Jack stopped and turned back to me. “I think so. We’re all eating pretty well right now, though Akela might try to catch it just for sport if it gets too close. There are other hawks all around here but they don’t get close to the wolves. Why did you bring your pet along?”
“It’s my camera.”
“Ah.”
Jack led me to a spot that I thought was ridiculously close to where I knew the pups were but I figured he knew what he was doing. Then, he started walking away.
“Jack. I’ll need to talk to you at some point.”
He stopped and considered that. “Some kind of interview, I expect.”
“Yes.”
“Not now. I have to help Raksha.”
“When?”
“We’ll see.” He pointed to the top of the rock.
“You can watch from there, if you like.”
“Won’t that make Raksha nervous?”
Jack laughed shortly. “She knows you’re no threat.”
“Are you the one who named them?”
He nodded. “They sure don’t need them.”
Setting up camp consisted of pulling the ripcord on the tent and tossing it about six feet away. The tent took care of the rest. Human-interest stories usually happen at interfaces of conflict. Wilderness/civilization, suburbs/city, neighboring tribes. I had been out into the bush before. I had a lovely little tent with an active skin. Tiny engines moved air through the pores, warming or cooling as needed, storing power from the sun. My jacket was similarly designed and kept itself clean. Active cloth is a bit stiff so, like most people, I didn’t wear it. I had a nice shirt and pants that kept me warm at night and cool in the heat of day and would have fooled an Arab into thinking they were made of the finest cotton. The tent had a bag that if I left my clothes in it they would be magically fresh and soft the next morning. I knew where it was in the dark; it was right next to the water condenser. I had a food dispenser that would make nutritious bread from grass or any other source of cellulose, but that was for emergencies. I had brought a collection of freeze-dried meals. They made up most of the weight in my pack; the tent and sleeping bag took up no more space than a shoebox. Less, actually, since I had left out the entertainment unit. I find it distracting.
I climbed up on the rock to set the scene.
I knew where I was from several instruments: my locators, the map section of interface to the feeds, from my phone. I was north of Forsyth and south of the Fort Peck Lake. To the west of me the Rockies curved away towards Canada. The Missouri River started carving through the Dakota and Nebraska plains to the east of me. I could even bring a little piece of civilization here with a phone call or a request to the feeds.
But it was small tinder as I stood there on the rock and looked around.
Here, the world was huge.
On the slow rolling plain there were no trees and it felt as if I could touch the edge of the world. The sky was such a broad and featureless blue I became disoriented and had to look away before I fell down. The colors of the land were as diverse as the sky’s were singular: russets, purples, grays, yellows, ambers—an infinite impressionist palette.
Good stuff, I thought. I made notes and made sure Goldie was getting good panorama shots.
Below me, Raksha and Jack were doing a strange sort of skip-jump in the grass. Raksha would move slowly for a bit, then stop, frozen. After a moment, she inched forward, then pounced. She flipped some nondescript piece of fur into the air and caught it, chewed it a moment, and swallowed it down. After twenty or thirty of these, she trotted back towards me—or, rather, to the rock I was standing on. The pups spilled out onto the grass and she gently regurgitated some food for them.
I knew immediately what sort of thing was going to end up on the cutting-room floor.
Jack, for his part, was doing the same thing. He stalked these things carefully and snatched them out of the grass with his hands. I could see them more clearly when he picked them up. They were rodents of some kind. He was a bit less flamboyant when he ate them. Instead of tossing them in the air, he broke their necks with his fingers and then munched them down like they were chicken legs.
After she made sure her puppies had cleaned their plates, Raksha trotted back to the grass and rejoined Jack. The puppies played in front of the den. Apparently, Jack had eaten enough and as she sat and watched him, he caught rodent after rodent and tossed them to her, all in complete silence. Even the puppies’ enthusiastic cries were muted.
After perhaps an hour, Jack finished and walked over a small hummock and lay down. Raksha made herself comfortable lying next to him and leaned her head on his shoulder. He rested his hand on her shoulder. The two of them looked intimate, like a long married couple lying together. I felt curiously intrusive.
I checked on Goldie. She had been shooting the whole thing.
I waved to him and he ignored me for a moment. Then, he waved me away.
I would have to be patient.
* * *
That night, as I sat drinking tea in front of my tent, I listened to the crickets and frogs sing. I had sort of expected Jack to join me at my tent. For a lot of isolated people, a man drinking tea in front of a tent, symbolizing as it does an outpost of what they had left behind, was an irresistible lure. Not Jack. He paid no more attention to me than he did the rock. I didn’t even know where he was sleeping. Not in Raksha’s den—it was much too small. The heat unit put out a glow all around, looking for all the world like a campfire.
I had cooked a little curry, a little bacon, some brownies. A few things to tempt a person in the wild living exclusively on raw rodent. Nothing.
This might be trickier than I had thought.
The next afternoon I waved at him again and this time he didn’t wave me away.
I eased down from the rock and walked as non-threateningly as possible over to them.
Raksha lifted her head and examined me for an instant, rose and trotted over to her cubs.
Jack watched her leave. “I guess this is as good a time as any. What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about the modifications,” I said. This was a sure opener for every person I’d ever met who’d undergone elective modification. Like hospital patients, it was the one reliable subject they all wanted to talk about. Jack Brubaker and your Aunt Edda getting her gall bladder out had a lot in common.
“Yeah,” said Jack. “It’s all common sense stuff, really. You figure I had to be out here on my own all year around, I needed certain things. Thick skin. A summer and a winter pelt. Some brown fat to generate heat when I need it. A little more strength in my arms, legs and back. A little more stamina. Better hearing. Better sense of smell. Better eyesight. You can guess the drill.”
I pointed at his knees and hips. “What about those?”
He stared at his own knee for a minute, not quite understanding. “Oh, yeah,” he said suddenly. “I know what you mean. Bigger points for muscle attachment and just to generally beef things up. A sprained ankle would likely kill me. Even so, I got a strained ligament last winter. If it hadn’t been for Raksha, I wouldn’t have made it.” He looked into the distance for a moment. “Winters are hard.”
“So, are you as good a wolf as they are?”
“I’m not a wolf,” he said looking straight at me. I had clearly hit a nerve. “They accept me into the pack. I’m a sort of brother to Akela. An uncle figure. The idea was to live with the wolves, not become a wolf.”
“Interesting distinction.”
Jack scowled a moment. “I guess. Maybe I could have been modified into a wolf but it would have cost a lot more money than I had.”
I couldn’t have asked for a better segue. “How did you pay for it? Modifications like this are expensive.” I cued Goldie to concentrate on his face. Briefly, I looked up. As usual, she was one step ahead of me.
“Sam didn’t tell you?”
“Sam didn’t tell me much. He left me pretty much to my own devices.”
; Jack chuckled and gestured to the empty landscape around us. “I expect he did. I won the Colorado lottery. Ten million dollars.”
“Come on. If a lottery millionaire had chosen to become a wolf—”
He glanced at me coldly.
“—chosen life with the wolves,” I amended. “I would have heard of it.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Sam and I came to the same conclusion. So, I lost the money at the Golden Hind Casino of Macau. It’s a neat trick. You contract for something illicit or secret and pay for it by losing. The casino takes ten percent. Had all the work done there, too, along with a couple of years of physical therapy to recover. Then, snuck back here through Canada broke as a penny.” He laughed. “Now, that was a pain in the ass. I look more or less normal if I depilate every day but it makes me itch like Hell.”
“Why choose this?”
He looked up at me as if I were crazy. Maybe to him I was. He looked back at Raksha. “It seemed the right idea at the time.”
“So, your whole life you spent thinking about wolves.”
He shrugged. “I saw a movie once that made it look pretty good. That’s about it.”
“Any regrets?”
“Quiet,” he said suddenly and his nostrils flared. “Akela’s coming.”
Akela was black with just a hint of brown along his belly. He had come up over the same ridge I had come the previous day. As soon as he saw us, he started running. It was at least a mile back to that ridge but he covered the ground quickly.
“Hold still,” said Jack.
That was okay for him to say. I’ve dictated live stories while mortars were exploding forty feet from me without losing a comma. But not this time. Maybe there is something to racial memory. All I knew was a black wolf was racing towards me Hell bent on evil. I remembered images out of folklore—legend, myth and majesty—and suddenly I was terrified. I turned and ran. I didn’t get two steps when Jack grabbed me by the jacket and hurled me to the ground. Then, he sat on me.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” I swore.
“Oh, shut up.”
“That wolf’s going to kill me.”
“True. He might,” Jack said judiciously. “You got a better chance with me sitting on you.”
Akela was much, much bigger than Raksha. He had to have been easily a hundred and fifty pounds. Unlike the trusting examination I’d gotten yesterday, Akela sniffed me over one end to the other.
When he was finished figuring out where I had been for the last several years by my smell, he walked stiff legged to face me. He made no sound but he was clearly considering whether or not to attack. A very slight huff came from Jack. Akela gave no sign of having heard. After a moment, though, he opened his mouth and seemed to grin. He leaped gracefully over my head and bowled Jack over. It was like having two Olympic wrestlers working out on my back.
Cautiously, I rose to my feet and turned around. Akela and Jack were rolling around on the grass. Jack grabbed Akela around his chest and started to roll over with him but Akela escaped and pushed him over.
I watched them dismally. I had been here two days and gotten some great footage but I knew almost nothing. It was time to start checking deep background.
Every HIR has his own techniques. I like to get just enough background to understand what I’m looking at before I start to interview the subject. This way the material always feels fresh. Other people do things differently. I know one HIR who won’t interview a subject without knowing everything down to the family tree.
My technique, though, is predicated on the subject cooperating. Usually it works out. Even people who are hostile to the idea will cooperate in some way—anger and hate are a form of emotional contact after all. It wasn’t working here. It wasn’t that Jack disliked cooperating. He just didn’t care. Somewhere in the back of people is a need to talk about themselves. It’s basic to our makeup. It’s fundamental. Jack didn’t seem to have it; he was just being polite. It was time I looked into alternatives. As I said, I was wired into the North American Communications Grid through my tent. Sam was only a few numbers away.
I could tell from the furniture behind him that Sam was in his office. His eyes were red and his expression surly. He was probably drunk.
“What do you want?”
“To talk to you. Jack’s not the only story here, you know.”
He looked at me suspiciously. “What do you mean?”
I smiled at him. “You’re part of this, too. After all, you run Beck-Lewis. He lives in your backyard, so to speak. You knew all about him. Why did you let him stay here?”
Sam didn’t say anything for a moment. “Didn’t want to arrest him. We grew up together.”
“Really?” I had guessed a connection of this sort. “Was he always like this?”
“Like what? Covered with hair? Nowadays, his dick and scrotum retract up into his belly. Did you think he was like that in high school?” Sam reached off camera and pulled back a bottle. “His dad ran the hardware store in Schmidt, north of the lake. He didn’t do very well at it and Jack was always helping out. Jack was almost always busy. He was the kind of kid that you could get to cooperate if you asked him but you’d run into a stone wall if you tried to force him. He hated taking orders or having anyone tell him what to do—it compromised his freedom, I guess. But if you asked him, he’d do everything he could for you.” Sam chuckled softly.
I wanted to yell: but how did he come here? That wouldn’t work. Sam had to tell the story in his own way.
“Whenever he had the chance, he lit out camping,” Sam said. He leaned forward into the screen. “You got to understand that Jack was talented. Look, as soon as he was old enough he got a hunting license. Every deer season he went out with a rifle and bagged the limit. Every time. Some guys go for years before they bag their first buck. Nobody gets his limit every year. Jack started out using his Dad’s 30-06, an old Springfield. That was too easy. Jack could take down a buck from a mile away and let you pick where to put the hole so it wouldn’t show when it was mounted. After a while, he went to a smaller bore and then to black powder. That got too easy so he went to bow hunting. He was fourteen years old at that point and bringing home a deer every time. Every time. That got too easy so he started stalking them with just a knife.”
Sam shook his head in admiration. “He was still this scrawny kid. He wasn’t that strong, but he was frightfully quick and it was like he could get inside the head of the game.”
“Deer hunting with a knife?”
“I think he could have got an elk, too, if he’d have tried.” Sam said with satisfaction. “You figure a two-hundred pound deer is one thing. A six-hundred or a thousand-pound elk is entirely different. Then, he quit hunting all at once. He said it just wasn’t fair. Instead, he started counting coup.”
“Counting coup?”
“Funny, eh? He’d go out there and get as close as he could and touch them on the head, or slap them or cut off a piece of tail or an ear. Not just elk but cougar and bear.”
“Bear? How did he do that?”
Sam laughed. “That wasn’t easy. He came back one time tore up so bad he looked like the only things holding him together were strings. But he had a piece of a grizzly’s ear.”
This was starting to sound like a tall tale. Pretty soon Sam would have Jack riding a tornado. “Did he count coup on wolves?”
“We didn’t have many wolves back then,” Sam said quietly. “He left them pretty much alone. I don’t know why. Then, he quit counting coup.”
“It got too easy?”
Sam shook his head. “No. This was something else. Something different. He was graduating college by this point and they were just putting Beck-Lewis on the boards.” Sam stopped a moment. “Do you really understand what Beck-Lewis is? It’s a park and a refuge, all right. But it’s bordered on all sides with corporate farms, ranches and gas wells. There are no roads into it. It’s a no-man’s land. It’s the badlands that nobody wanted so the corporations all decided to do
something to protect their inside borders and appease the environmentalists. Every couple of years the Sierra Club or the National Geographic or a few scientists come out here and do some work. But to do it they got to get federal permits, state permits and then border permits from each one of the abutting corporations. It’s really hard to do so people go elsewhere, to the Grand Tetons, or Yellowstone or Glacier. Jack and I realized that this place was going to be cheap, underfunded, barely visible. It was perfect. Accidentally, Beck-Lewis was going to slip backwards two hundred years. So we both applied to be rangers and got jobs here. We might have been the only applicants—there sure wasn’t much competition. That was the way of it for ten years.”
Sam stopped and stared at me through the screen, coming back to himself. I didn’t say anything. This was his song, his eulogy. I wouldn’t have broken it for the world. Every word, every gesture was being recorded. It was great background.
“Then, the wolves started coming down from Canada. A few strayed up from Yellowstone. Not many but enough to start a small population. Beck-Lewis wasn’t part of the Wolf Restoration Project but wolves go where they want to go. We wanted the wolves but we didn’t want the WRP—too many strings. Too much visibility. We didn’t want the scientists and the tourist trade. So, we started hunting them, tranquilizing them, and pulling off the radio collars. We left the collars to be found in different places to make the WRP think the wolves had dropped them or been killed. Some we just destroyed—a few collars are lost every year. It was tricky but there weren’t very many wolves. It didn’t take long for Jack to first discard the plane, then the trank gun. Then, he was going out there just by himself. We were only getting one or two collars a year. He would stalk the wolves just like he stalked cougars and elk. But wolves are smarter. They knew who he was and wouldn’t sit still for it. He had to get to know them before they’d let him take the collars. He spent more time out there than anywhere else.”
“Then, he won the lottery,” I prompted.
“Damnedest thing. He stopped in for a six-pack of club soda—he has always had a passion for carbonated water. Go figure. Bought a ticket and a week later he’s a millionaire.” Sam shook his head. “I guess he was already pretty clear in his mind what he was going to do with the money. That was eight years ago. I was against it. I thought it would bring trouble.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 66