by Asta Bowen
Marta watched, blood pounding, as the cow lowered her head toward Greatfoot. The gray wolf did not move, holding a steady gaze on her and her offspring. When the cow reared back to attack, Marta sprang from her crouch and charged. Aiming for the nearest moose flesh, she snapped at the rump of the yearling, but got only a mouthful of fur and a moment of his attention. As the bull whirled toward his attacker, the cow glanced too—just for an instant, but it was the instant Greatfoot needed. He dodged, and the cow’s blunt hoof missed his skull, landing painfully on his foot. Wrenching free, the gray wolf shot out from the willows and into the woods. As Greatfoot darted in one direction, Marta darted in the other, leaving the moose pair with mayhem in their eyes and nowhere to aim it.
Marta heard Greatfoot running through the swamps and circled to follow. She still had a mouthful of fur and a taste for blood, but she did not look back. She wasn’t half as hungry as the cow was mad, and as Marta streaked back toward Rock Creek, she could smell the swampy breath of the moose pumping into the air behind her tail.
Marta ran full speed, putting her footprints two by two into Greatfoot’s larger ones. Her blood had been stirred up before the confrontation; now it was rolling like spring runoff. Panting, she chased after her partner, racing to catch up with him. A different kind of hunger was pulling her now.
Forty
Wolf Love
Wolf love is sometimes slow and sometimes sudden. Between Greatfoot and Marta, what began slowly at Lindbergh Lake grew suddenly after the pair left Rock Creek. They crossed the freeway in darkness and traveled north, following game trails that led up the hills and into the forest. As they traveled, Marta’s inner urge grew, and the breeding scent rose from her breath and fur. Greatfoot responded with a scent and an urge of his own, and the two touched often as they wound deeper into the night.
In the sanctuary of the Rattlesnake Wilderness, on a moonless night between winter and spring, one gray wolf and one black danced courtship in a dust of new snow. The last time wild wolves had courted in that canyon, there were no roads; no cars; no hum of airplane overhead; no sky glow from the city. Back then the human presence was slight, scattered in camps along the river. Now their boxy homes filled the lower canyon, and their smells were carried on every breeze.
Still, Marta and Greatfoot danced. It was the dance of the male and female done for millennia on this land, and it was back. They chased, they howled, they sprang over stumps and under limbs; they stood nose to nose, panting steam in the still, cool air. They nuzzled one another—sometimes gentle, sometimes wild—and the chase was on again.
Greatfoot rode up on Marta and Marta rode up on Greatfoot in the play written millions of years ago that still shone in their golden eyes. When the scent was right, they tied. The dark silver of one shape merged with the frosted black of the other, and they remained so for a long time. Long enough for a breeze to come up and make the tiniest tree branches wave happily against the sky. Long enough for the snow to soften under Marta’s paws. Long enough for a late moon to rise and peer through the overcast. Long enough for the silver to mix with the black and for the race to go on. Long enough.
Forty-One
Evaro Crossing
After Marta and Greatfoot mated, their travels took on a new urgency. They were a pair, and a pair needed a territory. Before long there could be wolf pups, and they would need a den site, good hunting, safe rendezvous sites, and room to roam without human interference. For Marta and Greatfoot, the hunt for home was on.
The Rattlesnake was not home. City glow tinged the sky at night, and jets shuddered overhead during the day. For a wilderness it was small, and the wild heart of the valley had been cut out. A road ran upstream, bringing cars and people to and from the houses that grew up around the creek.
The Swan Valley was not home either. It was big enough, a two-day run from north to south, but except for places like Lindbergh Lake in the middle of winter, people had claimed it as their own. The Blackfoot Valley was too narrow and the Clark Fork, though broad, was halved by the same freeway that ran past Rock Creek; while Greatfoot and Marta could cross it, they could not live on top of it.
When logging trucks returned to the back roads, Marta and Greatfoot retreated to the woods. The wolves tried to avoid people, but people were everywhere. Their homes fronted the forest, and their cars sped through it. When Marta and Greatfoot could not find a way around a human place, they passed by at the edges. Usually they went unnoticed, unless dogs were nearby.
Marta ignored pet dogs as she did other human things, but Greatfoot could not. A dog was strangely like a wolf in looks and smell, and strangely unlike in other ways. The way of the wolf was a strict code, and dogs didn’t follow it. Only a few could howl at all, and their songs were without meaning: never a proper hunting howl, come-here howl or stay-away howl, just a confusing mixture of tones. Most dogs just stood and barked, the same noise over and over. Sometimes Greatfoot charged toward it and sometimes he ran away from it, but it always raised his hackles.
One day when travel was easy and their energy high, Marta and Greatfoot made a long run to the west, looping wide into the mountains around the northern outskirts of the city. On the last crust of snow, they slipped along the far side of the mountain, avoiding late season skiers, and headed for the top of Evaro Hill.
An ancient travel corridor for wildlife moving west and east, Evaro had also become a north-south corridor for humans traveling between the Missoula and Flathead valleys. Evaro Hill was long and steep. Downhill traffic rushed past in a blink, but uphill traffic was slow. Semi trucks crawled upward with much grinding of metal and fumes of oil, and smaller vehicles darted around them.
Nearing the highway from the trees, Marta and Greatfoot listened to the sounds, preparing to dash across at the first silence in the two streams of traffic. As they waited, Greatfoot grew restless. He chased a ground squirrel, followed an old elk track, then finally went to the fringe of the trees where he could see as well as hear the vehicles. Marta kept hidden. Suddenly she heard a frenzy of barking, an irritated clamor that included Greatfoot’s voice.
She reached the edge of the trees in time to see Greatfoot standing on the shoulder of the highway as a pickup truck labored slowly past. His glare was fixed on two pet retrievers racing back and forth in the bed of the pickup, and all three animals were barking furiously. Greatfoot was oblivious to the highway, ignoring both the rush of a down-bound car and the grind of a semi coming up. Marta waited until the car was safely out of sight, and before the truck came into view, she scrambled out of the trees.
Streaking past Greatfoot, she startled her mate with one short, sharp bark in his ear, and sped across the road. Greatfoot’s reflex was to give chase, and before he knew it, both he and Marta were safely in the trees on the far side of the highway. Behind them in the uphill lane, the big semi rolled past the place where the gray wolf had been standing seconds before.
Greatfoot grabbed Marta’s muzzle in his. She stood, chin high, as he applied a long lick to her face and neck. Then, still panting, Greatfoot looked down until his forehead barely touched her cheek. They stood that way for a moment, breath coming in short pulses as the sounds of the highway passed behind them. Marta whined then, a half breath that ended in a yip, and broke from their touch. She began running west, away from the highway, on the Evaro trail.
Greatfoot followed, and by dusk they were on the ridge above the Ninemile Valley. Marta and Greatfoot had been here when the snow was soft and deep, too deep for exploring, and they had gone no farther than the first creek.
The landscape looked different today, and not just because of the season. Today the wolves were looking for more than food; they were looking for home. From the top of Reservation Divide, Marta and Greatfoot could see the whole expanse of the Ninemile Valley. It was a gentle basin of a valley with more forests than clear-cuts on either side, and large checkerboards of pasture and trees in between.
The Ninemile was twice as big as Pleasant Vall
ey, but at this time of year, the evening light slanted the same way over its length. As beams of sunlight broke through the clouds and played across the winter-green hills, the wolves saw what they were looking for. They saw hiding places in the trees, and creeks that ran year-round. They saw few roads and fewer houses.
Mostly they saw tracks. As at Lindbergh Lake, the deer were so abundant that they had carved deep travel routes between their winter yards and browsing places. From the ridge, Marta and Greatfoot saw more whitetail country than they could hunt in a lifetime. There were cattle, too, in the pastures below, but not enough to drive out the deer.
All was quiet that afternoon in the Ninemile, except for a single blue pickup truck driving slowly down the gravel road. As the light faded, a look came over Greatfoot’s face and a song started in his throat. It was a hunting song, but not one Marta had heard before: a new hunting song for a new place. Marta joined in quickly—she was hungrier these days—and they chorused from the ridge as the sun played itself out into darkness. The wolves let their voices rise into the cooling air and were rewarded by a crash of hooves in the brush below them. With a flash of silver and black tails, Marta and Greatfoot bounded toward the noise.
The animal’s scent hit both wolves at once, and both came to a halt. There was no deer in the brush, only a wayward steer. Neither wolf was hungry enough to see the gawky, strong-smelling creature as food, and they gave each other a short, disappointed howl. Leaving the terrified steer to lurch away through the underbrush, they trotted back uphill in search of real food.
It wasn’t long before the wolves had their quarry. Marta made the first strike, pulling the doe off balance. She tottered and, as Greatfoot sprang forward, fell over. The wolves’ jaws met at the throat and closed around it with one bite. The body wrenched, and Marta took a violent kick to her hindquarters. A twinge shot up her spine, but she held on; at least the hoof had not connected with her belly, where tiny life was just beginning to form.
The wolf pair fed well. Marta finished first, pulling away from the carcass to lie down. Cleaning herself in the darkness, she heard more than saw Greatfoot continue feeding until he, too, was full. He went to Marta, who rose, sniffing him appreciatively. One lick became two, and a nip became a hearty wolf kiss with much wagging of tails. Drowsy then, bellies slung low, they lumbered toward the nearest creek for a long drink. Soon the two were settled for the night. They curled up as far as their bloated bellies would allow and slept the sleep of the satisfied.
Forty-Two
Den Hunting
Marta and Greatfoot settled in the Ninemile. It held a few more people and cattle than Pleasant Valley, but it was much larger: wide enough for the people and cows to spread out on the valley floor and long enough for wolves to pass through unseen.
Separately and together, Marta and Greatfoot set the boundaries of their territory and marked scent trails within it. Scouting cautiously, the wolves found secret corridors that linked wildland to wildland, and they explored the wide bands of mountain and forest that surrounded the valley. Greatfoot discovered a favorite corridor to the west, and often crossed the freeway for long, exuberant hunts in the Lolo Forest and nearby Idaho.
Greatfoot’s long hunts were not for lack of closer game. The Ninemile danced with prey. Whitetail sprang from the unlikeliest places at every time of day; they seemed to be hiding behind every stump in the woods and every clump of grass in the pasture. Food was so plentiful that the wolves often cached their kill, burying the leftovers for later.
There was little competition for the prey. At first, a coyote pack from Reservation Divide came down to raid the caches, but after a close call with Greatfoot, they stayed away from the marked wolf territory. Bears, for the most part, liked higher places with more huckleberries. Except for a mountain lion who sneaked down from Siegel Creek from time to time—a long walk for a secretive animal—Marta and Greatfoot had the big hunting to themselves.
The wolves were used to staying out of sight and posed little trouble for the ranchers, but dogs were a problem. Pets and working dogs ran everywhere, confusing the wolves’ careful scent marks and cluttering the air with random sounds. They irritated Greatfoot to the point of recklessness, and once he chased a dog all the way to its front porch in daylight. In every other way, the wolves fit into the valley as if they had always lived there. Despite new wolf tracks in the mud, wolf song in the air, and a wolf-killed deer every few days, life in the Ninemile went on as before.
Winter wound down slowly at first, and as it did, Marta became more aware of the life growing inside her. First a tightness across her belly and later a fullness in her womb were unmistakable. She was pregnant. In a few weeks, their pack of two would become a pack of more; how many more was impossible to tell. This time, at least, she would have Greatfoot’s help feeding them.
The alpha urge grew in Marta along with the coming litter. Her will to live expanded once more, and her own survival was no longer enough; survival included the life of her mate and, most important, her unborn pups. The alpha instinct rose in Greatfoot too, and he grew protective. These days he was quick to the kill when they hunted and quick to stand between Marta and danger.
Soon Marta began hunting for a home within a home, a safe den site where they would raise the new pups. The Ninemile was riddled with clear-cuts and roads, which made travel and hunting easy for wolves, but also made it hard to find a place safe from intruders. Marta confined her search to the south-facing hills, where there was more sunlight and less logging than on the other side of the valley.
As the last pockets of snow hardened into cakes, Marta took her search to Kennedy Creek. Her paws were sore from the crusty ground and from the new weight in her belly, but she kept on. Time was growing short. Digging out a den was no small task, and her energy was already beginning to flag. By midday she reached the source of the creek, almost at the crest of the divide, and still had not found what she was looking for. She quenched her thirst at the stream, rested, then turned around to try again.
Instead of going down the snow-pocked way she had come up, Marta found her way onto a dirt road. Picking her way around the sharper stones and melting shards of ice, she did not hear the sound of a car engine idling out of sight on the road. She did not hear the engine shut off or the car door click open and shut. She heard only the tick of her toenails on the road and the breath pushing in and out of her mouth as she trotted downhill, nose to the ground.
The shot caught Marta off guard. At the first crack from the rifle her head swung up, a mistake that brought the buzz of the bullet that much closer to her skull. It missed, and she dodged toward the ditch on her right—where the second bullet buried itself in the snow underneath her. She dodged left then, flying over the road to the opposite ditch. Two more shots whistled by, and instead of ducking for cover she leaped upward, shooting an arc over the embankment. She didn’t clear it. Crashing chest first into the top of the slope, she scrambled over as another bullet plowed into the mud a long step above her nose. This time Marta did not flinch, dodge, or change course. She simply placed her legs over the bullet hole in the earth and pushed upward with all her strength.
The final bullet was aimed not at Marta, but at the sky. The sound of a voice exploded in the air as Marta lay flat, panting. The snow was cold on her tight belly. She froze in that position, hearing a door open and close, and did not move. She heard an engine start and a car drive slowly away. Still she did not move. She listened, heart pounding, as an ordinary silence returned to the woods. When a screech sounded overhead she nearly stopped breathing—but it was only a blue-crested jay. No cars came, and still Marta did not move. By the time she shifted a stiff leg, preparing to get up, her warmth had melted a long trough in the snow.
By then, something else had happened. In the stillness Marta had felt the first quickening in her womb. Something stirred, the barest flutter of life swimming inside her. If she had not been motionless for so long, she would have missed it. In the wet snow,
the wolf gazed back at her belly and cocked her head slightly, as if listening.
Then she stood, shook herself more gently than she might have, and skidded carefully back down the embankment.
Forty-Three
Discovery
Later that day, Marta found a place to start digging. The soil was firm, painfully so. Still sore from icy paths, her paws curled hard as she scraped out the clay. She dug and scraped, dug and scraped, stopping only to clean the muck from her claws.
When she had made a head-size hole in the hillside, she stopped to rest. The smells were good here, and the creek gurgled nearby. No human sounds rose from the valley below, and the forest sounds were peaceful. Marta rested, licking her forefeet and nodding toward sleep. Suddenly she jerked awake, and her eyes swiveled around to her belly. Marta cocked her head: there it was again, the swimming. She stared at the taut skin of her underside, but the motion did not come again. Before her eyes could droop back toward sleep, they went wide and her ears went forward. Another vehicle was coming up the road.
Marta fled. She didn’t notice that the sound of this engine was different from the other, that it was a deeper, cleaner rumble, or that it moved more slowly up the road. It was a motor, and the last one Marta had heard brought gunshots.
She bounded through the thick woods, transformed from a sleepy mother-to-be into a four-legged athlete. She leaped over stumps, ducked under leaning timber, and sidestepped new trees. Sore paws forgotten, she did not take the road. She took anything but the road and kept running until the noise faded to nothing behind her.