The Loop (12 page)

A wolf might take an hour to die and the wariest among them, those who only sniffed and lightly licked while their brothers and sisters gorged, might take much longer. The strychnine went to work slowly in their gut until their fur fell out and left them wandering the plains, like naked ghosts, to howl and perish in the cold.

When winter tightened its grip and the daily harvest froze too hard for skinning, the wolfers stacked the bodies in the snow like firewood. It made the evenings easier but meant all could be spoiled by a sudden thaw. And it was one such thaw that gave birth to the road of skulls.

The winter of 1877 saw one of the longest freezes Hope had ever known. By March, more than two thousand unskinned wolves were piled in towers above the wolfers’ caves and around the sprawl of cabins where most now lived.

Then, one morning, there came a whisper of warmth in the air. The trees began to drip and the ice at the river’s edge to crack and soon a full chinook was blowing hot from the mountains. The cry went up and the wolfers, frantic with the fear of a whole season’s loss, set to work with their snicker-snack knives, like demons on the day of reckoning.

By sunset every stockpiled wolf in the village was skinned and not a pelt lost and the wolfers of Hope, giddy with triumph, danced up to their knees in a mire of melted snow and blood.

For years they had dumped their skinned carcasses on the lower ground beside the river to be picked clean by ravens and buzzards, many of which promptly died from the strychnine ingested by the wolves. Now, as a monument to their brave day’s doing, the wolfers raked all the bones together and, along with the headless remains of those just skinned, laid the footings of a road. Then they took the heads and boiled them and later, with great artistry, cobbled it with clean white skulls. And from that day forth the skull of every wolf they killed was added.

On a clear night when the snow was gone from the ground you could see the road from the mountains, many miles away, gleaming pale in the moonlight.

Eventually the skulls wound their way more than half a mile to where - perhaps to find more fragrant air, perhaps more fragrant company - those who had followed on the wolfers’ heels preferred to live.

By now the valley was filling with the moan of cattle and the town grew proportionate with every herd that came, servicing the rancher’s every need. Blacksmith, barber, hotelier and whore, all thrived in their several ways.

So too, at the other end of the road of skulls, did Hope’s wolfers, their daily deeds now overlooked, from its own Golgotha, by a fine white church (overlooked in senses both literal and metaphoric, for wolves, like all animals, of course, were not deemed to possess souls).

Even before the church was built, the wolfers had not gone in want of spiritual guidance, thanks in large part to a self-styled preacher, wolfer and former Indian fighter by the name of Josiah King, better known to his flock as the Reverend Lobo.

On Sunday mornings, depending on the weather and the amount of whiskey consumed the night before, Josiah would tell those assembled that the wolf was no mere varmint but the walking apotheosis of all evil. And he preached its annihilation with such infectious zeal that the wolfers of Hope came to see themselves as latter-day crusaders, reclaiming the frontier from this infidel beast and wreaking holy vengeance.

The work of the Lord brings just reward. Wolfing was better paid than ever. There was a state bounty of a dollar for every wolf killed, topped up by cattlemen whose hatred of the species needed no priestly prompting. For now that the buffalo was gone and the deer and elk grown scarce, wolves had acquired a taste for beef. Cows, moreover, were slower and dumber and easier to kill.

In truth, the elements were always better and more brazen in their killing than the wolf had ever been. The arctic winter of 1886 killed almost every herd in the valley. Only Hope’s hardiest ranchers survived, but with grievance etched in ice on their hearts.

Yet whom could a man blame for the cold? Or for sickness and drought or the pitiful price of beef? And why curse government, weather or God, when the devil himself was at hand? You could hear him each night out stalking the range and howling the stars from the sky.

So the wolf became Hope’s scapegoat.

And sometimes, for his crimes, they would catch him alive and parade him in shame through the town. Children would throw stones and the braver among them poke him with sticks. Then folk of all ages would gather by the river and watch while the Reverend Lobo’s most ardent inquisitors torched him like a witch.

Most of the wolfers drifted away with the century. There was no longer a living to be made. Some turned to different trades, others traveled farther north and west where easier killing persisted awhile. The livestock industry had gained huge political clout and, spurred by a rancher-president, who declared the wolf to be ‘a beast of waste and desolation’, the federal government took over the crusade.

Rangers in every national forest were ordered to kill every wolf they could find and in 1915 the US Biological Survey, the agency entrusted with nurturing the nation’s wildlife, methodically went to work on a well-funded policy of ‘absolute extermination’.

Just as they had followed the buffalo across the plains, wolves now followed it, in a few short years, to the brink of extinction.

In Hope, with its great hinterland of wilderness, some lingered on. They hid high in the forests, too wise and wary to be caught by a crassly poisoned carcass. They could smell a poorly set trap from half a mile and would sometimes dig it up and spring it to register their contempt. To catch these animals, a man had to be more than cunning; he had to think like a wolf, had to know every shade and scent and tremor of the wild.

And there was only one now in Hope who could.

Joshua Lovelace had first come to the valley from Oregon in 1911, attracted to Montana by a new state law that increased the bounty on wolves to fifteen dollars. He was so much more skilled than any of his rivals that soon the local cattlemen’s association hired him full-time. He built himself a home, five miles out of town, on the north bank of the Hope River.

He was a taciturn man who preferred his own company and guarded closely the subtle secrets of his profession. He was known, however, for two special trademarks. The first (for which many thought him either eccentric or excessively principled) was that he never used poison of any kind. When asked, he would proclaim his loathing of it, saying it was only for imbeciles who didn’t care what they killed. Wolfing, to him, was an art of the utmost precision.

His second trademark was a working illustration of this, a device he had invented himself and for which he had applied, unsuccessfully, for a patent. He claimed to have gotten the idea as a boy, in Oregon, watching salmon fishermen lay nightlines in the mouth of a river.

He called it the ‘Lovelace Loop’.

It was used only in the spring when wolves were denning and consisted of a circle of thin steel wire, some fifty feet in length, to which were attached, on traces of thinner wire, a dozen spring-loaded hooks. Each hook was baited with a bite-sized piece of meat (almost any kind would do, though Joshua’s personal preference was chicken). The loop would then carefully be laid around the outside of the den and anchored with an iron stake.

Timing was critical. For optimum results the loop needed to be laid between three to four weeks after the mother had given birth, and knowing this, through discreet observation, was part of the skill. An adult wolf would rarely be fool enough to take the bait. But it wasn’t to catch adults that the loop was designed.

At the age of two weeks a wolf pup’s eyes opened and a week later his milk teeth broke through and he could hear. This is when he would first venture out into the world and be ready to eat small morsels of meat, brought home and regurgitated by the adult wolves. Joshua used to pride himself on knowing the exact moment that the loop should be laid. He wanted his chicken to be the pups’ first taste of meat. And their last.

He would lay it as the sun was starting to go down and then retire to some high place and, for as long as there was light, keep watch with the brass army telescope he had once traded from an old Indian who claimed to have plucked it himself from General Custer’s body at Little Bighorn.

Sometimes, if Lovelace got lucky, he might see one or two pups emerge that same evening, lured from the den by the smell of the chicken. Once, in Wyoming, he caught a whole litter of six before nightfall. Normally, however, they came out of the den when it was too dark to see and you only knew you’d got one from the squeal they made when the triple-hook snapped open in their throats.

At dawn you would find five or six pups, hooked like fish around the den and still alive, though too tired by now to make more than a whimper. More often than not, their mother would be there, nuzzling and licking them, all her wariness lost in distress.

And therein lay the beauty of the loop. For if you were smart, if you had found yourself a good spot and didn’t go blundering in at first light, you could catch the whole pack, shoot the other adults one by one, as they came home from their night’s hunting. Only when you were sure you had them all, did you go in and finish the pups off with an ax or the butt of your gun.

Lovelace eventually married a woman much younger than himself and she died a year later, giving birth to their only child. The boy was christened Joseph Joshua but was known by his father from an early age simply by his initials.

By the time the boy was born, Lovelace had virtually eliminated Hope’s wolves. The ranchers kept him on a retainer to clear up the occasional disperser and any other lesser varmints they were bothered by. His reputation had spread, however, and he had offers of work from far afield, wherever wolves persisted. Almost as soon as J.J. could walk, Joshua took him on his travels and taught him about killing.

The boy was an eager pupil and was soon adding refinements of his own to his father’s techniques. He inherited a hatred for poison. For the next seventeen years, the two of them spent half the year in Hope and the other half traveling the continent, from Alaska to Minnesota, Alberta to Mexico, going wherever there was a wolf that no one else could catch.

From the mid-fifties onward, when the traveling became too much for his father, J.J. worked on alone and, of necessity, once wolves were protected by law, in ever greater secrecy.

The site of the old wolfers’ camp in Hope remained so toxic that for many years the County fenced it off. The road of skulls crumbled and succumbed beneath a tangle of bushes whose berries mothers of successive generations forbade their children to pick.

Then, long after the last howl of the last wolf had echoed in lament across the valley, bulldozers came to level the land for a park. While the work went on, several dogs died mysteriously from bones they brought home.

But only Hope’s oldest guessed why.

Indian folklore had it that the spirits of all America’s slaughtered wolves lived on. They were gathered, so the legend said, on some far-off mountain, beyond the white man’s reach.

Awaiting a time when they might safely walk again upon the earth.

9

L
uke Calder leaned back in his chair and waited while his speech therapist rewound the videotape. She had just taped him reading a whole page of
This Boy’s Life
and he had managed it with only one block, and although it was a big one, he felt pleased with himself.

Through the window he watched a double trailer-load of cattle that stood shuddering at a red light, a row of pink noses poking wetly through the slatted sides. It was only a little after nine in the morning but already the streets of Helena were shimmering in the heat. On the way in, he’d heard the radio weatherman promising rain. Barely a drop had fallen all summer. The traffic lights went green and the cattle truck rumbled off.

‘Okay, kiddo, let’s have a look.’

Joan Wilson had been helping him with his stutter for about two years now. Luke felt easy with her. She was a tall, genial woman, maybe a few years older than his mother, with rosy cheeks and eyes that disappeared behind them when she smiled. She seemed to have an endless supply of exotic earrings, which Luke thought was odd because otherwise she dressed like a Sunday school teacher.

Joan worked for a cooperative that covered some of the more remote schools in the area. Luke had always looked forward to her weekly visits. At the start he’d had joint sessions with a younger boy, called Kevin Leidecker, which Luke had found hard because the boy’s stutter was nowhere near as bad as his own.

He’d liked Leidecker well enough, until he overheard him in the locker room one day doing an imitation of ‘Cookie’ Calder, blocking on
To be or not to be
. It was pretty good; had the other kids almost wetting themselves. Luke’s nickname (some preferred ‘Cooks’ or ‘Cuckoo’) came from the stabbing stutter he often got into when asked to say his name.

A year ago, the Leideckers had moved to Idaho and since then Luke had had Joan to himself. During school vacations, instead of her coming to see him, he came to see her and, every Wednesday morning, drove himself to this private clinic.

They had used the video a few times before, usually to practice some new technique or to help him see what he was doing physically. when he blocked. Today it was because lately, in addition to the tightening he always felt around the mouth, he’d found himself blinking and skewing his neck to the left. Joan said this was quite normal. It was what they called ‘secondary characteristics’. She was videoing him so they could both examine what was going on and see if they could do something about it.

The first time they used the video, she’d been worried it might upset him to see himself on the screen, but it didn’t. It was like looking at someone else. His voice sounded weird, especially when he came near to a danger word and did that nerdy, smiling thing. Joan always told him how handsome he was, which was nice of her but, of course, just therapist bullshit. To his own eye he looked like a frightened bird, likely at a second’s notice to spread his wings and fly away.