by Paul Doiron
“I was hoping you’d be headed back to Grand Lake Stream.”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
As I was hanging up, Charley said, “Give Trooper Tate my fondest wishes.”
How had the old fart known that Dani was here with me? Maybe I had written off the existence of ESP too quickly.
“Charley Stevens sends you his fondest wishes.”
“I bet he does.”
Dani still considered Stacey to be an archrival, no matter that Dani was now the one sharing my bed. Her open jealousy both piqued and excited me, I had to admit.
“You must feel like you’re getting a pardon, too,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“When Billy goes free, you won’t have to carry around your guilt anymore. You can both move forward.”
“It’s not like I’ve been locked in there with him.”
“No?” She shrugged her shoulders. “I should get going. I don’t want to be late reporting for duty.”
“And I don’t want to be a bad influence.”
“Then stop being one.” Her tone was light, but the words landed hard.
“You were the one who came flying over here.”
“You’re right. That wasn’t fair. All I’m asking is you think about what I said before. I’m not giving you an ultimatum, but…”
She kissed me with closed lips and was the first to pull loose of our embrace. We exchanged awkward goodbyes. Then, before I knew it, her Ford Interceptor was rumbling down the track of mud that was my driveway.
Slate-colored juncos returned to peck at the husks under the bird feeder.
April was too early for bare feet. I hurried inside to warm my refrigerated toes beside the woodstove. I wondered if it was too soon for a bourbon straight up.
* * *
Six hours later, I was no closer to deciding how to spend the remainder of my vacation.
All I knew was that, for the first time in years, I no longer needed to worry about the Cronks.
One of the decisions I’d made, in moving into my new house, had been to sell my television. I had only ever watched sports on it, and I preferred listening to baseball on the radio. There were plenty of bars and friends’ dens I could visit when football season rolled around. And there was always the computer.
Now I retreated to my leather armchair and a copy of Edmund Morris’s biography of Teddy Roosevelt. I’d been a history major at Colby but had found the demands of my profession—the long hours, the endless paperwork, the constant motion—had broken my habit of reading for pleasure.
Sitting there, I remembered Dani’s gibe at me for being nearly middle-aged.
Thirty didn’t feel old.
Except when it did.
Somehow I had forgotten that Roosevelt’s first significant achievements came as the police commissioner of New York City. He’d rooted out corruption from among his own force, planted the seeds for what would become criminal-justice academies, and roamed the streets at midnight to observe his men in action. I wondered what TR would have done to reform the Maine prison system.
I fell asleep in my chair with the book open on my lap.
I had a dream that a fly had somehow found its way inside my house and had landed on my shoulder. It seemed to want to tell me something. But when I turned my head aside, it began to shriek.
I sat upright and the book fell to the floor. The lights were still on, but I had forgotten to add wood to the stove, and the room had grown cold. The buzzing was coming not from a fly, but from my phone.
It was nearly two A.M., and my friend Warden Gary Pulsifer was on the line. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“What’s going on, Gary?” I expected the worst, as one always does at that hour.
“Listen, I knew you’d want to hear this as soon as possible. I think you might want to drive up to Pennacook as fast as you can.”
It was an old mill town on the Androscoggin River in western Maine, most noteworthy in my mind for having been Dani Tate’s birthplace. Pennacook sat at the foot of a chain of low mountains that were the trailing edge of the Appalachian Range. My sleep-fuzzed mind could think of zero reasons I might need to go there, especially at this miserable hour.
“Why?”
“Shadow’s been hurt.”
“Shadow?”
“That wolf of yours is bleeding to death in the back of my truck.”
PART 2
All Stories Are About Wolves
12
Déjà vu.
“Will he live?” I asked the veterinarian.
“What do you want to hear?” Dr. Elizabeth Holman said.
“An honest answer to my question.”
“Then no. He’s not going to live. I doubt he’ll make it through the next twenty-four hours.”
The wolf lay motionless on the stainless steel table between us. He was even bigger than I remembered: seventy inches long from nose to tail, 140 pounds of muscle, bone, and sinew. His front claws were longer than jackknives. His canine teeth could have punched holes through the skull of a bull moose.
But his ordeal had left the powerful animal diminished. On his desperate flight through the forest, he had lost clumps of black fur and torn the pads of his feet to shreds. Those injuries were mild compared to what the surgery had done to him. He had an endotracheal tube jammed down his throat and a catheter taped to his foreleg where fluids were being pumped into his stagnant bloodstream. The vet tech had shaved his coat down to the skin in two other places: where the arrow had entered and where the point had exited. The rest of the carbon-fiber shaft had remained inside the wolf’s body for God only knew how long. Days? Maybe even weeks?
Careful to avoid the pillowy bandage taped to his rib cage, I pressed my palm against the wolf’s side and felt the faintest heat coming through my bare hand. I hadn’t wanted to reveal my emotions to the vet or her assistant. Under the circumstances, it was important that I appear aloof, disinterested, professional. When in truth the attack upon the animal couldn’t have felt any more personal to me.
What happened, Shadow? Who did this to you?
The small room was utterly unlike the surgical wing I had spent so many hours in the previous day. Yet I couldn’t shake the eerie sensation that I was reliving that earlier experience. A priest had once described purgatory to me as a netherworld in which you were forced to suffer repeatedly with your sins until you could finally see them with moral objectivity.
“I’d like to have a look at the arrow.”
“My assistant is bagging it up for you.”
“None of you touched it, I hope.”
Dr. Holman thrust out her bony chin. She was thin limbed and hollow cheeked in the way people are who run long distances every day, rain or shine. People who are so physically fit they appear terminally ill. I noticed a tiny gold crucifix held by a chain in the hollow of her throat. “We wear gloves when we operate, Warden Bowditch.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“The Pennacook Hospital for Animals isn’t some fancy clinic like you have downstate, but we’re fully accredited—”
“I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m a bit sleep-deprived.” With its fluorescent lights and white-painted walls, the operating room was too bright for my tired eyes.
“That makes two of us.” Lips pursed, she looked me up and down. “Gary—Warden Pulsifer—tells me you’re a warden investigator. Is that why you’re not wearing a uniform?”
“Actually I am on my vacation. You can call me Mike by the way.”
“My friends call me Lizzie.”
I removed my phone from my pocket and found the recording function. “Can you repeat for the record what you told me before—about the exact nature of his injuries? And how you treated them?”
A divot appeared between her eyebrows. “I thought you were on vacation.”
“I may need to open a criminal investigation, depending on what happened.”
Her gaze drifted toward the door. “Wo
uldn’t you rather we talk in my office?”
“Here is fine.”
The answer displeased her because she was understandably exhausted and wanted to sit down. But I wasn’t ready to leave Shadow’s side. These were likely to be my last moments with him.
With her narrow hand, she drew an invisible line in the air above the anesthetized animal. “The arrow entered his body through his left upper trapezius, punctured and deflated the left anterior lung lobe, and pierced the skin through the right rib intercostal. The point had snapped off, but the shaft remained lodged inside his body until I was able to remove it. That was good luck. He would’ve bled to death if the projectile had worked its way loose before he came to us. As it was, he suffered a class three hemorrhage.”
“Meaning?”
“He lost somewhere between thirty to forty percent of the blood in his body.”
“What normally happens to a canine if he loses a third of his blood?”
“The same thing that would happen to you—massive irreversible organ failure leading to death. This animal shouldn’t even be alive.”
“I see.” They had bathed the wolf before surgery, but an earthy, canine smell still rose like heat from his body.
“The danger now is pneumothorax and infection. His immune system has been badly compromised. But the longer he holds on, the more hope we have.”
From behind me came a faint knock and Holman’s assistant entered the room. Like the doctor, she wore blue scrubs, but everything about her shouted teenager. Her movements were clumsy, tentative. She refused eye contact. She had a complexion like pancake batter and a streak of pink in her hair.
“Is now a good time?” She carried a gallon-sized plastic bag. It contained a black stick with red-and-white fletching. A layperson would have called the synthetic material “feathers.”
I extended a hand. “I’ll take that.”
“Shouldn’t you be heading home?” Holman said in a motherly voice that seemed to suit her.
“Don’t you need me to help remove his tube?”
“I’m going to leave it in a bit longer. And you need to get your kids ready for school.”
“I’d rather stay, Dr. H.”
“I’ll be here.”
“I’m worried that if I leave—”
“What happens next is all up to him now. It’s out of our hands.”
The young woman’s eyes and nose began to run. “I never saw a real wolf except in a zoo. I didn’t know there were wild ones around here.”
“There aren’t,” I said.
She gazed at me with her lips parted. If there were no wolves in Maine, what was this thing before us? But I didn’t explain my cryptic comment.
After she had closed the door, I raised the clear bag to the overhead light to examine the arrow. “This wasn’t shot with a bow.”
“You think somebody stabbed him with it?”
“That’s not what I meant. How long would you say this is?”
“Fifteen inches, give or take.”
“It’s sixteen inches,” I said. “The brand name has rubbed off, but it’s a Spider-Bite. I’m guessing the X2 model. You said the point had broken off, but it didn’t. If you look closely, you can see the shaft is intact. Only the broadhead is missing. It would have screwed into the end here. Imagine an arrowhead made up of three or four razor blades—”
The muscles in her thin neck grew tense again. “I know what a broadhead is. This isn’t the first animal I’ve seen that was shot by an arrow, let alone impaled on a foreign body.”
“That’s just it. Technically speaking, this isn’t an arrow at all. This is what used to be called a bolt or a quarrel. At sixteen inches, it’s too short to have been fired by most recurve or compound bows.”
Now it was her turn to rub her weary eyes. “I’m still not following you.”
“Whoever fired it used a crossbow.”
“Does that make a difference?”
“It doesn’t make a difference to the wolf. But it might help me find the son of a bitch who tried to kill him.”
We both fell silent. What Holman was thinking I couldn’t imagine. Within me, a dark storm was raging.
The joy I had felt at the prospect of Billy’s early release had been snuffed out. I couldn’t even remember having experienced it. The previous day seemed a lifetime ago.
I stared down now at the dying animal, my heart a vessel for molten metal.
Here he lay, the big, bad wolf. Since the dawn of humanity, his kind had been the embodiment of our every nameless fear. Rather than confront our own psychic failings, we had used our terror to wage a campaign of extermination against these rival predators. We had shot them from planes and poisoned them with strychnine-laced baits and imprisoned them in zoos for our children to gawk at. Were we any less afraid as a result? I didn’t think so. Humankind had created a sanitized, safety-cushioned world for ourselves—and we had never been more terrified.
I reached out a shaking hand toward the wolf. “Can you give me a minute alone with him, please?”
13
I had told myself I wanted something meaningful to do with my remaining time off. Now here it was.
Outside the clinic, the sky was as black as it had been when I’d arrived, but there was a hint of light now in the east. The air tasted crisp and metallic, and a scrim of frost lay across the lawn. April, in the Maine mountains, is a winter month. Not that I needed the reminder, having grown up not far from here.
In the darkness I could hear the thundering of the river across the highway. The Androscoggin has its beginnings in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, forty miles to the west. Snow had fallen heavily up in the Presidential Range that winter, and all the meltwater was rushing down to the distant sea. The flood carried great rafts of ice that made groaning sounds or even violent explosions when they slammed against each other in the surging stream.
The last time I had come through Pennacook, half a decade ago, it had also been nighttime, and the sky above the town had been sepia colored from the glow of the old Atlantic Pulp and Paper Mill. The smokestacks themselves had been illuminated all the way up from the ground, and the clouds of steam billowing from their mouths had reflected the light. I remembered the nonstop rumble of the huge machines that lived in the bowels of that enormous rectilinear complex. But mostly what I remembered was the sulfurous stench: as if hell itself were around the next bend of the river.
The paper mill had closed since my last visit. After announcing the community’s apocalypse in a press release, its absentee owners had made noises about trying to find a new buyer even as they sold off everything of value, right down to the secretaries’ desks. This I had heard from Dani, whose father had lost his job and, then, his will to live in the shutdown.
Now Pennacook had fresh air, a nocturnal view of the constellations, and a sky-high unemployment rate that perfectly correlated with the spike in drug overdoses and suicides.
“It’s like the whole town just curled up into a fetal position,” said Dani. “I never knew that a place could give up and waste away just like a person.”
In the clinic parking lot, Warden Gary Pulsifer climbed out of his idling patrol truck to meet me.
His breath drifted sideways on the breeze. “How did it go in there?”
“Not good. The doc tried to hedge at first, but when I pressed her, she admitted he is going to die.”
Pulsifer had a scrappy build and a pointed face. He was pushing fifty, which made him old for a warden, and his fox-colored hair had recently turned white around the temples, which made him appear even older.
“I’m sorry, Mike. I know that dog meant something to you.”
“He’s not a dog.”
“Wolf dog then.”
“Genetically speaking, he’s a lot more wolf than he is dog.”
“How do you know about his genes? Did you run his DNA through a doggy database?”
Pulsifer had one of the highest IQs in the Warden Service, and
like most intelligent people, his brilliance was the wellspring of his problems. Because of his intellectual superiority, other wardens accused Pulsifer of mocking them even when he hadn’t said a word—his default expression was a knowing smile that resembled a smirk.
“His first owner had him tattooed with identification information,” I explained. “There are records of his lineage out West.”
Shadow had come from Montana originally, and he carried the blood of Yellowstone wolves in his veins. He had been brought into the world by a man who specialized in crossbreeding wolf hybrids to eliminate as much of the domestic dog in them as possible. Later, the animal had passed into a cross-continental network that dealt in contraband until, improbably, he had found himself the property of two methamphetamine addicts in Maine. I had rescued him from their drug den three years earlier.
Pulsifer tucked his hands inside the heavy ballistic vest he wore over his shirt. The armor was covered with an olive-green fabric the same color as his uniform. From a distance, you couldn’t tell he was bulletproof.
“When the woman who found him described the animal to me, I knew it wasn’t a German shepherd or black morph coyote. It had to be your wolf dog. Sorry, I mean wolf.”
“Shadow isn’t my wolf.”
“He escaped from your custody, correct?” Pulsifer’s smile was thin and superior.
“You could say that.”
“Then he’s your responsibility. N’est-ce pas?”
I couldn’t argue with him there.
Since Shadow had bolted for the wild, three years earlier, the semi-tame wolf had been glimpsed wandering through the high timber between the Rangeley Lakes and the surrounding mountains. Occasionally he had been spotted in the company of a she-wolf, whose place of origin and current whereabouts were both unknown. Having seen the violence done to her male companion, I found myself deeply concerned for her. Wild wolves had been expurgated from the state of Maine in the late nineteenth century, but a few wanderers from Canada appeared from time to time. I was grateful that Shadow had been neutered before he came to me, or I might have been personally liable for the reintroduction of Canis lupus to the Northeast.