Dead Man’s Fancy (16 page)

W
hen the patch of color shifted position, the cheek resting on the comb of the rifle stock inched forward. Contracting muscles drew the man's heavy eyebrows together. Sickle-moon scars shown whitely through the thicket of wiry hairs over his right eye. If there had been someone watching, and there was no one within miles, he might have said that the skin looked as if it had been cut by the rims of a dozen nickels. Without taking his eye from the scope, the man switched off the electronic game caller that had rendered the bleat of a dying rabbit, wiped his forefinger on his jeans, and then inserted it back through the trigger guard. He eased forward the two-position safety button on the Weatherby rifle.

Four hundred twenty yards across the canyon—the range finder in the scope calculated the distance to a nicety—a wolf stepped out of the pines into a small opening caused by an avalanche. It was a black wolf, fitting the description of the alpha male given to him at the FWP headquarters in Bridger. Gingerly, the man took up the slack in the trigger, which was set so light that a mouse scurrying through the trigger guard would trip the sear. Each beat of the man's heart caused the crosshairs to jump fractionally. Had his rest been perfectly steady, the man would have taken a breath, let half of it out and depressed the trigger between the pulses. But without a perfect rest, the crosshairs swam across the wolf's deep chest in unpredictable oblongs. He would have to shoot the instant they settled over the vital area, actually several inches higher to account for bullet drop. But this was not a conscious thought, nor, for that matter, did the man entertain any conscious thoughts. Rather, he had pulled down into a deep place in his being where time slowed and it was very calm and he was not cold but simply not present.

The report of the rifle echoed off the limestone walls. The man didn't hear it. Nor did he feel the recoil that jarred his shoulder. The sharp pain of the scope hitting him above his right eye, the steel rim cutting down to the bone—he felt that all right. When the sights settled back onto the opening, the wolf was gone. The man set aside the rifle and fished for a handkerchief to press over the wound. He tilted his head back and looked at a heaven he did not believe in and waited for the blood to stop flowing.

It took him twenty minutes to find a way down into the canyon and up the other side to the opening where the wolf had stood, where a spray of blood painted a dark-colored rock. The man sat down and drew out a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket. There had been a time in his life when he had limited himself to one cigarette a week, which he shared with his wife after making love on Saturday nights. After her death he had adopted the habit of smoking a cigarette before taking up the blood trail of any animal he shot, an odd transition of habit if he'd bothered to think about it, which he never had. He flicked a match head across his thumbnail and inhaled the sulfurous odor. He lit the cigarette. For the first time since seeing the patch of black in the trees, he permitted his mind to wander.

—

C
alvin Barr had worked as a government trapper for Animal Damage Control for thirty-five years, starting during the era when trapper was a very loose definition of his job, which consisted almost entirely of using a syringe to poison horse meat with sodium fluoroacetate, known in the business as 1080, which indiscriminately killed anything that fed on the carcasses. When large-scale poisoning was banned, he learned how to set an M-44 that shot cyanide into the mouths of coyotes and foxes. He also became certified as an aerial gunner, killing coyotes from helicopters with a 12-gauge shotgun. His heaviest bags came in winter, when coyotes loitered around the herds and showed against a pelt of snow.

In the first five years of his service alone, Barr put at a rough estimate that he had accounted for some 800 foxes, 250 bobcats, 30 mountain lions, about the same number of bears and at least 3,000 coyotes, and that didn't count coyotes killed by poisoned carcasses—God knows how many there had been before the ban, the dead prairie dogs strewn across the ground like fallen bowling pins around the bait stations. It was a slaughter that jaded him, and eventually had educated him to its ineffectiveness. How many sheep and cattle had the blood on his hands actually saved? A lot, probably, in the case of coyotes, which were enemy number one in the eyes of the federal agency, though wholesale killing often missed the one or two animals that actually took their toll on the sheep, and aerial gunning was expensive, nearly always costing more money than the value of the livestock lost.

But far too often, he learned, predators were blamed for killing animals that had perished for other reasons. When the trauma that indicated the attack of a particular predator was missing—lions, for example, left fang marks in the neck and licked hair away from areas they were eating with their raspy tongues, bears turned a sheep inside out as they ate it—Barr got to the bottom of the mystery by drawing his skinning blade. Sometimes, he found that the culprit was the rancher himself, who perhaps had left dead livestock lying around for scavengers to eat, or had pressed too deeply with the branding iron, with the resulting wound becoming infected. Dehydration, disease and damnable weather took a far greater toll on livestock than talon and tooth.

Like Alfonso Martinelli, who had been his supervisor for two years back in the nineties, Barr had helped live trap several of the Canadian wolves that were released into Yellowstone Park and Idaho in the reintroduction effort. It was a job that, as the wolf population skyrocketed, came to include killing the descendants of the very wolves he'd trapped for release. The irony wasn't lost on him. More than once, he had asked himself what the point of reintroducing wolves was if all you were going to do was kill them later.

Thinking of Martinelli made Barr shake his head. He'd been shocked when his current supervisor had called to inform him that a wolf was suspected of killing a human being. He'd been shocked again to learn it was the daughter of the man he'd once worked with.

Barr dug a grave for his cigarette with the heel of his boot. He looked again at the heaven he didn't believe in, then at the rock. The blood was pink and frothy. Lung blood. The alpha would not have gone far. Barr found it dead thirty yards along the contour of the slope, lying on its unwounded side with blood on its muzzle. The bullet hole on the shoulder was red on black. Bubbles of blood formed and softly popped over the opening as gases were released from the body.

Barr knelt beside the animal and took off his wool Kromer cap. He passed his hand over the wolf's flanks and then pressed the lid of its glassy left eye until it no longer stared at nothing.

—

B
arr radioed in the kill and found that he was a popular man when he drove his ATV back to the logging trace where he'd left his pickup. The group included Julie McGregor, Kellen Kirkpatrick, who was Barr's supervisor from Missoula, the county sheriff and a representative from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, flown up from Denver to put the government spin on the story. Before Barr had shut down the quad, eager bodies were pressing around the wolf strapped to the utility rack, its head bent to one side with fangs bared, its tail and hindquarters hanging stiffly off the rack, the body in the early stages of rigor mortise. Barr's eyes found the biologist, whom he'd met with the day before, after driving in from his home in Darby.

“This look like the alpha from the Bald Ridge Pack to you?” he said.

McGregor bent forward to examine the back of the wolf. The alpha had been photographed twice during aerial surveys the previous winter and had a broken stripe of light gray over his spine.

“That's him,” she said. “We'll autopsy his digestive tract at the lab. But it's been more than a week. My guess is if he consumed the victim, any trace will have passed by now. We'll have a better chance scraping the claws and teeth for DNA.”

“How soon do you think you'll get the others?” It was the rep from Fish and Wildlife.

Barr shook his head, not trying to hide his disgust. “Wolf has a say in that. The female alpha might lead them to another part of the range after this. Might not. If the pack stays in the basin, I have snares set and ten traps baited with lure. I'll check the sets tomorrow morning.”

McGregor nodded. “Let's get him loaded up.”

Barr ignored the press of willing hands and hoisted the wolf onto his shoulders, so that the head lolled down against one side of his chest. He'd had a lot of practice guessing the weights of wolves he'd trapped and sedated, and put this one at about 120 pounds. An average-sized male, in his prime by the wear on his teeth.

After McGregor had hauled the wolf away in the bed of her pickup, Barr answered questions brusquely and made busy with his gear. Finally the Fish and Wildlife rep took the hint, and Barr's company dwindled to his supervisor and Sheriff Ettinger.

“Those look big enough to catch a bear,” Ettinger said.

Barr finished strapping the two Brawn #9 traps to the cargo rack of his ATV.

“They aren't,” he said. “But they're big for a wolf trap. I wouldn't use them if we were trapping for release. Too much chance of breaking a bone. You want to trap a wolf for release, you don't use anything bigger than a Newhouse four and a half. I mostly use number fours with button teeth I forge myself. People think teeth break legs, but it's offset jaws that break legs. Sometimes you'll mangle a toe with a toothy trap, but nothin' a vet can't fix.”

Kellen Kirkpatrick had heard it all before. He interrupted to tell Barr to call him after checking his sets and left. Barr and Ettinger watched the truck out of sight.

“He knows damn well I got no way to call him here.” Barr spat on the ground.

“Tell me about wolf trapping,” Ettinger said.

“Well . . .” Calvin Barr was not a garrulous man, but like most men who knew their subject, he liked to put people straight. Especially with wolves, because there was no animal on earth more misunderstood. He liked that Ettinger was interested, not just working an angle.

He said, “Gotta understand a wolf's a tough critter. He's got strong bones, and he's not like a raccoon, who will chew off his toes to escape. It can happen but not usually, not if your conscientious about checking your line. Your biggest danger with a trapped wolf is overheating during transportation. I never like to set a trap in the sun. He's a dog, and a dog doesn't have sweat glands. The only way he can get rid of heat is panting. So you want to hose him down and keep him cool.”

“Have you relocated a lot of wolves?”

“About a hundred and a quarter, starting before the reintroduction. Most of them I trapped weren't guilty of the crimes they were supposed to have committed. Just like the enviros calling me Killer Barr. They got it wrong. Sure, I gave the go-ahead for killing a lot of wolves before the state took over management, but only if I had irrefutable evidence of livestock depredation. The only cure for a confirmed killer is a bullet. You relocate them they just get into trouble somewhere else. But like I said, that usually wasn't the case. Killing wolves isn't something I look forward to, not at all. If I had my way, I'd never touch a trigger on one again.”

“Your forehead would thank you,” Ettinger said. “Looks like you got kissed by your scope.”

Barr's laugh was short. “You'd think after forty years I'd have learned not to crawl a stock.”

“So this wolf,” Ettinger said, “do you think he killed the Martinelli girl? I didn't ask earlier because people would think I'm trying to insert doubt into a story they've shut the book on, that I'm some closet wolf lover. But now that it's just you and me, I'd value your opinion.”

“You're the first person who's asked that question. All the stink and you're the first. What do I think? I think if you tell me that girl's hair was found in wolf scat, then I have to believe you. But it goes against the grain of everything I know about wolves.”

“Why?” Ettinger crossed her arms.

“First off, you had a full scale manhunt for her, dogs, planes, the works, and they never found one trace—no footprint, no clothes, no scent.”

“We found her hat about a thousand vertical feet above the kill. We think she was bucked from her horse, maybe became disoriented.”

Barr furrowed his brow and winced. He tentatively touched the clot of blood over his right eye.

“I guess what I'm saying is, if she was killed by a wolf, I'd like to think I would have found the site. Wolf brings down a deer, that's where he eats it, where he brought it down. Now a lion, he might drag it a ways and bury what's left. Bear will do the same. Not a wolf. He leaves it where it falls. All that blood and bone, you got good men on this, they'd have their eyes to the sky looking for birds. Bird'll follow a wolf pack. Your people would see crows circling, they'd see ravens, turkey vultures. But she just disappeared into thin air. I'm not saying a wolf didn't do it, just that you'd expect to find evidence if it did.”

“You said ‘First off.' What else?”

“Well, the scat being found the way it was, that throws me. It seems a mite . . . convenient. Out in the open on a big rock, such an obvious signpost, right on the route that the scatman was checking? Where he was bound to look? I don't know, you tell me.”

Ettinger decided to level with him. “Cal, the reason I'm asking you this is one of the men I work with has been talking to Nicki Martinelli's sister, and she's got a different idea about what happened.”

He listened, interrupting only once to comment on the bottles of wolf lure in Martinelli's root cellar. “That Love Potion Twenty-nine was Alfonso's secret recipe. Had some roadkill tomcat in it if I remember correctly, you sprinkled a few drops where you buried a trap. Caught a helluva lot of wolves, that lure.”