The Loop (33 page)

He paused, waiting for a reaction, but got none.

‘And it got me thinking, once we’ve shipped the calves off to the feedlot, maybe you should give her a hand.’ He gave a great laugh. ‘So long as you don’t put any of those radio collars on our cows!’

Luke looked again at his mother. She raised her eyebrows in surprise.

‘Don’t think she’ll pay you much, mind. But seriously, if you want to help her out some, well, it’s okay by me.’

Luke couldn’t wait to break the news to Helen. He went right out and saddled up. But although he’d turned it inside and out in his mind, he was still no closer to understanding why his father had said it. Maybe those phone calls had really freaked him. It was possible, but Luke doubted it. There was probably some other, more sneaky motive. But Luke wasn’t going to argue.

He came to where the land leveled now and heard Buzz barking. He coaxed Moon Eye out of the trees toward the lake, which lay mirror still and steaming like the creek. Above, on the slope up to the cabin, the sun was already melting patches of green in the silver of the frost. The cabin door was open and Buzz stood on the doorstep, staring at something inside and barking uncertainly.

Helen’s truck was there, its windshield all frozen over. He had thought she might have already left to check the traps. Buzz turned and saw him and Moon Eye and came bounding down the slope to greet them.

‘Hey, Buzz-dog. How’re you doing?’

The dog pranced and circled them, then led the way up alongside the stream. In the frosted grass Luke could see the fresh tracks and droppings of deer who had come earlier to drink there. He expected Helen to emerge from the cabin, but there was no sign of her. He got off his horse and walked to the door.

‘Helen?’

There was no answer. Maybe she was around the back, in the outhouse. He waited a few moments outside the cabin door and then called again. And again there was no answer. So he leaned forward and knocked gently on the open door.

‘Helen? Hello?’

Buzz, beside him, barked again, then brushed past his legs and ran inside. Luke took off his hat and followed him. It was dark inside and it took awhile before his eyes adjusted. Across the room, he could just make out Helen, lying on the bed.

He didn’t know what to do. Perhaps he should let her sleep and come back later. But there was something about the way she looked that made him stay. One of her arms was dangling down, the fingers slightly curled, her nails touching the floor. A mug lay on its side in a pool of spilled liquid. There was an open bottle of pills there too. She lay perfectly still, even when Buzz nuzzled her and whimpered. Luke put his hat down on the table and took a cautious step toward her. He told Buzz to go out.

‘Helen?’ he said softly.

Closer now, he could see there was mud on her arm and on her hand and he looked farther down the bed and saw where her knee stuck out from the sleeping bag that it too was caked with mud and blades of grass. Another step now and he could see the same was true of her face. But she wasn’t asleep.

Her eyes were open and she was staring blankly ahead.

‘Helen? Helen?’

Then something flickered in her eyes, like life itself being switched on. She looked at him, without moving her head. It scared him.

‘Helen, what is it? Are you okay?’

She blinked. Maybe she was sick, had a fever or something, he thought. Tentatively, he stepped closer and reached down to touch her forehead. Her skin felt cold as stone. He lifted the edge of her sleeping bag and saw her T-shirt was dirty and soaking.

‘Helen, what happened?’

Silently she started to cry. The tears made tracks through the mud on her face and he couldn’t bear to see such wretchedness and he sat on the bed beside her and hoisted her up in his arms and held her. She was so cold and wet and he cradled her and tried to warm her and just let her cry, telling her it was okay, he was there, everything was okay.

How long they stayed like that, he couldn’t tell. He felt that her life was but the smallest flame that might be snuffed out if he were to let go of her. Her crying seemed to warm her a little and at last, when she had stopped, he found a dry blanket and wrapped her in it, then went to the stove and lit it, to get some heat going in the place.

Behind the door, when he closed it, he saw a screwed-up piece of paper. It was that same pale blue as the airmail letter he’d found and given to her last night. He picked it up and put it on the table, then lit the little Coleman stove and heated some water to make tea. And all the while she sat hugging her knees, with the blanket over her, shivering and staring at nothing.

He found a washcloth and soaked it with some warmed water and then went and sat on the bed beside her again and, without asking, gently cleaned the mud from her face and from her arms and hands. And she didn’t say a word, just let him do it. Then he found a towel and dried her.

Her blue fleece and a longsleeved undershirt were hanging on the little washing line she’d rigged up and he took them down and said maybe she should put them on instead of the wet T-shirt, but she didn’t seem to hear him. He didn’t know what to do, only that she needed to change, so he took the blanket off her and turned her gently by the shoulders so that she was facing away from him. Then he sat behind her so he wouldn’t see her breasts and pulled the wet T-shirt over her head.

Below the band of suntan around her neck, her skin was pale and smooth. And as he pulled the undershirt over her head he noticed the notches of her spine and the faint curve of her ribs and it made her seem fragile, like a wounded bird. He had to lift each arm in turn, feeding them like a doll’s into the sleeves. He pulled the shirt down over her body and did the same with the fleece.

He prepared the tea and made her drink, helping her hold the mug and guiding it to her lips. Then he stayed beside her, holding her in his arms, for a long time.

It must have been an hour or more before she spoke. Her head lay against his chest and her voice sounded small and faint, as though it came from a great way off.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m not worth the effort.’

He knew better than to ask what had happened. Perhaps it was something to do with the letter. Perhaps someone she knew had died.

All he knew at that moment, or cared to know, was that he loved her.

22

T
he two weeks that followed Abe Harding’s arrest were the toughest of Dan Prior’s entire career and by a long way the most bizarre. As if in revenge for the killing of the alpha male in Hope, wolf packs throughout the region seemed suddenly to be wreaking havoc.

A sheep rancher north of Yellowstone lost thirty-one lambs in one night to wolves that had wandered out of the park. They ate hardly anything, simply killed them and left them. Another pack killed a pair of thoroughbred foals just east of Glacier. And a lone disperser, from a pack in Idaho, killed three calves near the Salmon River and left a fourth so badly maimed that it had to be put down.

Bill Rimmer was hardly ever out of his helicopter. In ten days he shot and killed nine wolves and darted fifteen more, mainly pups, who were relocated where they would hopefully keep out of trouble. It was Dan who had to sign the death warrants and he did so each time with a sense of personal failure. He was supposed to be in charge of wolf recovery, not liquidation. He had little choice, however. Being prepared to use ‘lethal control’ was a firm promise in the plan that had allowed wolf recovery to happen in the first place. And because of what had happened in Hope, the media was watching his every move.

Reporters were calling him every hour of the day. At home he left the answering machine on all the time, except those nights Ginny stayed when she answered for him and pretended to be a Chinese takeout or a home for the criminally insane, which wasn’t too wide of the mark. At the office, Donna handled most of the media calls, only putting through to Dan those journalists he knew or those who might be important.

It wasn’t only the local media who’d suddenly renewed their interest in wolves, it was national and even international people too. There was one call from a German TV reporter who kept talking about Nietzsche and asking all kinds of deep philosophical questions Dan couldn’t understand, let alone answer. More surreal still was the guy from
Time
magazine who said they were thinking of doing a cover story on Abe Harding.

‘Is this a joke?’ Dan said.

‘No, of course not.’ The reporter sounded hurt. ‘Isn’t he, in a way, making a last stand for the values of the Old West? Don’t you see him that way, you know, as a kind of beleaguered pioneer?’

‘Can I tell you off-the-record?’

‘Sure. Go ahead.’

‘I see him more as a kind of beleaguered asshole.’

The idea of ‘Abe Harding, Last Pioneer’, on the cover of
Time
magazine had Dan chuckling and shaking his head for days. Thank the Lord, the piece had yet to materialize, probably because it would require at least a modicum of cooperation from Abe himself; and reporters, on Abe’s scale of preferences, would rate only fractionally higher than wolves.

After spending the night in jail, Abe had been charged with killing an animal listed as endangered, namely, one wolf, and of possessing the remains and transporting them. A further charge, of assaulting a police officer, was dropped. He was released by a federal magistrate, without bail.

Schumacher and Lipsky, the two Fish and Wildlife special agents who had been at the meeting, had gone with a search warrant to the Harding ranch, accompanied, at his own insistence, by Hope’s increasingly uncooperative deputy sheriff. Craig Rawlinson had caused nothing but trouble by more or less siding with Harding’s sons, who had been hostile and abusive. The agents managed to keep their cool long enough to find the loaded Ruger M-77 rifle with which Abe had admitted shooting the wolf. It was duly confiscated.

The wolf spent a night lying on some old pizza in Dan’s garage freezer and was shipped the next day to the Fish and Wildlife forensics lab in Ashland, Oregon, where a necropsy showed the animal’s heart and lungs had been entirely blown away. There were fragments of a 7mm magnum bullet, the bulk of which had passed on and out through the animal’s rear end and was never to be found.

The Ashland scientists did DNA tests which showed the wolf had no connection with any of the wolves released in Yellowstone or Idaho. They discovered a tag in one ear that showed he had traveled from a remote part of British Columbia, more than two hundred miles away. They also discovered he was missing a toe on his right foreleg and had a scar there that suggested he had once been trapped and torn himself free. This might have affected his ability to hunt deer or elk, one of the scientists suggested, and led him to the easier option of cattle.

Abe at first claimed he’d shot the wolf when he found it attacking a calf in a pasture only two hundred yards from his house. He later admitted it hadn’t yet attacked, but he knew it was going to. He said there was another wolf with it at the time and he wished he’d shot that one as well. He said he was not guilty and was going to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court to prove it. He refused any legal representation on the grounds that lawyers were just wolves in suits.

Meanwhile, pending ultimate endorsement from
Time
magazine, the Harding boys were doing their bit to turn their daddy into a folk hero.

They had two hundred T-shirts printed with Abe’s lugubrious face on the front and SWAT (SHOOT WOLVES ALWAYS TEAM) OFFICIAL MEMBER on the back. They went on sale at The Last Resort for fifteen dollars each and sold out in two days. A second batch of five hundred had almost gone too, though the mugs - ABE HARDING, HOPE’S HERO - were shifting more slowly. Bill Rimmer had bought Dan one of each and though he hadn’t worn the T-shirt yet, Dan drank his coffee from the mug every morning.

In contrast to their brethren across the state, Hope’s remaining wolves kept their heads down and for this Dan was grateful. He was damned if he was going to let Buck Calder bounce him into taking any kind of action there without proof that the wolves had done the damage. And he had enough on his plate as it was.

For every phone call he got from an angry rancher, accusing him of being soft, he got one from an animal rights activist calling him a murderer, on account of the nine wolves whose death warrants he’d signed. Four separate lawsuits had been instigated, two from livestock associations, seeking an end to wolf recovery because it violated the Constitution, and two from environmental groups seeking injunctions against ‘any further illegal act of lethal control’.

The day after the meeting, Wolves of the Earth had dispatched a team of activists to Hope to conduct a door-to-door survey. Dan got a series of furious phone calls. One rancher said if they knocked on his door again, he’d shoot them. He called them a ‘bunch of longhair commie terrorists’ and when Dan drove out and met the pollsters, he thought the guy had a point. He gently suggested to the group’s regional coordinator in Missoula that there was enough woe in Hope as it was and that the wolves might stand a better chance if they were allowed to keep a lower profile.

The last thing Dan needed was more trouble in Hope. And, secretly, he thought Abe may have done them all a favor by killing the most likely troublemaker. It had taken some of the sting out of the ranchers’ anger over lost calves and, at the very least, had bought Helen some breathing space. With luck, she could keep tabs on the rest of the pack and avert further trouble.

He hadn’t seen her since the night of the meeting and had become a little concerned about her. For three days she had neither phoned nor replied to any of the messages he left for her. He’d been on the point of driving up there when she called to say she’d had the flu but was now okay. She’d sounded a little downcast, but Dan figured she was still getting over her sickness. Calder’s son, Luke, had been taking care of her, she said, and had been really sweet.