The Loop (54 page)

And then it happened.

It was Doug Millward who heard it first. The photo session was over and he was coming in from the other corral, behind the bride and groom, when Eleanor saw him stop and turn to gaze up toward the pasture. He was frowning and asked those around him to hush and it took awhile for the word to get around and for someone to tell Elmer to quit playing his fiddle. But when he did, and everyone was quiet, you could hear it, quite plainly on the breeze.

The bellowing scream of cattle in distress.

 

The night was clear and crisp and a three-quarter moon threw their shadows down the slope as they loaded their gear into the pickup. They were wrapped up warm and though neither of them was hungry after their lunchtime blowout with Dan, they had made sandwiches and a flask of coffee for later.

Luke said he was going to stay down at the clearcut all night if necessary. It was twenty-three days since the alpha female had denned and he was convinced that tonight they would get to see the pups.

Buzz still hadn’t got the message that he didn’t come on these vigils and Helen had to get him out of the pickup and haul him by the collar back to the cabin. She was just locking the door when she saw the beam of headlights angling up through the trees.

It was an unusual time for anyone to come calling and since her truck had been defaced, she was wary of visitors. She went back and stood beside Luke and they both waited in silence to see who it was.

The car was traveling fast, the headlights jagging as it came over the bumps and furrows of dried winter mud. Neither of them recognized the car and only when it came right up to them and stopped did Helen recognize Ruth Michaels at the wheel and Luke’s mother beside her. They both got out and Helen knew, even before they spoke, that something was wrong.

‘Mom?’ Luke said, going to her. ‘What’s going on?’

‘The wolves have killed some of Doug Millward’s calves. Your father shot them.’

‘Shot the wolves?’

‘Two of them. He just grabbed a gun from one of Doug’s ranch hands and shot them both. Doug tried to stop him but he wouldn’t listen. And now he’s getting a whole crowd together and they’re going up to the den to kill the rest of them.’

‘They know where the den is?’ Helen said.

‘Clyde says it’s up above the Townsend place.’

‘They’ve gone down to The Last Resort to pick up the Hardings and some of Clyde’s logger pals,’ Ruth said. ‘Then everybody’s heading up there. They’ll all have had a few drinks.’

Luke was shaking his head in disbelief. Helen tried to think.

‘I’ll call Dan.’

She grabbed a flashlight and ran to the cabin. She snatched up the cell phone and punched in the number. She waited, hissing curses that it was taking so long to connect.

Luke’s mother and Ruth were standing in the doorway now and Luke was lighting a lantern. Eleanor’s eyes roamed the cabin. It was the first time she’d seen her son’s new home. Then Helen realized that all this time on the phone she had been listening to total silence.

‘Shit!’ She slammed it down.

‘It still hasn’t re-ch-charged?’

‘No. Shit!’ She thought for a moment.

‘Luke, you go down to the clearcut with your mom and Ruth and try and talk some sense into them. I’ll go try and get the pups out.’

‘Helen, these guys are pretty fired up,’ Ruth said.

‘He w-won’t listen to us anyway.’

‘Then block the road. Do anything. Just stall them, try and buy some time.’

‘Helen, you’re the only one they might listen to,’ Eleanor said.

‘I’ll g-get the pups out.’

‘You’ve never done it before. You have to crawl right down into the den. With the mother down there, it can be dangerous.’

‘I’ll manage.’

‘Luke, come on—’

‘Helen, I can do it!’

She hesitated. He was probably right.

‘C-come on, let’s go!’

‘You’ll need something to carry them in. Those bags of yours, the canvas ones.’

Luke ran across the cabin, hauled them out from under the bunk and started emptying them.

‘Ruth, we need to get hold of Dan. Could you go into town and call him?’

‘Sure.’

Helen scribbled his home number on a piece of paper and handed it to her.

‘Call the police too, the Forest Service emergency line, anyone you can think of. Tell them we’re at the big clearcut above the Townsend ranch.’

‘You bet.’ She was off at once, running to her car.

Luke had the two empty bags. He was loading his rifle.

‘You won’t need that.’

‘No, but you might.’ He checked that the safety was on and held the rifle out for her to take.

‘No.’

‘Take it.’

She did as she was told. She picked up the chain saw, locked Buzz in the cabin and followed Luke and his mother to the cars. Ruth was already driving away. Helen dumped the gun and chain saw in the pickup and took the jabstick and another flashlight over to Luke, who was climbing into his Jeep.

‘Go down into the den slowly. And be ready, she could come right at you.’

‘I know.’

‘Keep the jabstick out in front of you. She’ll threaten you, but in the end she’ll make a break for it.’

‘Okay.’ He fired the engine and turned on the headlights.

‘Shall I bring the p-pups back here?’

Helen hadn’t thought about it. But the cabin would be the first place anyone would look.

‘Take them to Ruth’s house,’ Eleanor said.

‘Okay.’

‘And Luke?’ Helen said.

‘What?’

‘Be careful.’

He smiled and nodded then slammed the door. As he swung the car around, Helen and Eleanor climbed into Helen’s pickup. For a moment she thought it wasn’t going to start. But at the third try it did and soon she’d caught up with Luke and was following the glow of his tail-lights down through the winding corridor of trees.

‘Thank you,’ Helen said. ‘For coming to tell us.’

Without taking her eyes off Luke’s car, Eleanor reached across and gently touched her on the shoulder.

35

T
he white wolf paused in the mouth of the den while the two biggest and bravest of her pups tottered between her legs and out into the moonlit world.

The excavated earth around the den was packed solid as cement from the pacing of the two yearlings and was strewn with scat and bone shards. One of the pups tried his new teeth out on a piece but then dropped it, unimpressed. There was something near at hand that smelled better.

The mother had smelled it too, all day. Perhaps she thought it was something the yearlings had brought, though they hadn’t been back since the humans came the previous night. Perhaps the humans had left it there. She had caught their scent long before she heard their voices and she’d lain still and listened to the scuffle and tramp of their feet outside the den. She’d heard the clink of something too and could still smell it out there, mixed with the waft of fresh meat. It had the same harsh, unnatural tang as the thing that had once snapped shut on her paw.

It was a scent unknown to the two pups however. All they smelled was the meat. All day they had tried to leave the den and time and again she had stopped them and carried them back. But after so many hours of waiting in vain for the yearlings to bring food, and with six greedy mouths tugging at her teats, she was starving and at last relented.

The first of the pups staggered with great purpose toward the smell and his mother followed, nudging the other pup before her to his first proper meal. Behind her, two other pups stood in the mouth of the den, blinking at the moon.

There was a lump of pale meat and now she could smell and see others, the same, a few yards to either side. The tang she had smelled came from a line, a thing of humans, that ran between them. She hesitated, sniffed the air.

By now the pup was sniffing the meat. He nudged it with his nose and nipped it, pulling it along the ground. As he tugged, his mother saw the line move and she shied, as she might at a rattlesnake. There was danger here, she now knew. And it was no snake. In a bound she was beside the pup.

But the meat was already inside his mouth and he bit on it.

 

Luke waved as he forked down off the road and Helen, behind him, flashed her lights and kept on toward the clearcut. He left the car in its usual hiding place, took the bags and the jabstick and headed off at a run through the trees.

The going was tricky. He kept the beam of the flashlight low and ran in the pool it made. There were rocks and roots and tangles of blowdown and several times he caught a foot and fell headlong in the bushes.

He tried to work out how much time he had.

If they set out from The Last Resort, they would be coming from the north. They would use the road that ran from town due west alongside the Townsend property all the way to the forest, then turn left onto the logging road. But without knowing when they had left, it was pointless trying to calculate. All he knew was that he had to keep running.

At last, through the trees ahead of him, he saw the moonlit glow of the clearcut. He turned off the flashlight and fished in his pocket for Dan’s nightscope, while he walked to the forest’s edge. He stopped there and switched it on and just as he found focus, the wolf started to bark.

It was the alpha female. She was a few yards from the entrance to the den and barking right at him. There was a movement behind her and it took Luke a moment to realize it was the pups. They were scurrying down into the den. They were much darker than their mother and he couldn’t count how many there were. The mother was shepherding them in, but she didn’t seem to want to follow them.

When the last one had gone, she started pacing to and fro, all the while looking toward Luke and barking. Every now and again, she kept going back to the same place and lowering her nose to sniff something. Then she would lift her head and bark and now she ended each burst of barking with a howl. Luke willed her to shut up. She was telling the whole world where she was.

He put the nightscope away and stepped into the clearcut. The wolf was about fifty yards away and as he got closer, she seemed to grow less sure of herself. She kept running off a few yards, lowering her tail, and then seemed to get her courage back and turned and came back, barking and howling at him. In the moonlight, Luke could see something dark in the place that she kept returning to. And now, in a pause of her barking, he heard a whine and a whimper that he knew didn’t come from her.

As he walked the last few yards to the den, the mother ran off. She stopped about twenty yards away and stood watching him. She was suddenly silent. There was another whimper. He switched on the flashlight.

‘Oh God,’ he murmured.

 

Helen had parked the pickup across the road and hidden the keys under a rock nearby. On its own, it wasn’t much of a roadblock, but the tall Douglas fir she’d cut down in front of it with the chain saw made it better. Now she was cutting a second and the chips were showering into the beam of Eleanor’s flashlight.

In a minute she was through and she stood back and yelled for Eleanor to do the same. The tree leaned and creaked and toppled exactly where she wanted it and the forest repaired its bruised silence around them.

They were a mile and a half north of the clearcut. Helen had chosen the place for its view of the road that wound up from the valley below in a series of steep bends. Any approaching headlights would be seen a long way off. So far there were none.

Helen put the chain saw in the bed of the pickup. Eleanor handed her the flashlight.

‘Mind if I switch it off and save the batteries?’

‘No. I like the dark.’

She seemed perfectly calm and Helen wondered how she managed it. Her own heart was on a rollercoaster. The two women stood in silence for awhile beside the pickup, staring at the moon. Somewhere far above them in the forest, an owl was calling.

‘Are you warm enough?’ Helen asked.

‘I’m fine.’

‘I’d give anything for a cigarette.’

‘I used to love to smoke.’

‘Well, they say only the best kind of women smoke . . .’

‘And the worst kind of men.’

‘So if we quit, does that disqualify us?’

‘Absolutely not.’

They both laughed and then fell silent again.

‘Maybe they’re not coming,’ Helen said.

‘Oh, they’ll come.’ She frowned. ‘What is it, do you think, about these animals, that makes people hate them so much?’

‘About wolves? I don’t know. Maybe they’re too much like us. We look at them and see ourselves. Loving, caring, social creatures who also happen to be terrific killers.’

Eleanor considered this awhile.

‘Maybe it’s envy too.’

‘Of what?’

‘That they’re still part of nature and we’ve forgotten how to be.’

She seemed about to go on, when something down in the valley caught her eye.

‘Here they come,’ she said.

A pair of headlights was coming around the first bend. Helen’s heart climbed back on the rollercoaster The women stood watching while another vehicle, then another came into view. And now they could hear their engines and dogs barking. There were more trucks coming now. Five, six . . . eight in all, winding up the road in convoy.

‘Well, here we go,’ said Helen.

 

Buck hadn’t counted but he figured there were about twenty of them, including a good few he’d rather not have had along. The two Harding boys and the loggers they’d been drinking with in the bar were pretty far gone. Some had brought liquor along and he’d had to stop on the way up and tell them to quit whooping and singing or they could turn around and go home. On the other hand, there was safety in numbers. No one was going to put the whole damn town in jail.