The wolf they had caught turned out to be one of the pups, a female. Under Helen’s instruction, Luke did most of the work, all the measuring and noting, leaving her only to give the shots and take the blood and feces samples. The pup weighed a little over sixty pounds and still had some growing to do, so they fitted her with an adult-size collar and padded it out with foam rubber and duct tape.
For Helen, that day was a turning point. Luke’s elation seemed to wake in her a glimmer of hope that life might again be bearable.
She still cried herself to sleep most nights or lay awake, with her head playing movies of Joel at the altar with his flawless Belgian bride. She told herself again and again that it was insane to feel this way, because nothing had changed. It had been all over with Joel from the moment he applied for that job. But try as she might, she couldn’t avoid the conclusion that his marriage confirmed her worthlessness.
She’d punished herself by giving up smoking and though she’d been surprised at how easy it was, it occasionally made her aggressive, like on the evening Dan had brought the snowmobile out.
He’d planned to take her somewhere fancy over in Great Falls for dinner, but at the last minute she said she couldn’t face it. He’d been all hurt and tried to talk her into it and she’d ended up yelling at him. It was probably just as well; she would only have embarrassed them both by sobbing into her entrée or getting drunk.
With Luke, however, her moods didn’t matter. He seemed to understand whenever she was ambushed by a sudden rush of rage or tears. He would simply gather her up and hold her, as he had done that first, frosty morning, until she stopped.
Now, listening to the story of the elk, she marveled at how the son of such a father could have learned such tenderness. It must all, she assumed, come from his mother, a woman whose friendly but formal reserve Helen had never yet managed to breach.
Telling the story had brought Luke’s stutter back.
‘My f-f-father g-got real mad. He always w-w-wanted me to b-b-b-be like my b-brother. He shot a six-p-pointer when he was t-ten.’
‘I didn’t know you had a brother.’
Luke swallowed and nodded.
‘He d-d-died. Al-most eleven y-y-years ago.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘In a c-c-car wreck. He was f-f-fifteen.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘Yeah.’
He shot her a grim little smile and she got the message that he didn’t want to talk anymore about it. He nodded at the radio receiver on the dashboard.
‘W-why don’t you try the trap signals? See if we g-g-got lucky up here.’
‘You’re the boss.’
She reached for the receiver and turned it on. These were the last two traps they had to collect. The chances of having caught another wolf were slim. It was a pity, because Helen had wanted at least four of the pack collared - including, ideally, two pups - before the hunting season started.
Most hunters were responsible and law-abiding, but there were always going to be one or two who would take a shot at anything. If the anything in question happened to be wearing a radio collar, they might just think again.
She found the frequency of the transmitter attached to the first trap. It wasn’t beeping.
But the second one was.
They’d set the trap in the fork of a deer trail, a little farther down from where they’d caught the female pup. The trail was walled on either side by steep banks, tangled with scrub and young fir trees. Judging by all the scat and tracks they’d found there, it was a kind of wolf version of Grand Central Station. You could drive right to it, but to cause less disturbance, they left the pickup a few minutes down the trail and went in on foot.
They heard the squealing from a long way off and as they came around the last bend in the trail, they could see the bushes moving in the angle of the fork. They put down their packs and as Helen got the jabstick ready, she became aware of a strange, musty smell, like a wet dog, but much stronger. The squealing sounded strange too, quite unlike any noise she’d heard a trapped wolf make before. Peering cautiously through the bushes, while Luke stood back, she saw why.
‘Uh-oh,’ she said quietly.
‘What?’
‘Luke, it’s wolves we’re after. You caught a bear.’
He came up beside her and looked. It was a cub, a male grizzly, maybe eight or nine months old. Helen flicked the syringe on the jabstick and squirted a little sedative out to clear any air bubbles.
‘You’re g-going to p-put him out?’
‘Well, we need to get that trap off his foot and he’s a little past the cuddly stage, wouldn’t you say? Did you see those teeth and claws? He’s not a happy bunny. And we need to be quick. Chances are, his mom’s not far away.’
In his efforts to escape, the cub had snagged the drag securely in the bushes, so he hadn’t got much room for maneuver. While Luke distracted him, Helen managed to slip behind and got the jabstick neatly into the bear’s rump. He yelped and turned on her but not soon enough to stop the sedative being pumped into him.
They stood back to let it take effect. Helen knew she should weigh and measure him and do all the checks she would normally do on a wolf, then hand the data over to whichever Fish and Wildlife people were working on grizzlies. But with the near certainty that the cub’s mother was somewhere close, possibly at that moment deciding which of them might taste better, Helen didn’t want to hang around.
‘Are we going to ch-check him over?’
‘You can. Once that trap’s off, I’m out of here.’
The cub’s snarling had grown drowsy now and as soon as he had settled, they knelt down beside him. Helen sniffed.
‘He should definitely change his deodorant.’
‘Yeah, my mother says they smell like garbage.’
Helen levered open the trap. His foot was bleeding. With all his thrashing around, the jaws had cut into him. Luke knew the routine and, without being asked, passed her a cloth to clean the wound and then the antibiotic ointment to smear on it.
‘I’d better give him a shot too.’
Just as Luke was handing her the syringe, a branch snapped somewhere among the trees above them. They both froze and looked and listened. All was still.
‘Time to go home,’ Helen mouthed. She quickly loaded the syringe and gave the cub his shot of antibiotic. She remembered an old Dan Prior joke.
‘Know what you do if you get charged by a bear?’
‘What?’
‘Pay up, quick.’
He grinned, but she could tell he was as nervous as she was pretending not to be. She handed him the syringe and checked the foot wound again. It had stopped bleeding. When she looked back at Luke she saw his expression had changed. He was staring up toward the trees and she turned and saw a big grizzly staring right back at them. It was no more than forty yards away.
‘That’s not his m-mother.’
‘You’re right. He’s too big.’
They were keeping dead still, muttering like ventriloquists.
‘If we leave the cub, he’ll k-kill it.’
Helen knew it was true. Grizzly males would kill any male cub they came across, even their own. Slowly, the bear lifted his front feet off the ground and reared up on his hind legs. He had to be eight or nine feet tall. It looked more like twenty. He probably weighed about eight hundred pounds. He was a pale, yellowy brown, though darker around the ears and throat, where the fur was tipped with silver. He lifted his dish-shaped snout high in the air and sniffed.
Helen’s pulse was galloping. She thought of the can of pepper spray Dan had given her for exactly this kind of encounter. It was gathering dust in a corner of the cabin.
‘Luke, go get the truck.’
‘Y-you go. I’ll stay with the c-cub.’
‘Listen, I’m the hero here. Go. But slowly. Slow-ly.’
He handed her the empty jabstick.
‘Thanks, I’ll give it to him to pick his teeth.’
&nbs
p; As Luke backed away, she kept her eyes on the bear. She had seen bears many times before, but never till now a grizzly. She’d read a lot about them. Ursus arctos horribilis was his formal name and right now it seemed to suit him pretty well. His claws were like kitchen knives. Pale and curved. She couldn’t take her eyes off them.
As to what to do when you came face to face with horribilis, for every piece of advice, there was another contradicting it. Lie down and play dead or yell and try to scare him off; stand still or roll yourself into a ball or slowly back away and talk in a quiet monotone; climb a tree, don’t climb a tree. About the only thing biologists agreed on was that fleeing was a waste of time. A grizzly could run at forty miles an hour. With all this confusion, Dan had said the safest bet was to carry the pepper spray. Which she’d left at home.
Slowly and as quietly as she could, and all the time watching the bear from the corner of her eye, she started to put the kit into her pack.
The bear dropped onto all fours again and took a few paces to his left, walking in a slow rolling motion, his head swinging clumsily from side to side, like a sailor who’d had too many beers. He turned and retraced his steps, looking at Helen, then looking away again, and sniffing the air as if he couldn’t quite get the drift of her.
She could see the dark hump on his shoulders and, above them, his hackles starting to bristle and the sight gave her a first stab of pure fear. Suddenly she felt ashamed of all her recent, wretched self-pitying and of all those times she had wished she were dead. Perhaps such thoughts had conjured this prowling nemesis to deliver her. But she wasn’t ready. With total clarity, she realized that she wanted to live.
She glanced down at the cub by her feet. He was still flat out. She wondered if Luke had reached the pickup yet and, even more, why the hell she hadn’t gone with him. Why was she risking her life for that of another who would happily bite her head off?
She heard the distant sound of the pickup now and saw the big grizzly catch sight of it over her head. He stopped his pacing, but didn’t seem scared, just mildly diverted. She tried to work out what to do when Luke arrived and decided they should try to lift the cub into the back of the pickup. And pray that the big grizzly didn’t charge.
From the sound of it, the pickup was getting close. She could hear Buzz barking and Luke telling him to shut up. The big bear was taking all this in and, from the way he was laying back his ears, took a dim view of it. Helen knew this was not a promising sign.
She slowly turned her head and saw Luke climbing cautiously out of the truck. He’d left the engine running. Buzz was inside with his front paws up on the dashboard, barking for all he was worth. As Luke came up beside her, she slipped the strap of her pack over one shoulder.
‘Let’s get this little brute in the truck,’ Helen said.
They got either end of the cub and lifted him up. He already weighed about sixty pounds. They both kept an eye on the big male. Suddenly he gave a loud ‘woof ’ and then another. He was swinging his head rapidly from side to side.
‘That doesn’t look good.’
‘It m-means he’s g-going to charge.’
‘If he does, we drop baby bear here and get our asses into the truck, okay?’
‘Okay.’
Suddenly the big grizzly made a loud popping noise with his teeth.
‘Here he c-comes!’
Helen turned and saw the bear setting off down the bank toward them. And as she did so, the pack slipped off her shoulder and she tried to hoist it, lost her grip on the cub and dropped her end of him.
‘Shit!’
She quickly shed the pack and picked him up again, glancing over her shoulder at the charging bear. The bank was well covered in scrub and saplings but he was surging through them like a snowplow.
They got to the pickup and Helen lunged for the door handle and in the process almost dropped the cub again. Inside, Buzz was on the seat, going berserk.
‘Wouldn’t it be better to p-put him in the back?’
‘No. In here, quick!’
They bundled the bear into the passenger-side footwell and Helen shoved Buzz away across the cab and dived after him. The big grizzly was down on the trail now, only twenty yards away, and coming for them in great rollicking bounds.
Helen got herself into the driver’s seat, with Buzz wedged against the window, barking like a maniac in her left ear. Then, to her horror, she saw Luke was going back for her pack.
‘Luke! Leave it, get in!’
But he was almost there. The bear was closing on him fast. Luke grabbed the pack, but as he turned to run back, he slipped in the mud and fell.
‘Luke!’
She slammed her hand onto the horn and gave a loud blast, but the bear didn’t even falter. He was only about five yards away from where Luke was scrambling to his feet. There was no way he’d reach the pickup in time. Helen screamed.
Suddenly, the bear was knocked sideways and for a moment everything was just a blur of brown fur. Then Helen realized what had happened. Another bear, presumably the cub’s mother, had charged. The impact sent the big male rolling into the bushes, with the female in roaring pursuit.
‘Luke, come on!’
He was almost at the pickup now. But the big male grizzly wasn’t going to be so easily deterred. He knocked the mother flying and was after the cub again.
‘He’s coming! Quick, get in!’
Luke dived into the passenger seat, swinging his feet over the cub. He reached out to shut the door when the big male arrived and saved him the trouble by removing it with a single swipe of his paw, sending it cartwheeling into the scrub.
‘G-go, Helen! GO!’
Helen rammed the gearshift into reverse and stamped on the gas pedal and the pickup lurched off down the trail, slithering and snaking as it went, its wheels flinging mud and rocks at the big grizzly who was left standing there, apparently non-plussed for a moment.
‘Buzz, will you shut the fuck up!’ Helen yelled.
She was swiveled in her seat, looking out the back window and trying to steer and pin Buzz to the door all at the same time.
‘Is he coming after us?’
‘No—’
‘Thank God.’
‘Yes.’
‘Shit.’
‘Both of them. And the c-cub’s waking up.’
‘Terrific.’
Farther down the trail, about halfway to where they had parked, there was a place Helen recalled might be wide enough for them to turn. The question was whether there would be time enough to do it before the bear got there too. She didn’t dare look back at him in case she reversed off the edge of the trail.
‘Is he still coming?’
‘Yeah. He’s g-gaining on us.’
She saw the turning place coming up now and decided to give it a go. She told Luke to hold tight, hit the brakes and swung the rear of the pickup around. The truck lurched and lifted up on two wheels and for a sickening moment Helen thought it was going to topple over. But it came down with a bump and she found herself looking into the face of the grizzly. He skidded and thumped into the driver’s side door, cracking the window and making the whole vehicle rock. Buzz took this as a cue to duck under Helen’s arm and pounce on the waking cub.
She wrenched the gearshift into drive. The big bear had his face pressed against the window and was showing her his dental work.
‘Sorry, buddy, no room,’ she said. ‘See ya!’
And with Buzz and the bear cub trying to kill each other between Luke’s legs, off they went down the trail, leaving the big grizzly to cope with the cub’s mother.
Helen drove with one hand, as fast as she dared, at last managing to hook the other inside Buzz’s collar, while Luke wrangled the rapidly recovering cub. Two miles down the trail, he’d recovered enough to claw gaping holes in Luke’s jeans and bite a chunk out of his boot.
Helen figured they were far enough from the adults by now for the little one to have a fair chance of survival. Hopefully he woul
d hitch up with his mother again. Helen pulled up and they ejected him unceremoniously from the doorless side of the truck. And with Buzz tethered to the steering wheel, still bawling blue murder, Luke and Helen stood side by side and watched the cub lope grumpily off into the bushes.
‘Hey, please, don’t mention it!’ Helen called after him.
She put a hand on Luke’s shoulder and leaned on him and he shook his head and gave her a grin.
‘Maybe we b-better stick to wolves.’
That evening, it started to snow. With no wind to drift it, it fell in heavy, floating flakes which settled on the cabin windowsills while inside Helen and Luke cooked and ate and laughed about the day’s events.
After supper, before he went home, they wrapped up warm and took the snowmobile high into the forest with the snowflakes flitting like uncharted galaxies in the headlight. Luke sat behind her, holding on, as you had to, with his arms encircling her and it felt warm and comforting to be held that way. They drove to where they thought the wolves might be and just as they got there, the snow stopped and the clouds opened on a sliver of moon.
She turned off the snowmobile engine and they stood for a moment listening to the perfect muffled silence of the forest. Then they took the flashlight and the radio receiver and walked a little way along the trail, their boots crunching in the snow.
They found the signals right away, clucking clear in the crystal air, and they knew the wolves were very close. In the beam of the flashlight, they found tracks no more than minutes old.
Helen turned off the light and they stood quite still and listened. The only sound was the soft thud of snow falling, now and then, from a tree.
‘Howl,’ she whispered.
He had heard her do it several times, without success, but had never yet attempted a howl himself. He shook his head.
‘Try,’ she said softly.
‘I c-can’t. It w-wouldn’t . . .’
He made a little gesture with his fingers toward his mouth and she realized that he was afraid his voice might not come, that it would betray him, and leave him mute and embarrassed as so often it did.
‘It’s only me, Luke.’