The Loop (37 page)

‘Shit!’

She quickly shed the pack and picked him up again, glancing over her shoulder at the charging bear. The bank was well covered in scrub and saplings but he was surging through them like a snowplow.

They got to the pickup and Helen lunged for the door handle and in the process almost dropped the cub again. Inside, Buzz was on the seat, going berserk.

‘Wouldn’t it be better to p-put him in the back?’

‘No. In here, quick!’

They bundled the bear into the passenger-side footwell and Helen shoved Buzz away across the cab and dived after him. The big grizzly was down on the trail now, only twenty yards away, and coming for them in great rollicking bounds.

Helen got herself into the driver’s seat, with Buzz wedged against the window, barking like a maniac in her left ear. Then, to her horror, she saw Luke was going back for her pack.

‘Luke! Leave it, get in!’

But he was almost there. The bear was closing on him fast. Luke grabbed the pack, but as he turned to run back, he slipped in the mud and fell.

‘Luke!’

She slammed her hand onto the horn and gave a loud blast, but the bear didn’t even falter. He was only about five yards away from where Luke was scrambling to his feet. There was no way he’d reach the pickup in time. Helen screamed.

Suddenly, the bear was knocked sideways and for a moment everything was just a blur of brown fur. Then Helen realized what had happened. Another bear, presumably the cub’s mother, had charged. The impact sent the big male rolling into the bushes, with the female in roaring pursuit.

‘Luke, come on!’

He was almost at the pickup now. But the big male grizzly wasn’t going to be so easily deterred. He knocked the mother flying and was after the cub again.

‘He’s coming! Quick, get in!’

Luke dived into the passenger seat, swinging his feet over the cub. He reached out to shut the door when the big male arrived and saved him the trouble by removing it with a single swipe of his paw, sending it cartwheeling into the scrub.

‘G-go, Helen! GO!’

Helen rammed the gearshift into reverse and stamped on the gas pedal and the pickup lurched off down the trail, slithering and snaking as it went, its wheels flinging mud and rocks at the big grizzly who was left standing there, apparently non-plussed for a moment.

‘Buzz, will you shut the fuck up!’ Helen yelled.

She was swiveled in her seat, looking out the back window and trying to steer and pin Buzz to the door all at the same time.

‘Is he coming after us?’

‘No—’

‘Thank God.’

‘Yes.’

‘Shit.’

‘Both of them. And the c-cub’s waking up.’

‘Terrific.’

Farther down the trail, about halfway to where they had parked, there was a place Helen recalled might be wide enough for them to turn. The question was whether there would be time enough to do it before the bear got there too. She didn’t dare look back at him in case she reversed off the edge of the trail.

‘Is he still coming?’

‘Yeah. He’s g-gaining on us.’

She saw the turning place coming up now and decided to give it a go. She told Luke to hold tight, hit the brakes and swung the rear of the pickup around. The truck lurched and lifted up on two wheels and for a sickening moment Helen thought it was going to topple over. But it came down with a bump and she found herself looking into the face of the grizzly. He skidded and thumped into the driver’s side door, cracking the window and making the whole vehicle rock. Buzz took this as a cue to duck under Helen’s arm and pounce on the waking cub.

She wrenched the gearshift into drive. The big bear had his face pressed against the window and was showing her his dental work.

‘Sorry, buddy, no room,’ she said. ‘See ya!’

And with Buzz and the bear cub trying to kill each other between Luke’s legs, off they went down the trail, leaving the big grizzly to cope with the cub’s mother.

Helen drove with one hand, as fast as she dared, at last managing to hook the other inside Buzz’s collar, while Luke wrangled the rapidly recovering cub. Two miles down the trail, he’d recovered enough to claw gaping holes in Luke’s jeans and bite a chunk out of his boot.

Helen figured they were far enough from the adults by now for the little one to have a fair chance of survival. Hopefully he would hitch up with his mother again. Helen pulled up and they ejected him unceremoniously from the doorless side of the truck. And with Buzz tethered to the steering wheel, still bawling blue murder, Luke and Helen stood side by side and watched the cub lope grumpily off into the bushes.

‘Hey, please, don’t mention it!’ Helen called after him.

She put a hand on Luke’s shoulder and leaned on him and he shook his head and gave her a grin.

‘Maybe we b-better stick to wolves.’

 

That evening, it started to snow. With no wind to drift it, it fell in heavy, floating flakes which settled on the cabin windowsills while inside Helen and Luke cooked and ate and laughed about the day’s events.

After supper, before he went home, they wrapped up warm and took the snowmobile high into the forest with the snowflakes flitting like uncharted galaxies in the headlight. Luke sat behind her, holding on, as you had to, with his arms encircling her and it felt warm and comforting to be held that way. They drove to where they thought the wolves might be and just as they got there, the snow stopped and the clouds opened on a sliver of moon.

She turned off the snowmobile engine and they stood for a moment listening to the perfect muffled silence of the forest. Then they took the flashlight and the radio receiver and walked a little way along the trail, their boots crunching in the snow.

They found the signals right away, clucking clear in the crystal air, and they knew the wolves were very close. In the beam of the flashlight, they found tracks no more than minutes old.

Helen turned off the light and they stood quite still and listened. The only sound was the soft thud of snow falling, now and then, from a tree.

‘Howl,’ she whispered.

He had heard her do it several times, without success, but had never yet attempted a howl himself. He shook his head.

‘Try,’ she said softly.

‘I c-can’t. It w-wouldn’t . . .’

He made a little gesture with his fingers toward his mouth and she realized that he was afraid his voice might not come, that it would betray him, and leave him mute and embarrassed as so often it did.

‘It’s only me, Luke.’

For a long moment he looked at her. And she saw in his sad eyes what she already knew he felt for her. She took off her glove and reached out and touched his cold face and smiled. She felt him tremble a little at her touch. And as she lowered her hand, he put his head back and opened his mouth and howled, long and plaintively, into the night.

And before the note had time to die, from across the snow-tipped trees of the canyon, the wolves replied.

24

N
obody witnessed the wolfer’s return to Hope. His silver trailer slid into town like a ghost ship in the dead of the night before Thanksgiving, when the plowed snow lay like unmarked graves along the roadside and the blacktop glistened with salt.

J.J. Lovelace sat alone in the old gray Chevy pickup he always used for hauling the trailer and as he came toward the junction by the old school, he turned off the headlights and slowed to a halt.

Behind the trees on the other side of the street was the graveyard where the mother he’d never known was buried. But Lovelace didn’t look that way or even think of it. Instead, he squinted sideways through the darkness along Main Street and was pleased to see it was deserted. He pulled away from the junction and, driving on his sidelights, cruised slowly through the town.

It was much as he remembered. Except for the modern cars parked there, with their windshields masked against the frost. Some of the names on the storefronts had changed, the gas station had new pumps and there was a new red traffic light swinging in the wind on a wire across the street, flashing pointlessly at no one.

Lovelace had no special feelings for Hope, one way or the other. And no memories, good or bad, were stirred by this witching passage through a place he’d once called home. To him, it was just another faceless town.

Buck Calder had mailed him a map of how to get to the Hicks house, where he was going to be based, but Lovelace didn’t need it. He remembered the route well enough. It would take him past his father’s old house on the river. And he wondered, as he headed out that way, whether he would feel anything when he saw it.

He had told Calder he would be arriving late and there was no need for anyone to wait up for him. With jobs like this, it was best to come unseen and stay unseen. That was why he had waited for the hunting season to end and the mountains to clear of prying amateurs.

Once he was out of town, he turned his headlights back on, but kept them dimmed. For five miles, following the snow-rutted gravel, the only sign of life he saw was an owl, sitting on a fence post, watching him with saucered yellow eyes.

The gateway to his father’s old house was overgrown with scrub and drifted deeply with snow. Lovelace stopped the truck so that the headlights angled toward the house. If he’d turned the engine off and wound down the window, he would have been able to hear the sound of the river. But he didn’t. It was a clear night and freezing hard and his bones were too brittle.

He could see the house plainly enough through the bare branches of the cottonwoods and he could tell right away it had long been derelict. A shredded screen hung askew from the window of what was once the kitchen and a wrecked mobile home stood in the yard with its roof agape. Snow had filled the inside so that the windows looked as though they were hung with shrouds.

Lovelace knew such moments called for nostalgia. But try as he might, he couldn’t summon any. The best he could do was a mild surprise that some city-type hadn’t knocked the place down and built a fancy summer vacation house instead. He turned the steering wheel and headed on up the valley.

At last he saw the epic gateway of the Calder ranch with the steer’s skull looming above it, capped with snow and watching all who approached. A mile farther and he saw the ranch house. There were lights on above the yard and he could see cars parked and a pair of dogs running from one of the barns, then stopping when they saw him veer left and on up the road toward the Hicks place.

When he got there, he parked the trailer, as instructed, under some high trees at the back of the barns, where Calder said it couldn’t be seen, even from the air. Hicks and his wife were the only others who knew he was coming and what his business was, Calder had assured him.

He felt the blast of the freezing air as soon as he got out of the truck. It had to be fourteen or fifteen below. He pulled the flaps of his fur cap down over his ears and walked back to the trailer, past the snowmobile loaded in the bed of the pickup. The rimed crust of the snow cracked loudly under his boots. An old dog was barking inside the house.

He stopped by the trailer door and looked up at the sky. It was milky with stars, but Lovelace didn’t pay them any heed. He wanted clouds that might bring some respite from the cold and he knew there were none.

In the trailer, he lit a lamp and heated some milk on the kerosene stove. He sat on his bunk to wait, shivering and jamming his gloved hands under his arms and hugging himself. When the milk was ready, he filled his mug and warmed his hands on it and felt each hot swallow disperse without effect in the cold cave of his body.

There was a wood stove but he hadn’t the energy to get it going. The trailer was built for work, not comfort. It was like a smaller version of his trap room at home, about eighteen feet long with a narrow aisle of linoleum running from the bunk and galley at the front to a table and workbench at the rear. Instead of hanging exposed, his gear was concealed in wooden cupboards all around the trailer’s interior.

Lovelace had made and fitted them himself and he alone knew of the secret panels behind which he stored the things that could betray his true trade: the traps and snares and pots of bait and the collapsible German ‘sniper’ rifle with its screw-on silencer and laser nightscope; the radio scanner that he used for tracking collared wolves and the M44 cyanide gas ‘getters’ that exploded in their faces, which were the only concession he’d ever made to poison and which (knowing how his father would have disapproved) he rarely used. It had taken him most of a month to get everything back into working order.

He gulped the last of the milk now and felt just as cold as before. He swung his legs up onto the bunk and lay down, still wearing his coat and cap and boots and gloves, and heaped himself with his wolfskin rugs and the old log cabin quilt that Winnie had once sewn for their bed. Then he reached out and turned off the lamp.

He lay quite still and tried to distract himself from his shivering by thinking about the job that would start in the morning. It was awhile since he’d worked, but he had no doubt he could do it. Even though he was getting old, he was still as handy as some men half his age. Maybe his heart wasn’t in it, like it had been before, but then hearts were treacherous things at the best of times. At least, the work would keep him busy.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he saw how the trailer’s frosted rear window had been turned by the glow of the starlit snow into a blank screen of silver. And the wolfer lay beneath his wolfskins watching it, as though a movie were about to start, and waited for the dawn.

 

‘Shall we all join hands?’ Buck Calder said.

Everyone was seated at the long table that had been set up in the living room. Ribbons of steam curled from the giant golden turkey that held pride of place, amid a multitude of other dishes, at its center. Helen turned to Luke, who was sitting beside her, and held out her hand. He smiled and took it in his and they lowered their heads for his father to say grace. For a moment, the only sound was the crackle of the great logs that blazed on the hearth.