Dead Man’s Fancy (13 page)

“I
'm next up,” Martha Ettinger said. She picked up her jacket to make room for Stranahan to sit on a metal chair. He nodded to Julie McGregor sitting on the other side of Ettinger, then to Katie Sparrow, who was dressed in her park ranger uniform. Sparrow cocked her forefinger at him, tapped her chest and pointed toward the back of the room.

“Now?”

She shook her head and mouthed “Later.”

Stranahan took off his hat and sat down. “Any progress on the hair?” he asked Martha.

“Wilkerson says she'll do a spectral analysis tomorrow. The techs found usable DNA in Martinelli's cabin, feminine pads with menstrual blood and a toothbrush, so there's a good chance for a match. You'll know when I know. Tell me you got a cell phone.”

“I got a cell phone.”

“Really?”

“No.”

Martha's cheek reflexively tightened as she side-eyed him, one of her “You disappoint me” gestures, and looked down at her notes.

The last time Stranahan had been in the convention hall of the Holiday Inn, for a Trout Unlimited Banquet, the space was crowded with trust-fund trout fishermen, women sporting sculpted calves and spaghetti strap dresses, fishing guides who were the negative images of raccoons, with sun-blackened faces and ovals of fair skin where their sunglasses would normally rest, and there had been a lot of money in the room. There was a lot of money in the room tonight, but it was ranch capital, tied up in land.

Walking in, he'd passed by a banner that read “Emergency Meeting of the Ranchers and Hunters for Taking the Wolf Out of Montana.” A woman wearing a Wapiti Unlimited baseball cap was hawking bumper stickers carrying the image of a wolf in the crosshairs of a rifle scope. Her competition, a man dressed in a buckskin jacket with fringe, sold rifle cartridges with the bullets drilled out and filled with silver for twenty-five dollars a pop. “The Werewolves Are Coming. Be Prepared!” read his placard.

The ink on the newspaper article was less than a day dry.

“What have I missed?” Stranahan whispered.

“Ranchers pissed at wolves. Hunters pissed at wolves. Everyone pissed at me. Sshh now, we got to stay quiet for the celebrity.”

The featured speaker was Clive “Buster” Black, the treasurer of the Hyalite chapter of the Stockgrowers Association and a cowboy poet on the side, a side that had gotten him as far as a guest spot on the
Tonight Show
. Hence his Tony Lama snakeskins, hence the Johnny Cash register of his voice, hence the Magnum P.I. mustache with down-turned tips.

“What happened in the Madison Valley last week was a shame,” he began, “a crying shame.” He looked directly into the eye of the television camera set up in the center aisle. “All of you sittin' here saw it comin', and all of you sittin' here knew it could have been prevented. We didn't ask for the lobo; the lobo was forced on us by the U.S. of A. government, which I guess took more stock in the crying of a bunch of vegetarians from Massachusetts than the reasonable voices of the people who have to make a living in Montana.” He paused, and there was murmuring assent from the crowd.

“Now that very second,” he went on, “that very instant the first wolf was released into Yellowstone Park in nineteen and ninety five, why it doesn't take an Einstein to know it would only be a blink of the eye before our stock wound up in their stomachs. Just last month, the Diamond L Ranch out of Dillon lost a hundred eighteen Rambouillet bucks—that's purebred sheep to you folks don't know. Livestock loss like that, wanton killing, was why we got rid of the lobo in the first place. For every fifty heifer I raise to twelve hundred pounds, I lose one, sometimes two, to those bloodthirsty bastards.”

Ettinger rolled her eyes. She whispered to Stranahan. “That man hasn't seen life from the saddle of a horse in thirty years. All he does is parcel off inherited land to Californians.”

Clive Black was rolling. “Now those bastard dogs are eating into our wild meat as well, and I don't have to tell anyone here how much revenue a healthy elk herd brings. A six-point bull's one hell of a valuable commodity at the end of a gun barrel—we're talking up to ten thousand dollars by the time you add up license cost and outfitter fees—but he ain't worth a bucket of glue in the gullet of a wolf. But now they aren't content to limit their diet to our beef cattle and wild game. The reason we're here tonight is we've got ourselves a pack of wolves that have turned man killer, and the loss of human life is something you can't put a price on. Sure, it's ironic that young Nanika Martinelli was a wolf lover herself, but did she deserve the fate that awaited her in Papoose Basin? No, sir, she didn't.”

He again paused to let the crowd express its sympathies. As the voices died down one young woman stood to shout. “It's the dog that's the bastard of the wolf, not the other way around, you dumb shit.”

“And you can take your bleeding heart back to wherever you hail from,” Black said evenly. “Please don't dishonor our memory of this woman with your political agenda.”

“As if you don't have one? What are you going to do, write a poem about her? Sell it to her crying parents?”

Martha Ettinger stood up. “Gentlemen, ladies. Please. There will be a time for comments after the last speaker.”

“Thank you, Sheriff Ettinger,” Black said.

Ettinger sat down and muttered, “I hate standing up for that self-satisfied asshole.”

Black seemed unfazed by the interruption.

“They told us”—he held up his fingers to put quotes around the word
they
—“they being the
federales
that permitted this travesty. They said that wolves wouldn't bother our livestock and compromise our livelihood, and they were wrong. They said that wolves wouldn't damage elk herds outside the park, and they were wrong. They assured us we had nothing to fear from wolves because there had never been a fatal attack on a human by a wolf in North America. Well, gentlemen,
they
were wrong about that, too.”

He waved a sheet of paper.

“November 8, 2005. Kenton Joel Carnegie, twenty-two, a geological engineering student working in the Athabasca Basin in Saskatchewan went for a walk where co-workers had reported seeing wolves. He was attacked and consumed by a predator. A judicial inquest carried out by the provincial government concluded wolves were the culprits.”

He raised his eyes to the room, then bent to the paper and ran thumb and forefinger along the points of his mustache.

“March 8, 2010. Candice Berner, thirty-two, a schoolteacher, went jogging near Chignik Lake, Alaska. Snowmobilers found her mutilated body among wolf tracks. Wolf DNA was found on her clothing. She had been eaten. The Alaska state medical examiner ruled her death was caused by wolves.”

Again, he paused to let the information sink in.

“I won't go on with what's happened in other countries,” Black said, and then did, reporting the hundreds of people who had been chased down in horse-driven sleighs or killed in their fields in medieval Europe, the thousands of Russian peasants who'd met similar fates in the teeth of wolves and as recently as the 1960s, the nearly one hundred villagers in the Indian state of Assam who had been dragged from their huts and eaten by wolves.

“Now the naysayers will tell you those were different wolves. Last time I looked they was all
Canis lupus,
each and ever' one, what biologists call the gray wolf and what most of us see as the devil incarnate. They may be scrawnier in India or fluffier in Siberia, but they all got the same blood and they all got the same color heart. Black. We assembled here tonight to find out what if anything's being done to track down and kill the monsters that snatched Miss Martinelli from the prime of her young life, but that ain't the end of the story. No, sir, not by a long shot. We want to know, we demand to know, what's going to be done about the other eight hundred and fifty wolves roamin' Montana, and we're sick and tired of settling for halfway measures like the limited hunting season we got now. The only way we're going to control these sons of bitches is by declaring war. We want to trap them year round, we want to use electronic game calls to bring them in range of our rifles and we need our FWP to shoot them from the air like they do in Alaska.”

“Here, here,” came a shout from behind Stranahan. He turned to see a heavyset man with a very red face pound the butt of a square blade shovel against the floor. A ringing thud echoed around the room. The man raised the shovel and brought the butt down again. “Shoot,” he said, and banged the shovel. “Shovel,” he said, and down came the shovel. “Shut up,” he said, and once more the thud of his shovel. The chant was taken up by someone else in the same row and in a few moments half the room was chanting “Shoot, shovel, shut up! Shoot, shovel, shut up!” Metal rang off linoleum. Stranahan saw Ettinger close her eyes and blow out her breath.

“I knew I should have put Walt at the entrance,” she said. She rose from her chair while shaking her head and deliberately strode to the lectern. She snapped her fingers and held up her hand.

“I'm not finished, Sheriff,” Black said, the microphone held casually at his side.

“Yes, you are.” She looked at him levelly. “The camera's on you, Clive. Do you really want to create a scene here?” Ignoring her hand, he placed the mike in its cradle on the lectern, and, walking off, accepted a shovel from a woman in the front row and brought it down with a resounding thud. Then to applause, he brandished it over his head.

Ettinger waited for the angry murmur to subside.

“Stand down!” shouted a man from the back of the room. “I think we all want to hear what the sheriff has to say.”

It was Sam Meslik's gravelly baritone. Stranahan swiveled his head. He'd first met the burly fishing guide in this very room two summers ago, but he knew that Sam, as a rule, avoided public meetings, gatherings of any kind for that matter, unless maybe a keg was involved. Was he here to support Martha?

Sean turned as Ettinger began to speak.

“I understand your frustration,” she said. She paused for half a dozen dissenting voices to pipe down. “Thank you. First, I'd like to bring you up to date. The hair in the wolf scat collected at the Palisades is in fact human hair. The last newspaper article made it sound as if it has been linked to Nanika Martinelli. It has not. The hair has been transferred to the state crime lab for analysis and the results will be made public as soon as they are available.”

“That's not good enough!” It was the first man who'd pounded a shovel.

“It's what we have,” Ettinger said. “But rest assured, we're acting on the supposition that a wolf or wolves have either killed or scavenged the remains of a human being. FWP personnel along with officers from my department are actively trying to kill the animals responsible. We're also bringing in a wolfer from Hamilton who has as much experience hunting problem predators as anyone in the Rockies. The pack we heard in Papoose Basin the night Martinelli went missing is our first priority. Julie McGregor of FWP will speak to this subject more fully in a few minutes . . . No, Julie, why don't you come up now?”

The game biologist glanced at Stranahan. “Talk about being thrown to the wolves,” she whispered. She gave him a “here goes nothing” look, exhaled with pursed lips and ascended the steps to the lectern.

“I'm Julie McGregor, the Region Three elk and wolf biologist,” she said.

“Speak up,” somebody shouted.

She flicked the mike with the backs of her fingers, which brought a shriek from the amplifying system. She raised it closer to her mouth. She repeated her position and began to talk wolves, her expertise having made her the center of aggressive attention at many public meetings over the past several years, while the federal courts waffled back and forth on removing the animals from the endangered species list. Only two years earlier, an act of Congress had overridden the judiciary and permitted wolf hunting, as long as the population was not brought below the number of breeding pairs federally mandated.

“As most of you know,” McGregor said, “our department has had its hands tied in the past with regard to public wolf hunting. However, we have always been able to eliminate wolves that kill livestock through a cooperative effort with Wildlife Services, which is a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and with Animal Damage Control, another federal agency. That includes aerial hunting. So we have a system in place to eliminate problem predators. Usually it works very well because we try to capture and radio collar at least one wolf from every pack whose range overlaps areas where cattle and sheep ranchers have grazing rights. That way, if the pack is determined to have killed livestock, we can track them down. The problem we're running into with this pack is that none of them are collared.”

“Why the hell not?” The question came from the back of the room.

“Here's the situation,” McGregor went on. “The wolves that frequent the southern Madison Range are called the Bald Ridge Pack, because they were first spotted together up there on Baldy. In the last aerial survey, which was in March, the pack consisted of two wolves that broke away from the Black Butte Pack before that pack was destroyed for killing cattle, and two subadult females driven out of the Snowcrest Seven Pack that occupied the southern Gravelly Range. In addition, there's a black wolf that joined the group last winter. He's the alpha male of the Bald Ridge Pack and the female from the Black Butte Pack is the alpha female.”

A high-pitched whistle pierced the room. A tall man dressed head-to-toe cowboy removed his fingers from his mouth and said, “Aren't we missing the point? We shoot all the wolves we'll get the one ate this girl. No sense wasting time looking for just one, or just one pack for the love of Christ.”