by Urban Waite
“What makes you not trust him at all?”
“A lot has been said about him.”
“You’ve heard it all before,” Sheri said. “It’s not like you haven’t gotten used to the things people say.”
“Not all of it.”
“Well, you know him better than me,” Sheri said, sarcasm in her voice.
Drake had his eyes open still, the dark room was coming back into focus and he saw the nightstand and the wall farther on. “What makes you so certain about him?”
“I just feel for him,” Sheri said. “For where he’s been and what he’s had to do to get here with us. It took a lot for him to come back here after everything. To the house he used to share with your mother and you. For him to come to Silver Lake. I have sympathy for him, but I also think it takes a lot of courage.”
Drake turned so that he could face her, hoping that she could see the smile on his face when he said, “You’ve got a soft heart, Sheri.”
“Well, you’ve got a heart made of stone,” she said, pushing at him a little beneath the sheets, her own smile now visible.
“He’s here because he has to be. We said we’d take care of him, didn’t we? It was one of the conditions of his release.”
“I know he seems like a loner but he’s not really to blame for what he is. Not totally.”
In the dim light of their bedroom Drake lay watching his wife. He didn’t know what else to say to her. The trip into the woods with Ellie was less than eight hours away. All the things people had said about Patrick Drake over the years and now he was here. Sleeping in the room down the hall, resting up for his chance at the mountains.
Drake lay there for a long time thinking it over. Sheri falling asleep and the thoughts in his head whistling around like leaves over an empty lot, nothing to catch them or anchor them to the earth as they moved. All the while, Drake simply trying to see the world through Sheri’s eyes, but he just couldn’t.
He didn’t want his father to be any of the things people were saying about him. Mostly, though, he didn’t want his father to be a murderer on top of everything else he’d already been convicted of.
PART II
THE HUNT
Chapter 6
THE SUN WAS JUST up over the mountains when Drake pulled his cruiser past the cattle fence. The barbed wire stained black where the deer had been, but little else to say what happened two days before. Patrick sat in the passenger seat watching the houses go by as they rounded the lake. The smell of coffee thick inside the car from one of the old chipped cups Patrick held in his hands, amplified by the closed-in air packed tight between the windows.
Drake had half expected to see Driscoll at the end of his drive that morning, sitting there on the hood of his Impala, just waiting for them. Only he hadn’t been there and Drake turned south along the lake and followed the road, feeling loose and untethered from his day and the expectations he usually had for himself. The home he’d made the last twelve years in Silver Lake shattered by what Driscoll had said. No way of knowing how any of this would turn out. His father next to him in the passenger seat and all they’d need for the wolf hunt loaded up in the back.
As he pulled past the field he saw the Fish and Wildlife truck waiting beneath the trees. The brown vehicle tucked into the shadows up a small access road that wound back into the forest and ran the perimeter of the property, ending at the farmhouse. Ellie standing there with the tailgate down and a rifle pitched skyward. The red tufts of tranquilizers sitting there beside her on the metal with the rest of her gear.
Drake parked the car off the side of the road and got out. He came and stood next to the truck with his arms resting over the top of the bed. A good amount of gear laid out below. “You really think you’re going to take her down with one of those?” he said.
Ellie finished packing the tranquilizers into the case and then zipped it closed. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“You’re supposed to use silver bullets, aren’t you?”
Ellie smiled. “You think this wolf is going to turn into a person after we catch up to her?”
“It might explain why she’s all alone. The last of her kind.”
“A wolf in these mountains is just about as rare as Bigfoot.”
“Some might tell you a wolf is rarer than Bigfoot,” Drake said.
Ellie laughed, hitching the strap of the rifle over her shoulder and leaning into the bed to grab up her pack. “Well, we’d probably have to put Bigfoot on the endangered species list as well, wouldn’t we?” Over the uniform she wore a green fleece vest. Her hair, kept back from her eyes with a rubber band, bobbed from shoulder to shoulder as she moved one item after another out of the truck bed, setting them on the ground in a wide circle at her feet. “What about him?” Ellie nodded toward Patrick where he sat in Drake’s backseat with the door pushed open, pulling on his boots. His coffee cup and pack on the ground near his feet. “Is he going to come over here and tell me to wear garlic around my neck and make sure to stab the beast in the heart with a wooden cross?”
“Don’t be silly, Ellie. We may be talking werewolves here, but not vampires.”
Ellie gave him a wry look, raising her hands in mock surrender. “Of course. But you know after all the rumors that have been going around the last dozen years, your father’s probably going to be the scariest thing in these woods the next couple days.”
Drake looked back to where his father sat, lacing his boots. In the last twelve years, he knew, Patrick had been called a number of things, which in their own way had reflected on Drake. He didn’t know what to say about that. He knew Ellie was joking with him, and he wanted to laugh and play it off like it didn’t matter, but the comment had hit too close to home and he was struggling to find anything to say.
He was still trying to find a way to keep the darkness out of their conversation when he heard gravel popping beneath tires as a car came down the ranch access road. The headlights cutting through the shadowed tree trunks for only a moment before they came around the corner and Drake saw the bubble lights on top of the car.
Ellie straightened at the sound and then moved some of her gear to the side of the road, close in to the wheels of her truck, leaving enough room for the cruiser to go past.
“You tell Gary where we would be this morning?” Drake asked.
Ellie turned and looked to Drake for a moment. “I asked Gary to go talk to the rancher for us. I thought asking for a spot to leave our vehicles would be better if it came from him. Fish and Wildlife aren’t exactly the ranchers’ favorites right now. They’d all rather see this wolf shot than have us out here trying to save her.”
Drake glanced to his right and found his father up now, standing about three feet off, watching as the cruiser drew to a stop close by.
“It’s been a long time,” Gary said to Patrick through the open window. His arm up over the passenger seat as he spoke to Patrick. “I hope your boy told you Andy and Luke say hello. We’d like to have you down to the Buck Blind when you’re finished here. We can catch up over a few drinks.”
Patrick nodded. “Just like old times out here, isn’t it?” he said, bending at the waist so that he could look in through the passenger window at Gary.
Gary glanced back over his shoulder to where Drake stood. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Pat. Going on a wolf hunt a few days after being let out of Monroe. I already told Bobby and Ellie how I feel about all this. Making you the third wheel. If you want, I can give you a ride back into town and we can grab breakfast. You shouldn’t be going up into the mountains your first week out.”
“It’s good for me to get back into the hills. Maybe it will help me tame some old demons.”
“I guess it is just like old times, then,” Gary said. “We’ll catch up, don’t worry. I wouldn’t have much time today anyway.”
“You sure you don’t need me?” Drake asked, stepping closer to the car.
“No. It’s nothing,” Gary said. “Cheryl didn’t m
ake it home last night. Her parents called us pretty late. You know how this goes. She’s probably shacked up at a boyfriend’s somewhere.” He nodded back toward Patrick and said, “You just watch out for your father, Bobby. I don’t want anyone else going missing around here.”
Drake nodded, watching as a thin smile slipped across Gary’s face.
“I don’t want it to be anything like old times out here,” Gary said. “Make sure your father doesn’t step out from behind a tree with a couple sacks of BC bud under each of his arms.” Gary laughed. “See you both in a day or so, okay? Pat, let’s grab that drink when you get back.”
“Okay,” Patrick said, stone-faced and impossible to read. “You and the boys.” He moved back from the door and straightened up.
Gary laughed once more. “Happy hunting.” Then he pulled away down the road and they watched him take the turn and head north toward Silver Lake.
SOMETIME AROUND NOON they lost the trail. No tracks in the moist ground. No broken branch, or scat, or tuft of hair. Nothing to go on. The forest all around them, dense and black with shadow. Sword fern and moss all across the forest floor. The large trunks of fir and hemlock stretching down from above and the sky only visible through slim blue cracks in the canopy.
Ellie stood and marked their location on the map. She was holding a GPS in her hand and as she looked around at the forest, she measured their bearings against the map. Drake found an old deadfall. The bark beneath his fingertips, grown thick with rough moss, felt spongy to the touch. He put his full weight to it and sat, the log buckling slightly as the rot compressed.
On his knee he wore a metal brace, with Velcro ties and padded fittings. The material beneath wet with his own sweat. For nearly five miles they’d been making a straight line upward through the mountain, veering often before coming back on path, heading almost parallel to the lake below, but always climbing.
Next to him, Patrick swayed on his feet, his hands tucked under the straps of his pack and a half circle of sweat stained into the shirt below his neck. “So what’s the plan here?” he said, raising his eyes to Ellie. “We’re just going to track this girl, shoot her, and then put a collar on her?”
“You make my job seem so easy,” Ellie said.
“Well, there is the hiking part.”
Ellie grinned and studied her map. When she looked back up, searching the hillside above, she said, “And the finding her part.”
Drake worked the muscles beneath the brace, feeling the familiar pain. He knew this was good for him, all of it, pushing himself till the new muscles formed over the old, cutting out the scar tissue. He carried with him his old .270 hunting rifle, the gun strapped to the side of his pack, and a scope zipped into one of the pockets. He wasn’t expecting to use it, but he was nervous about this whole thing and had packed it that morning, thinking about stories he knew were myths, but that somehow had worked their way into his reality. When he looked back up at Ellie she had walked off a ways and then come back, GPS in one hand and her own rifle in the other.
“How long since the last wolf sign?” she asked.
“It’s been a while now,” Drake said.
Ellie turned and looked to Patrick. “You see anything?”
Patrick had produced a water bottle from his pack and stood drinking. When he was done he passed it along to Drake and said, “What did you think? This wolf was just going to pop out of the woods so we could shoot her?”
“That wasn’t exactly it,” Ellie said.
“You bring any kind of bait?”
“This one seems to be attracted to dead bodies.”
“That why you had us come along?” Drake said. “Human sacrifices?”
“The way you’re both breathing it’ll probably turn into something like that,” Ellie said. “I brought along some urine from a male wolf, and a distressed-elk call. I figure between the two we can hope to get her coming our way.”
“Where to now?” Patrick asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ellie said. She ran the back of her palm along her hairline to wipe the sweat away. “You got any hideouts for us to hole up in?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Two years smuggling drugs over these mountains and you got nothing, huh?”
“Well, the idea was not to leave a trail.”
“Makes sense,” Ellie said. “I’m just starting to think about how it took them two years to find a guy in these mountains and we’re looking for one wolf who’s only been here a few weeks.”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly howling at the moon, either,” Patrick said.
Drake finished drinking from the water and then offered it to Ellie. When she turned it down he handed it back to his father. “Still,” Drake said. “You did get caught.”
OUT IN THE darkness they heard the wolf call.
Drake and his father sat around a small fire Ellie had allowed them to make on Forestry land. The two tents they’d set up just beyond the light in the shadowed forest. Ellie already asleep in her tent and only Drake and Patrick sitting up with the fire. No words spoken between the two of them in thirty minutes or more as they sat looking inward. Transfixed by the dance of the flames while out in the forest the wolf called and called without response.
The feeling Drake had carried with him through the day brimming at the edge. The simple question he feared to ask. He felt it all circling around them in the night. The threat out there and all it held with it. His father returned to the valley for only a few days and already Drake’s life felt more tenuous than perhaps it had ever felt. But still he wouldn’t say a thing, fearful of what response might come, of what truths might be revealed. Miles from home in the middle of the woods it was either the best or the worst place to confront his father.
From the pile by his feet Drake grabbed a piece of wood and threw it into the fire, the sparks dancing for a moment and then settling again. The fire small but strong where the coals burned bright and iridescent in the belly. Nothing to be said. In the morning they would bury the black coals in the ground and move on.
The wolf called again and Drake raised his head, trying to fix a location. The night all around them now and the cold that came with it. A bright half-moon above in the sky and the pathways of moonlight visible on the ground in all directions. The flicker of the fire reaching only so far into the forest, where the blue-black light began and the ferns feathered out of the shadows. No idea how far or close the wolf might be. Only the lonely rise and fall of the howl trailing through the trees.
DRAKE WOKE IN the morning with the air thick around him. The tent he’d packed for his father and him zipped up and stale with the smell of their breath. In the night he’d dreamed about Ellie. The two of them sitting up in her truck on another night, waiting, not for poachers this time but for something else, something that had gone—like most dreams—painfully unnamed. What they’d said to each other and how they’d acted as indistinct as fresh ink smeared on paper. Words only half-legible. His hand at one time during the night held toward her.
Rolling over, remembering it all, he brought his arm up and lay looking at his hand as if it had acted alone in some brutal conspiracy that implicated them all. Above, through the thin tent walls, a pale light came streaming down. A slight hiccup to his breathing as he tried to calm whatever thoughts had been churning inside him. It was a full minute before he realized his father was missing.
Unzipping the tent, Drake stood up into the forest. The trees all around him as they’d been the night before. His eyes skipping over the landscape, settling on their packs for only a moment before skittering on. No sign of his father. The question he’d wanted to ask the night before never having come to his lips and the two men simply watching the fire until it died away and they, too, went to sleep.
He stood now with his feet bare on the forest floor, the dry needles like a mat beneath his heels, and the green moss over everything else. The sun was up, slanting in sideways from the east, and where the sun did not touc
h the shadows felt cold and damp with mountain dew. The only thing to hear was the slight breeze roaming in the branches high above, washing the treetops one way, then another.
He didn’t have an idea where his father had gone and he looked from their packs to the opening of the tent, only a few feet behind him. He sat in the entrance to the tent and pulled his knee brace on, then his socks and boots. He didn’t want to worry Ellie, and in some way he knew, too, he wasn’t ready to admit to her the unease he’d felt all through the night and the guilt he now felt for bringing his father along.
When he checked the packs a minute later he saw that Ellie’s rifle was gone. He looked around the camp, trying to remember if she had stashed it somewhere, or if it was in her tent. No memory of either, and a certainty he’d seen the rifle right here, strapped to the side of her pack when Drake had gone to sleep.
For a moment his eyes scanned the dense forest. The camp made in a little clearing among the trees. Dark soil beneath his boots and nothing but the endless wall of tree trunks in any direction. A slope to the ground about twenty feet east of the camp, where the valley opened up below and the lake sometimes could be seen through the trees.
Taking his eyes off the surrounding forest, he unstrapped his own rifle from his pack and slung it over his shoulder. Driscoll’s words from the day before playing in Drake’s head and not the first idea which way his father had gone, or why he’d wanted to come along with them in the first place.
There was a small stream a tenth of a mile downslope and this is the way Drake went, hoping his father had simply gone for water. He could feel the breeze strengthen as soon as he came off the even ground. The valley floor far below him down the slope, and the rush of air felt rising upward through the trees.
With his boots loosely tied, the land fell away quickly and felt dense and fragile beneath his feet. The deep scent of fungus and turned soil rising from the ground any time he took a step. His heels landed heavily on the downward slope, sinking in as they pushed a mixture of detritus that clumped and fell away before him.