The Loop (2 page)

God, really, she should count her blessings. Clyde was as fine a husband as any woman could hope for. Though not the richest (and, okay, maybe not the brightest either), he’d been, by a long way, the best-looking guy at college. When he’d proposed, on graduation day, Kathy’s friends had been sick with envy. And now he’d given her a beautiful, healthy baby. And even if this place was at the back end of nowhere, it was still a place of their own. There were plenty of folk her age in Hope who’d give their right arms for it. Plus, she was tall, had great hair and even though she hadn’t quite got her figure back after having the baby, she still knew her looks could crank any tractor she chose.

Self-esteem had never been a problem for Kathy. She was Buck Calder’s daughter and around these parts that was about as big a thing to be as there was. Her daddy’s ranch was one of the largest spreads this side of Helena and Kathy had grown up feeling like the local princess. One of the few things she didn’t like about being married was giving up her name. She had even suggested to Clyde that she might do what those big-shot career women did nowadays and go double-barreled, call herself Kathy Calder Hicks. Clyde had said fine, whatever, but she could see he wasn’t keen on the idea and so as not to hurt him she’d settled for plain old Kathy Hicks.

She looked up at the clock. It was getting on for six. Clyde and her daddy were down in the hay fields, fixing some irrigation, and they were all coming over for supper around seven. Her mom was due any minute with a pie she’d baked for dessert. Kathy cleared the mess out of the sink and put the corn into a pan on the stove. She wiped her hands on her apron and turned the radio down. All she had left to do was peel the potatoes and, when they were done, Buck Junior out there on the porch would no doubt be hollering for his feed and she’d do that then get him all bathed and brushed up nice and smart for his grandpa.

 

The cows in the top meadow looked up as one when the wolf came out from the trees. He stopped where the grass began, as if to give them the chance to inspect him. They had never before seen such a creature. Perhaps they placed him as some larger, darker kind of coyote. Coyotes were only a real danger when a calf was freshly born. Perhaps he seemed more like one of the ranch dogs who wandered among them sometimes and the only time you had to pay heed to them was when they snapped at your heels to make you go some place you’d rather not.

In return the wolf barely graced them with a glance. All his senses were locked on something else, something down at the house, and he lowered his head and started down the meadow toward it. He moved more slowly now, with greater caution, not skirting the cattle but passing right through them. But so clear was his disinterest that none moved away and all soon went back to their grazing.

As the sun slid behind the mountains, a line of shadow came creeping across the grass in front of the house and up and onto the porch, like a rising tide, so that first the wheels and then the base of the baby’s buggy were engulfed and the oxblood wall behind it congealed to a darker red.

The wolf by now was at the foot of the meadow and here he stopped by the fence where Clyde had rigged up a pipe and an old enamel bathtub to water the cattle if the creek dried up. A pair of magpies broke from the willow scrub down by the creek and came up toward him in a series of fluttering swoops, scolding him, as if they knew his business here and didn’t much care for it. The wolf ignored them. But from the shelter of his buggy, now only some twenty yards away, the baby did a passable imitation of the birds, shrieked with delight at how it sounded then did several encores. Inside the house a phone started to ring.

 

It was Kathy’s mother. She said the pie had burned but not to worry because she had something else in the freezer that they could microwave.

‘Oh and Luke says he’ll come, if that’s okay.’

‘Of course it’s okay.’

Luke, Kathy’s brother, had just turned eighteen. He was sweet with the baby whenever she bumped into him down at the ranch, but he and Clyde didn’t get along too well and since she’d been married, Luke hadn’t been up here to the house more than a couple of times. As kids, they had never really been close. But then no one was close to Luke. Except, of course, their mom. She was the only one, in the end, who could handle his stutter.

Kathy had always been too impatient. Even when she was old enough to know better, she couldn’t help finishing his sentences for him when he blocked. Since he’d graduated from high school, a couple of months ago, she’d hardly seen him. He was getting to be more of a loner than ever, it seemed to Kathy, always off on his own in the wilderness with only that funny-looking horse of his for company.

Anyway, he was coming to supper and that was fine.

Her mother asked how the baby was and Kathy said he was just great and that she’d better get off the phone because it was coming up toward his feed time and she still had things to do.

It was just as she hung up that the dogs started barking.

Normally, she wouldn’t have given this a second thought. The dogs were forever hollering and taking off after some varmint or other, But there was something about the noise they were making now that made her look out of the window.

Maddie, the old collie, had her tail tucked under her and was slinking off around the side of the barn, muttering over her shoulder. Prince, the yellow Labrador that Kathy’s father had given her when they first moved up here, was pacing to and fro with his hackles up. His ears alternately pricked and flattened as if he were unsure of himself and he punctuated his barking with worried little whines. His eyes were fixed on something beyond the house, something up toward the meadow.

Kathy frowned. She’d better go see what was spooking them. The pan in which she was cooking the corn started to hiss and she went over to the stove and turned down the heat. When she came out through the kitchen screen door and stepped down into the yard there was no sign of the collie. Prince seemed relieved to see her.

‘Hey you, what’s going on here?’

The dog started to come toward her, then seemed to change his mind. Perhaps her presence gave him that little extra courage he’d been lacking, for now he took off in full cry around the side of the house, kicking up the dust as he went.

It was only then that the thought struck her. The baby. There was something on the porch, getting at the baby. She started to run. It must be a bear. Or a mountain lion. God, how could she have been so dumb?

As she came around the corner of the house, Kathy saw, directly below the porch, what at first she took for a big, black dog, a German Shepherd maybe. It turned to face the Labrador’s charge.

‘Get out of here! Git!’

The animal glanced at her and she felt the yellow flash of his eyes upon her and knew in that instant this was no dog.

Prince had skidded to a halt before the wolf and had lowered himself, his front paws splayed so that his chest was just inches from the ground. He had his teeth bared and was snarling and barking but with such timid bravado that it seemed he might at any moment roll over and submit. The wolf stood very still, but somehow at the same time seemed to make himself bigger so that he towered over the dog. His tail was bushy and raised high. Slowly, he curled back his lips and snarled and his long incisors showed white.

Then, in a single lunge, he had his jaws on the Labrador’s throat and swung him off his feet and through the air as if he were no heavier than a jackrabbit. The dog yelped and Kathy had a sudden image in her head of the wolf having already done the same with her baby and she screamed and jumped onto the end of the porch.

The buggy was at the far end and it seemed like a hundred miles away as she ran toward it.

She couldn’t tell whether the buggy had been disturbed, but even through the dog’s shrieking, she knew her baby inside was silent and the thought of what she would find made her sob.

When she got there she hardly dared look. But she forced herself and saw the child staring up at her, his face breaking into a gummy grin, and she cried out and reached down and snatched him up. She did it with such sudden violence that the child began to cry and she held him to her so hard that he cried even louder. She turned, pressing her back to the wall, and looked down from the porch.

The wolf was standing with his head lowered over the Labrador. Kathy could see right away that the dog was dead. His hind legs gave a final twitch, just like they did in his dreams when he slept in front of the fire. His throat had been torn out and his belly gaped like a gutted fish. The bleached grass under him rivered red. Kathy screamed again and the wolf started, as if he’d forgotten she was there. He stared right at her and she could see the glisten of blood on his face.

‘Get out of here! Go on! Get out!’

She looked around for something to throw at him but there was no need. The wolf was already running off and within moments he was ducking under the fence and loping up among the cattle who had all quit their grazing to watch the spectacle below. At the top of the meadow he stopped and looked back to where Kathy still stood over the dead dog, clutching her baby and crying. Then he turned and vanished into the shadow of the forest.

2

T
he offices of the US Fish and Wildlife Service Wolf Recovery team were on the third floor of a plain red-brick building in a quiet part of Helena. There was no sign outside that told you this and if there had been it probably wouldn’t have lasted long. There were people around here who didn’t much like any federal agency, least of all one whose sole purpose was to protect a creature they considered the most loathsome God ever came up with. Dan Prior and his team knew from experience that when it came to wolves it was best to keep the profile low.

In the outer office stood a glass case from which a stuffed wolf looked, more or less benignly, on their labors. The plaque on the side of the case said its occupant was
Canis Lupus Irremotus, Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf
. But, for a reason no one in the office could now recall, the wolf was more informally known as Fred.

Dan had gotten into the habit of talking to Fred, particularly on those long nights when everyone else had gone home, leaving him to unpick yet another political tangle in which Fred’s more animated brethren had snagged him. On such occasions Dan would often come up with other, more vibrant names for his silent companion.

Tonight was definitely not going to be one of those nights. In fact Dan, for the first time in living memory, was leaving early. He had a date. And because he’d made the mistake of mentioning it, everyone in the office had been teasing him about it all week. As he came out of his office, stuffing some papers into his bag, they all chanted in rehearsed unison, ‘Have a nice time, Dan!’

‘Thank you very much indeed,’ he said, through clenched teeth. Everyone laughed. ‘Will someone tell me, what’s so goddamn fascinating about my private life?’

Donna, his assistant, grinned at him. She was a big, gutsy woman in her late thirties, who ran the office with a calm good humor that even in the most frenzied moments never seemed to desert her. She shrugged.

‘I guess it’s just that you never had one till now.’

‘You’re all fired.’

He gave them a dismissive wave, told Fred to wipe that grin off his face and was just reaching for the doorknob when the phone rang.

‘I’m gone,’ he mouthed to Donna and out he went.

He pushed the elevator button and waited while the cables clunked and whirred behind the stainless-steel doors. There was a ping and the doors opened.

‘Dan!’

He waited with his finger on the button, keeping the doors open, while Donna hurried down the corridor toward him.

‘You know that new private life of yours?’

‘You know, Donna? I was just thinking of giving you a raise.’

‘I’m sorry, but I thought you’d want to know. That was a rancher called Clyde Hicks from Hope. He says a wolf just tried to kill his baby boy.’

 

Twenty minutes and half a dozen phone calls later, Dan was in his car and on his way to Hope. Four of the calls were to game wardens, Forest Service rangers and other Fish and Wildlife people in case any of them had heard anything about wolf activity in the Hope area. None had. The fifth was to predator-control agent Bill Rimmer, asking him to meet him in Hope to do a necropsy on the dog.

The last call was to the lovely and formidable Sally Peters, the newly divorced marketing director of a local cattle feed company. It had taken Dan all of two months to summon the courage to ask her out. After her reaction just now when he’d told her he wasn’t able to make dinner, next time, if there was one, it would take longer.

It was about an hour’s drive from Helena to Hope and as he swung west off the interstate toward the mountains, now darkening against the pale pink of the sky, Dan reflected on why it was that anyone who worked with wolves ended up getting screwed by them.

Over the years, he’d met a lot of biologists who specialized in other animals, from pygmy shrews to penguins, and though there were one or two damaged souls among them, on the whole they seemed able to stumble well enough through life like the rest of humanity. But wolf biologists were walking disaster areas.

In every league - divorce, nervous breakdown, suicide - they came out tops. By these standards, Dan himself had nothing to be ashamed of. His marriage had lasted nearly sixteen years. It was probably some kind of record. And even if Mary, his ex, didn’t speak to him, Ginny, their daughter - who was fourteen, going on twenty - thought he was an okay dad. Hell, she adored him; and it was mutual. But apart from Ginny, what, really, at the age of forty-one, did he have to show for all these years of devotion to the welfare of wolves?