When We Were Wolves

by Jon Billman

  The next item up for auction was a rust-colored Alaskan husky puppy, a cross between a Siberian, an American pointer, and a little something else built for speed, which had been bred by Hunter. Timber, the blue-eyed puppy, had stumbled over to the Count halfway through the Calcutta to gnaw at the Count’s cowhide boots. Every once in a while the Count reached down and scratched the dogs head. As the crowd watched him, Hubert slowly raised his finger and owned the puppy.

  They stacked the metal folding chairs in the corner and the rest of the evening was the dance. Hunter, who had honed his dancing skills as part of a set of instinctive traits for Rocky Mountain survival, fared the best at the dance, dancing with every single woman and a few not single. A whistling cowboy dusted the floor with talcum powder, which covered the asbestos tiles like snow. The Noble Hussy Orchestra struck up a western swing. Hunter led Lizabeth through spaghetti turns and athletic dips.

  By the third or fourth song the Count left his place against the paneled wall, pushing the sled across the talced floor toward the back door. Timber ran with the Count, hesitating when Hunter squatted to call him, but the puppy didn’t stop until he reached the door.

  In the heavy snow and halo of light from the parking lot, with the mid-tempo “Smokin’ Cigarettes and Drinkin’ Coffee Blues” at his back, the Count looked over his shoulder and saw Hunter dancing closely with Lizabeth. He kicked the sled through eight inches of newly fallen champagne, all the way home, the other side of town.

  The sled had a special place on what used to be the altar stage of the church. The Count carried it through the double front doors and set it gently on its runners atop the carpeted stage. He spent the next hour or so admiring the sled from every angle, testing the flex of the wood, the runners, the joints. The old church was sparsely furnished, a couch along one wall, a table near the kitchen, and piles of worn-out running shoes everywhere, holes in the uppers, frayed laces, soles flattened slick and worn through. Timber chewed on a shoe and Perch jumped into the sled—the new centerpiece of the place—and watched his master.

  That week KHAM broadcast special hourly dog-racing-trail-condition weather reports and updates on how the racers were faring on the legs prior to Hams Fork—Jackson to Moran, Moran to Dubois, Dubois to Pinedale, Pinedale to Lander, Lander to Hams Fork. From Hams Fork they would race to Afton, then on to the neon finish in Jackson. The map of the course was drawn on a Wyoming highway map in thick black marker and resembled, ten feet and a glass of blush away, an outline of France. Guy de Calvaire and a pack of Europeans stayed tight on the leader, an American dog food tycoon. The course would become more hilly, the dogs more tired. They would get a day of rest in Hams Fork.

  The morning of the day before the Hams Fork leg of the race, a howling dawn, Lizabeth awoke to a knock at her door. She tied on her robe and answered it, holding tight to the storm door in the wind. “Oh, Mr. de Sablettes what a surprise. I’m flattered at what you paid for the sled.” She, like everyone, had heard the rumors and didn’t invite him inside, out of the sideways-blowing snow. The Count had never knocked on her door, never been to Lizabeth’s home.

  “It’s beautiful,” Hubert said. “I have it ready and thought you might like to drive it.”

  “I didn’t know you had a kennel,” Lizabeth said, opening the door wide to look at the sled in the street.

  “No, just Perch and Timbre”—he pointed to the basset hound sitting by the sled and the puppy in the cargo bag—“and myself.”

  “Well, I—” But Hubert had turned toward the sled and began linking himself to the gangline with a caribiner. Perch ran to Lizabeth and sat, eyes pleading for a hot dog.

  Hubert, in harness, looked back to the door, which Lizabeth had pulled back tight against herself. He looked down to his feet. Then back to Lizabeth. Hubert wore track shoes, distance flats, with quarter-inch spikes screwed into the soles. No socks. “Won’t you come for a ride? I have a beautiful new sled and now I need a driver.” His voice blew away on the wind, but his English was careful and Lizabeth could read his lips in the early-morning porch light. Hubert stood facing forward, concentrating, waiting for Lizabeth but no longer acknowledging her. She reached down to Perch and rubbed behind his floppy ears.

  Mumbling to herself that this was crazy Lizabeth went inside to dress. She found her hat and mittens and stepped outside into the snow, where she could see each breath come nervous and fast. She led Perch back to the sled and wrapped him in the sled’s red cargo bag with the puppy. Hubert stepped forward, pulling the slack out of the gangline. “‘Gee,’ I turn right, ‘haw,’ I turn left. ‘Whoa,’ I stop, and you stand on the brake.”

  Lizabeth stood on the runners and lifted the ice hook. “Mush,” she said softly, her breath rising upward.

  “Sorry,” Hubert said. “Its difficult to hear you in this wind.”

  “Mush!”

  The brush bow lifted, then the sled tracked straight behind Hubert and leveled like a boat on-plane. “Hike!” They ran down Klondike Street in the low, muted light of the early-morning snowstorm, the crystals of snow the shape of tiny arrowheads. Hubert moved slowly, awkwardly, at first, but smoothed out and picked up the pace as his joints and muscles warmed and flexed. “Gee!” There were no cars on the streets, but the team set the racing dogs howling as they passed the parked mobile-kennel trucks awaiting the next day’s competition. It was feeding time, and the dog handlers stopped chopping frozen salmon and beef roasts, set their axes down, and gawked as the little team slid by. A dream? “Trail!” yelled Hubert as they passed the dog trucks, “Trail!” The hundreds of dogs in town began howling at the event, drowning the steady pattern of Hubert’s breathing.

  Hubert had long ago become addicted to endorphins, the natural form of morphine his body produced through hard running. But as his running progressed, he needed more and more miles of it to produce the same effect, and the rush wore off faster. He ran harder and longer, running himself deeper into oxygen debt. Without a run he became dogged or edgy, enough that he had to avoid contact with anyone. So without running, he was convinced, he couldn’t survive. Running had become his habitat, and if that habitat shrank, like a constricted heart, he would no longer be wild inside, and he would die. He could not explain this to anyone. Only the rabbits knew. The hares. The coyotes. Perch.

  They ran the streets of town, a line of quick color in the storm, Lizabeth keeping one foot on the runners and pedaling the uphills. “Haw!” yelled Lizabeth, and they turned left and started up the steep hill of Canyon Road. The sled tracked true in the fresh snow that covered the sooty streets, though she found herself thinking about the design, about modifications she would build into the next Calcutta’s sled, mostly slimming it down, making it lighter. Most of all the sled felt heavy, the Count straining alone on the gangline. Next year she would pare away at the stanchions, crosspieces, and slats. The footpads would be made of something lighter than strips of old snow tires. Guilty, she tried to pedal when she could, but Hubert kept the pace fast enough that her kicks did little to propel them forward. Perch and Timber pointed their muzzles out of opposite sides of the cargo bag. Perch still looked back at Lizabeth with hot-dog eyes. Timber had fallen asleep to the rhythm of the run.

  “Haw!” yelled Lizabeth. They shot down Elk Street, Lizabeth standing on the brake so as not to let the sled run over the runner on the long downhill. “Gee!” she yelled again, and they swung onto the Union Pacific service road that paralleled the railroad tracks. A yellow-and-black locomotive engine with a chevron snowplow over the cowcatcher blew its air horn as it slowly gathered momentum from a dead stop and finally passed the sled team at the other edge of town, on its way to the power plants of Utah with a load of coal. Lizabeth, warm in her down parka, lost track of time, but thought the Count must be exhausted. Crystalline rime formed on Hubert’s fleece hat and wind-shell jacket. “You’ve got to rest!” she yelled. “Let’s have coffee!” Hubert looked back, surprised. “Yes, all right,” he said. “Gee!” she commanded, and
Hubert made a right onto Antelope. “Gee!”—another right onto Third West—and “Gee!”— across Moose, back to Klondike.

  Hubert was skittish in public. People avoided him and he avoided them when he could. He shopped for groceries at night, bundled in winter clothes, just before the IGA closed, though people still studied him and speculated what he must be eating based on the basketful of ingredients he bought. Green onions and bulk garlic by the pound. Fresh spinach and anaheim peppers. Potatoes, carrots, parsley, avocados no matter what the season and their price. Dried beans. Rye flour. Brown rice. Tabasco and balsamic vinegar. Port wine. Apples. “How do you marinate rabbit?” they asked each other, or “What on earth could he be doing with all that garlic?” Now Hubert held Timber on his lap, stroking his ears. Lizabeth set the cup and saucer before him on the kitchen table.

  “Cream? Sugar?”

  “Black, thank you.”

  The house now smelled musky, acerbic, of hard sweat and garlic. Sawdust and wood glue. It had belonged to a mine foreman in Hams Forks early days. Lizabeth had taken out some of the interior walls and now it was light and spacious. Most of the furniture was hardwood she had designed and built herself. “You must be training for something. The Boston Marathon? The Beargrease? Iditarod?” Her question echoed against the hardwood floors of the house.

  “No, I run for myself mostly,” Hubert said softly. There was a long silence as they sipped coffee and crunched chocolate biscotti. The wind whistled in the power lines outside. Pellets of snow rapped at the windows. They could hear each other chewing and sipping. Under the table Perch grunted in his sleep.

  “I must say,” Hubert said suddenly, making Lizabeth jump, “I admire the sled, the work you put into it.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad I had a chance to drive it. Now I have ideas for a better sled next year.”

  “Yes. I respect those who always try to improve.” Timber growled and jumped from Hubert’s lap to pounce on the sleeping Perch. Lizabeth laughed and Hubert studied the animals wrestling on the floor.

  “Animals are funny,” Hubert said without laughing.

  “I’m sorry,” Lizabeth said, “but I have to ask this. What about the rabbits, the hunting? I’ve heard stories in town …”

  “There are many rabbits. I marinate them, yes, in cheap red wine, then sauté them in much garlic, a little onion. It is good for me to eat. Protein.”

  “But why do you run and hunt them that way?”

  “Its the only way I can hunt them. Without insulting them. I run because of this wilderness around us. I must run before there is nowhere left to run.” There was a long silence, sipping sounds, a clock ticking. “Enough of me. Tell me, why did you become a carpenter?”

  She paused, digesting what he said. “When I was little, my father said to me, There are only two respectable occupations. One’s a bootmaker, the other, a carpenter. I never really saw myself as a bootmaker. I worked out of Telluride for a while. Jackson. Ketchum, Idaho. Just the summer months. I skied all winter, fished all fall. But it got so building saunas and adjoining bathrooms with fourteen-karat bidets in condominiums with names like the Bear Foot just put me off my feed. One morning I found myself two stories up, hammering a Swiss-style molding on a Kmart Alpenhaus in Red Lodge, Montana. I set my hammer down, took the nails out of my mouth, turned and looked behind me, at the landscape I was helping to exploit and ruin. I collected my pay and moved to the high desert. Hams Fork. My father always used to say that people were breeding like rabbits. It’ll be a long time before many of them follow me here.”

  “I agree with your father. A carpenter is a very respectable profession.”

  “Yes. I’ve just decided to improve what’s already here. I don’t live life on a postcard anymore.”

  Hubert stood awkwardly, signaling his need to go. “I have something for you,” he said, “because you know.” He let himself out into the snowstorm and ran to the sled, with Perch and Timber chasing after him. The Count reached into the foot of the cargo bag and produced a cloth flour sack. He ran back to the door and handed it to Lizabeth. “You understand,” he said, “you can do something good with these.” Lizabeth opened the sack. Inside were a dozen or so hare pelts. She was puzzled, but she reached into the sack and felt the fur with her fingertips as if pinching salt, and rubbing the pinch into a roux. When she looked up again, Hubert, his dogs, and his dogsled were gone.

  The morning of the sled-dog race, Lizabeth dressed warmly and went next door to see if the Count wanted to go and watch the start of the race with her. She wanted to look at the sleds and get some more ideas. She thought she heard a noise inside the church but there was no answer to her knocks.

  Hubert de Sablettes ran. Under the power lines held high with silver standards and the cellular towers like church steeples on the ridgetops. Over the buried phone cables that allow the Californios to live in Teton County and commute daily to L.A. via their modems. The big bears were gone. The wolves. The mineral rights had been stolen from the Indians, who came from somewhere else and stole hunting rights from each other. It had all been wildness, before the polar ice caps began their melt. This place had become Europe, the only wilderness inside the hearts of a few.

  The first mushers were French fur trappers who used the dogs to run their traplines. Marche! Hike! Marche! Now the top mushers in America are gaunt and hungry Europeans: Scandinavians, Austrians, Germans, and Frenchmen training out of Canada. They eschew heavy pac boots for running shoes that they duct-tape to their Gore-Tex pants to keep the snow out as they run, pushing their sleds up hills. The Americans have become thick and complacent and, though they can still afford the best of dogs, grow heavy on the sleds.

  One musher that afternoon, an American from Grand Marais, Minnesota, told Hunter at the checkpoint midway between Hams Fork and Afton, that he had seen a man near the ridge, on foot, running by himself in the snow and rabbitbrush, twenty-five miles from town. The race director radioed in that they needed to call out Search and Rescue, that no one could survive up there, unaided in that wild country, the snow, wind, and cold, alone.

  tah. Loaded down with honey. Our regular route. The December sun is coming up over Wyoming. While I keep a tired eye out for a state trooper’s black-and-white, Wayne is driving and singing. Got an old dog, ain’t got much class … The milk van strains as we tack up winding U.S. 89, a 6 percent grade, through Logan Canyon. We’re wired on adrenaline, coffee, and money. He’s got three legs, and a hole in his ass … The day is overcast, thick; it develops slowly, like a photograph.

  On the broad side of the white panel van we restored—an old Ford Meadow Gold milk van with sliding doors and rounded panels—Wayne has painted a beautiful pale Indian maiden. Her hair is the color that you think is brown, but is actually red in the sunlight. She holds her honey dipper like a trident. Bees surround her. Below the maiden in crimson-and-gold letters: QUEEN BEE HONEY COMPANY. But her eyes! Her eyes are deep green, as if they go many fathoms inside her to inside the truck, and the honey behind those thin sheet-metal panels is laden with the power of love or magic or something else, something more. Studying the sunrise, Wayne says this: “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.”

  The laws of Utah scare us. They are arcane and cryptic. They sneak up on you, like game wardens and ATF agents. Utah is a 3.2 state: weak beer. Everything good here is regulated by the state, which is run by the Mormons. The people of Utah are deprived, and where there is deprivation there is money to be made. But, as my father told me years ago, you can’t legislate against what people want. I’ve memorized this road, the sagebrush and Mormon tea. In the vibrating rearview, underneath WELCOME TO UTAH, the sign will say “Still the Right Place.” You can’t legislate against what people need. The sign in front of us now reads:

  WYOMING

  LIKE NO PLACE ON EARTH

  The sea was here once, a long time ago. “I don’t get it,” Wayne says, offering another of his jeremiads after the singing turns to humming for a few miles, which
makes him winded. Wayne is an artist, a painter, and a student of history as well as the fermentative sciences. “Used to be the Mormons could have their whiskey, wine, coffee, beer, art. Then somewhere along the way someone with authority had a vision and put the kibosh on everything worth getting out of bed for.”

  Wayne and I offer them libation at a fair price. We have found a fortune to be made by importing U.S. Grade A Utah honey from the Beehive State, fermenting it on the lee side, and exporting Wayne Kerr Wyoming Mead back in. The Mormon men’s illicit social drink of choice is mead—nectar of nectars!—and they’re buying their own honey back, masterfully fermented, by the barrelful.

  “Know the difference between a Catholic and a Mormon?” Wayne asks, fondling his beard. I shake my head east and west. “Catholic’ll say hi to ya in the liquor store.”

  There are nights out here when the cavalry arrives in the form of a bright-orange snowplow. You can’t mind the weather if you’re going to live here in Hams Fork, Wyoming. Apocryphal stories about Wayne, about us, float around Hams Fork like flotsam and jetsam. He’s building a wooden sailboat, the Cuba Libre, in his back yard. His dream is to sell all that he has, hoist the sails and the Jolly Roger, and become a citizen of the world. Live off third-world economies where a few greenbacks will make you a tycoon. Eat a lot of seafood and grapefruit. Make love. Drink good rum every morning. The air in Utah tastes of salt.