Widowmaker (30 page)

Phyllis Murray had to shout to be heard above the animals. “We had to separate him from the other dogs. They're terrified of him.”

There was a vacant kennel between Shadow and his nearest neighbor, a shivering gray mutt who looked like he was still too close to the wild animal down the lane. The black wolf dog stood in the back of his cage. He didn't approach, make a sound, wag his tail, or signal in any way that he acknowledged us. At a glance, you might have mistaken him for a stuffed animal in a museum diorama—until you stared into those eerie gold eyes.

“Isn't he, like, the most awesome thing you ever seen?” said Kendall.

“He's magnificent,” said Phyllis Murray.

“How often do you let him outside?” I asked.

“We don't.”

“Why not?”

“He found a spot along the bottom where the cage had broken loose of the concrete and started to attack it,” Phyllis Murray said. “I didn't even know there was a hole there. He almost got out.”

I crossed my arms and stared deeper into the wolf dog's uncanny eyes. To make eye contact with a predator is usually a prelude to a fight, but Shadow and I were still sizing each other up.

“Do you have some protective gloves you can put on?” Kendall asked. “We have some you can use.”

“I won't need them,” I said.

The schoolmarmish Phyllis Murray replied, “Yes, you do.”

“He knows I'm his friend.”

“Friendly dogs can tear your arm off under certain circumstances. You need to put on the gloves.”

She disappeared into the adjoining room and returned with heavily armored gloves that extended past the elbow. I put them on.

I squatted down beside the carrier. “Hey, Shadow.”

His eyes bored into mine. If this was going to be a challenge, would it be better for me to assert myself as an alpha? Or should I accept the role of a harmless beta to lure him close? With domestic dogs, you always want to show them who is boss. With wolf hybrids, I had absolutely no clue.

“OK, Kendall,” I said. “You can open the door.”

For protection, the two women kept the chain-link door between the wolf dog and themselves.

I held my breath.

None of us moved for the longest time.

And then, without further enticement, Shadow trotted forward. He ducked his head and stepped into the plastic carrier as if he'd been trained to do it. He was such a big animal, he barely fit when I closed the gate behind his tail. In the cramped box, he was going to have trouble turning around on our long journey up into the mountains.

“He really does know you're his friend,” said Kendall, amazed.

“Here,” said Phyllis Murray, taking a handle. “Let me help you with that.”

The woman was remarkably strong. The two of us lugged the heavy crate through the series of rooms and outdoors without having to pause to rest.

“I'll take it from here,” I said.

“You'll throw out your back,” said Phyllis Murray.

I squatted down so that I would be using my leg muscles, and then I grabbed the two handles and pushed hard against the ground. It was like deadlifting a hundred-pound barbell. Getting the carrier onto the truck gate took everything I had, and I knew I was going to be stiff for days afterward. The wolf dog growled and flicked his tail. I crawled into the bed of the pickup and pushed the box until it was right behind the cab, out of the wind. Then I tied the kennel tight with bungees to the frame of the truck.

“Call us, please, when you get there,” said Phyllis.

“I will.”

“It means everything to us to know they're safe.”

I hadn't driven three miles when the phone buzzed. It was Kathy.

“You're in luck,” she said. “The sanctuary is going to take your wolf dog. The guy I spoke with sounds like a character. He made me promise to make a donation to his cause in exchange for taking the animal on short notice. I hope you brought cash, because I don't think he takes credit cards.”

“That is awesome,” I said, chuckling. “But I wish you'd called me half an hour ago.”

“What did you just do, Grasshopper?”

“My good deed for the day.”

 

29

After I had crossed into New Hampshire, I stopped at a rest area to get my bearings.

The Fenris Unchained Wolf Refuge had a Web page that looked as if it had been built in 1990 and not updated since. I recognized the name Fenris as belonging to a monstrous wolf out of Norse mythology. The site consisted mainly of pixelated photos of wolf dogs inside a border of Nordic runes with a flashing button to click if you wished to make a donation. No driving directions were given—the refuge didn't welcome drop-in visitors—but Kathy had gotten route information from the guy who ran the place. His name, she'd told me, was Dale Probert.

By my rough calculation, I guessed it would take an hour to get there, allowing for traffic. I checked on Shadow, who had somehow found a way to lie down in the tight carrier. He sniffed my hand, then went back to sleep.

I decided I had better get moving if I wanted to be home before nightfall.

The summit of Mount Washington was hidden in clouds of its own making. It was the tallest mountain in New England. Even more noteworthy, the highest winds ever measured on the planet, 231 miles per hour, had been recorded at the weather station at the top.

Mount Washington was a killer and not to be underestimated. I remembered the time when my college friends and I had gone backcountry skiing down the face of Tuckerman's Ravine. All of the sensations I had felt that glorious April day came back in a rush: the burning in my quads as I trudged up the ridge, carrying my skis over my shoulder; the surprising warmth of the spring sun on my face; the moment of stomach-dropping fear at the top; and then the burst of adrenaline as I pushed off into space. Skiing had always made me feel so alive, even more so because it had never come easily to me.

Maybe when Stacey visited again we could try it, but when would that be? Not until after the funerals. I'd had more brushes with death than any man my age should have, but I had never lost three close friends in a single day.

I stopped at a market in the failing mill town of Berlin and got an Italian sandwich, a bag of salt and vinegar chips, and a jug of water. At the meat counter in back, I bought a package of stew beef for Shadow. I had a feeling that the stomachs of near wolves were not well adapted to digesting kibble made from soybeans and corn.

I pressed the chunks of beef one by one through the metal gate. He took them gently, as if not wanting to nip my fingers with his fangs. He even held his mouth open while I poured water from the jug into his throat. This was, indeed, one of the smartest animals I had ever seen.

Kathy had told me to turn east off Route 16, cross the Androscoggin River, and then head up the backside of the Mahoosuc Range. As I climbed out of the valley floodplain, I found that the roads grew worse and worse with every passing mile. Eventually, I couldn't see the paving beneath the compacted layer of snow. Kathy had told me to watch for a signpost. When I passed a weathered rail carved with Viking runes sticking up out of a snowbank, I felt confident I was on the right path.

The woods around me were mostly young evergreens with an understory of poplars and willows. The trees had been cut hard a couple of decades earlier, which might have explained how Dale Probert had gotten the acreage cheap. Few buyers viewed clear-cut hillsides as investment opportunities. I checked my cell phone and saw a
NO SERVICE
message. I had entered the geographical middle of nowhere.

I reached for my pager and clipped it to my belt.

The road evened out along a ridgetop, but I found my eyes rising above the ragged skyline. Up high, in the distance, circled dozens and dozens of black birds. They were not crows. They were ravens, recognizable by their shaggy throats and wedge-shaped tails. Their calls carried across the winter landscape: a chorus of croaks, rasps, chortles, and knocks.

I rolled down my window to listen, and that was when I heard the wolves.

In my life, I had heard hundreds of coyotes and even more dogs, but never anything like this except in television shows. Wolves had been extirpated from the Northeast more than a century ago. Never in my life had I expected to hear them howling in the wild mountains of New England.

I wished Stacey could have been here to share the moment with me.

Suddenly, Shadow started howling as well. Which only excited the others even more. A few ravens peeled off from the others to have a look at us.

I spun my tires, I was in such a hurry to see what was ahead.

When I finally crested the last hill, the scene that greeted me could not have been further from my romantic imaginings. The refuge was located at the bottom of a basin between clear-cut hillsides. It seemed to consist of a rusting mobile home, a handful of weathered sheds, and a checkerboard of wire-fenced pens. Each scrubby enclosure housed a handful of wolflike dogs of various shapes, sizes, and colors.

As I rode the brake down the hill, a skinny old man emerged from inside the trailer.

I climbed out of the truck and raised my arm. “You must be Mr. Probert.”

“And you must be the warden with the wolf.” His voice was harsh as a raven's, little more than a rasp.

He was wearing a leather hat, glasses that darkened in the sun, and a sweatshirt with a wolf airbrushed on the front. His slim-cut jeans only made his long legs look thinner. Cigarette smoke trailed from the butt clutched between his fingers.

I introduced myself and we shook hands. Probert's face appeared even more gaunt, with just the thinnest layer of skin covering the bones. If I were to come upon his skeleton sometime in the future, I felt that I would be able to recognize him from his skull alone.

“Well, let's have a look at him,” he said.

I moved around to the back of the truck and leaped into the bed.

Probert peered over the side. “High-content animal,” he said, expelling smoke with every word. “Ninety percent or so, I would estimate. What's this handsome fellow's name?”

“The people who had him last called him Shadow.”

“That won't do,” said Probert. “An alpha like this deserves a kingly name.”

“How do you know he's an alpha male?”

“You see the fierceness in those eyes?” When he spoke, the skeletal man used his cigarette as a prop, waving it in the air for emphasis, pointing the orange tip to draw attention. “I'll tell you right now, if I were to let him loose in one of my pens with another alpha, there'd be a dead wolf in five minutes. What is his history? How did he come to be in your possession?”

“A couple of drug dealers got him from another drug dealer, who got him from who knows where,” I said. “But there's a tattoo on his belly saying he came from Montana originally. No one knows how he got to Maine.”

“I am sure it was an odyssey,” he said. “But he looks healthy enough, and your lady friend said he's been neutered and vaccinated. She is quite the pistol, your lady friend. I'd hoped she might be coming with you.”

“This is quite an operation you've got,” I said, surveying the acres of fenced pens.

I still couldn't get over the howls I was hearing, or the aerial show overhead. To think that the ancient partnership between wolves and ravens, long gone from this part of the world, had re-formed here was nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Probert led the way. “Come on, I'll show you around.”

We followed a dirty, trampled path to the first chain-link enclosure, where a couple of animals that looked more like German shepherds than wolves rushed forward, wagging their tails. The snow inside was grooved from the trails the animals had made, littered with chewed bones, and stained with urine. The fence looked to be about twelve feet high, but the unshoveled snowbank on the opposite side provided a natural ramp. It wouldn't be hard at all for one of them to escape, I thought worriedly.

“Good day, ladies.” Probert extended his long fingers to be licked.

I judged the pen to be about an acre in size, maybe an acre and a half, with an island of short firs in the center. From the depths of the evergreens, a third wolf dog peered at us. It had the recognizable long legs and snout of the wilder mixes.

“That's Macduff,” said my guide. “He's a little shy. Bad story there. Terrible abuse and neglect. The people who had him in Pennsylvania never changed his collar, and so as he grew, it began to strangulate him. Amazing that he even made it here. Macduff has the distinction of being the only one of my brothers and sisters to bite me. It happened as I removed him from his crate, and no, I haven't yet become a werewolf.”

Brothers and sisters?
I wasn't so sure Probert didn't howl at the moon occasionally.

The wolves had grown louder since I had arrived. The arrival of the newcomer, Shadow, was causing a commotion.

“How many animals do you have here?” I asked above the howls.

“Thirty-seven at the moment. Housed in six pens. Each is a perfect pack structure, with an alpha and beta pair running the show. The way of the wolf.”

“And you run this entire refuge yourself?”

“My apprentice, Kara, is off on a ‘meat run,' as we call it. A slaughterhouse generously gives us its scraps. Wolves prefer the company of females to males. They associate our sex with death and danger, I have come to believe. And with good cause.”

“They seem to like you.”

“That's because I have taken the time to learn their language. Wolves communicate in all manner of ways, from their posture to their facial expressions. Their vocalizations are more nuanced than they might seem to the untrained ear, more complex than that of dogs. What you hear as yips and yaps, I hear as full sentences. But if you really want to see into the soul of a wolf, you need to look into its eyes.”

Dale Probert and Don Foss couldn't have been any more different physically, and yet they both shared an inflated sense of self-importance and a mannered way of speaking, as if they had attended the same preschool eons ago. But whereas I had doubts about Foss's motives, it was clear Probert sincerely cared for his wolves. As run-down as this refuge might appear, he seemed to be doing his best to create a true sanctuary. Unlike Pariahville, this was a place of protection and caring, not exile and exploitation.