The Wolfer

by Loren D. Estleman

  "If you can't hang onto a gun, don't carry one," he said.

  The journalist was in a mild state of shock, partly from the violence that had almost come to pass and partly because of his role in averting it. He had acted from reflex, and even now wasn't sure exactly what he had done.

  The look in Aaron's eye was murderous. "Now you went and scared her off. What is she, a pet?" He spat the words.

  "Her den's close by," North explained. "She ain't about to stray far after just whelping." He returned the Winchester.

  "So her den's close by." The other fingered the carbine and glowered. "So what?"

  "So have you ever heard of a mother wolf bringing up her pups alone?"

  Fulwider took charge of the wolfer's rifle and reins while he dismounted. When he was halfway up the next slope he sank into a crouch and finally onto all fours, crawling the rest of the way to the top. Even in that awkward posture he moved with the grace of a splendid animal, as if he found it more natural than walking erect. The journalist worried lest one of the others in his excitement mistake the nearly supine figure in the gray fur for a wolf and shoot him on the spot.

  After some minutes of motionless observance from the crest, however, North reversed himself and straightened to trot back in their direction. He helped himself to a draft from his canteen.

  "She's alone," he said, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand and replacing the cap. "Just her and the den. Whelps wouldn't be old enough to come out into the open yet. Reckon she come here for a rest from all that sucking and squealing."

  "Got to be a male someplace," Aaron observed. He had retrieved his Colt from the ground and was blowing dirt and bits of grass from the action.

  "There usually is, or she wouldn't have young ones." The irony in this statement wasn't evident in North's tone. "More than one, by the signs. The others will be out hunting. If we stick it out till dusk we might could have us a proper stand."

  There were no objections, least of all from Fulwider, who had no idea what was meant by the term "stand." The four led their animals into the depression ahead and left them to graze while they crawled on hands and knees to the top under the wolfer's direction, flattening out on their stomachs in the tall grass.

  Slabs of shale that had tumbled from the mountains eons past lay in piles at the base, between which clumps of brush and stately lodgepole pines forced their way into the sunlight. From there the ground rose first in a steady grade, then ever steeper until it pierced the clouds. The sun glared off the ice a thousand feet up and coaxed a million tiny sparkles out of the bare granite beneath.

  The journalist saw nothing that resembled either a wolf or what he thought a den should look like, until North joined him and pointed out a triangular opening less than eighteen inches across in a rockfall thirty yards dead ahead. It hardly looked like something a full-grown wolf would choose to drag itself through. Yet the other assured him that he had seen the mother slink into its depths only minutes before.

  "She's had her rest," North murmured. "She won't be coming out again before the others show up."

  The pack, he explained, would approach from the brush that girded the mountain. "One thing." He spoke so quietly Fulwider had to cock his head to hear. "Black Jack's mine. If there's more than one bullet in him when he falls and they ain't both mine, it'll be just too bad for someone."

  No elaboration was needed. The easterner passed the ominous message to Aaron, who lay on the other side of him. Protest flickered in his close-set brown eyes, then faded. He whispered to his brother. Jim's only reaction was to push out his moustache and tug down the dilapidated brim of his hat. Neither appeared to doubt the wolfer's ability to back up his threat. The four made themselves as comfortable as possible for the long wait.

  Fulwider dozed, or thought he had. He opened his eyes after what seemed only a moment to see that everything was bathed in gray wash. The sun's last rays described a bloody gash over the range's western sweep. Almost immediately the journalist noted a tension in the air, like the oppressive stillness that precedes a sudden cloudburst. The men beside him were stiff as rods. Even the wind had ceased for the moment. It was as if the whole world were holding its breath.

  They came trickling down the eastern face like drops down a glass, without pattern and seemingly leaderless as they negotiated the descent through a sparse stand of lodge-pole pine near the base. In the eerie twilight the gray shapes slunk in and out of view among trees and shadow, now visible, now not, now materializing a hundred feet lower, six ghosts gliding over stone and sparse grass and springs that glistened like quicksilver under the rising moon. They made no more noise than peals of fog, which in their effortless movement they resembled.

  As they neared the bottom, the scattered shapes drew into an amorphous, moving mass from which a narrow tongue slithered presently, revealing itself in a shaft of dying sunlight as a line of animals advancing in single file. At that point the men watching were presented with their first clear view of the newcomers, one the journalist would never forget.

  The wolf in front was a big male, steel gray, with a well-developed ruff and a black mantle that covered his head cowl-fashion and extended back over his shoulders. There it narrowed into a thin edge along the spine before disappearing into a brush tail, held horizontally in an attitude suggesting dominance. White hairs in his muzzle bespoke age, but his heavy frame would have discouraged many of the younger males from testing his leadership. There were some, however, who had not discouraged so easily, as demonstrated by the various slash-like scars on his face and shoulders. It was an expressive face, with almond-shaped eyes that tilted down from a square muzzle, and a wide mouth drawn taut as in concentration. A leader's face clearly, strong and worried.

  Directly behind him crept a smaller wolf whose coat was as white as any ermine Fulwider had seen adorning a fine lady's shoulders in Manhattan. This would be Black Jack's mate, and a worthy queen she appeared, with her dark eyes and black nose and coal lips that stood out strikingly from their snowy background. He had never beheld a creature more beautiful.

  In winter the beasts' coats were a wonderful combination of heavy, butter-soft fur overlain with waterproof guard hairs growing as long as five inches at their throats and shoulders, where the ruff was so thick no claw or fang could penetrate to the vulnerable flesh beneath. The shedding season was well along, but even now the coarse outer layer remained largely intact. Thus, while the creatures might have appeared to decrease in bulk during warm weather, they didn't look as if they'd been on the losing end of a fight with a wildcat, as had the buffalo once their coats began to fall away in bloody patches.

  A startling change overtook the pack as they neared the den. The mother whom they had left behind to care for her pups emerged to greet them with a joyous little yip, where upon they abandoned caution and became nothing more sinister than a family of big, friendly dogs. Their sides were full from the day's hunt, and as they loped panting toward the waiting female their tongues lolled out of their mouths and they barked and whimpered like pets at play.

  And play they did. Before Fulwider's amazed eyes, these scourges of the northwestern cattle industry, hated and hunted from the Bering coast to the Gulf of Mexico, leaped and tumbled and butted each other and touched noses and carried on generally as if blood and bounties were things that had nothing to do with them. The noise was like that in a kennel, only gayer, more carefree. For North had chosen his stand well: The wind was blowing in the wrong direction for the quarry to know they were being watched. And then they knew, but by then it was too late.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Aaron's Winchester spoke first, followed closely by his brother's rifle, a muzzle-loader whose ka-pow sounded like a stuttering echo to the cleaner report of the carbine.

  There was confusion in the vicinity of the den. Wolves fell, but there was so much frantic movement around them that it was impossible to tell which had been hit. North's Ballard barked at a stately pace, letting the Stemmers' weapons r
elease four bullets to its one. Blue smoke coarse as wire drifted back from the flaming muzzles and enveloped the shooters' heads, trapped under their hat brims. After each shot, Jim produced a powder horn, caps and a sack of lead balls, loaded the antique piece, tamped down the wadding and fired again almost as fast as his brother could lever a fresh round into the chamber of the repeater.

  The animals near the den had scattered. One, whose black mantle Fulwider could barely make out in the gathering darkness, yelped loudly and went down, but was up again in an instant and bounding on three legs for the cover farther up. North reloaded, his fingers moving swiftly but surely as he replaced the spent cartridge from the leather pouch he carried on his belt. But his target was faster by half a beat, and as he made ready to fire again the creature's brush tail vanished into the foliage. The wolfer sent a bullet after him. A swiftly moving mass slid noisily through the scrub, followed by silence.

  "Some shot," Aaron sneered, in the stillness that followed on the heels of the last report. His face was black with spent powder. "I could of dropped him if you let me."

  "If I wanted you to, I would of." There was no trace of disappointment in the wolfer's speech. Again he reloaded. "I didn't hear that Remington."

  "No," replied Fulwider, "you didn't."

  North glanced at him, but by then their features were invisible.

  It was dark, as if Black Jack had dragged the last shred of daylight with him into the bushes. The air stank harshly of rotten eggs from the sulphur in the powder. North stirred, rose, and was heard walking away in the direction of the horses. Miscellaneous noises sounded, a match flared presently, followed a moment later by a spreading glow as a lantern was ignited. Its yellow illumination erased the weathered creases in the wolfer's face; for the first time since they had met, the journalist was struck by Asa North's youth. Coming back up the hill he looked no older than some of the copy boys at the World. This reminded Fulwider of the scarcity of truly old people in the West, and suddenly he felt quite ancient at forty.

  As North drew near carrying the lantern, its light fell across the others standing with Fulwider in a semicircle where they had been lying in ambush. Spaced in this fashion they had effectively sealed off every line of retreat for their prey save one, the mountain itself. There was something eerily familiar about the arrangement that eluded the easterner until he remembered that Black Jack's party had employed the same tactic in bringing down the straggling elk a few weeks before. He strongly doubted that it was a coincidence.

  Four wolves lay in the clearing, a fifth in the rocky perimeter of the den. North raised the lantern over the others. The glow fell across the body of the white female. A glistening dark streak marred its pale side where an ounce of lead had torn a furrow before entering the heart behind the left foreleg. Her eyes shone softly in the coal oil light.

  Three were male, one smaller than the others and evidently a yearling. The largest of the trio lay at the extreme edge of the clearing, where it had been shot a second time while limping for cover. The first had smashed one of its hind paws, but the other had struck it behind the ear and carried away most of its head on the way out. That would have been a ball from Jim's big muzzle-loader.

  North stepped over to the den, where the mother wolf lay panting.

  Blood seeped through a hole in her chest and bubbled obscenely in her mouth and nostrils as her breath passed in and out with a sucking sound. Her amber eyes watched North as if to determine whether he was an ally or an enemy. They were intelligent eyes, almost human. A tiny reflection of the lantern flickered in each pupil. Then there was a deafening crash, her entire body heaved as though trying to rise, fell back with a grunt of escaping air and lay twitching. The left side of her head was gone. Soon the twitching stopped. Smoke found its way out of the barrel of the Ballard.

  A quiet moment followed. Then came a sound that wrenched Fulwider's heart from its moorings. Something was squeaking far back in the den.

  "The pups," he whispered.

  "Clean forgot about them." North paused, the pale light playing off the angular bones of his face. "Who does it?"

  "Me," said Aaron. "Providing Jim and me get the bounty." His brother nodded support.

  The wolfer looked doubtful. "Think you'll fit?"

  Jim said, "Don't let the way he's built fool you. He's mostly muscle."

  "Yeah, I seen it hanging over his belt. Get to it, then."

  Stemmer relieved himself of hat, coat and weapons, and with Jim's help lifted the limp carcass of the mother away from the entrance by its legs. It left a dark patch behind. Then he sank onto his hands and knees and crawled through the narrow opening, grunting as he squeezed between the boulders. His bulk muffled the whining sounds issuing from below ground.

  For several minutes he struggled, dragging himself forward an inch at a time on his stomach, until only the thick soles of his boots were still exposed. The noises grew more frantic as he advanced. They didn't sound frightened. To Fulwider they were the joyous yip-yaps common to pups everywhere when greeting what they thought was their mother. At that age they wouldn't understand fear.

  For a moment Aaron was motionless. Then his bootsoles twitched as if seeking leverage. One by one the noises rose to shrieks and ceased.

  He kicked his right foot twice in the manner of a signal. Immediately Jim stepped forward and, grasping one of his brother's ankles in each hand, pulled him backward out of the hole. Moments later Aaron, disheveled, sweating, streaked with dirt, got up displaying his trophies: Four small, round, furry objects, two in each hand, their little necks squeezed between thumbs and forefingers. Quite dead.

  "That all there was in the litter?" North asked.

  Stemmer shrugged. "Association's offering two bucks apiece for whelps. Money's money."

  Fulwider was aware that Jim was staring at him. "What's your problem, tenderfoot?" he said. "You don't look so good."

  He didn't reply. Instead he stepped away into the shadows and was sick as quietly as he could manage.

  "Suit yourself."

  In the moist light of dawn, Asa North studied a patch of blood the size of a dinner-plate staining the sparse grass a hundred feet up the mountainside. He had finished his breakfast, as had the Stemmers, who were busy skinning the dead wolves below. Fulwider, not quite ready to trust his stomach, had refused everything but coffee.

  "Aren't you curious about why I'm leaving?" the journalist demanded, irritated by the wolfer's brusqueness.

  "I know why. You found out we strangle whelps and now you don't like us no more."

  "It isn't that. It's just that I've lost my enthusiasm for the hunt."

  North turned on him, cold malevolence in his stare.

  "What the hell did you expect? We was going to take their pictures? I told you before you wasn't cut out to be no kind of wolfer."

  "Then why did you ask me along this time? I'm still not clear on that."

  "Why did you say yes?"

  Fulwider made no response, and the wolfer resumed his scrutiny of the rusty patch.

  A warm wind was gusting up from the flatlands, one of those southerly chinooks that hastened the thaw and made summers unbearably hot away from the high country. It felt good, though it did little to dispel a chill in the journalist's bones not entirely due to the night he'd spent on the damp, marshy ground that flanked the mountains.

  Sometime during that long night, as he lay staring up at the charcoal-wash of the sky, his interest in the fate of Black Jack and of the men who hunted him had evaporated. The speech he had made to North about going back had run through his head ten thousand times before it found its way past his tongue. But he could see that it was lost on the wolfer.

  "He's wasted a heap of blood." As usual the comment seemed directed more to North himself than to the journalist. "He'll be looking for cover till it stops."

  "Well, good-bye." Fulwider held out an awkward hand, made more so by the other's refusal to acknowledge it. As he turned to leave:

&nb
sp; "Cut out your share of the provisions and hold to that elk run on your way back. That way you won't be so likely to get lost."

  Fulwider thanked him and walked away.

  "The guy was from Minnesota, fancied himself a wolfer."

  Aaron Stemmer's foghorn voice was raised to carry to the man transferring supplies from the black to his own saddle pouches. Arms bare and bloodied to the elbows, the brothers labored cheerfully over the slain wolves.

  "Said he didn't hold with strangling wolves. So he taken this here English forty-five he set some store by and crawled down into the den and started blasting away right and left like it was the goddamn Fourth of July. Clean busted both his eardrums."

  Fulwider hoisted himself up and over the gray while their laughter welled over him.

  The sun burned off the morning mist early and lay like a warm shawl on his shoulders. After an hour he shrugged out of his jacket, stowing it behind his cantle. By midmorning, however, he had reached the ledge overlooking the river, and the cool, damp air wafting up from its banks forced him to put it back on. Later he would remember that as the decision that saved his life.

  A mile farther on he came to a stop where a rockfall blocked his path. Twenty feet above, blue daylight showed through a notch where the wall had collapsed scant hours before. He dismounted to lead the reluctant horse over the mound of jagged granite.

  Something struck his left shoulder. He lost his footing and staggered back several steps, swinging his arms to regain his balance on the very edge of the precipice. Beneath his heels he glimpsed the fuzzy tops of the two hundred-foot pines that skirted the river. He stepped away, heart pounding.

  His shoulder felt stiff. Deciding that a rock had bounded off it from the top of the broken wall, he bent to pick up his reins and gasped as a sharp, stinging pain coursed through him. He reached back to feel his shoulder.