Wolf, No Wolf

by Peter Bowen

  Du Pré shrugged and got into his Rover and he drove off with a few reporters in pursuit. He went up the back roads, pounded and now drifted, and left them stuck there.

  Du Pré stopped high up on the benchlands and he looked down on the bleak white land below, marked a little, a house here, barn, one or two rocky outcrops, the rest white on white on white.

  The sun in the east high up had sun dogs on each side.

  Very bad sign, that, three suns ride the sky. My people, long time since, it was colder then, I was told, pile the good buffalo robes in the lodge, get in the little hot-burning alder sticks for cooking, everyone live under the robes till the cold pass, eat a lot of pemmican, meat, fat, and berries.

  You got to wait for this country, sure. This country, you be like the water, it is cold, you go to sleep till the sun comes back, then you can move through it, animals, too. Live under the snow where it is warm.

  Them big white owls come down, times like this, hunt animals under the snow. Owls sit, wait, got ears so good they hear mouse under the snow, owl plunge into the snowdrift and grab that mouse.

  But you got to let this country tell you what to do.

  You try to tell it, it will kill you plenty quick now.

  Yes.

  Them people who got shot, they think these ranchers are not part of this country. They say, you are to move right on. Take your dead grandparents with you, dig them up and haul them away, we want to play here.

  It is more than they cut a fence, shoot a cow maybe. That is dumb kid stuff.

  But these ranchers are not so dumb, though maybe they cannot say why this make them so angry they just kill them.

  Always, this country, more people come and say to the people who were here, you go away and starve, this is ours now, we want it, we are right and you are wrong.

  The wind was rising up and a ground blizzard started. Du Pré put the Rover in gear and drove back down while he could still see the road, sort of. He went by another route, so he wouldn’t have to help stuck reporters out of drifts and so forth.

  There were several cars outside the Toussaint Bar, Benny’s four-wheel Sheriff’s rig, the usual battered ranch pickups.

  Du Pré parked and walked up to the front door. When he put his hand on the door pull he happened to look down and there was a badly broken television camera, half sunk in the snow.

  It took Du Pré a couple of minutes to see in the dim bar. The light outside was bright even through the high white haze.

  Remember that time I got myself snow-blind, spent three days couldn’t see and a month feeling like hot sand packed around my eyeballs.

  Madelaine came over to him. He recognized her footsteps. Broke an ankle as a little girl, made her left foot a little bit stitchy, pull the sole just some there.

  “Hey, Du Pré,” said Madelaine, “you don’t remember me, eh?”

  “Can’t see you,” said Du Pré. “You live here, maybe?”

  “You die here you don’t think pretty quick, now,” said Madelaine. “Say something funny quick, it is how you guys survive so long. You make us laugh we don’t tear your plums off, shove them down your throat, eh?”

  “Interesting times,” said Susan Klein, washing the bar top. “That’s an old Chinese curse. May you live in interesting times. These damn journalists are all over, blocking the doorways. Or they were till Ol’ Jim found them between him and his afternoon smile.”

  Old Jim was in his seventies, still ranching, still breaking horses clamped down in an old bear-trap saddle. He was sitting off in a corner with a big glass of whiskey. He called a glass of whiskey a smile.

  “Ill-mannered bastards shoved a microphone in my face and wouldn’t get out of the damn way,” boomed Old Jim, “so I cracked a couple of their heads together. Christ, it used to be quiet round here.”

  Du Pré laughed.

  One of the newspaper reporters came out of the men’s room and he saw Du Pré and edged toward him.

  “Not in here, you,” snapped Susan. “You got a question for Gabriel, you find him someplace else. I have absolutely had it with you people bothering my customers.”

  The man slunk toward the door.

  “They’ll be gone soon,” said Susan, ignoring the journalist. “No story here, I guess, until the snow melts enough to find those poor fools up Cooper’s Canyon. Almost got one out, didn’t you?”

  The reporter had stopped.

  “Shit,” said Susan.

  Du Pré shrugged. He tapped the bar top and Susan poured him a whiskey.

  Old Jim and Susan and Du Pré and Madelaine stared at the man till he gave up and left.

  “Good thing this all didn’t happen in the summer,” said Old Jim. “As it is the bastards get frozen pretty quick and then they go away.”

  They will be back, though, Du Pré thought, they will be back.

  “We are at Jacqueline’s and Raymond’s for dinner,” said Madelaine. “Couple hours. My kids are liking cook for themselves, when I am gone they can use the phone all the time.”

  Du Pré sat thinking, while Madelaine and Susan chatted. He drank whiskey. Old Jim joined them. Benny arrived, then Bart and Booger Tom and Packy and his wife and several other townsfolk.

  Deputy Lawyer Foote came.

  “The journalists are pulling out,” he said. “They starve rather quickly.”

  Du Pré grunted.

  Bart stacked wood in the big old stone fireplace at the far end of the barroom. He lit the fire and stood back and poked at it till the flames caught well.

  It was growing dark, fast. The shortest days of the year were on them. Christmas. A new year after.

  Du Pré got his fiddle from his Rover and he let it warm for a few minutes and then he tuned it and he played some slow tunes, laments, the songs of the voyageurs on sleepless nights when they were homesick and lonely for their families and women, all the things there were not in the endless black-green forests of the North.

  Bales of furs.

  Carry them for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Sucking the furs out of all Canada, pulling them in with trade guns and rum, blankets and beads, axes and hatchets and knives and brass kettles. Priests pull the souls along into heaven.

  If that was real.

  But the Hudson’s Bay Company was. HBC. Here Before Christ.

  On them old-time long voyage, take a whole year, sometimes two, while the women raise babies and make the canoes. Make them good and tight and strong so their men don’t drown.

  Du Pré thought of the dark he had been buried alive in, holding himself hard to the light, reaching up through the snow above him to heaven, shining through the hem of the storm come down from the North where hell really is, it is cold.

  Dark forests. Ice. Sun dogs. Big land waiting and hungry.

  Du Pré played his heart. Up out of the ice, the dark ice.

  Eight people under the avalanche, frozen faces turning dark red, long frost crystals growing out of their eyes. Maybe even some still alive, yes, it could be. Nothing to be done.

  How many voyageurs end up in the bellies of wolves and coyotes, badgers and skunks and magpies and ravens?

  Play for them.

  Play for everybody ever died in the cold.

  I will rot in the earth but the music is forever, God breathes it in and out.

  Du Pré let the last note die.

  He reached out for the whiskey in front of him.

  He drank. He looked over at his friends and his lover.

  They were staring at him.

  Corey Banning had come in while he was playing.

  Tears ran down her cheeks.

  “It is time we go to dinner,” said Madelaine. “You come now.”

  Du Pré nodded, and finished his whiskey, and packed his fiddle away.

  Chapter 18

  RIGHT AFTER NEW YEAR’S an arctic air mass lumbered down the front of the Rockies. The mass was huge and very cold. It stretched from Montana to Minnesota. Some nights, the temperature fell to fifty-five degrees belo
w zero. Water pipes burst. Smoke from chimneys rose straight up in yellow-white columns.

  Du Pré walked out behind his house one glittering morning, looked up at the white sky, and shook his head. He glanced at the outbuildings and a wispy plume of steam caught his eye. It was coming from a crack in the siding of the barn.

  He went back in the house and got a shotgun and shoved some rounds of buckshot into the magazine, racked one home.

  Bear in my damn barn.

  He went in cautiously. He gauged where the plume of breath had come from outside against the dark shadowed walls. The bear had crawled under some bales of straw and broken the ties. Fluffed the straw up for a bed and comforter.

  Du Pré stood a few feet from the animal. He heard gentle snoring.

  He shrugged.

  Me, I wish that I could sleep till it gets warmer. When it gets warmer, out you go. Not now.

  He had his Rover plugged in to an electrical outlet, so the engine was warm, but when he started the engine the belts shrieked piercingly for fifteen minutes before friction warmed them enough to grab properly. When he drove off, the flat spots where the tires had set against the ground thumped loudly.

  He’d left little trickles of water running from the taps.

  If them cast-iron drainpipes freeze up I’ll have run, he thought, as he drove slowly down the snow-packed county road. Thump THUMP thwap THUMP. The paved highway was pretty clear when he got to it, but the tires were still out of round and didn’t warm up enough to pop back to their intended shape until just before he turned off into Toussaint.

  Benny Klein had tacked a temporary airlock out in front of the bar, a sloppy arrangement of plastic and scraps of lath, to cut down on the blasts of arctic air that burst into the saloon every time the door opened. Du Pré pushed through the hanging sheets and he rearranged them; they were tattered and breaking from the cold. He opened the door quickly and slammed it shut. A pane of glass in one of the front windows went pop!

  “Little more respect for my property there, Gabriel,” said Susan Klein. She came out from behind the bar with a roll of wide clear tape. Several other panes were patched.

  “When we last have this?” said Du Pré. “Maybe ’89? Yeah, three weeks it was fifty below every night. Old man Thompson froze to death, went out to check his stock, slipped and broke his hip.”

  “Yeah,” said Susan. “Benny went out to check on him that afternoon, but he was dead. Benny’s still sad over it, felt he should have gone that morning, but old man Thompson, he didn’t like being hovered over, remember, he’d about run Benny off the day before.”

  “You see that Bart?”

  “He called a little bit ago, looking for you. Said he’d be in for lunch. I told him we were having iceworm salad.”

  “Nobody doing ver’ much right now,” Du Pré said. He thought of the FBIs in the trailer, all the pipes frozen—spraying water had hit a fuse box and blown all the neutral wires out, and then the cold had pulled the aluminum skin away from the frame, so the next good wind would shuck the hide off the roof.

  Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of folks, Du Pré thought sourly. But I like that Corey Banning. She is pret’ edgy these days, like a hawk don’t got anything moving down on the land below. Nothing to do.

  Susan Klein shoved a bottle of whiskey across the bar top and a short glass.

  “The ice machine froze up,” she said. “If you require ice, you may just hump your stumps outside there, where you will find all you need.”

  Du Pré laughed.

  “Anything happens to satellite TV,” said Susan, “the murder rate here’ll look like Miami’s the first night. By eleven P.M. Gives us a little idea what it was like here a hundred years ago, people going insane.”

  Du Pré poured himself a whiskey. He rolled a cigarette and lit it and he looked at the smoke rising to the ceiling.

  On, yes, them winter, maybe 1910, when that Black Jack Pershing he come and round up the Métis and shove them in cattle cars, it is forty below, and he send couple of thousand of us, North Dakota, to Pembina, throw us off.

  Don’t take us here, we are citizens, take the poor Métis from Great Falls, Helena, Lewiston, they don’t know what country they are in. How many die that time? Four hundred, I think my grand-père say, they froze in the boxcars, they starve in North Dakota, under the three suns in the sky, them sun dogs.

  People. Damn. All them honyockers Jim Hill sucker into homesteads, little farms on the plains, whole families found frozen round the stoves in the spring. Starved to death. Some live, there are raving crazy people screaming in the spring mud, everybody that knew who they were has died. Coyotes, they eat the dead in the houses. Here, the Dakotas, down to Nebraska, they say there are twenty thousand poor farmers and their families die that winter.

  This damn winter, when it is like this it scares my bones.

  My blood, it remembers the taste of boiled moccasins, worse things that my people ate.

  Got no songs about that. ’Less you count the burial hymns, the church. So cold, the fiddles, they broke.

  The door banged open and Bart and Corey Banning came in, their faces red from the short dash from car to warmth. Bart shoved the door to and they both stamped their feet, in their heavy felt-lined packs.

  The saloon was hot. Benny had put a second woodstove in, near the door, and both of them were roaring. But if you went near the walls the cold reached out. The single-paned windows had sketches of frost in their corners.

  Corey and Bart shucked off their down parkas and vests. They came over to Du Pré.

  “What’s shakin’?” said Corey.

  “Um,” said Du Pré, “I got a bear in my barn, he is sleeping, I did not have the heart to run him out.”

  “What kind of bear?” said Bart.

  “Sleepy one,” said Du Pré. “He is under the straw there, but he is not big, his tracks are maybe a two-year bear’s.”

  “I love this weather,” said Corey Banning. “My superiors are sitting on their big fat warm asses in Washington, wondering why I ain’t run all these foul perpetrators to earth. Two of the Butte office’s turkeys went off to nail some poor schmo on a warrant, car stalled, they walked for a ways, and they are both in the hospital, not too bad, one lost four toes and the other the tips of some fingers. Oh, yeah, when they got cold, they ran like hell. Bright guys. Frostbit some of their lungs, got necrosis pneumonia.”

  “Ol’ Corey here’s always pleased to hear her fellow agents have about died,” said Bart. “Always perks her up. Got such sympathy for ’em.”

  “Wussies,” said Corey, “the lot of ’em.”

  “You going to the party?” said Bart.

  Du Pré nodded.

  “Party?” said Corey.

  “Every January, Martins, they give a big party, cheer everybody up, they got this huge paddock they use to train horses, they build a square dance floor, barbecue couple of steers, bring in some good musicians. Everybody is invited, unless they are in jail,” said Du Pré. “You should come, dance some, it will make you kinder, maybe.”

  Corey looked at Du Pré for a moment.

  “I’ll do just that,” she said.

  “You seen old Benetsee?” said Bart.

  Du Pré shrugged. He’d been by, but the old man was gone and so were his dogs. Or the dogs had frozen to death and the old man was out under the snow somewhere.

  “He is probably Club Med, some island in the Caribbean,” said Du Pré. “He don’t send postcards. No, I check his house and he has not been there. You know him, he comes, goes, who knows?”

  “How long you know the Martins?” said Corey.

  “All my life,” said Du Pré. “They have that ranch, I think it is as big as Rhode Island, I read. I go there, when they ship, never any trouble.”

  “Never any trouble,” said Corey. “I checked with Booger Tom, he worked on their ranch a while, he likes them. Booger Tom don’t like anybody much.”

  Du Pré shrugged. He didn’t know the Martins
well. No one did. They kept to themselves other than the ordinary business of being good neighbors. They sent all their children east to private schools.

  “There’s Taylor,” said Corey. “War hero, helicopter pilot, rodeo cowboy, and he’s also a veterinarian. Enough to do on the ranch, he doesn’t have a practice. Then there’s his kid brother, Clark, West Point and he made Nam a little later. There was a third brother.”

  “Hall,” said Du Pré. “He died pret’ young, flew a plane up a box canyon and got trapped, couldn’t fly out. He was only maybe nineteen.”

  “I like to dance,” said Corey Banning.

  Du Pré nodded and sipped some more whiskey.

  Chapter 19

  BOOTHEELS THUMPED ON THE hollow wooden floor. The Western swing band had been flown up from New Mexico and they were superb. All the musicians were dressed in Flash Western, expensive custom clothing heavy with embroidery.

  “Bet all their boots got chipmunks fucking butterflies on ’em,” said Booger Tom.

  Du Pré laughed. The three hundred or so people on the dance floor were two-stepping fast. They were merry with drink and the bright music.

  “Good band,” said Du Pré.

  Booger Tom snorted.

  Bart was standing in his uniform, fully belted, over near one of the huge double-drum wood-stoves. Corey Banning stood with him, in a leather jacket long enough to cover her gun.

  Clark Martin, tall and dark blond, was teaching one of his little girls to dance. The child stood on the tops of his boots and she laughed and bounced as Clark shuffled.

  There were huge trestle tables against one wall of the arena, piled with food. The far corner of the building had a new false-front saloon built in it; the raw wood oozed sap and gave off a thick scent of pine. Five barkeeps shoved drinks across the bar top.

  “They put on a good party,” said Du Pré. He turned around and saw Booger Tom sliding around the milling couples, on his way to the bar again.

  That old goat can drink some, Du Pré thought, especially when it’s free.

  A few people, too old to dance or too drunk, were scattered in a mass of smaller tables to the side of the bandstand. The Martin family had their own. The elder Mrs. Martin sat at it, her son Taylor next to her. She wore a purple silk blouse and a beaded vest, and she had a choker of emeralds and diamonds at her throat. White-haired and pale-skinned, fingers glittering with rings, she sat slender and erect, smiling faintly when someone would stop and say something.