by Steven James
“I don’t think it’s going to be okay, Nicole.” The tracks disappeared into a thick stand of pines that he couldn’t see very far into. “That wolf is probably dying. We really don’t want to be close to it right now. There’s no telling how it might react.”
“We’ll keep our distance then. I need to see it, Daniel.”
When she persisted he finally gave in. “Alright, I guess we can walk around those pines, see if it left the other side. But we’re not going in there. I don’t mind us keeping our distance—like you said—but I don’t want to startle a dying wolf up close.”
“Okay.” She’d already started on her way. “Come on.”
Silently, they traversed the pine grove, giving the shadow-riddled stretch of forest a wide berth.
They arrived at the other side just in time to see thewolf die.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
The wolf was lying at the edge of the pines and, based on the location of the smear of blood on her fur, Daniel could tell that he’d been right: she’d been shot in the chest.
She was breathing shallowly and it was clear that she wasn’t in any state to attack them, so he and Nicole edged closer until they were about twenty feet away.
The wolf lifted her head slightly and stared in their direction, but she didn’t growl.
It was unsettling how quietly she died.
One moment her eyes appeared keen and alert. And then, the next, as her head slumped back to the ground, they were simply staring blankly, unblinkingly at the forest around her.
Alive one moment.
Gone the next.
Just like that.
Daniel and Nicole waited for a few minutes in the still day, almost as a way of honoring the wolf’s death, before going to her side.
Nicole took off her mitten and petted the dead wolf gently, stroking her fur, but being careful to keep her hand away from the blood.
“We’re going to find out who did this,” she vowed softly, but there was iron in her voice. “They’re not going to get away with it.”
Daniel eyed the area again for any sign that someone might be coming their way, perhaps following the wolf tracks to make sure the animal was dead. He didn’t see anyone, but it was always possible the shooter might be coming through the stand of pines just as the wolf had.
He knelt beside Nicole. “We should get back to the car.”
As he helped her to her feet, he noticed that the wolf’s ear had been tagged, probably by the forest rangers so they could keep track of her and study her movement patterns.
He didn’t know how many wolves in the area had been tagged like this, but from what he’d heard, the forest service was trying to tag as many as they could to monitor the wolves’ numbers to see if the population was recovering.
“I wonder if the others were too.” He didn’t realize he’d spoken the words aloud instead of just thinking them until Nicole said, “The others were what?”
“Tagged.” He pointed to the wolf’s ear. “Like she was.”
“You mean the other ones that were shot?”
“Yes.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Just an idea.” Using his phone, he took a photo of the tag on the wolf’s ear. “I mean, I know there are more wolves around these days, but how many do you ever actually see?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the wild before—but I don’t spend as much time in the woods as you do.”
“And I’ve only seen ’em a couple times. Wolves keep to themselves. So how is this person, whoever it is who’s shooting them, finding so many in such a short period of time to poach?”
“You’re thinking he’s shooting ones that’ve been tagged?” They started back toward the car. “That he’s locating them by using the tracking stuff, the GPS or whatever, on the tags?”
“It’s a place to start. I think we should tell my dad about this tag.”
His father wasn’t really into texting, so Daniel went ahead and tried calling him. When he didn’t pick up, he left a brief message that they’d found a dead wolf, then asked him to call him back. He sent him the photo of the wolf’s tag.
Daniel and Nicole followed the path back to the trailhead. When they got there, he said, “We need to find out whatever we can about the wolf research tagging program.”
He suggested that Nicole follow him home, but she explained that she’d forgotten to feed her cat that morning and her parents were gone.
“I need to take care of Harley,” she said. “Swing by your place and grab your laptop. Let’s meet at my house.”
“Works for me. I’ll see you in half an hour.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Nicole’s bedroom walls were decorated with bird paintings and posters of ballet dancers. As a Star Wars geek she also had posters of Darth Vader and Han Solo, all from the original movies back in the seventies and eighties—not such a big fan of the more recent additions to the series.
On the wall, Darth Vader was inviting Daniel to the dark side of the Force.
Just like that wolf inside of him was doing.
Wolves fighting.
Killing—
—Dying, like the one in the forest today.
Nicole positioned herself on the bed with her back against the wall and propped her laptop on her legs. Her cinnamon-colored cat, Harley, now well fed and content, lounged on a pillow on the floor. Daniel sat on the edge of the bed with his computer on his lap.
“By the way,” Nicole said, “I got you a Christmas present.”
“I got you one too.”
“Really? What is it? No, wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know—es, I do. I hate surprises—well, not always; sometimes, yes, but—”
“I’m not going to tell you and you won’t get it until Christmas. But you’re gonna like it.”
“I’m sure I will. Don’t tell me.”
“I won’t.”
“But I am sorta curious.”
“Too bad.”
“Good, because I don’t want to know anything about it—but I kind of do.”
“I know.”
As Nicole nestled in among the stuffed animals and dolls that she still unashamedly kept piled beside her pillow, Daniel directed her attention to one of them. “I’ve never pointed this out to you before, and I don’t mean to be Captain Obvious here, but your doll only has one arm.”
“Yeah.” She picked it up tenderly. “It sort of got loved off over the years. At first my mom tried to fix it—sew it back on, you know—but I just kept carrying her around by that one arm all the time and then it would tear off again. Finally, my mom told me there are people who only have one arm and that Rebecca wasn’t any different. She said she was unique and special just like they are.”
“That’s cool.”
“Yeah.”
“But you said ‘her’ and ‘she.’”
“Her and she?”
“Yeah, you said you kept carrying her around, that she was special. I would’ve said ‘it.’”
“Her and she, sure, of course. Rebecca’s a girl doll. All dolls are boys or girls. You probably had boy dolls.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I never played with dolls.”
“Oh really?”
“Nope. No dolls in the Byers home.”
“And what about that Batman doll you have?”
“No, you see, that’s not a doll.”
“Oh? And what is it?”
“That’s a vintage posable action figure toy.”
“Uh-huh. A vintage doll.”
“Posable action figure toy. Huge difference.”
“Riiiiiight.”
Okay, definitely time to change the subject. He pointed to a sketchbook sitting on Nicole’s desk. “
So, have you done any new ones?”
“A couple.”
“Can I see them?”
“Um . . .”
From what he’d discovered in the past, Nicole didn’t think she was very good at her line drawings and hadn’t been all that forthcoming with showing them to him—in fact, he’d been going out with her for nearly six weeks before she finally let him see any of her sketches.
But she was wrong about them.
The drawings were amazing.
She did mostly landscapes, sometimes wildlife. She could visit a place once, or see a deer in the forest or a loon on a lake, and then come back and sketch it with details so intricate and precise that Daniel doubted he would’ve been able to notice them even if he were staring right at the animals out there in the wild.
“I promise I’ll love them,” he told her. “You know I will.”
“You’ll say you love them even if you don’t just because you don’t want to hurt my feelings.”
“Okay, how about this—I promise to hurt your feelings if I need to.”
“Oh. Well, that’s much better.”
“Anything I can do to encourage you.”
“Aha.”
He held out his hand expectantly and, after letting out a slight sigh, she leaned over, picked up the sketchbook, and handed it to him.
He paged past the drawings he’d seen before.
“You’re almost done with this sketchbook.”
“Just a few pages left.”
He came to the new ones.
The first was a sketch of the Gateway Arch and the skyline of St. Louis. He knew Nicole had gone down there with her parents last June, but just the fact that she’d only recently sketched it astonished him.
“Nope. I can’t hurt your feelings quite yet.”
He flipped forward and saw a flock of geese flying over a marsh. “Still can’t hurt ’em.”
“Well, just wait. You think your blurs are disturbing. Wait ’til you see the last drawing.”
He turned the page.
And paused.
She had sketched a man who was apparently asleep, lying on some sort of mat or cot. From what it looked like, a demon was hovering above him. It wasn’t one of those cartoonish caricatures of a devil with horns and hoofed feet and a pointy tail and a pitchfork. No, this demon seemed like something straight out of a nightmare.
She’d captured wickedness and evil and horror in a simple line drawing that was disturbingly real looking. The demon’s leathery flesh was stretched tightly across an outline of his skeleton and there was something about the way she’d drawn the creature that made it look like it was ready to lift off the page with its dark, bat-like wings, and fly straight into someone’s thoughts or infest her soul.
“See?” she said. “I warned you.”
“Is that just from your imagination?”
“Yeah, I mean, I was in a weird place when I drew it. I’d been reading the Bible and I came to the story of Job and, well, it kind of got to me.”
Nicole wasn’t afraid to talk about her faith so Daniel wasn’t surprised now that she mentioned Bible reading. Some people didn’t like to bring up anything about the supernatural, but Nicole had always been honest and forthcoming about what she believed, which was actually refreshing and one of the things that attracted him to her.
He wasn’t super familiar with the Bible, but he at least knew enough from going to church with his mom when she was still living with them to know that Job was a guy who’d been rich and then lost everything. “Is the demon tempting him?”
“More like terrorizing him.” Nicole typed on her laptop and pulled up an online Bible. “Job 7:13-15.”
“What does it say?”
“It’s Job and he’s been having these frightening visions, and he writes, ‘When I say, My bed shall comfort me, my couch shall ease my complaints; Then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions: So that my soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than my life.’”
“So God sent him nightmares so horrifying that he would have preferred to be strangled and killed? Why would God send anyone nightmares like that?”
“Job thought they were coming from God, but, well, it’s kind of complicated, but God was allowing Satan to basically torture him to see if he would turn away from his faith. But Job didn’t know about any of that, so he assumed it was God sending him all these troubles.”
“But ultimately, what’s the difference? I mean . . .” Daniel wasn’t trying to be argumentative; it just came out. “God either sent the nightmares or he allowed them, and either way he could have stopped them from happening.”
“Yeah,” she said somewhat uncertainly. “I guess so.”
He closed up the sketchbook and put it back on the desk. “One time we talked about demons and you told me that you believed in them.”
“I remember.”
“How do you know if . . . well . . .”
“What?”
“If they’re around you. Tempting you, torturing you, whatever they do?”
She looked at him with concern. “Is that what you think? That demons are torturing you?”
“Based on some of the things I’ve seen, I’m not sure what to think—although, I have to say, I’ve never wanted to be strangled and killed rather than see another blur. So at least there’s that.”
“Well, I’m no expert on demons, but I think people make a mistake when they either overestimate them or underestimate them.”
“You mean they think demons are more powerful than they really are, or think they’re, what—maybe not real at all?”
“Something like that. I mean, if you were a demon, the last thing you’d want people to know is the truth, right? You’d want them to be scared to death of you or believe you’re not even there.”
“And you’re saying it’s somewhere in the middle.”
“Yeah, but I believe God’s more powerful than they are and sometimes there’s a bigger purpose at work than what we can see. Like with Job, and now with your blurs—there’s more going on. We just need to figure out what it is.”
Neither one of them seemed to know where to take the conversation from there.
“I guess we should get started, then,” he said at last. “With the wolves, I mean.”
“Good plan.”
Two wolves.
Which one are you feeding?
When he glanced at his girlfriend’s desk he saw the demon sitting on top of it, leering at him, its wings outstretched.
He blinked to make it go away, but that didn’t help, and the demon flapped into the air until it was poised above the desk. Then it darted through the wall and was gone.
Letting out a soft breath to calm himself, Daniel shifted his attention away from that corner of the room and looked at Nicole, who was eyeing him somewhat cautiously.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“You saw something. I can tell. What did you see?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Daniel—”
“Let’s just say that was a very realistic dragon you drew.”
“You saw it.”
“Yeah, but it flew away. So that’s a good thing, right?”
“I’d say yes—but just seeing it at all is kind of disturbing.”
“You’re telling me.”
Man, right now you do not need to be obsessing about demons.
Redirecting things back to the reason they were here, he said, “I think we should look into more than just the wolves being tagged.”
“What do you mean?”
“That research facility, the Traybor Institute, we need to see how that place and the poaching might be tied together.”<
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“I’ll take the wolves,” Nicole offered. “You take the fish research place with the razor wire fence.”
“The one where they bring handcuffed prisoners.”
“Exactly.”
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
They researched things for about half an hour, then went to the kitchen to grab lunch and catch each other up on what they’d been able to figure out so far.
While they threw together some grilled cheese sandwiches, Nicole said, “There wasn’t anything online about whether the other wolves that’ve been poached were tagged, but I did find out that a couple dozen were part of this joint research project between the Department of Natural Resources, the forest service, and a wildlife management program at UW-Superior.”
“So it’s at least possible that the other wolves were tagged too.”
“Yeah. It’s possible.”
“I should tell my dad what we’re thinking. Maybe he would know.”
He still hadn’t heard from his dad since leaving the voicemail earlier, so he texted him to call when he had a chance.
Nicole flipped the sandwiches to brown the other side. “What do you have about the Traybor Institute?”
“Honestly, not much—which is sort of surprising. But since that van came from the Department of Corrections, I decided to see if there was any connection between the Traybor Institute and the Derthick State Penitentiary. I mean, since that’s the closest prison, I figured I’d start there.”
“Anything?”
“One thing that’s kind of interesting. On the institute’s website there’s a list of their staff. I Googled the names and didn’t come up with anything for most of them, but this one guy, Dr. Waxford, used to be in a private research program on how humans process time. I thought that was kind of weird, that he would end up counting trout and walleye for a living.”
“How we process time?”
“Yeah. A chronobiologist. I guess there was this famous researcher back in the 1960s who spent two months living in a cave with no way of telling how much time was passing, how long he was sleeping, any of that. So Dr. Waxford did the same thing—only for four months. He wrote in a journal and eventually lost track of time so much that when they went in to find him he thought that only a few weeks had passed. He nearly went insane. Some people say he did.”