by Asta Bowen
Today in Pleasant Valley, the strange wolf scent was mixed with the scent of humans, and as Marta was sorting out the two signals, she picked up a third: the highpitched smell of metal. Metal on or under the ground, not far from her feet. This was no strange wolf. It was a trap.
Cautiously, she strained her nose toward the metal. It was set right where she would have turned from the creek toward the den. She knew to avoid these smells, but the pups did not. As their range grew, this was one of the first places they would come to explore.
Marta backed away. But instead of turning and running down the path, she did something she had seen Oldtooth do once after she and Calef met him in the Kootenai. She picked her way down the shallow bank of the creek and pawed through the stream bed. The creek was only a trickle at this time of year, and she didn’t have to hunt long for what she wanted. Marta dug furiously, spattering herself with mud, until she unearthed a large rock. It was nearly the size of Rann’s head, and though her jaws fit easily around it, the weight strained her neck as she hoisted herself over the bank and back onto the trail.
There she dropped the stone with a thud, shook the muck from her coat, and sniffed past the twigs and leaves for the wolf-metal-human scent. The whole area reeked, and it made Marta’s nose ache. She picked up the stone again and took a step toward the source of the smell. Lifting the rock as high as she could, neck trembling, she turned her head to the side and opened her jaws. The stone broke through the twigs, bounced off one side of the trap, and onto the trip plate. The metal jaws sprang closed with a dull clank.
Marta jumped at the sound she had made. The forest was silent now, engulfed in blackness. She sniffed around the sprung trap and its drag chain, marked the metal fiercely with her own scent, then turned and made her way up the trail toward the den. The human footprints looped crazily, wandering from side to side across the draw, but eventually they, too, reached the mouth of the den. It was ripe with human scent; Marta could almost feel the skin of fingers exploring the clay walls. She shook. That scent would fade, and for now she had no need of the den.
Marta continued up the draw, taking a shortcut over to the rendezvous site. Though the human sign stopped at the den, she jumped at every sound, and her nose swung sharply to the tang of any new scent. It was not until she reached the clearing, receiving the hungry whines and licks from her pack, that the feasting howl finally came loose from her throat. There was still a meal of elk waiting for them in the aspen grove.
Twelve
Meadow Days
After the trap appeared, Marta moved the pack’s rendezvous site to the aspen grove at Dahl Lake. The island of trees could be seen from the road, but from it, intruders on the road could also be watched in safety. In the meadow the pups had more room to run and play, and the stately aspens gave shelter from traffic on the road or in the air. The pack quickly finished the elk—these days, each pup was eating almost as much as Oldtooth—and Marta expanded her hunting routes.
More and more often in her travels, she came upon the sign of humans. She found grasses freshly flattened and shrubs brushed aside by something other than the narrow legs of elk and deer. She found footprints at their old rendezvous sites and bones missing or moved from kills. She smelled the scents of the same individuals whose footprints had led to the trap. Quiet Pleasant Valley, with its wide margin between wolves and humans, was not so quiet anymore.
It was almost time to start taking the young wolves out to hunt, but for now, Marta was keeping the pack close together at the aspens. Oldtooth returned to clean up the remains of the steer he had discovered, but coyotes had done their work, and there was nothing left but hide and bones. Always looking for an easy meal, he found another dead cow—a scrawny one that had starved to death—and for a few days took one or another of the pups on midnight raids to scavenge the meat. Marta concentrated on wild game, afterward leading the pack to the kill sites but always returning to the aspens. She neither prevented nor went along with the nighttime raids. The pups’ heads now came almost to her shoulders, and she had stopped nursing entirely. To keep growing, they required more meat than she alone could provide.
The days grew shorter. Sunrise came later over the eastern hills, and sunset earlier from the west. Afternoon skies reddened with the haze of forest fires, and mornings started crisp and dry. Signs of humans continued to appear, but Marta found no more traps.
Summer ripened over the great meadow of Pleasant Valley. While Annie hunted rabbits—she had graduated from mice—Sula ran and ran. She chased anything for fun, even a calf, if one was nearby. She would chase her own shadow if she could find nothing else. Rann, meanwhile, perfected his hiding skills. He hid in the aspen grove and practiced standing still in the grasses that waved over his head. Marta and Oldtooth were hunting much of the time, but they sometimes played and sometimes rested, watching the youngsters grow and explore.
Road traffic increased, and the pack played hide-and-seek from the cars that drove and sometimes stopped on the road near the dam. Except for the increased traffic, the wolves were not disturbed.
On these late summer days, Marta wakened early and surveyed her sleeping pack. The pups had grown lanky and long. With weeks of good eating and good exercise, they had nearly doubled in weight. Sula and Annie were the same size now. Rann, the largest, seemed to be catching up in size with his father’s massive skull. All their coats had grown in thick, and the three sleeping shapes—two black and one gray—bore little resemblance to the round, wet creatures she had birthed back in the den. Even Oldtooth was keeping a certain plumpness under his tattered coat, though Marta didn’t always know what he was eating.
So far, Marta’s genius for survival had held the pack together. Despite Oldtooth’s fearful arithmetic, despite hunger and attack and now intrusions, all the pups had lived. The pack was whole and healthy. As soon as the youngsters got a little bigger and their real teeth came in, they would join Marta and Oldtooth as part of the hunting team. With five hunters and no small mouths to feed, they would face winter well prepared.
But then more traps appeared.
Thirteen
Kidnapped
Sula and Annie stepped into traps on the same afternoon. It was a late day in summer, raining again. Coming back from a carcass Oldtooth had found at the edge of the meadow, Annie noticed a strange smell: wolf smell, but not one of their pack. More curious than afraid, she went to investigate, and Rann and Sula followed.
The pups had not received Marta’s lesson on avoiding human smells and metal smells—especially when they appeared together—and Marta was not there. She was tracking a deer, trying as ever to keep up with her pack’s mountainous appetite. As for Oldtooth, he had lagged behind the youngsters and trouble was upon them before he knew it.
First Annie and then Sula were caught by surprise. As one trap snapped around Annie’s foreleg, she burst into an almighty cry. Sula, backing away, caught her back leg in a different trap. Helpless at their howls, Oldtooth and Rann sprinted for the aspens. On the ridge, Marta stopped her hunt in midstep. She turned her head slowly toward the meadow, ears trembling with the shrill sounds rising into the heavy overcast. She stood for a moment, then turned and raced toward the cries of her young.
Before she could reach the road, a vehicle drove up slowly and stopped near the traps. Someone got out. The wolves’ wails were suddenly silent. Another vehicle arrived. Unseeing, listening only for clues from the meadow, Marta walked past a grazing deer as she skulked down from the ridge. Seeing the vehicles, she kept out of sight, a shadow that paced the fringe of trees on the far side of the road.
Marta could not see Annie and Sula. She could only see people and trucks and ropes and guns. The activity was quiet, almost gentle; once the pups stopped howling, there were no loud noises. A human figure approached the aspens, but before it got near, Rann and Oldtooth darted out the other side, disappearing into the deep meadow. The grasses waved wetly here and there, as if wolves were lurking everywhere—or nowher
e.
After a time, the people and vehicles left as quietly as they came. Sula and Annie were nowhere to be found.
Dusk came, a gray, wet dusk, and Marta shook the rain from her coat. The valley was silent: no calls from her daughters. No bluebird songs. Just the sound of water dripping from leaves. Marta stood and filled her lungs. The cry started in her belly, growing as it circled through her chest and out the bellows of her throat. The howl rose and fell, rose and fell across the bowl of Pleasant Valley. When she was done, there was a long silence. Darkness settled. And in the silence, first one, then two songs rose to her ears from near the aspens: Oldtooth and Rann. We are alive. We are here.
Then silence. Then silence.
Fourteen
Trap Smart
Annie and Sula were not gone long. In a few days vehicles arrived again. People got out and busied themselves, and left in their vehicles. When they were gone, two cages stood side by side near the aspens. In one was Annie and in the other, Sula.
Marta waited until night. When all was dark and there was no traffic and no sign of movement near the meadow, she approached. One footfall after another brought her near and she whined softly, a long breath with an edge. Hearing her, Annie and Sula hurled themselves against the wire and plastic, howling in a way that was no longer puppy-like. Marta’s heart thumped against her chest as she prowled toward the cages, nose to the ground and then to the air, inspecting each blade of grass as if it could reach up and snap at her.
Two lengths from the kennels, she balked. A ridge of hair rose along her spine, and she opened her lips in a menacing grin. A threat clattered from her throat, so loud and so convincing that Annie and Sula quit howling and cowered in their crates. Then Marta barked sharply, a command that pulled Rann and Oldtooth from the aspens. As they ventured forward, she mixed threat and command, command and threat; Rann and Oldtooth moved uncertainly toward her.
The threats were not directed at Marta’s packmates but at a point on the ground directly in front of her. A strong smell of strange wolf urine rose from that point, halfway between the free wolves and the caged. The smell was mixed with the scent of metal and the scent of humans: another trap.
With no stones nearby, Marta could not spring this trap. Instead she called Rann closer, caution rattling in her throat, and taught him a lesson not to forget. She watched as he sniffed the strange mix of scent, and as soon as his nose came too close to the trap, she snarled. If he drew back, she stopped snarling. If he did anything else, she snapped hard, teeth closing next to the delicate skin around his nose. He sniffed again, more cautiously: another snarl. Too close: another snap. Only a few lessons were needed before the smell of the trap—the mixture of metal, human, and strange wolf—connected with the snap of his mother’s smooth teeth on his whiskers. Rann backed away from the smell.
Marta continued moving toward the kennels, sniffing at each step, and Rann and Oldtooth followed. No more traps appeared. When she was close enough, Marta charged Sula’s cage. The kennel rocked under her, sending the frightened pup sliding into her trays of food and water. Annie attacked the metal grating on her door, but her teeth only plucked a dull tune on the wire. Marta threw herself at Annie’s kennel then, but it too was well anchored. She alternately growled and bit at the cages, and licked and sniffed at the captives inside, but could not get through. Oldtooth and Rann howled plaintively, sending Annie and Sula into a frenzy.
After a time Rann and Oldtooth slinked back into the aspens, but Marta stayed on. She divided her time between licking her pups and attacking their enclosures. She chewed at the wires until her mouth grew sore and she tasted blood. Only when a tooth grew loose—one of her grappling canines—did she stop.
Exhausted, she lay down by the kennels. The pups finally slept, and Marta stayed until the sky grew light. She rose then, and retreated to the aspen rendezvous. All day she hid; at night, she traveled back toward the pups, skirting the traps that lay in her path. Every few days, people came to bring food and water for the pups and to clean their cages. Annie and Sula were by turns anxious and listless. Their coats grew dull. Their packmates remained hidden, watching the watchers who came and went from their valley. Traffic came and went on the road, and the sky seemed alive with huge metal birds. Every day a helicopter or airplane buzzed the hills and meadows where the wolves were hiding.
Oldtooth wandered the meadow, scavenging and hunting in his old way. Rann followed Oldtooth or Marta—the three rarely moved together now—and sometimes went off on his own. Though alive, the pack was in tatters. Singing, hunting, grooming, playing, and teaching were things of the past; only survival mattered. All that was natural, ordinary, and instinctive faded like the long days of summer.
Oldtooth was trapped next. Coming from one of his scavenger hunts, distracted by calls from Annie and Sula, Oldtooth stepped into a trap near the aspen grove. He was taken away but, unlike the pups, did not return.
That left Marta and Rann, and sometimes Annie and Sula. The noise overhead grew more constant. Under the roar of the blades, Marta crouched in the trees or streaked through the long meadow grasses. Sometimes, Rann was a dark ripple parting the green behind her.
As days passed, the urge to run, to run farther and longer than she had ever run before, grew strong, but Rann was too young to travel far, and Annie and Sula could not run at all. Marta’s survival instinct worked overtime. She bit at the cages at night and hid from traffic during the day; early or late, she hunted to feed Rann. Together they dodged the traps.
She did not even notice when the tranquilizer dart hit. She had left the tall grass, racing across the flat and up the hillside, and under the thundering helicopter, the sting of the dart blended with the beat of the wind and the thrashing of the long grass blades. Then all was dim, dimmer, dark.
Fifteen
Reunited
When Marta awakened, the world was gone. Swirling around her was a cave of spinning lights with shifting sides, and she could not tell which way was up or down—if up or down existed anymore. Sounds came out of nowhere and then disappeared into nowhere, as in a dream. Marta whined, and her own voice came back in waves, sour and twisted, to her ears.
Gradually the lights and sounds steadied around her. When she could see and hear clearly, the world as she knew it was indeed gone. Pleasant Valley had disappeared. There was no grass, no soil, no trees, no sky. She was in a big, square den: a box with a flat stone bottom covered with straw and sides made of stone and wire. There was a tightness around her neck, a stout band of some kind, and the smell of humans was overpowering. The smell of metal, and other smells she did not know, filled her head.
But she was not alone. There on the other side of the wire, out of their small kennels and placed in a large cage like her own, were Annie and Sula. Whining eagerly, the two pups poked their noses through the wire grid, trying to wiggle through the links to reach their mother. Marta rose to go to them, but dizziness set in. When the room stopped spinning she saw that there, on the far side of the pups, was Oldtooth. He turned to her, but did not rise. He gave no sign, not even the flop of his tail, and seemed to look through rather than at her. Marta sniffed nervously, whined once to the pups, then sank back down to the cold floor.
As for Rann—Rann was nowhere to be seen. The champion of hide-and-seek had gotten away.
Part Two
Sixteen
The Bad Dream
The sound of voices forced Marta from her daze. Two steps away, just the other side of the wire grid, was a group of people staring at her. From their mouths came a flat music, more of a drone than a howl, and her head reeled with their smell—so many, and so close! Marta pressed herself into the straw. Ears slicked back and eyes downcast, she felt a tremor run through her legs. The urge to run was unbearable. But the people made no motion to come closer, and the murmurs ceased as a louder, deeper voice took over.
A brilliant flash struck the room, and Marta winced. There was no thunder, just a sharp click followed immedia
tely by another flash. Marta winced again and turned toward the wall, legs trembling. The voice droned on.
A door banged open, and a wave of fresh air swept through the place. A young woman in a white lab coat joined the group at the cages. Her smell, drifting toward Marta, was somehow familiar, as if the two had recently touched. She began to speak, and the other voice stopped. Her sound was soft and did not grate on the wolf’s ears. The woman nodded at Marta and gestured toward Oldtooth, then stopped talking. The deeper voice resumed.
From the corner of her eye, Marta could see Oldtooth lying still in his cage. Like Marta and the pups, he also wore a thick collar with a small box that hung under his chin. For once, his big gray face held no expression at all: not the hunting face, the play face, or the warning face. It was hardly a face at all, despite the familiar arrangement of features. His eyes stared into the distance. His left foot was wrapped in white and stretched out straight in front of him.
The people moved on to Annie and Sula’s cage. At this the pups glanced uneasily in Marta’s direction, then Oldtooth’s, but the adults gave no sign. When people touched their fingers to the wire, the pups cowered in the corner. Sula whined at the smell, and the room again spun around Marta. Her claws gripped the floor as if it were tilting. When she regained her balance, she could hear the deeper voice again, moving past Oldtooth’s cage. The people were out of sight now, and her trembling eased.