Wild Sorrow (6 page)

 

 

As I drove past the village plaza again on my way out, the bonfires had burned down, but a gang of men huddled around one small fire they were keeping alive. Their shadows hovered like dark spirits on the adobe wall of the pueblo behind them. The group suddenly burst into loud laughter over something one of them had said. I saw a bottle passed between two of the men, even though alcohol was forbidden on the reservation. The recipient jumped to his feet, and his silhouette—distorted in the flickering firelight—looked more like a coyote than a man. He held up the bottle as if it were a lance or a tomahawk and his strength came from its power—and he gave a whooping war cry.

Bad Wolf

I was bone tired and aching as I made the forty-five-minute drive from Tanoah Pueblo to the remote cabin west of Taos where I lived. I prayed all the way that an elk or coyote wouldn't dash in front of my car, as they were wont to do. To stay awake, I promised myself a hot shower when I got home, a warm fire in my woodstove, and then a good night's sleep.

But it was not to be.

For the third time in as many weeks, the electricity was off at my remote little abode, which was nestled against forested foothills. I rented this place, which was almost entirely off the grid. No phone, no television reception, no Internet—and though some or all of these might be available via satellite, there were not enough residents in the area to make it worth anyone's while to develop these services for so few. All this was fine with me. My first six years at the BLM, I had worked as a range rider, riding fence lines and patrolling the backcountry either on horseback or in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. I had learned to sleep out under the stars, travel light, and live next to nature for seven or eight months of the year.

But for a year and a half now, I'd been assigned as liaison to Tanoah Pueblo, which was nearly surrounded by BLM land. I had to interact with people every day, frequently show up dressed in a uniform. When the power went out at my cabin, that meant I lost kitchen and bathroom facilities because my water was drawn from a cistern by an electric pump. During the previous power outages, I had told myself that the situation was temporary, used an area in the woods behind my house as an open-air latrine, roughed it until the electricity came back on. I had hauled water in buckets for washing up and for cooking from La Petaca, the shallow, icy stream above my cabin, about an eighth of a mile away in the forest. I can cope better than most with inconveniences of this nature. But this was getting old.

Since I had not been home for two days, my cabin was so cold that it was probably a good thing there was no water in the pipes. I cleaned the ash out of the woodstove, laid a new fire, and tended it until it got going. Then I grabbed the big plastic bucket, a tube to siphon, and a little ax to break the ice, and headed up the slope toward the woods and La Petaca. Mountain ran ahead of me, eager for an outing after spending so much of the day snoozing in the back of my Jeep.

I chose a good place on one side of the stream where there was solid, high ground next to a fairly deep little pocket that trout liked to frequent during the spring and summer flows. These little recesses might have been the reason for the name of this seasonal stream.
La Petaca
meant “tobacco pouch,” probably named for the brownish water that pooled in tiny coves on the edges of the current at the center. I squatted on the cold ground and began chipping at the ice with my ax. I could hear Mountain sniffing and snorting and snapping twigs as he explored around me. As I struck the ice with my ax, I felt a throbbing ache in my shoulder where it had slammed into the gate. My head hurt both from lack of sleep and the welt from the stirrup. I pounded the ice again and again, creating a rhythmic sound with the impact:
chank, chank, chank, chank.
The cadence seemed to offer momentum to my thrusts, so that all I had to think about was keeping the beat—not how the blade was barely scoring the ice, how the ice was so thick that it wasn't breaking, how it might be that the shallow stream was frozen completely through, or even how much it hurt to strike each blow. It was only the tempo that mattered, keeping time, every crack ringing out in the night in the silent woods.

And then I stopped. The woods
were
silent. I rose to my feet. “Mountain? Mountain? Mountain!” My voice echoed against the ice. Then, stillness.

I dropped the ax on the ground and started for the last place I'd noticed the wolf rooting through the undergrowth. I called again, “Mountain? Mountain!”

Instead of the usual crashing of brush as the wolf responded to my call when he had wandered a little far, there was not a sound beyond my own breathing, and the pounding of my heart in my ears. “Mountain!”

I searched and called for the wolf for two hours. This had never happened before. Mountain might jog off after some critter, but he always returned within minutes, and never went far. There was not a sign of him anywhere. I returned to my cabin feeling like my gut had twisted over something as hard and cold as the ice over La Petaca. Fear and worry crowded my chest until I could barely breathe. With anxiety coursing through me, I forgot my fatigue and paced the floor of the one big room of my cabin, unable to sit or lie down.

It crossed my mind that the experience of spending such a cold and miserable night with a dead body may have upset Mountain almost as much as it had me. But this was so uncharacteristic of the wolf—wolves lived and traveled in packs, and I was Mountain's pack! He had never left me before, and he never wanted me to leave him, for any reason. I had lost a lot of my personal belongings to his abandonment anxiety-driven rampages in my cabin when I'd tried leaving him for short periods of time. And now he had suddenly run off without regard for where I was or how he would get back to me!

 

 

When I finally forced myself to sit down in front of the fire, I soon dozed off. The sound of the wolf scratching at the door jarred me awake instantly and I shot to my feet and raced to open the door. But Mountain was not there. I shook my head to wake up, grabbed a flashlight off the kitchen counter, and walked outside. Ten yards away, Mountain stood over something, his ears up, his tail wagging wildly with excitement.

“Mountain!” I said, moving toward him. “Mountain, I've been so worried! Where have you been? Come here.”

The wolf lowered his head and grabbed at something with his teeth. Something big.

“Hey, buddy. What have you got there?” I lowered the light from the wolf's face and shone it on the object on the ground, trying to discern what the unfamiliar shape could be. This thing was coated in dirt, matted with bits of duff and tiny twigs and thorns, brown and white, almost as large as Mountain, but flatter. Wide at one end, and narrowing to . . .
a hoof!
It was the leg, the entire hindquarter of a cow.

While this last registered, I heard the distant sound of a car engine. Then headlights shone like two eyes looking at us from afar, as the vehicle turned down my long dirt road, a drive leading only to my cabin. Mountain and I turned our heads in unison and watched the car approach.

There is at least one good thing, and probably more, about having a forest ranger boyfriend who works evenings and frequently stops by your cabin after he gets off work, often very late at night. Kerry got out of the truck and came to see what was illuminated in his headlamps. “He must have dragged that thing from wherever he got it. It probably weighs well over a hundred pounds, at least. Good-sized calf or mature beef, I would guess,” he said.

Mountain delighted in the attention his captured prize was attracting, and he pranced around the carrion, sniffing it and nudging it with his nose, as if to dare it to move.

I shook my head. “But where did he get it? He couldn't bring down a cow by himself. He wouldn't.”

“It doesn't seem likely. For one thing, have you ever seen Mountain hunt?”

“Mice, sometimes, in a field or when we're hiking.”

“Okay, so he's no hunter.”

“He likes to play with coyotes and run around with them.”

“Yeah, but that's play. He's not hungry enough to want to hunt.”

“Not unless it's something like a mouse—something that stimulates him with fun and excitement.”

“Well—fun and exciting—that's not a cow. Probably the animal got sick and died. Or coyotes took it down if it was hurt or slow. Even coyotes wouldn't be likely to take down a healthy steer.” Kerry bent down to give the remains a closer look. He waved a hand over it, scooping air toward his face, sniffing for signs of decay, then probed at it with a finger. “No, this cow didn't die tonight. It's been dead long enough for this meat to be frozen. It could have happened recently, since it's been freezing for days, just not in the past few hours.”

The wolf wagged his tail and grabbed hold of a flap of hide on the thing. Tugging and jerking, he dragged it a foot or two, working hard to pull the heavy weight across the ground.

“It must have taken a ton of effort for him to drag that here,” I said.

With Kerry's help, I got a lead on Mountain and forced him to leave his prize and come in the cabin. Once we got the wolf inside, Kerry gave me a hug. “I can't stay. I just stopped by to tell you that I have training the next few days in Albuquerque,” he said. “I'll be back late on Friday night.”

“I've got the weekend off,” I hinted, smiling.

“I'll come see you on Saturday, then.”

“I'll miss you,” I said, meaning it.

“I'll miss you, too, babe.” He reached down and gave Mountain's ears a tousle, but the wolf was too obsessed by the thought of the bovine booty outside. While I held Mountain by the collar, barely containing him as he struggled to escape, Kerry went out the door to put the carcass in the back of his truck and haul it away.

I tried to distract him, but Mountain was not fooled. He stood at the window looking out as if he could actually see from the light into the darkness, and he yipped and howled and paced from the window to the door for nearly twenty minutes. I tried to get him to come to me, and I even got down on the floor, prepared to snuggle him and sing to him, which was usually a comfort for both of us. I knew he was tired. He had to be tired. I was tired.

But the wolf was angry, and he pulled up in the corner farthest from me and lay down on the floor, his back to me. Within minutes, he curled into a wolf donut, his nose tucked under the thick fur of his tail, and went to sleep.

What It Means to Be Hungry

When I left my cabin in the morning, I drove to the first place where I could get cell phone coverage. I pulled over in my Jeep to call the power company on the new and unfamiliar device that I had decided to call “Screech Owl” because of its insistent, shrill ring. The receptionist left me on hold for a near-eternity, then transferred me to a voice-mail message system. I left a report that my power was out, the cell phone number, and a description of the location of my cabin. In northern New Mexico, there are still plenty of places without addresses. In fact, they haven't entirely sorted out who owns all the land because of a complex tier of Spanish land grants that began in the 1500s. These grants have been redrawn and rewritten every time the territory of Nuevo México changed hands—and when it became a state, the mess got worse. It has created some complex real estate laws, and a few interesting loopholes as well. When a squatter started up an illegal homestead in an inaccessible place along the Rio Grande, he managed to evade legal action for so long that the BLM just let him have the place. His address became “Brown Trailer, Agua Azuela, NM,” because there were no roads on that side of the river to use for an address. When you go to someone's house for the first time, your instructions might be, “Take the road by the house with seven windows, follow it to the big willow, and turn up the hill toward the bottle house,” because there are so many roads without names, and so many distinctive houses built without codes or covenants. My mailing address was a home carrier route number, followed by the number on a metal box at a unit of postal boxes up by the highway, over three miles away from my cabin. If anyone around there referred to my place, it was usually “that old cabin up near La Petaca.”

 

 

I left Mountain in the back of the Jeep when I went to the governor's office at Tanoah Pueblo. A tall man stood in front of a counter that nearly spanned the tiny entry room. He was wearing a tan blanket with pale mauve stripes, his long silver hair loosely plaited into two thick braids. He studied me before speaking. “May I help you?”

“I'm Jamaica Wild with the Bureau of Land Management. I'm liaison to the pueblo. I came to ask about setting a meat lure and some traps on Tanoah land in order to capture a wounded mountain lion and her cubs.”

The man drew up his chin and narrowed his eyes. “I cannot make any decision for the tribe, miss. I am just here for tourist.”

I looked out the open door at the empty, snow-patched, dirt plaza, the seldom-used aspen-log hide-drying racks, the closed blue and turquoise doors of the apartments in the mammoth adobe structure. “Do you have many tourists this time of year?”

“No,” the man said. “That is why they ask me to be here for this time. I am not good at talking much.” He broke into a wide smile. “I have seen you before.”

“You have? I don't remember you, I'm sorry. I'd like to know your name.” I was careful not to
ask
for his name, as the Tanoah looked upon a question as a demand for information. The tribe spoke Tiwa, and their native tongue contained no direct way to say
no.
Instead of learning to speak against things, they had developed a complex and subtle system of civilities that made them a generally peaceful people. I had learned that their language was the strong seam that held the fabric of their culture together.