The Loop (11 page)

Calder had organized a preacher to come from Great Falls and do the honors, in front of family, friends and, of course, the press and TV cameras. The tombstone was made of black marble and had probably cost the best part of five hundred dollars. Instead of Dan’s idea for the epitaph, which Helen liked a lot, they had gone with something more resonant:

Since then, Dan said, things had quieted down some. Every so often he would get a call from a reporter asking if he had located the wolf yet and he would play the whole thing down, giving the impression that it was all under control, that they were monitoring the situation constantly and that the fact that this wolf hadn’t been seen again almost certainly meant he was a lone disperser and was by now probably a hundred or more miles away, which Dan wanted to believe but didn’t. Just two days ago a Forest Service ranger hiking the backcountry due west of Hope had reported finding tracks.

At the office he introduced Helen to Donna, who gave her a big welcome and said it was great that at long last Dan had seen sense and hired a woman.

‘And this is Fred,’ Dan said, patting the top of the glass case. ‘The only one who does any work around here.’

A few minutes later, Helen bumped into Donna having a quiet cigarette in the restroom and gratefully lit one herself. One of life’s lesser-known truths, Donna confided, was that only the best kind of women smoked - and only the worst kind of men.

Dan sent out for sandwiches and the two of them adjourned to his office where they spent the next couple of hours, with the help of maps and charts and photographs, going through what Helen would be doing once she got to Hope.

They had flown the backcountry three times now, Dan said, and hadn’t picked up so much as a hint of radio signal. Whatever was out there almost certainly wasn’t collared, so Helen’s job was to trap, fit collars and then track to find out what was going on. Bill Rimmer, who was due back any moment from his vacation, had volunteered to help her set the traps.

If there turned out to be a whole pack, Helen was to find out its size and range, what it was preying on, all the usual stuff, Dan said. As well as that, of course, the important thing was to try to build a rapport with the local ranchers.

Finally, he sat up and put on a mock official voice while he went through the terms of her employment. The only way he was allowed to hire her, he explained, was on what was known as a ‘temporary’ basis. That meant she was employed for a fixed term of a hundred and eighty days, which he could then renew. She was to be paid a thousand dollars a month, no benefits.

‘No health insurance, disability or retirement pay, no rehire entitlement. Basically, being temporary means you don’t exist in the federal system. You’re invisible. We have temporary people who’ve been working for us for years.’

‘Do I get to have a scarlet letter T painted on my forehead?’

‘That’s entirely optional, Miss Ross.’

‘Do I get a truck or is it just a bicycle?’

He laughed. ‘I’ll show you. Want to take a drive out there?’

‘To Hope?’

‘Sure. Not right up to the cabin. We can do that tomorrow. But I thought maybe you’d like to have a look at the town, then maybe we could go get something to eat. If you’re not too tired.’

‘Sounds good.’

As they went out to the parking lot, Dan said they could either check her into a hotel for the night or she could stay at his place. Ginny was at her mother’s, he said, so Helen could have her room.

‘Are you sure? That’d be great. Thank you.’

‘And this is what you’ve really been waiting to see.’

He stopped by the old Toyota pickup. In the sunshine it didn’t look too bad. He’d taken it through the car wash and discovered that the paintwork when cleaned was more or less the same color as rust, which was handy. The chrome was even trying to shine. He slapped the hood affectionately and the wing mirror fell off. Helen laughed.

‘This is mine?’

Dan bent down and picked up the mirror and handed it to her.

‘Every last bit of it. In fact it has to be. All federal vehicles have to be of US manufacture and I don’t have one available. I can only give you mileage. Thirty-one cents a mile.’

‘Gee, Prior, you sure know how to spoil a gal.’

She drove. The steering felt like dancing on rollerskates, you had to plan each turn well in advance to have any chance of making it. But Helen soon got the hang of it and followed Dan’s directions out of town, heading with the sun toward the mountains.

They had talked all afternoon and it didn’t feel wrong to be quiet for awhile. It was cooler now and the wind had blown itself out. On either side of the road, the land stretched away as far as she could see, cropped a pale gold and scattered with hay bales like giant Tootsie Rolls.

Both sky and earth seemed to Helen immense, their every angle boldly drawn. The roads ran straight and purposeful to ranches confidently placed. She found herself both thrilled and daunted and somehow inconsequential to it all. And she thought of Joel, as she still did a dozen times each day, and wondered whether he felt anchored in his new world or detached as she now was in hers, a watcher wanting to belong but somehow always floating past.

As the mountains loomed larger, the land before them crumpled into a badland sprawl of rocky bluffs, sliced randomly by sudden scrub-filled creeks. Cresting a hill, she saw a line of cottonwoods converging from the south and through their foliage the glint of water.

‘That’s the Hope River,’ Dan said.

The blare of a car horn made them both jump. Looking at the river, Helen had let the pickup wander and in the mirror now she saw a black truck right behind them. She yanked the steering wheel so hard to the right that they lurched and shuddered briefly onto the verge. She quickly got control again. She narrowed her eyes and didn’t look at Dan.

‘One crack about women drivers and you’re dead.’

‘I’ve never seen a woman drive better.’

‘You’re dead.’

The black truck pulled out to pass. As it drew alongside, Helen turned and beamed her sweetest apology at the two inscrutable cowboy faces that surveyed her. They were maybe in their early twenties but with an attitude that made them look older. Dan gave a friendly wave. The one in the passenger seat touched the brim of his hat and almost smiled, while the driver just shook his head and drove on by, his disdain shared by a dog who rode windblown in the back. Once they were ahead, the passenger turned briefly to look at them through the gun rack in the cab’s rear window.

‘You know them?’

Dan nodded. ‘They’re Abe Harding’s boys. They ranch a little spread up near the Calder place. You’ll be neighbors.’ Helen looked at him and saw he was grinning.

‘Are you serious?’

‘ ’Fraid so.’

‘Well, there’s me off to a great start.’

‘Don’t worry, it’s not your driving they’ll hate you for. See the bumper sticker?’

She had to lean forward and squint because the truck was accelerating ahead, but she could still make out a wolf’s head crossed out in red and, beside it, the words
No Wolves, No Way, No Where
.

‘Terrific.’

‘Oh, you’ll soon have them eating out of your hand.’

The road followed the bends of the river for another four miles until Helen saw a white church on a low hill, then other buildings rear above the trees. There was a narrow, railed bridge that crossed the river and a sign saying HOPE (POPULATION 519) after which some cryptic soul had added three clean bullet holes of perfect punctuation, consigning both town and people to a state of perpetual suspense.

‘I always get this childish urge to spray “abandon” on it.

‘Dan, you’re doing a really great job selling this place to me.’

‘Like I told you, it has a history.’

‘So when do I get to hear it?’

They were coming over the bridge and he pointed ahead.

‘Take that turn there.’

She pulled off the road and down into a small gravel parking lot beside the river. There were a couple of other cars there and Helen stopped beside them and turned off the engine.

‘Come on,’ Dan said. ‘I’ll show you something.’

They left Buzz in the pickup and walked into a small park that stretched beside the river. It was a pretty place, its grassy slopes kept lush by sprinklers. Their spray made rainbows in the sun that was shafting the shade of several tall willows. There were swings and a climbing frame for children, but those there now were playing chasing games through the sprinklers. Their mothers sat chiding them halfheartedly from one of half a dozen wooden picnic tables.

Below, at the water’s edge, silhouetted against a molten reflection of sky between two cottonwoods, an old man in red suspenders and a dusty blue feed cap tossed crusts to a family of swans. Helen could see their feet churning to hold steady in the current.

Dan led the way along the raised path that snaked from the parking lot to the white clapboard church on the hill at the far end of the park. He seemed to be scanning the ground. Then he stopped and pointed down.

‘Look.’

Helen stopped beside him. She couldn’t see what he was pointing at.

‘What?’

He bent and picked up something small and white from the path. He handed it to her and she examined it.

‘It’s like a piece of shell or something.’

He shook his head and pointed again to the ground.

‘See? There’s some more.’

There were flecks of it along the edge of the path, like a snowy residue, scuffed there and scrunched to ever finer fragments by the constant passage of sneakers and bicycle wheels.

‘Sometimes you can find bigger pieces,’ he said. ‘Deep down the soil must be full of it. I guess that’s why the grass grows so well.’

‘What is it then?’

‘It was from an old road that was here once.’

Helen frowned.

‘It’s wolf bone. The road was paved with wolf skulls.’

She looked at him, thinking he must be kidding.

‘It’s true. Thousands of them.’

And while, across the park, the children played on among the sprinklers, their laughter floating on the balm of the evening air, as if the world had ever been thus, Dan sat her down at one of the tables beneath the willows and told her how there came to be a road of skulls.

8

I
t was a hundred and fifty years since white hunters and trappers first arrived in any number in this valley. The first of them came in search of beaver when the land farther east was trapped out, making their watchful way along the Missouri in mackinaw boats piled perilously with store enough, they hoped, to see them through a winter. Paddling west then south, they found a narrow tributary, nameless to all but ‘savages’, that led toward the mountains and they followed it and made their camp.

Along the slopes of the hill where the church now stood, they dug cave-like shelters, roofing them with timber, brush and sod so that all that showed were stumplike chimneys of stacked stone. The following spring, when they sailed back to Fort Benton with their pelts, word began to spread of the great killing to be had. And over the next few years others followed, bringing horses and wagons, until soon there was a small village of hunters and trappers, a veritable colony of carnage to which someone, not in aspiration but rather in memory of a drowned child, gave the name Hope.

In a few seasons the beaver were all gone, their pelts sold for proceeds soon squandered on Indian whiskey and women and shipped east to warm the fashionable heads and necks of city folk. It was only when the beaver ponds stood stagnant that Hope’s earliest inhabitants switched their attention to the wolf.

The valley had been a special place for wolves since ancient times. Honored as a great hunter by the Blackfeet who had long lived here too, the wolf knew it as a winter shelter for deer and elk and as a passage from the mountains to the plains where, in great packs, he trailed herds much greater still of buffalo. By 1850 the white man had begun his grand massacre of these herds. Over the next thirty years he would kill seventy million head of buffalo.

Ironically, at first, this made life easier for the wolf, for all the hunters wanted was the hide and maybe the tongue and a little prime meat. Wolves could dine in style on what was left. Then, from across the eastern ocean, came a great demand for wolfskin coats. It didn’t take a genius to find a way of meeting it. Like thousands of others all across the West, the good, the bad and the downright demented, the trappers of Hope turned to wolfing.

It was easier than killing beaver, provided you had the two hundred dollars to set yourself up. A bottle of strychnine crystals cost seventy-five cents and it took two to lace a buffalo carcass. But set the carcass in the right spot and it could kill fifty wolves in a single night and still be fit to use the next. With good wolfskins now fetching two dollars apiece, a winter’s poisoning might net you two thousand dollars. That kind of money made the risks seem worth taking. A man could freeze to death with no trouble at all and lose his scalp too, for of all the white invaders, the wolfer was the most reviled and the Blackfeet killed him when they could.

Each day the wolfers of Hope rode out in search of bait. As buffalo grew rare, they improvised with any creature they could find, even the smallest songbirds, whose breasts they delicately slit and stuffed with poisoned paste. The line of bait might stretch for many miles and was laid in a circle. When they rode its circumference the next morning, the wolfers would find it littered with the dead and dying of any bird or beast that had happened across it. As well as wolves, there would be fox and coyote, bear and bobcat, some still retching and convulsing. Their vomit and drool would poison the grass for years, killing any animal that grazed it.