Project Hannibal

by Kathryn Hoff

  Annie laughed. “Your mother must have been so proud.”

  Sera’s shoulders drooped. “I hope she was. That was the last time she saw me dance.”

  Annie reached out a hand. “She sees you, dear. She’s watching you from heaven.”

  “Is she?” Sera’s eyes flashed. “Father Roberts didn’t seem so sure.”

  There it was again. The quick pivot from helpful teen to angry, betrayed daughter.

  “Father Roberts is an ass,” Estelle said.

  To Annie’s startled look, she explained, “My sister died by suicide. The priest had some harsh words to say in his homily. Totally unnecessary, theologically out of date, and terribly hurtful, especially with Sera and my parents sitting right there. I cornered him afterward and gave him a piece of my mind, the old bastard.”

  “Ah.” Annie turned sympathetically to Sera. “Don’t you worry, dear. Your mother’s at peace now and watching over you. The good Lord knows a person’s heart better than any priest.”

  Sera shook her head. “The good Lord must know more than me, then. I never understood why she was so depressed. We weren’t poor. I tried to be a good daughter. Why couldn’t she ever just be happy?”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Estelle said. “Depression is an illness. She couldn’t control her feelings any more than a cancer patient can control her tumor.”

  Sera looked up, tears lining her eyes. “When I slipped down the ice today? I was never so scared in my life. I was falling for what, two seconds? Mom chose that. She didn’t just stand on the railing and let herself fall into the Mississippi. She ran to the railing. Purposefully, deliberately, even though people tried to stop her. Like she couldn’t stand to be alive one more minute. She chose to jump fifty feet into cold water, knowing she’d never come up except as a wet, disgusting corpse. How could she do that?”

  Estelle put an arm over Sera’s shoulder, at a complete loss for what to say.

  Annie said, “My baby brother killed himself.”

  Estelle looked up in shock. “I’m sorry, Annie. I didn’t know.”

  “It was a long time ago. Just out of school, he was. Got laid off, broke up with his girl. But so what? Folks get laid off all the time. He had family, a place to live. He could have worked anyplace, done anything, found another girl.”

  Sera leaned forward eagerly. “That’s the problem. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Annie smiled sadly. “You never know what’s in somebody’s heart. Even if you knew, it might not make sense to you. You just have to make peace with not knowing and trust the good Lord. He knows, and He understands. Your mother chose her time, that’s all. Like my brother chose his.”

  “She might have waited till I graduated high school,” Sera grumbled.

  “And then you’d have wanted her to wait until you were married,” Annie said. “And after that, until your babies were born. It’s never going to be the right time to lose your mother.”

  Sera sniffed. “Now there’s nobody to remember my first day of school or the time I broke my arm. I can’t ask her about my dad or what I was like as a baby.” Her gaze wandered to the distant hills. “I think about it all the time now. Dying.”

  Estelle took her hand. “Dying’s the most natural thing in the world, but most of us go through our days as if death doesn’t exist. It’s a defense mechanism—if we worried all the time about how life ends, we’d forget to live.”

  “When my brother chose to die,” Annie said, “it made me think about whether I should choose, too. I thought about dying for a long time. But then I chose: I chose to live. Not just to drift through life, floating downstream like a fallen leaf, but to live, to fight, to swim upstream if I had to. Like a salmon, fighting against the current, jumping up the rapids. It makes no difference to the salmon that they’re all going to die at the end of the journey—they fight to make the journey anyway.”

  Estelle nodded. “Focus on the journey—that makes sense. There was so much more to Marie than the way she died.” She blinked back tears, remembering the sassy, competitive little sister, always teasing, always goading Estelle to be just a little better. “She loved dancing too, you know. She’d march in the parades every year, no matter what the weather was.”

  Annie patted Sera’s knee. “You go on dancing, dear. Your mother’s clapping with the rhythm, cheering you on.”

  Estelle gave Annie a grateful smile. Sera had a long hard road to reconciling herself to her mother’s death, but every step, no matter how small, was a positive one.

  From afar came a slow, undulating cry. The hair rose on Estelle’s neck.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Sera whispered.

  Another howl answered, echoing off the rocky hills.

  Annie nodded. “Wolves.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Alpha wolf

  Luis had been a fool to agree to this rescue. Now he was stuck with the gun-happy trooper grieving over the shards of his stupid rifle.

  It would take the herd hours to settle down enough to mount up again. Settling Kanut might take even longer.

  “Ground rules,” the cop thundered, face pale with fury. “Never touch a trooper’s weapon. I mean never!”

  Calmly and reasonably, Luis answered, “I wasn’t the one who threatened you with your own rifle. If you think about it, by removing the ammunition, I actually kept the two of us from harm. We were never in any danger at all.”

  That only made Kanut angrier. “You’re unbelievable.” He inspected the remains of his rifle, murmuring as if to a wounded child.

  “If you’re going to keep that, wrap it up.”

  “Of course I’m going to keep it!” More quietly, Kanut added, “I just hope to God it can be repaired. You’re a madman, you know. You endanger our lives by stealing my ammo, you let your overgrown pets attack people . . . At the very least, your priorities need some drastic rearranging.”

  The cop’s priorities were clear: protect the people in my charge, respect my property. Plus a need for control. An alpha wolf, Luis thought. Dangerous, dogged, and devoted to protecting his pack.

  Fair enough. A show of submission would defuse aggression.

  Luis bent to pick up his drying clothing, incidentally making himself small in front of the trooper. Submissive posture. “I’m sorry,” Luis said. “The rifle is important to you, not just as a weapon but because of the connection to your father. I’m sorry it’s damaged.”

  Kanut grunted.

  Luis deemed that to mean apology accepted. “Now, if you want to do something useful, help me find the saddlebag they stole. That’s got several days’ worth of food I’d rather not lose.”

  Luis let Kanut take the lead, although following Diamond’s trail wasn’t hard—broken branches and flattened shrubs marked his path. It led over a ridge to a shallow lake that hosted a float plane. Beside the lake the valley floor was filled with cultivated cannabis plants.

  In the middle were Diamond, Opal, and the troika, all calmly munching on the tender buds.

  Kanut laughed. “Those two pot farmers are probably halfway to Canada by now. Normally, I’d notify the drug squad to come in and destroy the plants, but your pets seem to be taking care of the problem.”

  Cannabis as fodder. It probably wouldn’t hurt the mammoths—the chemicals that made a user high needed heat to be released. And even if Luis had wanted to cut short the marijuana banquet, there was no way he could stop a mammoth from eating something it found tasty.

  “Keep looking for the saddlebag,” Luis said.

  “You look. I’m going to check out the plane.”

  While Kanut poked around the plane, Luis spent an hour searching for the saddlebag, with no luck. Either the pot grower had managed to hang on to it, or it was lost in the brush.

  “We’re wasting time,” Kanut said. “What does that do to our food supply?”

  Our food? A day ago it had been Luis’s food. “I have two more food packs. We planned on enough for two men for a month, but if you
add three stranded travelers . . .” He did a quick calculation. “We have enough for a few days, but a real rescue better come soon.”

  Kanut grunted. “At least we didn’t find any bodies.”

  The fate of the thieves hadn’t even crossed Luis’s mind. “Diamond’s only interest is to protect the herd. Once the man threw down the rifle and ran, Di wouldn’t follow him far.”

  It took another hour to entice the mammoths back to the cache of supplies and load them. When the men were again mounted and the herd was on the move, Ruby set a strong pace. Topaz followed Ruby closely, near enough that Luis and Kanut could have a conversation of sorts.

  “You got any other surprises in that tablet?” Kanut shouted.

  “Recorded elephant calls. I raised these animals. I had to learn to communicate with them in their language.”

  “How’d you learn to speak elephant?”

  “After I got my degree in animal behavior, I went to Asia. For two years, I managed elephants that had been working in the logging camps, reintroducing them into the wild. Taking elephants that had learned to follow human commands and retraining them to stay away from people and farms. Teaching them to look to the herd for companionship and guidance, instead of to people. When Anjou called me to help him train mammoths to be released into the wild, I jumped at the chance.”

  “Maybe you should have trained that Diamond to be a little friendlier.”

  “I don’t want them friendly. I taught them to stay away from people, especially people with firearms. They’re not domesticated, you know. Even elephants used for work in Asia aren’t really domesticated—they’re just wild elephants, caught young and tamed, sometimes brutally, to obey certain commands.”

  “Your mammoths seem to listen to you.”

  “Only because I act like a member of the herd. They’ve known me all their lives—as far as they’re concerned, I am a member of the herd. But if I were to act outside what the herd expects of its members, they could very well turn on me.” Luis twisted so he could face Kanut. “Listen: if you see a mammoth flap its ears and stamp its feet, it means you need to back off. Never stand your ground when a mammoth gets aggressive. That’s a fight you’ll always lose.”

  After a couple of hours of pushing through the brushland, Ruby slowed. Luis kept her moving southeast, but let her amble slowly enough for the herd to snatch tender twigs as they traveled. The low rumble of contact calls changed in tone to grumbles. The mammoths were tired, they wanted to rest.

  Luis was tired, too, and while the trooper had kept his mouth shut, he had to be hurting from the unaccustomed exercise of riding. A fine rain of ash sifted sporadically from the gray sky, prompting the men to cover their mouths and noses with kerchiefs like bandits.

  When they came to a meadow near a stream, Luis called a halt. It was six in the evening, and according to the tablet, they were twenty-one miles from where they’d begun. Ahead of them rose the forbidding peaks of the Philip Smith Mountains—tomorrow, they’d be climbing. And somewhere halfway up one of those mountains was the wrecked plane and its survivors.

  Kanut managed to scramble off Topaz and rescue his pack and rifle before she flopped on her side and rolled in the knee-high grass. Ruby and Emerald grunted impatiently for Luis to unload their harnesses before indulging in a roll fest.

  Kanut pitched the tent, flattening the grass with the ground cover while Luis set up the portable wind turbine and plugged in the tablet to recharge.

  A check of the news confirmed that Mount Taktuq was still billowing gas and ash into the atmosphere.

  “Mind if I recharge my satphone?” Kanut asked.

  “Later. The tablet gets recharged first—we need it for navigating.” He wondered who Kanut would choose to call before his satphone died, wife or job?

  Kanut punched in numbers. “Hey, honey . . .”

  Luis smiled to himself. The alpha wolf, taking care of his pack. Or maybe just a henpecked husband.

  Luis turned to check on his family, the mammoths.

  They greeted him with puffs and touches. He caressed their rough fur, muttering a soothing brum-rum, brum-rum.

  The troika were back together, gossipy old friends who never tired of one another’s company. Matriarch Ruby calmly plucked mini sheaves of grass, giving each bunch a shake before shoving it into her maw. Clever girl. She’d learned a new skill, how to get the ash off the grass. The others would learn from watching her.

  Little Jet played, practice-charging at Turq. At four years old, Turq was still young enough to tolerate the youngster—that would change soon, as Turq reached full maturity. In the distance, the great bulk of Diamond kept watch, sniffing the air every so often, keeping his eyes on Pearl.

  Opal approached Luis, rumbling querulously.

  “How are you doing, Opal? You did well today, keeping up with the herd.” Still no sign that the calf was imminent. He blew into her face to reassure her. “Just stick with Ruby. She’ll see you right.”

  Luis hoped he’d be there when Opal’s calf was born. From his experience in Asia he knew that elephant mothers usually did all right on their own, but he felt like a proud grandpa, eager to see the next generation. Ginger had already picked out a name for the new herd member: Jade.

  A wolf’s distant howl broke the evening calm. The mournful cry echoed Luis’s mood. For Luis, being solitary had never meant being lonely, but out here, so far from humanity, knowing that he would soon be leaving his mammoth friends, he felt very alone.

  The howl sounded again and was joined by another. And another and another. Wolves, reinforcing their family ties, warning rivals to stay away. So gregarious among their own kind, so violent toward outsiders. Not unlike humans.

  Opal stirred restively.

  “Don’t worry, girl. Even a pack of wolves isn’t likely to take on a full-grown mammoth.”

  But they wouldn’t hesitate to attack a newborn if they could separate it from the herd.

  Luis stroked her trunk. “Hang in there, Opal. Keep that baby safe inside for another few days, please.”

  At the tent, Kanut had already put water on to boil. “What’s your slop-du-jour?” he asked, holding up packets of freeze-dried dinners.

  “I’ll have the curry.” Luis reached into his meager store of clothes and drew out two pairs of socks. He threw one to Kanut and sat on the ground to unlace his boots. “Here. Change your socks and I’ll wash them with mine.”

  The trooper’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.”

  “Come on. A man can live in the same clothes for days at a time, but changing your socks every day or two is a must.”

  Kanut didn’t question further but pulled off his boots, his face lighting up with relief when he put on the clean socks.

  By the time Luis had rinsed out the socks and hung them on the guy ropes to dry, supper was ready.

  “Hmm. The chicken and mac isn’t bad,” Kanut said, spooning it up. “Any idea when we’ll get to the crash site? Headquarters says the doctor isn’t answering her phone, probably out of power. Alaska Eagle Med is badgering them every hour.”

  “We’re still twenty miles away, as the crow flies, and we’ve got a lot of rough terrain to cross. No chance of getting someone else to her sooner?”

  “Not with the latest eruption.”

  “How’s your family?” Luis asked. Not that he cared, but he’d learned to pretend interest in the things that were important to the people he worked with.

  “They’re all right.” Kanut perked up, apparently taking for granted that a stranger would be interested in his domestic harmony. “I got two boys, eight and ten. They’re good kids, but a handful, you know? Probably driving Karen crazy, but she says having her mom there helps. Here, I’ll wash these out.” He picked up the used food packets but groaned when he stood up.

  He’s not a bad guy, Luis thought again. “You must be sore. There’s some ibuprofen in the first aid kit.”

  “Better save that in case the crash victims need it.” Kanut
paused. “Actually, I found something else that might ease the pain.”

  He pulled from his pocket a plastic baggie full of dried cannabis buds. “The pot growers left this in their plane. But since they got away, I guess there’s no sense me keeping it as evidence. Would you happen to have a pipe on you?”

  CHAPTER 29

  Everybody needs family

  Luis didn’t have a pipe, but he found a pack of rolling papers in the stuff Brandon had left behind. The buds were a little raw but good enough for mellowing out after a hard day.

  Not a bad guy at all, Luis thought.

  Kanut took another hit off the lumpy joint. “I can’t imagine what Karen’s going to say when I show up at home in clothes I’ve worn for days. She’ll probably make me strip in the backyard and just burn the lot.” He looked up. “What about you? Have you called Bran, to make sure he got home all right?”

  Luis hadn’t even considered calling Brandon. “I’m not worried. By now, he’s probably got a new boyfriend to mooch off.” With my laptop.

  Kanut winced. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize it was a breakup.”

  Luis waved away his concern. “Just a recognition of the inevitable. Brandon’s like a friendly puppy—ready to follow anyone who throws him a bone.” He took the joint from Kanut. “I got him this job, you know? He’s from Wyoming or Montana, someplace like that. Knew all about horses, but I had to teach him how to handle mammoths. Much more intelligent than horses.”

  “Is that right?”

  “S’true. Humans could learn a lot from elephants. The females? They get along. Hang out together like teenage girls, but when the matriarch says move, they move. They look out for each other, too, y’know? Cooperate. If there’s danger, the whole herd pulls together to protect the kids.” Certainly, it was a far cry from the possessiveness and ambition-by-proxy Luis’s own mother had inflicted on him.

  “What about the males?” Kanut asked. “That one that chased the pot growers didn’t look too cooperative.”

  Luis tapped his head. “Musth.” He took another hit.