safe until she’d opened the door. Her shoulders were shaking not just with shock but with anger now too.
‘I’d appreciate it if you’d tell whoever’s messing with my traps that they’d better watch out. They could end up in a lot of trouble.’
Even to her own ears the threat sounded feeble. Her voice betrayed how close she was to tears. Harding made no reply.
Helen climbed behind the wheel and slammed the door. It was nearly dark. Harding stood watching while she turned the pickup around. Her headlights panned briefly across him. And, with her heart banging and the tears starting to spill, she headed off down the driveway. She cried all the way home.
13
Hope’s fairground had known better days. It lay in a dusty sprawl of pasture at the back end of town and for most of the year played host to cottontails, gophers and occasional parties of high school rebels who used it for illicit midnight drag racing.
The rails around the pens and the rodeo arena hadn’t seen a paintbrush in years and the bleachers were so rickety and splintered that only the most bolstered or reckless dared sit on them. Around the perimeter was a straggle of exhibit booths whose roofs had been warped to a matching tilt by winter winds, providing nesting space for various kinds of bird.
In times gone by, the place had been busy all around the calendar with craft markets, gun shows and various parades and rodeos. There used to be an annual Mountain Man Rendezvous, to which fantasists in beards and buckskin flocked from several neighboring states, and a Testicle Festival, which for awhile enjoyed even greater popularity, except perhaps with the calves who supplied the food, euphemistically served as ‘prairie oysters’. COME TO HOPE AND HAVE A BALL, the posters urged. But as the years went by, fewer and fewer did.
One by one, all these events had either petered out or sought more salubrious locations elsewhere. The only survivor of any consequence was the Hope Labor Day Fair and Rodeo and even this had now been forced, by dint of stronger competition elsewhere, to change its name and shift from Labor Day to mid-September, in the process shrinking from three days to a single Saturday.
The fair had always climaxed with a concert and a pitchfork fondue, in which hunks of beef the size of small dogs were speared and cooked in drums of boiling oil. In previous years, the concert had attracted some medium-to-big country music stars. This year, however, top of the bill were Rikki Rain and the Ragged Wranglers, who had come all the way from Billings and, for a few precarious moments, seemed set to go all the way back without playing a note.
They had parked their two customized black RVs by the cattle pens and as they climbed out, the first thing Rikki saw was a poster on which someone had scrawled who? right under her name.
Buck Calder and several members of the fair’s organizing board who had turned out to welcome her had been treated to some vivid advice on where they could stick their godforsaken, horseshit apology for a fair. The offending poster had been rapidly removed and at last the late afternoon sunshine, a drifting smell of pitchforked steak and some serious Buck Calder sweet-talk seemed to have prevailed.
Eleanor sipped her iced tea beside one of the concession stands and watched her husband across the crowd. He had his arm around Rikki now and she was tossing back her peroxide curls and laughing raucously at something he’d said. She was wearing a black shirt, red cowboy boots and a pair of white jeans so tight that Eleanor feared for her circulation.
‘Finest set of dentures I ever did see,’ Hettie Millward said, following Eleanor’s gaze. ‘I reckon she looks a sight more ragged than the Wranglers.’
Eleanor smiled. ‘Hettie, you don’t need to say that.’
‘Well, doesn’t she? Anyhow, I didn’t think Buck was on the board this year.’
‘He isn’t. You know Buck, if ever there’s a damsel in distress. ’
‘Some damsel. Look at her shirt all unbuttoned there. Talk about mutton dressed as lamb.’
‘Undressed.’
They laughed. Hettie was her best friend, the only one who came close to understanding how it was between her and Buck. She was a big-hearted woman, constantly at war with her weight, though it was a war she seemed happy to lose. Doug, her husband, was a friend of Buck’s - and one of Hope’s most popular and respected ranchers.
Eleanor changed the subject and asked Hettie about her daughter’s wedding plans, which seemed to change every week. Lucy was getting married next spring and wanted it to be the ‘wedding of the millennium’. The whole of Hope was going to be invited. Hettie told her the latest idea, which she thought absolutely insane, was to have the whole ceremony conducted on horseback. Bride and groom, best man and bridesmaids, even the minister, for heavensakes, were going to be on horses. Hettie said it was a surefire recipe for disaster.
Then she looked at her watch and said she had better go and find her two boys, who had just won blue ribbons in the 4-H calf classes. Their animals were going to be auctioned and the parade was about to start in the main arena.
‘Charlie says he’s looking for at least three dollars a pound. I told him if he got three hundred it wouldn’t pay for all the misery those animals have put us through. I just want to be shot of them. I’ll see you later, honey.’
Eleanor finished her tea then strolled along the row of exhibit booths whose dilapidation was disguised by colored flags and streamers that fluttered in the breeze. There were booths selling anything from dogtags to jars of homemade chokecherry jelly. One had been transformed into a tepee outside which a group of teenage girls stood giggling while they waited to have their fortunes told by a ‘Genuine Indian Medicine Man’. Farther along, smaller and noisier children were throwing wet sponges at two volunteers from the town fire department, bravely smiling in cut-out faces of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.
It had been many years since Eleanor had last come to the fair, though Buck, whose glory days were well remembered by older folk who watched the rodeo, never missed it. Eleanor had stopped coming after Henry’s accident, fearing she might glimpse her dead son’s face among the crowds of kids waiting to show their steers or clamoring for hot dogs and soda at the concession stands.
Nevertheless, it had been her idea that Paragon should take a booth and, making her way back toward it, she was relieved to have found no ambush of pain. In fact, she was proud that one of her first suggestions as Ruth’s new business partner had worked out so well. The warm weather had brought out the crowds. They had sold as much here in one day as they did in the shop in a whole week and had easily covered the fifty-dollar rental for the booth.
As she came up to the booth, she saw Ruth staring at something across the crowd. She had a strange, almost a
ngry expression on her face. Eleanor followed her gaze and saw that it must be Buck she was looking at. He was still making a fool of himself with that singer woman.
It was touching, Eleanor thought, that Ruth should care.
Buck wished Rikki and the Wranglers all the best and said he’d see them after the show, although he wasn’t so sure he would. Rikki had looked a whole lot better from a distance than she did at close range and the wink she gave him as she went off to her van did little for him. With his wife and his mistress chatting away to each other like best buddies at the booth over there, life was complicated enough, thank you very much.
He’d seen Eleanor go off to the concession stand and had been about to head over to grab a quiet word with Ruth, when he’d gotten waylaid sorting out Rikki Rain’s ego problem. Now he’d missed his chance. Being a pillar of the community was tough sometimes. He felt Eleanor’s eyes on him and headed off in the opposite direction.
Buck loved the fair and rodeo, though it wasn’t half the show it had been when he was a kid. In those days the whole county used to turn out, as well as hordes of people from far and wide. Winning a rodeo event back then really counted for something. Some of these kids nowadays hardly knew which end of a horse the hay went in. There was a bigger crowd here today than there had been in years, but it still wasn’t the same.
He followed his nose to one of the long trestle tables where the meat from the pitchfork fondue was being carved. As he walked past the arena he noticed a huddle of youngsters, mainly girls, gathered around a tall man in a pale blue shirt and a tanned young woman in a tight white dress.
Both seemed to be signing autographs and, with their backs to him, Buck didn’t recognize them. A photographer he recognized from the local newspaper was taking pictures. The man in the blue shirt said something Buck couldn’t make out but which was obviously hilarious because all the folk gathered around him roared with laughter. As the couple turned to go, all smiles and little waves, Buck saw it was that TV anchorman fellow, Jordan Townsend, who had bought the Nielsen place for a small fortune two summers ago.