The Loop

by Nicholas Evans

  In his scheming, he’d remembered an old trapper who, a long time ago, used to live up on the Hope River. One of those legendary fellows you never came across nowadays. Buck’s father used to hire him whenever they had varmint trouble, usually coyotes, but sometimes a mountain lion or a grizzly that was hanging around.

  Buck recalled the guy having a son in the same line of business. But try as he might, he couldn’t remember the name.

  Then, two nights ago, over a beer in The Last Resort, he’d casually asked old Ned Wainwright, who was ninety if he was a day, if he could remember it.

  ‘Lovelace. Josh Lovelace. Passed away, hell, must be twenty, thirty years ago.’

  ‘There was a son too, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Uh-huh. J.J. Moved down Big Timber way. Old Josh went there too when he got too old to cope. That’s where they buried him.’

  ‘Does the son still live there?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Must be knocking on a little himself.’

  ‘What’re you talking about, Buck Calder? He’s a good twenty years younger than I am. Barely out of diapers.’

  The old man laughed wheezily and started to cough. Buck bought him another beer then saw him safely home.

  He’d found a J.J. Lovelace in the phone book and had called several times. There was never a reply. So, with the address in his pocket, Buck had decided to stop by on the way back from Billings and see if he could find him.

  Driving in his black mood toward a black horizon, he saw the sign for Big Timber looming ahead. He indicated right and pulled off the interstate.

  He stopped at a gas station and asked the kid behind the counter for directions. Ten minutes later, his truck and trailer were bouncing through the potholes of a winding dirt road.

  It was getting dark and starting to spot with rain. After about three miles, the road passed through a grove of cottonwoods, whose last leaves whipped yellow in the wind. Beyond, his headlights found a rusty green mailbox that said ‘Lovelace’.

  The driveway looked too treacherous for his trailer, so he parked and, hoisting his coat collar against the rain and the wind, set off on foot.

  The rutted track rose steeply along one side of a coulee whose tumbling water Buck could only hear, for it was masked by a thick scrub of willow. After about half a mile he saw above him a low wooden house, set among trees on the shoulder of a hill. There was a light on inside. Parked nearby under the trees was a trailer, the kind you could live in. It was silver and had rounded ends that made it look somehow sinister, like an alien spaceship.

  He expected dogs to bark. But the only sound, as he climbed toward the house, was the wind and the tap of the rain on his hat.

  There were no drapes on the windows of the house and Buck could see the light was coming from a single bulb that hung above the kitchen table. There was no sign of life in there, nor in the trailer. He went to the kitchen door and knocked. While he waited for an answer, he turned casually around - and nearly had a heart attack.

  He was looking right down the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun.

  ‘Jesus!’

  The man at the other end of it was wearing a long black parka with the hood turned up. In the shadow of the hood Buck could make out a bony, graybearded face and hostile black eyes. To clear up any doubts about his identity, all he’d need to do was swap his shotgun for a scythe.

  ‘Mr Lovelace?’

  The man didn’t admit or deny it, just let Buck hang there.

  ‘Hey, I’m real sorry just dropping by unannounced like this, but I was worried my trailer might not make it up the driveway.’

  ‘You’re blocking the lane down there.’

  ‘Am I? I’m sorry. I’ll go move it.’

  ‘You’re not going anyplace.’

  ‘Mr Lovelace, my name’s Buck Calder, from Hope.’

  He thought of offering his hand but decided against. The mad monk might think he was grabbing for the gun.

  ‘Your daddy, Joshua, used to do some work for my daddy when I was a kid. In fact, I’m sure you and I must have met, but a long time ago.’

  ‘You’re Henry Calder’s boy?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I am.’

  This seemed to make some impression. Lovelace, assuming that’s who it was, lowered the gun a little. It was now pointing at Buck’s groin.

  ‘Your daddy’s something of a legend in our parts,’ Buck said.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Well, I understand you’re in the same line of business as your father was. Or used to be.’

  Lovelace said nothing.

  ‘And, well . . .’ Buck glanced down at the gun. ‘Mr Lovelace, do you think maybe you might adjust your line of fire there a little?’

  Lovelace looked at him for a moment, as if considering whether Buck was worth the price of a shotgun shell. Then he whisked the barrel in the air, clicked the safety on and strode past into the house. He left the door ajar behind him and Buck waited outside for a moment, wondering if this added up to an invitation to follow him.

  He decided it did.

  Lovelace put the gun down on the table and pushed back the hood from his head. The house was cold, so he kept his coat on. Since Winnie died he could never be bothered to light the stove in the living room. He headed through the house to his trap room at the back and heard Calder following him.

  The trap room was really no more than a garage but nowadays that was where he spent most of his time. He’d rigged up a little electric fire and even slept there at night, on a mattress he’d hauled in from the trailer. Not that he slept much. It was more a matter of lying there, waiting for the dawn. He knew it was crazy and that he ought to get used to using the bedroom again without Winnie, but he couldn’t bring himself to do in

  The bedroom, the kitchen, the whole house were empty without her and yet somehow filled with her presence. He’d tried hiding most of her things away, but it wasn’t any use. Everything, even the spaces they left, reminded him of her. It was safer to stay out here in the back room, which had always been his territory and not hers. She used to refuse to come in here, saying it smelled too awful, of trapping bait and dead animals, which he supposed it did, though he himself couldn’t smell it. He noticed that this Calder fellow could though and was trying not to look bothered.

  Lovelace sat down on the camp stool by the fire, dragged the plastic pail with the deer head in it between his legs and got back to work. He’d been half-done skinning it out when he’d heard Calder’s truck slow and stop down in the lane. Not bad, he thought, for an old buzzard of sixty-nine, hearing that.

  While he got on with the deer head, Calder told him about the wolf trouble they’d been having up in Hope. There wasn’t another chair, so he’d propped his backside against the workbench that ran the length of one wall. As he talked, his eyes kept roaming the room, looking at the walls and the wooden beams of the roof, all festooned with traps and wires and snares and the skins and skulls of animals.

  Lovelace remembered the man’s father, Henry Calder. His own father used to call him ‘King Henry’ and joke about how high and mighty he was. Lovelace could remember helping out up at the Calder place one summer back in the early fifties, when the buffaloberries high in the forest had failed and the grizzlies were coming down, sniffing around the cows. He and his father had trapped three adults and shot four or five cubs.

  He had no recollection of meeting this man yacking away at him here, but then, back in the fifties, Buck Calder would only have been a kid and by that time anyhow Lovelace was mostly working away from home, in Mexico and Canada. In fifty-six he’d married Winnie and moved to Big Timber and after that he’d rarely visited Hope.

  ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘Killing wolves is against the law.’

  Calder smiled knowingly and leaned back, folding his arms. There was something smug about him which Lovelace didn’t care for.

  ‘Who’s going to know?’

  ‘They’ll be watching them
like hawks.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Calder winked and grinned. ‘But you’d have inside information.’

  He paused for a reaction but Lovelace wasn’t going to play games. He waited to be told.

  ‘My boy’s helping this biologist woman out. He knows where the wolves are, what they’re doing, the whole deal.’

  ‘Sounds like you don’t need no help then.’

  ‘No, except the boy sees things more their way than mine.’

  ‘So how come he’s going to part with the information?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll find some way of getting it.’

  The deer head was almost skinned out. Lovelace put his knife down and carefully peeled the skin like a mask from the raw pink face.

  ‘I see you’re quite a taxidermist too,’ Calder said. ‘We hunt a fair bit. Do you do it for other people?’

  ‘Only for friends.’

  It wasn’t true. The only friends they’d ever had were Winnie’s. None of them had called in months. Not that he cared.

  ‘So, Mr Lovelace. What do you say?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Will you help us out? You can name your price.’

  Lovelace stood up and picked up the pail. He took it over to the stainless-steel sink at the other end of the workbench and poured the blood away. He cleaned the knives while he thought it over.

  It was three years since he’d last done a black job, killed illegal wolves. Two years since he’d last killed legal ones, up in Alberta. After nagging him for ages to retire, Winnie had at last persuaded him. And then, just when he was getting used to it, even starting to enjoy it, six months ago, she’d gone and gotten cancer. Found her little frame was riddled with it. Within three weeks she was dead.

  The truth was, he now needed to keep himself busy. This was the first offer of work he’d had since the funeral. The traps hanging from the rafters were covered in rust. But he could soon fix that.

  He dried the knives and swilled the blood from the sink. ‘What’s that wire thing over there, with all those little bits of metal on it?’ Calder said. ‘If you don’t mind my asking.’

  He was pointing to the far wall, above the freezers, where Lovelace hung his drag chains and hooks and coils of steel wire.

  ‘For catching pups. My father’s idea. He called it the Loop.’

  23

  The fatherless pups of Hope were nearly five months old. Slim and lanky, their fur burgeoning with winter growth, they were only slightly smaller than the three older wolves. Most had lost their milk teeth now and though they still hung back in the hunt and had much to learn in the ways of the wild, every day saw them bolder and shrewder.

  Each by now had his or her own ranking in the pack and, at play or in earnest, at rest or at the carcass of a kill, the weaker readily deferred. They would pin back their ears and tuck their tails away and grovel, licking and nipping at the jaws of any stronger sibling who stood, assertive and bushy-tailed, above them.

  With their father, the alpha cattle-slayer, dead, it was to their mother that they and the two young adults now looked for leadership. Heedless of the collar on her neck, it was she alone now who roused them from their lazy afternoon rests and mustered them for the hunt. It was she who led them in sinewed file through the autumn gloam of the forest, who stopped to sniff the cold night air for the waft of prey, who chose which lesser life to spare and which to take.

  Only the younger female had assisted her father in the killing of calves, though the others had all, at times, shared the spoils. She had been with him that night, when the bullet had ripped out his heart. She had fled in terror and seemed content now to follow her mother’s choosing.

  And her mother chose, through fear or innate inclination, to keep away from where the humans had herded their dim-witted beasts, and to prey instead upon the elk and deer who were drifting down to their winter range, distracted in their mating. The bull elk battled mightily for their harems and the mountains echoed to their bugling and the click and clack of their antlers.

  The wolves weren’t alone in their hunting, however.

  Human predators too were abroad. For a month now, men in mottled green and brown and faces smudged with dirt had stalked the canyons with bows and razored arrows. They left piles of guts which the wolves would sometimes eat when they had failed, as often they did, to kill for themselves.

  Soon, more men, dressed in vivid orange, would come with guns. Some would cruise the forest roads in their cars, shooting from the window whatever strayed within range. The more romantic would soak themselves with deer gland scent or, like sirens of the forest, fake mating calls to lure the lustful into the crosshairs of their scopes.

  For a month the world would be a frenzy of coupling and killing, while life was seeded in hot abandon and reaped in cold blood.

  The two hunters trudged up the trail. They weren’t talking and the only sound was the squelch of their rubber boots in the mud. Above them, a steep bank of Douglas fir disappeared into the blanket of damp, autumn mist that had filled the canyon since dawn.

  They were wearing full combat gear and had automatic pistols and long, semi-serrated knives on their belts. Both were carrying backpacks and their magnum rifles were slung over their shoulders. The general hunting season started tomorrow and these two clearly didn’t want to miss a minute of it. They were probably going to camp somewhere and be out stalking before dawn.

  Helen sat in the passenger seat of the Toyota, idly stroking Buzz’s sleeping head on her lap and watching the hunters in the wing mirror as they drew closer.

  She and Luke had seen others like them earlier. One, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, had asked what they were trapping and when Helen told him, gave her a wild-eyed tirade about how wolves were going to wipe out all the deer and elk that belonged by right to hunters like him. Something in his eyes made Helen think of the young soldiers Joel had described in his letter.

  She saw Luke now, coming down through the trees above the trail, with the traps he’d just gone to collect slung over his shoulder. They had to collect them all; it wouldn’t be good for business if a hunter stepped into one, though seeing these two approaching now, Helen didn’t find the idea wholly unappealing.

  Luke stepped down onto the trail just as the hunters came alongside. Buzz suddenly heard them and sat up barking and growling. Helen hushed him and rolled down the window.

  The hunters were eying the traps that Luke was dumping, along with the others already collected, in the bed of the pickup. Helen thought she recognized one of them from the wolf meeting. As they walked by, she smiled and said hi. He made a minimal, unsmiling response. A little farther on, the other one muttered something that Helen couldn’t make out and the first one glanced back over his shoulder. Then both of them started to laugh. Luke was climbing into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Rambo morons,’ she said.

  Luke smiled. He started the engine.

  ‘D-did you never hunt?’

  ‘No. But I know plenty of good biologists who do. Dan Prior for one. He used to be a big hunter. We’d have these endless arguments about it when we worked together in Minnesota.’

  They were driving past the hunters now. Helen smiled sweetly at them again. Buzz growled.

  ‘Dan used to say, man’s a predator and needs to stay in touch with that. He’d say our problem as a species is that we’ve gotten detached from our true nature. And half of me thinks, okay, I’ll buy that, and the other half thinks it’s just one helluva good excuse for a whole lot of boys’ stuff. Like, “We’re natural-born killers, so, hey guys, let’s go kill!” The truth is, I’m a lousy shot.’

  Luke laughed.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘You don’t hunt?’

  ‘Once. When I was thirteen.’

  Helen could tell from the way his face suddenly changed that she’d touched on something.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

  ‘No, it’s o-k-kay.’

  She listened whi
le he told her about shooting the elk, of finding it wounded in the tree and how his father had forced him to help butcher it. Luke kept his eyes carefully on the road as he talked and Helen watched him over Buzz’s head, picturing what he told her.

  Since that cold morning when he had found her lying wet and filthy in her cabin bed, there was a closeness between them unlike any friendship she’d ever known. Without him, she knew, she would not have survived.

  While she clawed her way out of the pit, a little higher each day, he had taken care of her, making sure she ate and slept and kept warm. He would leave her last thing at night, turning off the lanterns and stoking up the stove, and he would be there again at dawn to let Buzz out and make her coffee.

  For the first few days Helen had barely been able to speak. She had been in a kind of waking coma. Instead of panicking or pestering her with questions, he had quietly looked after her, as if she were a wounded animal. As if he understood what had happened without needing to be told.

  Only later did he mention that his father had said it was okay for him to help her with the wolves, if she wanted him to. And while she lay in the cabin, or sat outside in the pale sunshine, huddled and blanketed like an invalid, he got to work, checking the traps and tracking the signals of the collared wolves.

  In the evenings, when he came back to the cabin, he would give her his notes and, while he cooked her supper, tell her all he had seen and done. Through the mists of her own misfortune, she saw he was in his element.

  At times now, his stutter seemed to have vanished, returning only when he talked about his father or got excited. Such as on the morning he had come racing back to tell her there was a wolf in one of the traps.

  ‘You’ve g-g-got to come.’

  ‘Luke, I can’t—’

  ‘You’ve g-got to. I don’t know w-what to do.’

  He made her get dressed and gather her gear, then he’d driven her in the Toyota up to a narrow canyon, high above the Millward ranch, where the wolves seemed to be spending a lot of time lately. He drove so fast along the narrow logging trails, she sometimes had to close her eyes.