Blue Wolf In Green Fire (15 page)

“As a trophy?”

The biologist nodded solemnly. “I'd think so. When you get something that occurs maybe once in ten thousand times, trophy hunters always take notice. Look at what happened to the deer in Marquette.”

Presque Isle Park in Marquette had been home to several nearly tame albino deer, which somebody had shot. The case was still open.

Zambonet added, “If it's big or odd, man will kill it. That's what makes us the most dangerous predator of all. The wolves cull the young or the weak because they don't have the stamina to take down healthy animals except in rare circumstances. Wolves kill to eat and survive. But man doesn't need the food and we have the wherewithal to take the breeders and best specimens and we do. We kill for sport.”

“How do you keep track of your animals?”

“Radio tracking collars, but we don't have the money to collar them all. We try to collar one in each pack to serve as a marker. The batteries last about three years. Our budget here has been about thirty grand a year, but even if we had more cash I doubt we'd collar more animals. We have what we need. Between the collars and our winter tracking surveys we have a pretty good fix on what's going on.”

“Thirty thousand dollars? That's all?” He had to be joking. The money certainly didn't take into account the time COs spent handling depredation and nuisance calls from farmers and citizens. Few biologists factored CO time into their program costs.

Zambonet smiled. “It's enough if you're taking our approach. If you want to haul animals in from elsewhere, the price tag goes way up.”

“Have you heard of the Animal Freedom League?”

“
Time
and
Newsweek
articles, that sort of thing. Some of my colleagues talk about them at symposia. But we don't worry about them here because we don't have captive animals.”

But Vermillion did. “How easy is it to release wolves? Do you just open the gate?”

Zambonet laughed. “Wolves are creatures of habit and, like people, they're totally unpredictable. One time you open the doors and they fly out. The next group will stand inside for days, scared shitless to even approach the opening.”

“What effect would a bomb have?”

Zambonet paused to weigh a response. “I would think the reaction could range from scaring them to death to making them run, but there's really no way to predict.” The biologist looked at him. “Are you sure the Vermillion wolves are gone?”

The question caught Service by surprise. “I found tracks of two animals outside the enclosure.”

“Two of five? You might want to be sure about the rest of them. Don't assume anything with wolves.”

Service got his cell phone and called Joe Ketchum in Newberry.

Joe and his wife Kathy were COs in Luce County. She handled the southern part, and Joe's territory stretched north from Newberry to Grand Marais. He had been friends with the couple for years.

“Joe, this is Grady. Can you make a run for me over to Vermillion today?”

“Jesus, do you know what time it is? I thought you caught that case.”

“Sorry, I did, but I can't get there right now. Do me a favor and take a look and let me know what you find.”

“What am I looking
for
?
”

“Are the wolves actually gone?”

Ketchum started to laugh but checked himself. “You're serious? The radio and TV stations are all jabbering about how that explosion freed them.”

“It probably did, but I want to be sure.”

“I'll be there in an hour.”

Kathy came on the line, her voice filled with sleep. “Hi Grady. What're you and Maridly doing for Thanksgiving?”

“We plan to lock ourselves in the house and stay there three or four days until somebody hauls us out in cuffs.”

Kathy laughed softly. “Try using the cuffs on each other,” she said. “You'll like it.”

A plane buzzed overhead in the darkness at 5 a.m. Service couldn't see its lights because of a low ceiling and wondered how the observer in the plane would see the ground.

Zambonet set his radio on the edge of the truck's bed and spoke to the pilot, Jesse Fulsik.

The biologist read coordinates off his handheld GPS unit. Fulsik repeated the coordinates and signed off, promising to check back.

“This pack likes the peninsula between Porier and Cable Lakes. This time of year they're in their rendezvous areas, the pups from last spring are up to fifty pounds and learning how to be pack members. This pack also dens around here and in late fall the deer begin to migrate south from the Superior shore into their winter yards down here. The wolves like to set up nearby to wait for heavier snow and easy hunting. They eat good here. Now we wait,” Zambonet said, refilling his coffee.

They talked for a while about DNR problems and politics and Zambonet gave Service a perspective on a biologist's job. “Fewer and fewer of us trying to cover more and more, and as people retire, replacements are rarely authorized. I wouldn't be surprised if Clearcut tried to privatize the whole operation.”

Service wouldn't put such a plan past Bozian, whose claim to fame centered on taking money and services away from people and labeling it progress. The governor harbored dreams of national political office and maybe he would be headed to Washington, but one thing Service knew and took solace in was that when Michigan's voters went to the polls next November Bozian would be finished. Whether a new governor could undo the damage Bozian had done was a different issue.

The radio suddenly came to life. Zambonet picked it up.

“Got a pencil?” the pilot asked.

“In hand.” Fulsik read off a series of coordinates. “I have a warbler at that location.”

“Good reception?”

“Unfortunately.”

“The numbers are solid?”

“Clean as your mama's underdrawers.”

Zambonet reached into the bed of the truck and hoisted his pack, which looked massive to Service. “We're about four miles away. Ninety minutes max.”

Service got his own pack out of his vehicle. “What's a warbler?”

“Mortality signal. If the sensors in the collar don't detect motion for four hours, the transmitter begins to speed up. We know something is wrong because wolves don't stay still for that long.”

“What if the animal's sleeping?”

“You ever watch a dog sleep? They're constantly moving around, repositioning themselves, restless. Wolves are the same. When we get a warbler, we have a dead animal,” he said through clenched teeth.

Newf never lay still for long, Service told himself.

Service took half of the sandwiches and one of the thermoses and placed them in his pack. The two men checked each other to make sure the packs were secure. Zambonet strode away, with Service struggling to get into step behind the long-legged biologist.

This was his first time in the area and Service was impressed with what he saw.

The biologist walked a hard pace, talking softly as he went, leading them over deadfalls, scurrying over logs, moving across boulders covered with lichen, always advancing in a straight line, letting nothing stop him.

Service considered himself to be in good shape, but the other man's pace was brutal. He wanted a cigarette and tried to get his mind off the nicotine his body was demanding.

“This is as close to wolf paradise as it gets,” Zambonet explained as they hiked. “Impenetrable swamps, deciduous forests, aspen stands, high ground with good cover, hardwoods with heaps of mast crops for prey animals, a couple of small streams with healthy beaver populations, lots of springs and freshets, no roads, no people, no nearby farms with livestock to tempt the pack. How long this will last, I can't say, but right now it's got everything a wolf could want. This is home to the Net River Pack, which branched off the Nordic Pack. The Net River alpha male is a little guy as far as alphas go, but he's been an independent little shit since he was born. Natural leader type and all the ladies loved him. Most males leave their birth pack at two years, but this kid split at fourteen months.”

“Is he collared?”

“Yeah,” Zambonet said. “The little bugger went into Wisconsin two years ago and brought back a bride from the Bootjack Pack.”

Along the way Service stopped twice to shed layers, which he stuffed in his pack before moving on. He had learned in the marines and early in his DNR career that anything you hung on the outside of a pack had a good chance of falling off, especially in rough terrain. If you wanted to keep what you had, you put it inside and buckled it down.

They stumbled nearly a mile across spongy, damp sphagnum, which was like walking on a loose trampoline. When they climbed onto rocky ground Service's calf muscles began to tighten. They headed into tamaracks so close together that they had to twist and wiggle their way between trunks. The scent of cedars filled his nose, and in the distance he heard ravens.

Zambonet stopped to let Service catch up. When he got to the base of a granite wall, he found the biologist on the radio with the pilot again.

“Ravens,” Fulsik radioed. “Flocking.”

“Same coordinates?” Zambonet asked.

“Virtually.”

As they pushed up the hill past cedars into heavy white pines, the morning clouds began to separate, allowing the sun to peek through.

The searchers climbed cautiously down the hill into a swale packed with popples. Service saw the imprint of a two-track. Zambonet was studying the road and pointing off in the distance. “ATVs use this road in summer, snowmobiles in winter. They're not supposed to be in here at all, but that doesn't stop the bastards.”

Service sucked in a deep breath trying to catch his wind. Even with two fewer layers he was sweating. Zambonet looked like he hadn't walked ten feet.

Service cursed the nature of his new job. Riding around in his vehicle all day making phone calls wasn't going to cut it. He was going to have to get his big feet back in the woods again, he told himself.

They followed the tote road for another mile and when they struck a low berm of balsams and boulders, Zambonet held up his handheld GPS receiver and stared at it. Then he took the tracking device off his back, flipped up the H-antenna, and turned it on. Service heard a fast clicking sound. The biologist said, “There were dens here last year. Probably will be again this year when they get down to making babies in January and February.”

The two men moved deliberately. After fifteen minutes Zambonet knelt, his eyes fixed dead ahead and sniffing the air. The carcass of a wolf was nailed to the side of a tree with a spike. The animal had no head and no collar. The stomach had been sliced open and its entrails hung down to the ground. The warm weather had ripened the remains.

“
Fuck,
” Zambonet said with a growl as he crawled slowly toward the dead animal. He felt its fur, held out its still legs, stared, continued to curse in a stream that made no sense and served only to release anger.

“Spiral out,” he told Service. “The collar will be nearby.”

It was fifty yards away, sitting on a flat rock. Zambonet used a stick to pick it up and deposit it in a plastic bag from his pack.

Service could see that the man was shaken.

“Who would do this?” Service asked.

“Some ignorant cocksucker who thinks wolves are sent by the devil to eat his deer,” Zambonet said in exasperation.

Maybe, Service thought.

Zambonet looked at the detective and sucked in his cheeks. “I'm going to nail this motherfucker.”

Service said, “We are.” He knew that most violets who did this sort of thing couldn't keep their yaps shut. A determined CO from Iron River had doggedly tracked a wolf killer for two years and finally nailed a Wisconsin man for the crime. People who killed like this always talked to someone about it, either to make themselves look good or to rationalize what they had done.

“I'm going to pack the carcass out,” Zambonet said. “I'll have it X-rayed for fragments, then send it down to Rose Lake for necropsy.”

Service nodded. Zambonet took off his pack and took out a sandwich. “First we eat and have coffee. Out here we take care of us first.”

Service had always found biologists oddly immune to the sickening odors of death. In college he had gone to a biology professor for help and while they sat in his office, the scientist dissected white rats, which he took one at a time out of a huge glass vacuum jar where they suffocated while he ate a sandwich with one hand and held a scalpel in the other. “Is it your alpha male?”

Zambonet nodded. “It's him,” he said glumly.

“Cause of death?”

“Big-bore bullet. Probably went through, but I doubt we'll ever find it. I doubt he was killed here. It's almost impossible to get close to a wolf in this terrain. The shot would have to be a long one.”

Service looked around, studying the crags and hills around them. Finally his eyes settled on a rocky promontory to the south. “How about from up there?”

“That's got to be three, four hundred yards,” Zambonet said, shaking his head.

Service studied the hill. Four hundred yards was less than a half mile. In Vietnam snipers had often taken shots at a mile or more if they had the right weapon.

He put the remains of his sandwich in its plastic bag, walked back to where the carcass hung, and began looking around. Thirty yards west of the wolf he found spatters of blood on rocks and, using a balsam branch, carefully brushed a layer of leaves and pine needles away to find a splash of coagulated blood and tissue. He looked again at the rocky outcrop on the hill. “Yogi, you'd better take a look.” The biologist studied the blood and got out a plastic bag, but Service grabbed his arm. “Let's not touch anything more. We can take the carcass after we get some of your people out here to help us. I think the animal was shot right here, which means the shooter mutilated him here. We might find evidence. Get on the radio and call for help. I'm going up that hill.” Service pointed.