The van they had hired was dark green and unmarked except for the spattering of mud that their night’s efforts had given it. When they were finished, they were going to take it down to the cabin and Dan was going to use it to load it with all the things she didn’t want. By nightfall the cabin would be as empty as the day she’d moved in. The mice could have it back.
The road was getting rough now and as they bumped from rut to pothole, the whole van shuddered. Helen could hear the faint rattle of the cages in the back. She hadn’t been up this high since the day Luke had shown her the wolves’ first den. She remembered the look on his dusty face when he came crawling out and what he’d said about being happy to die down there.
‘I figure this is about as far as we can get,’ Dan said.
‘Seems as good a place as any.’
‘Okay.’
The road was being repossessed by newgrown weeds and flowers and seemed to peter out in a short plateau of rock. To the east, it fell away sharply in a narrow, rock-strewn funnel through the trees. Below, in the wakening light, Helen could see a meadow full of colorless flowers and beyond it the white flash of a creek still swollen with snowmelt.
Dan swung the van around so that its rear was pointing to the top of the funnel. He turned off the engine and looked at her.
‘You okay?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Just like the old times, huh? Prior and Ross, alpha wolf team.’
She smiled. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘With my life? I don’t know. Get a proper job, I guess. My mom always said I should “work with people” and I’d say, okay, I’ll be a mortician.’
‘So even back then your jokes weren’t any good.’
‘That’s true.’
Dan had handed in his notice the day after Luke was shot. They’d asked him to stay on and insisted he was in no way to blame for what happened but he said he’d had enough; he was ‘wolfed out’. He agreed to stay on until they found a successor. The new guy was due to start next month.
‘I’ll probably stick around these parts till Ginny’s finished high school, then move on somewhere, I guess.’
They were silent for a moment. Dan peered at the sky.
‘It’s getting light. Better get this show on the road. Ready?’
‘You bet.’
They got out and walked to the back of the van. Helen held the flashlight so he could see to unlock the padlock on the rear doors. Then he pulled the handle and opened them wide.
They pulled off the tarpaulins and the flashlight glinted on two aluminum cages standing side by side. They were similar to the cages that had been used to bring the Yellowstone wolves down from Canada. They were like perforated crates, about four feet long and three feet high, with a sliding door at the front. Poles to carry them with slid out at each corner.
‘I hope someone’s told these guys what happens to wolves around these parts,’ Dan said.
‘I thought you said these were vegetarian wolves?’
‘They are. But, you know, it could be just a fad.’
Helen wasn’t going to ask where they’d come from. Dan had made all the arrangements. All she knew was that they were an alpha pair, untagged, uncollared and untraceable. She and Dan had picked them up just before midnight at a remote spot about ten miles south of the Canadian border. There was no one to meet them. The crates had just been there waiting for them, covered with the tarps and a few branches.
Helen went behind the first crate and slid the handles out.
‘Ready?’
‘Yep.’
‘One, two, three, lift.’
They put it down at the top of the slope, then did the same with the other one. Then they took off the locks and slid up both of the front doors. Behind each was an inner door of vertical square bars through which, now, they could see two pairs of amber eyes, warily surveying them.
‘Good morning, folks,’ Dan said. ‘This is your four a.m. wake-up call.’ He looked at Helen. ‘One at a time or both together?’
‘Together.’
On the count of three, they opened the inner door and for a moment nothing happened. Then, like two Tomahawk missiles, the wolves launched themselves out of the cages. They landed in a clatter of sliprock, but didn’t fall or falter, just plunged headfirst down the slope. They were both gray, the color of the shadowed rock they ran down.
‘Well, looks like the sedative wore off,’ Dan said.
Halfway down the funnel, they stopped and though in the dawn it was hard to be sure, they seemed to look back up toward the van. Helen started to sob.
Dan walked over to her and put his arms around her.
‘Hey, come on now. It’s okay.’
‘I know, I know, I’m sorry.’
When her tears cleared and she looked again, the wolves had vanished.
When they pulled up outside the cabin, the sky had brightened to a perfect, cloudless blue and the sun was drying the dew from the spring flowers that still smothered the slope down to the lake. Buzz came bounding through them and because he didn’t know the van, he barked loudly until Helen climbed out and then he came wiggling and wagging toward her in apology. As they walked toward the cabin, they could smell breakfast cooking.
Luke was standing in the doorway.
He was smiling and squinting in the sunshine with his one good eye. The black patch over the other still gave Helen a shock whenever she saw it. In time she was sure she would find it dashing.
He saw that she’d been crying and he stepped out and came to meet them and put his arms around them both and the three of them stood huddled in silence for awhile, their heads bowed in unspoken communion, while Buzz bounced around them, wondering what was going on.
The bullet had hit him in the side of the neck. It had passed right through, then hit a rock, sending a splinter of it, the size of an arrowhead, into his left eye. In the time it took for the helicopter to arrive and fly him to the hospital, he had lost a lot of blood. That he had survived was little short of a miracle.
The neck wound had done little damage. They had operated on his eye for many hours and managed to save it, though Luke would never see much with it. The first thing he wanted to know, when he came around, was what had happened to the pups.
Only the hooked one had died. The others had been taken to Yellowstone and successfully fostered. Luke’s father had told the police where they could find the wolfer’s trailer. And sometime later, a ranger discovered his snowmobile in a clearing above Wrong Creek. No trace of the old man himself was ever found.
Luke had been keen to come with Dan and Helen last night to collect and release the wolves. But Dan said it was safer, in case anything went wrong, if Luke wasn’t involved.
‘It went okay then?’
‘Like a dream.’
‘I wish we could stay to hear them howl.’
‘Maybe one day you will,’ Dan said.
‘I hope you’re both hungry.’
‘Ravenous.’
They sat on the grass outside the cabin and ate eggs and bacon and hashbrowns and washed it down with coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. They talked about Alaska and some of the places she and Luke were going to visit in the next two months before he started college. Beyond that, they hadn’t made plans.
Luke wanted her to come to Minnesota with him. They would find an apartment, he said, and while he went to classes, she could do more research and finish her thesis. On weekends she could show him the wilderness.
Maybe she would. There was plenty of time to decide.
Curiously, for the first time in Helen’s adult life, the future didn’t seem to matter. It was as though all that had happened here had purged the part of her that had always yearned and nagged and worried. No amount of worry would alter for the better what befell them. Perhaps, as Celia had suggested in a recent letter, Helen had at last learned, along with their rookie-Buddhist father, simply to be. All that mattered was now and that she was with the
person she loved best in all the world.
After breakfast, Dan wouldn’t let them help clean up the cabin. They had a long journey ahead of them, he said. So together they loaded the last few things, along with Buzz, into Luke’s Jeep. Helen gave Dan the keys to her old pickup.
‘You see?’ he said. ‘It lasted the year.’
‘So did I.’
None of them wanted to make a big issue of saying goodbye, so they just gave each other a hug and wished each other well. Dan cracked a joke about them quitting when there was still work to be done. He stood beside the car, with the sun behind him, while Helen and Luke got in and buckled up.
‘Angels on your body,’ he said.
‘Yours too, Prior.’
Driving down beside the river, with the cottonwoods swaying green and silver above them, they passed the derelict house where the old wolfer had once lived. There was a SOLD sign nailed to a tree by the gate.
They saw no one they knew when they passed through town. They turned east and headed out toward the plains.
As they came over the bridge, Helen slowed the car and stopped and they both looked one last time toward the church above the river.
‘Look,’ Luke said.
He was pointing at the sign on the other side of the road, the one that said HOPE (POPULATION 519). Three narrow beams of sunlight were shining through the bullet holes.
THE END
Also available from Time Warner Books
The Smoke Jumper
by Nicholas Evans
The fire that was to change so many lives started with a single shaft of lightning that struck a mountain ridge on a still and moonless night. The woman who camped nearby with her group of troubled teenagers slept on and heard nothing. Until the deadly inferno engulfed the mountain, and into the flames leaped The Smoke Jumper.
His name is Connor Ford and he braves the flames to save the woman he loves but cannot have, for Julia Bishop is the partner of his closest friend, Ed Tully. Julia loves them both but the tragedy on Snake Mountain forces her to choose between them and burns a brand on all their hearts.
In the wake of the fire, Connor travels to the world’s worst wars and disasters to take photographs that find him fame but not happiness. Reckless of a life he no longer wants, he dares death to take him, until another fateful day on another continent, when he must walk through fire again . . .
Read on for a preview of this epic novel of love and loyalty . . .
1
The important things in life always happened by accident. At fifteen she didn’t know much, in fact, with each passing year she was a lot less clear about most things. But this much she did know. You could worry yourself sick trying to be a better person, spend a thousand sleepless nights figuring out how to live clean and decent and honest, you could make a plan and bolt it in place, kneel by your bed every night and swear to God you’d stick to it, hell, you could go to church and promise properly. You could cross your heart seven times with your eyes tight shut, cut your thumb and squeeze it and pen solemn vows on a rock with your own blood then throw it in the river at the stroke of midnight. And then, out of the black beyond, like a hawk on a rat, some nameless catastrophe would swoop into your life and turn everything upside down and inside out forever.
Skye later reckoned that on the night in question that old hawk must have been outside sitting up on the roof biding his time and watching the rat have a little fun, because it all started in a real low-key kind of way when those two women came sashaying into the bar.
She didn’t know who they were but what they were was plain for all the world. They were wearing more make-up than clothes and she could tell from the way they swayed on their high heels that they were already hazed with drink. They both wore tight little tops, one red, one silver and fringed, and the woman in front, who had long black hair and breasts propped up like melons on a shelf, had a skirt so short she needn’t have bothered. The music in the bar was thumping loud and the black-haired woman tried a little shimmy to it as she walked and almost fell.
The men they were with were close behind them and obscured, steering them through the crowd. Both wore cowboy hats and from the corner booth across the room where Skye and her friends were sitting, she couldn’t make out their faces. Not that she was remotely interested. She was more than a little hazed with drink herself. The lights were dimmed to a dull red glow and through the hanging curl of smoke all she registered was a couple of sad forty-something-year-old guys chasing their youth and doubtless cheating on their wives. Skye looked away. She picked up her beer and drank, then lit another cigarette.
She watched them mostly because she was bored, which was kind of sad too, considering it was her birthday. Jed and Calvin were slumped stoned and speechless beside her, Roxy was still crying into her hands at something Craig had said to her, and Craig was still cussing on and on about his goddamn heap of a car breaking down. Another great night in fun city, Skye said to herself and took another swig. Happy birthday to me.
The bar was a godforsaken dump so close to the railroad that the bottles shook and clinked whenever a train went by. For reasons that weren’t too hard to fathom, the cops left the place alone and so long as you weren’t in diapers, the staff turned a blind eye to underage drinking. Consequently much of the clientele was around the same age as Skye. A lot younger for sure than the four who had just walked in. They were at the bar now and stood waiting to be served. They had their backs to her and Skye again found herself staring at them.
She watched the tall man’s hands moving on the black-haired woman’s hips and on her ass and up her spine to her bare shoulders and saw him lean in close, nuzzling her neck. God, he was licking her. How gross some guys were. What was it with women? How could they stand being slobbered over by jerks like him? The whole sex trip was something Skye still didn’t get and doubted she ever would. Oh sure, she did it. Everybody did. But she still couldn’t figure out why it was cracked up to be such a big deal.
The man must have whispered something dirty because the woman suddenly threw back her head, laughed raucously and made a playful attempt to slap him. The man laughed too and swiveled to avoid her and his hat fell off and for the first time Skye could see his face.
It was her stepfather.
In those few moments before his eyes met hers she glimpsed in his face a look she had never seen before, a kind of inner face that was still just a boy’s, loose and joyful and strangely frail. Then she saw him recognize her and saw the boy vanish as swiftly as he had appeared. His face clouded and clenched and became again the one she knew and feared and loathed, the one she saw when he came back in the early hours to the trailer seething with drink and fury and called her mother a squaw bitch and beat her until she howled for mercy and then turned his foul attention upon Skye.
He straightened up and put his hat on the bar and said something to the woman who turned to consider Skye with a look that lay somewhere between disdain and disinterest. Now he was heading toward the booth. Skye squashed out her cigarette, hoping he hadn’t seen it. She stood up.
‘Let’s go,’ she said quietly.
But she was trapped in the booth. On one side Roxy was sobbing into Craig’s shoulder and hadn’t heard and on the other Calvin and Jed were still out of it. Her stepfather reached the table, his eyes taking in the evidence: the beer bottles, the brimming ashtrays, the comatose bums she chose to hang out with.
‘What the fuck are you doing in here?’
‘Come on, it’s my birthday.’ It was pathetic but worth a try. She even thought of calling him ‘Dad’ as she briefly had when he and her mom married, before he revealed just what a mean, disgusting sonofabitch he really was. But she couldn’t bring herself to utter the word.
‘Don’t give me that shit. You’re just fifteen years old! What the fuck do you think you’re at?’
‘Aw, give her a break, man. We’re only having a little fun.’ It was Jed, who had resurfaced. Skye’s stepfather leaned across and gra
bbed him by the throat, hauling him halfway across the table.
‘You dare talk to me like that, you little slice of shit.’
Jed’s weight made the table tilt and everything on it except for him slid off onto the floor in an avalanche of breaking glass. Craig was on his feet now and he tried to grab Skye’s stepfather by the arm but her stepfather twisted himself around and with the hand that wasn’t throttling Jed punched the boy full in the face. Roxy screamed.
‘For godsake,’ Skye shouted. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’
She was aware that everyone in the bar was staring at them. One of the waiters was coming over along with the man her stepfather had arrived with.
‘Hey folks, let’s cool it here, shall we?’ the waiter said.
Skye’s stepfather shoved Jed back into his seat so hard his head slammed against the back of the booth. Craig was on his knees bleeding from the mouth and Roxy was sobbing over him, trying to help him. Skye’s stepfather’s chest was heaving and his eyes were narrowed and dark and he turned them on the waiter.
‘Did you serve alcohol to these kids?’
The waiter held up his hands. ‘Sir, let’s keep things calm now, please.’
He was slightly built and about a foot shorter than Skye’s stepfather. He had long hair tied back in a ponytail.
‘Did you? Did you serve them alcohol?’
‘They said they were twenty-one.’
‘And you believed that? Did you ask for their I.D.?’
‘Sir, could we talk about this—’
‘Did you?’
Skye stood up and pushed her way out of the booth.
‘Look, we’re going, okay? We’re going!’
Her stepfather spun around and lifted his hand to hit her and although all her instincts told her to cower, somehow she managed not to and instead stood her ground, glaring at him. She could smell his cologne and it was so cloying and the memories it stirred so foul that it almost made her gag.