She couldn’t believe it.
‘Luke?’
He groaned but the sound got lost in a great unfurling of thunder.
‘Luke? God, what on earth . . . Are you okay?’
She knelt beside him helplessly while he tried to get the air back into him. And when at last he succeeded, she made him sit up and stayed beside him with her hands on his shoulders until he was breathing evenly again. She brushed the dirt and twigs from his back, then went back with the flashlight and found his hat and his bag which he had dropped in the fall. When she came back she saw there was blood on his forehead where he must have knocked it.
‘Are you okay?’
He nodded, not looking at her yet. She took out a handkerchief and knelt beside him again.
‘You’ve cut yourself, just there. Shall I . . .?’
Rather than allow her to do it, he took the handkerchief and wiped the wound himself. It looked painful. Maybe it would even need stitches. He said something which Helen couldn’t catch.
‘What?’
‘I s-said, I’m s-sorry.’
‘Is it you who’s been doing this all along?’
He nodded, still looking down. The thunder was becoming more distant, rolling down the valley away from them.
‘Luke, why?’
He shook his head.
‘Don’t you want me to catch the wolf? Your dad does, I know.’
He gave a little humorless laugh. ‘Oh, yeah. H-h-he does.’
‘But you don’t?’
He didn’t answer.
‘You like wolves?’
He shrugged, looking away, still avoiding her eyes.
‘That’s it, isn’t it? You know, Luke, we’re not trapping him to kill him or take him away. Just to put a radio collar on him. It’ll protect him.’
‘There’s m-more than one. There’s n-nine, a whole p-p-pack. ’
‘You’ve seen them?’
He nodded. ‘And collars won’t protect them. It’ll just make them easier to g-get rid of.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘You wait.’
For awhile, neither of them spoke. A sudden gust of wind blew down the canyon, rattling the leaves of the alders. Helen shivered.
Luke looked at the sky. ‘It’s going to rain,’ he said.
And then, at last, he looked at her. And something in his eyes startled her. Something lonely and lost, like a mirrored fragment of herself.
It began to rain, as he had said it would. Large, cold drops that smacked on their upturned faces and on the rocks around them and filled the air with the smell of wet dust that always reminded Helen of long-ago summers when she was a child.
He sat on a chair beside the cabin stove, with Buzz curled up at his feet and his forehead tilted up toward the light so she could see to clean the wound.
She was standing over him and he watched her face while she worked, noting the way she frowned and bit her lip in concentration. Their clothes were still soaked from the rain and he did his best not to look at how her T-shirt clung to her breasts. She had lit the potbellied stove when they came in and now in the warmth he could see curls of steam rising from her shoulders. She smelled wonderful, not of perfume or anything, just of her.
‘This is going to hurt a little, okay?’
He nodded. It was iodine and he couldn’t help wincing as she dabbed it into the wound.
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘That’ll teach you to go messing with my traps.’
He looked up at her and smiled but his mouth went all askew and it ended up more like a sneer.
It was amazing how well she’d taken it. The way she’d come roaring out of those trees like that had scared him half to death. He thought she was going to kill him. But afterward, walking down through the dripping forest, with her backpack strapped to Moon Eye’s saddle, she had actually laughed about it. She’d made him get the bottle of Wolf-Stop out and taken a whiff of it which nearly knocked her out. She’d laughed even more, when he told her all the trouble he’d taken making it and testing it out on the dogs.
Once or twice, she said, she’d gotten the feeling someone was spying on her and for a moment he was terrified that she meant down here at the cabin, which he hadn’t, of course, mentioned. There was no way he could tell her about that, not without her thinking him a total freak. Luckily it turned out all she meant was when she’d been out checking her traps.
He explained how he had first come across the wolves and how since then he had watched them. And when she tried to convince him that collaring them was the right thing to do, he could see she cared just as much as he did about their survival.
She was sticking a Band-Aid on him now.
‘There you go. You’ll live.’
‘Thanks.’
The pan of water she was heating on the Coleman stove was boiling and she went over and started to make hot chocolate.
‘Is that horse of yours okay out there in the rain?’
‘He’ll be fine.’
‘Bring him in if you like. There’s a spare bed.’
He smiled and this time his mouth felt okay.
While she busied herself, he looked around the room. It was cramped but in the light of the hissing gas lamps it looked warm and cozy. The floor was cluttered with boxes in which she seemed to store everything from books to wolf traps. A red sleeping bag lay crumpled on the bottom bunk and there was a candle in a jar on the floor beside it and a book whose title he couldn’t make out. There was also what looked like a half-written letter and a pen and one of those little lamps on a band that you could fix to your forehead. He imagined her curled up at night writing to someone and wondered who it might be.
Across the other corner she had rigged up a washing line where a towel and some clothes hung to dry. Her cell phone and stereo were wired up to two deep-cycle six-volt batteries below the window. Her computer was on the table, surrounded by a chaos of notes and charts and maps.
There was a bucket in the corner with a tin can strung across it. She saw him frowning at it as she came over with the mugs of hot chocolate and told him it was a mousetrap and how it worked.
‘That really w-w-works?’
‘You bet. Better than my wolf traps have been, anyway.’ She narrowed her eyes at him, putting the mugs down on the table.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to change out of that wet shirt? Look, there’s steam coming off you.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’ll catch cold.’
‘You sound like my m-m-mother.’
‘I do? Catch cold, I don’t give a damn.’
Luke laughed. He was starting to relax a little.
‘But I’m not going to,’ she went on. ‘So if you’ll excuse me, I shall retire for a moment to my dressing room.’
She went over to the wardrobe and, facing away from him, started taking off her T-shirt. He caught a glimpse of the back of her bra and quickly looked the other way, hoping he wasn’t going to blush and trying desperately to think of something to say, something casual that would make it seem like it was no big deal to have a woman take off her clothes in front of him.
‘Am I still un-un-under arrest?’
‘I’m thinking about it.’
She came back and sat down at the table, giving him a sly kind of smile. She’d put on a pale blue fleece which made her face look all golden. Her hair was still wet and shone in the lamplight. She picked up her mug of chocolate, cradling it in her hands, then took a thoughtful sip.
‘It depends,’ she said.
‘On what?’
She put the mug down, gathered up one of the maps and placed it squarely in front of him.
‘On you showing me where to catch those wolves.’
15
The old bull moose stood with his head lowered, perhaps to get a better view through the dusk of the forest or perhaps to give a better one of his antlers to the nine pairs of yellow eyes that were watching him.
The antlers were full-grown by now with a spread of nearly five feet. At the shoulder he was as tall as a horse and probably weighed the best part of eleven hundred pounds. But he was lame and past his prime and both he and the wolves knew it.
They had found him in a bend of the creek, browsing its bank in a thicket of slender aspens which looked like zebra stripes against the dark brown of his flank. He had turned to face them and stood his ground and for the last five minutes predator and prey had waited, weighing their respective chances.
The pups were just big enough now to come hunting with the others, though they normally hung back with their mother or one of the younger adults. The mother was much paler than her mate, the alpha male, and in the twilight looked almost white. The pups and the two younger adults - one male, one female - were various shades of gray between. Occasionally one of the pups fidgeted or whimpered, as if bored with the wait, and one of the alpha pair, mother or father, would chide it with a look and a quiet growl.
The moose was about twenty yards away. Behind him, the creek gleamed like bronze in the dying light. A cloud of freshly hatched flies pirouetted above its surface and a pair of lace-winged moths flitted like pale spirits against the dark of the pines beyond.
Now the alpha male moved. His tail was bushier than the others’ and usually held higher, but he kept it lower now as he went slowly in an arc to the right, keeping the same distance from the moose all the way. Then he stopped and retraced his steps and made a matching arc to the left, hoping to prompt the old bull to make a run.
A moose that stood its ground, even one that was old and lame, was much harder to kill. He could see where his attackers were coming from and aim his defensive blows more accurately. One well-placed kick could crack a wolf’s skull. They had to get him running, when he couldn’t aim so well or see where the next bite was coming from.
But all the old bull moved were his eyes. They followed the wolf’s every step, first one way, then the other. The wolf stopped on the left and lay down. And, on cue, the alpha female now moved forward. She went to the right, slowly, almost sauntering, and farther than the male had gone, so that when she stopped she was down by the edge of the creek and slipping behind the moose and at last he had to move to keep an eye on her.
He stepped backward, turning his head toward her, and at the same time realized he had taken his eye off the alpha male and turned back, taking a couple of small backward steps. And as he moved, the younger female moved too, following her mother through the trees.
The moose shifted uneasily, edging back toward the water, perhaps now wondering if, after all, it might not be better to run.
His first instinct might have been to head into the creek, but when he turned that way he saw the two female wolves had worked their way along the bank below him. Between them and the alpha male there was probably not enough space to escape. The alpha female’s paws were in the water and when the moose looked at her, she casually lowered her head to drink, as if that were all she was there to do.
On some silent signal, the younger adult male and the five pups were moving now, heading toward their father. And in so doing, they opened a wide gap which, as he was no doubt intended to, the moose saw.
Suddenly he erupted. He thundered off through the thicket, his hooves churning the damp, black earth and his antlers clacking against the white stems of the aspens, gashing their bark and setting off a shower of leaves in his wake.
As soon as he moved, the wolves were after him. He was partly lame in his right front leg and he ran with an odd rocking motion. The alpha male must have seen this for it seemed to summon extra energy in him. He was gaining on the moose with every bound. The others were close on his heels, dodging in their different routes through the trees and leaping the rocks and rotting wood that littered the forest floor.
Upstream, the bank of the creek was clearer and the old bull headed that way, hoping perhaps to run where his antlers wouldn’t hinder him and where with luck he could gain access to the water. But as he emerged from the thicket, the alpha male made a great lunge and fastened his teeth onto the left of his rump.
The moose struck out with his hind feet but the wolf swung clear of them without loosening his grip and the fraction of speed the moose lost by kicking gave the alpha female her chance. Her teeth flashed and found purchase in the bull’s right flank and as he tried to kick at her he stumbled. He quickly found his footing again and plowed on up the clearing with the two wolves locked to his flesh and swinging from him like stoles.
He had gone more than half a mile, through another thicket and out again onto a rocky meadow, when the younger adults got involved. Before, they had seemed content to leave the attack to their parents, but now they started slashing at the bull’s other flank. The pups loped along behind, the bolder among them plainly tempted to join in, the others hanging back, preferring to watch and learn.
Up ahead, their father lost his hold and the moose thrashed out and caught him a thudding blow on the shoulder with a hind hoof, sending him cartwheeling into the undergrowth in a cloud of dust. But the wolf was on his feet again at once and, seeing the moose veer toward the creek, raced at an angle to cut him off. Within a few seconds he was alongside and he twisted his body around and at the same time launched himself up beneath the moose’s neck and closed his teeth on the long flap of tufted skin that dangled there.
The bull swiped at him with his antlers but the wolf was too quick. The whole pack seemed to sense that however mighty this animal once had been, age had dulled and weakened him and tonight was his time to die.
And as if to show the moose he knew this and how reckless he was thus prepared to be, the alpha male let go and came within an inch of being trampled by the heavy front hooves, but instead bounced like an acrobat off the ground to get a better bite. His teeth sank deep into the moose’s throat.
The old bull had run more than a mile and was bleeding heavily at both ends, the blood spattering the faces of the young adults as they slashed at his flanks and his rump. Yet on and on he ran.
He swerved sharply now toward the creek and half ran, half fell down a steep bank of willow scrub to the water, dragging his baggage of wolves with him and setting off an avalanche of mud and rocks.
The water near the bank was barely a foot deep and as the moose hit the bed of the creek his lame leg buckled and he went down on his knees, ducking the alpha male beneath him. He quickly found his feet again and when his neck came clear of the water, the alpha male was still fastened there, blood and water sluicing down his fur.
The pups had reached the top of the bank and they stopped there to watch. The old bull turned his head, perhaps to see what had happened to the others when he fell and, seeing her chance, the young female leapt at his face and hooked her teeth to his nose. The moose lifted his head, thrashing her from side to side like wet laundry, but she didn’t let go.
All his efforts focused now on the teeth that were sunk into the black, fleshy splay of his nose. He started to stagger blindly toward the far bank, forgetting for awhile about shedding or kicking at the other wolves that were locked on to him.
The mother and the other young adult seemed to sense it and hacked with added vigor at his flanks and his rump then ducked their heads under him to rip at his belly, while the alpha male at his throat tore another gaping hole.
And finally, just as he reached the other bank, the clamor of pain and loss of blood were too much for the old moose and his hind legs collapsed and down he went.
He kicked and struggled for another ten minutes and once during that time managed to get briefly to his feet and haul his bloody cargo of wolf onto the gravel.
But there he fell again and for the last time.
And the pups who had been watching from the near bank took it as a cue and cautiously made their way down into the water and waded across to join the feast.
And only when the old bull had stopped twitching and the rising moon glinted its reflection in the sightless black of hi
s eye, only then did the alpha male loosen his grip. And he sat up and raised his blood-soaked muzzle to the sky and howled.
And one by one, all his family joined in and lifted their heads and howled with him, both those who had killed and those who had witnessed.
Where once there had been life, now was death. And out of death, thus, was life sustained. And in that bloody compact, both the living and the dead were joined in a loop as ancient and immutable as the moon that arced above them.
16
The allotments that the Calders and their neighbors leased for summer grazing lay along the shoulders of the mountains like patches stitched by some sedulous giant into the darker green of the forest. Among them, along the creeks and coulees now, seams of yellow, lime and gold were starting to show, as the nights gave a first brush of frost to the willow and chokecherry.
In some years all might by now be blanketed in snow. But summer this year was like a party guest with no home to go to and even the flocks of migrating birds, the only apology for cloud in a constant cobalt sky, seemed hesitant, as if tempted too to linger for a last drink.
Buck Calder sat resting his horse on a bare bluff that leaned out from the forest above his allotment. The horse was a Missouri Fox Trotter, a handsome, deep-chested gray, who held himself every bit as proudly as his owner. In the early morning sun, squinting out at the plains from under the brim of his hat, it occurred to Buck, as it often did, that the two of them cut quite a picture. The kind of thing that would have had old Charlie Russell reaching for his paintbrush.
He looked down over the trees at the double curve of tracks he and Clyde had made in the dew of the pasture and those the cattle had made as they moved away. Beyond, hazed by the low sun, the valley stretched away toward Hope. Along the river a curl of mist shrouded the knees of the cottonwoods. Their leaves too were yellow now and the grass around them cured pale as an old elk hide.
Buck loved the fall. The fences were all fixed and the irrigation work all done and everything was on hold for awhile. It gave a man a moment or two to breathe and take stock before the mid-October frenzy of selling and shipping the calves. In a few days they would be gathering the herd and bringing them down where he preferred them to be, on land that belonged to him rather than the government.