Wolf, No Wolf

by Peter Bowen

  He saw some bright red pieces of cloth float past. There were other pieces of ripstop nylon on the brown boiling water, stuck in the tangled branches of alder at the verge of the creek bottom.

  Du Pré eased down the bank far enough to grab a couple scraps. He sidestepped back up the sodden bank and stood, turning the scraps around. He knitted his eyebrows.

  “What?” said Bart.

  Du Pré shook his head.

  He walked over to Bill Stemple.

  “You seen any them grizzly this winter?” he said.

  “Oh, my God,” said Stemple. “Not a sign. None.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about,” said Bart, “that I can’t know about?”

  “Them male grizzly, they don’t hibernate,” said Du Pré. “I think that maybe one he was just napping when the avalanche it come down. So then he maybe get out of his den and he come on one of the people got killed. Eat them, then he just go on, under that snow. They were maybe all pretty close together. This cloth got some punctures in it, I think the holes made by bear teeth, myself.”

  “Hee, hee,” said Booger Tom. “All winter long that damn bear there he has sack lunches under the snow. Didn’t have to come out to the meat dumps.”

  “Oh, God,” said Bill Stemple, “I shoulda thought of it. All those dead sheep we put there and a couple cows went tits up. I should have known.”

  “What meat dump?” said Bart. “I ain’t following.”

  “We put them dead animal out so coyotes and bears eat them, don’t bother the good stock,” said Du Pré. “Worked good. Them Fish and Game people say it is illegal.”

  “I gather that the corpses in there are reduced to bear shit,” said Bart. “Oh, they are gonna love this at USA Today. I think we have a good deal of the obnoxious press to look forward to. I suggest that we don’t bring it up right away.”

  “No,” said Du Pré, “I think you call a press conference maybe an hour from now, you do it by phone.”

  “Why?”

  “It make such a big stink that the Governor, he will have to send people, dig around in there, otherwise we have to.”

  “I take your point,” said Bart. “Although maybe all we have to do is put a screen across the creek here.”

  Benetsee say this country, this land hate these people, Du Pré thought. All my time here, I never know of anything like this now. But it did not kill me. It did not. It could have, but it held me for some time and it let me go. Up toward the light.

  “Thanks,” said Bart to Bill Stemple. They got on the snow machines, rode back down to the ranch.

  Bart drove as quickly as he dared back down to the Sheriff’s office. Du Pré went in and listened while Bart informed a news bureau of the day’s startling events.

  Then they drove back to the Toussaint Bar.

  Benny and Susan were behind the bar, pulling beers and mixing drinks. The place was packed. The winter had been so miserable that no one had gone outdoors much, but the warm weather had come and spring and its mud and sleet weren’t far away.

  “It seems that a bear has been eating the unfortunates at the bottom of Cooper Canyon,” said Bart.

  “I know you don’t drink anymore,” said Susan, “so did you fall on your head?”

  “Du Pré thinks the avalanche that buried the people also buried a grizzly sleeping in a cave or something. Then the bear crawled out and began munching. It’s preposterous. I think he’s probably right.”

  Benny looked at Du Pré for a long moment.

  “Cooper Canyon is part of that big boar’s country,” he said. “I’ve seen the son of a bitch a couple times. He’ll go twelve hundred, maybe.”

  “Can he just move through the snow?” said Bart.

  “Easy,” said Du Pré. “They are very strong. Pick up a bull and carry it, you know.”

  “Jesus,” said Bart.

  Du Pré nodded.

  This is some place now, strange time, he thought, I am perhaps not seeing something. The ranchers they have killed, the country it has killed, but who was it shot the four people up in the mountains? Shot the wolves? Me, that I don’t understand.

  That time they thought about it, thought about it long time. They know this country, know it as good as me, lots of people know it as good as me.

  Up there, big bear with a full belly sleeps under the ice.

  Just shove his way through the snow, I have seen them in their strength.

  Du Pré looked down suddenly at the drink Benny had set before him.

  He lifted it and he sipped.

  Some of my friends I fiddle for are murderers.

  Them Fish and Wildlife people they kill that bear now, they will have to, the Governor, he will make them. Bad for the tourists, not so many will come.

  My state is some kind of whorehouse now, I guess. I work in it. Take nice hot towels around.

  I got to go and see Benetsee.

  Du Pré rolled a cigarette and he lit it and he drew deeply. He drank.

  What they do now? Try to dig what is left, those people, out?

  I got to see Benetsee.

  “Du Pré!”

  Du Pré turned. Corey Banning was standing there, snifter of brandy in her hand. Her leather jacket was open. Du Pré could see her stainless-steel nine-millimeter in its holster on her belt.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  Du Pré’s fingers hurt.

  He looked down. The cigarette had burned down between them. He dropped it on the floor, stepped on it, reached down, and picked up the butt.

  “Thinking,” he said. “It is very hard for me, you know.”

  “Strange business,” said Corey, “the bit about the bear. You sure?”

  “Pretty strange,” said Du Pré, “but I don’t know how else that cloth get all torn up. Them avalanche break bones but they don’t do that, the rocks were covered in ice, no trees to tear them up, just brush in the bottoms.”

  She nodded.

  “Corey,” said Du Pré, “I think maybe everything has some changed, you know, I never had a time like this. Someday soon maybe the winds all smell different and I look at the stars on a clear night and the Big Dipper it is gone and there is something there I don’t know.”

  “Well,” said Corey, “things should start unraveling soon.”

  “Huh,” said Du Pré. “Like them cloth, Corey? Only it don’t unravel. It was ripped right apart.”

  She sipped her brandy.

  They both looked at the floor.

  Chapter 22

  THE BACKHOE DUG AT the ice jam in the creek. The brown water started flooding through. There was a heavy fine-meshed net across the creek below. It was hung from two other backhoes’ buckets, one on each side of the creek. When the chunks of ice were near, the operators lifted the net, let the ice pass, and set it down again. Strips of cloth were stuck in the net.

  It was early April. The snow was melting back up the canyon. Earthmoving equipment had been brought in and National Guardsmen to operate it. The big machines were painted in desert camouflage.

  A front-end loader dug at the collapsed snow and lifted its bucket. The big machine backed away.

  “There,” said Bart. He pointed.

  The tail of a snowshoe stuck up from the bucket.

  The operator backed away from the snowbank and he set the bucket down.

  Bart and Du Pré walked over to the big machine. They looked at the snowshoe. It was twisted and the wooden frame was broken. Du Pré looked at the tail. It had been bitten. There were teeth marks, big ones, cutting right through the hard ash.

  “There,” said Du Pré.

  Bart shook his head. He signaled the operator, who lifted the bucket and dumped the load in front of them. The snow broke open. There was a pack still tied into the thongs, but the felt liner was gone and whatever foot might have been in it.

  “Jesus,” said Bart.

  Du Pré shook his head.

  Not much to say. So far we got not one scrap of a person but I don�
�t know what we find, them grizzly got big strong jaws. Eat someone’s head like it is an apple.

  “You become Sheriff things get so interesting,” said Du Pré. “I think I quit, change my name, move to Canada.”

  “Too late,” said Bart, “or I’d join you.”

  Bart jammed the sharp end of a crowbar at the snow. It began to crumble. A glove appeared. Bart picked it up. He rolled the wristlet down. Some bones stuck out.

  “Bingo,” said Bart. “Now we call the medical examiner.”

  He trudged off toward a tent where there was a radio telephone.

  Du Pré worked the frozen hand out of the glove. A woman’s hand, a wedding ring and diamond on her left hand, there in the snow.

  Du Pré reached in his pocket and pulled out a clear plastic bag and he sealed the hand and glove in it. He looked up at the loader. The operator backed away from the face of the slide. A long red stocking cap stretched between the bucket and the snow face. The hat parted.

  Du Pré slipped and slid over to the snow face. He pulled out his sheath knife and chipped away around the edges of the hat.

  He pulled the hat away.

  Just white packed snow is all, he thought. I wonder, that damn bear he eat everything else?

  Bart waved at Du Pré from the trail. Du Pré slid back down to him, holding part of the hat.

  “They said for us to leave it alone,” said Bart. “Better minds and much better men than the likes of us will take it from here.”

  Du Pré shrugged.

  He handed Bart the plastic bag with the hand and glove in it.

  “Just a minute,” said Bart, walking toward the tent.

  He came back empty-handed.

  They walked down the muddy, icy track, stepping over big lumps of snow and gravel, to Bart’s truck.

  The mudlug tires threw slop and gravel hard against the truck’s bottom shields. They wallowed down to firmer ground and out to the dry county road, and Bart got out and so did Du Pré to unlock the front hubs.

  “Where you put that hand?” said Du Pré.

  “On top of the sandwiches in the cooler,” said Bart.

  Du Pré nodded.

  “It’s a clear day,” said Bart. “I think I’d like to fly up and look at the mountains.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “I’ll go, too,” said Du Pré.

  I want to see who might be up them mountain. No one is trapping now, no one did too much this year, too bad. But there is someone who was up there when they set down them people and them wolf. That guy is crazy. The rest of it I don’t know we ever know but I find out, that one.

  Got to go up, got to come down, someone got to have seen something.

  They went to the Toussaint Bar for lunch and had just finished their cheeseburgers when the Martin ranch’s helicopter racketed in and set down on the bare brown softball field across the road. The picnic tables were still piled the way they had been in the winter, when the fools came for the service for the martyrs for the environment.

  Du Pré and Bart ducked under the rotor wash and got in and strapped down. Taylor Martin revved the engine and they lifted off. It was a small, light machine, made for crop dusting and herding cattle.

  Bart sketched out where he wanted to go on the pilot’s knee pad of paper. Martin nodded and headed off toward the Wolf Mountains, hard and bright with snow, black-green forest running down the flanks like thick spilled paint.

  They flew over the nearest high basin, unbroken white save at the edges where the trees held shadows. One tree shook and dumped its load of snow and the white clod sank and a lynx appeared, clutching the very top and glaring up at the noisy machine.

  The pilot flew over to the north side and along the flanks of the mountains about a third of the way down. Some ravens were feeding on something in a thicket. They flew a bit and settled back down.

  The pilot turned and flew over to the south side. The deep cleft of Cooper Canyon and its barren sides and the massive slide in the bottom appeared.

  They went over a spur of the mountain to the next drainage.

  Du Pré spotted some tracks.

  “Skis!”

  Bart leaned over and looked and he banged on the pilot’s shoulder and pointed. The helicopter sank quickly toward the double line of tracks across the white. They went into thick growth a mile or so down the mountain.

  The pilot dipped down lower and he went back and forth. The spur of the mountain ended in rock.

  The tracks did not come out of the lower side.

  He flew up the spine of the spur slowly.

  The rotors roiled the snow below; it rose like a ground blizzard.

  Du Pré stared.

  “Have him go back up, find where he came up now,” Du Pré yelled in Bart’s ear. “Why this guy, he don’t go down where he come up?”

  Pretty simple, that, when you run a trapline it is a long circle or a U or something, so you got the most traps.

  They rose up the slope till the mountain began to rise nearly straight up, broken masses of rock hard under the sky.

  He didn’t come over that.

  They went to the right.

  Nothing.

  They went to the left.

  Du Pré stared again. There was a small basin just above the treeline and the snow on it looked strange.

  The wind had pretty well cleared it.

  The pilot flew slowly around the edge.

  Du Pré spotted some ski tracks at a place where the low trees had come in close.

  “Go back down!” he yelled at Bart.

  Bart scribbled on the pilot’s pad.

  The machine dipped and headed down, blades biting the gelid air.

  They sank from winter to spring.

  The pilot set down on the softball field.

  Du Pré and Bart ducked out and ran and the machine rose and went off.

  “The son of a bitch is still up there,” said Bart.

  Du Pré nodded.

  “He’ll wait till dark to come down,” said Bart, “but he’s only got so many ways he can come.”

  “He has a bunch of them,” said Du Pré. “He get down low and hide his skis he can cut across long ways. Take time but I don’t think he will care.”

  “We call all them ranchers, see if there is a truck or car parked someplace,” said Du Pré. “But I don’t think so.”

  Bart nodded.

  “Why be up there?”

  “It is not far from where the people and the wolves were killed,” said Du Pré. “This guy, I think he just wanted to see it again, you know.”

  “Why?”

  Du Pré rolled a cigarette.

  “He’s a very tough guy,” said Du Pré. “Knows this country good, you bet.”

  He smoked.

  “Bart,” said Du Pré, “he is very proud of what he did. He just maybe wanted to see where he did it again.”

  “Jesus,” said Bart.

  They walked toward the bar.

  Chapter 23

  DU PRÉ SQUINTED THROUGH the cold rising light at the mountains. He was hidden on a long sloping ridge, one with a good view to both sides. Anyone coming down the mountain for four miles on either side of him would have to cross the open sometime.

  He glanced quickly back and forth. The air was dead still. He waved his smoky breath away from his face.

  This guy he is out here. No car waiting on him. Nobody knows of anyone who was up there and I wonder he maybe drop from the sky. Somebody drop him from the sky.

  Lot of damn work and it needs someone else who has a helicopter. Now who has one and who used it yesterday morning? Guy took us has one and he didn’t take us till the afternoon. That guy, Taylor Martin, he was a war hero, Vietnam, flew choppers. Been over east there, his family, long as us Du Pré s been here. Big ranch there.

  Du Pré stood up. He switched on his telephone and dialed.

  “Yeah,” Bart whispered.

  “That guy we look for he is gone,” said Du Pré. “I think that Taylor M
artin drop him off, take us up, bring us back down, go back up and pick him up.”

  “You know him?” said Bart. “Why do you think that?”

  “Got to be someone pretty close,” said Du Pré. “Chopper can’t fly that fast. It’s his, he don’t fly out of an airport, just out of his hangar. Sixty miles away, you know. Now, he got a brother and a couple brothers-in-law there. Some of them people shot, they are killed near that Martin ranch. That bunch of people, they are burned, you know. Hot fire, someone made a firebomb, that car. Magnesium.”

  “Is there a reason that we are sitting out here playing soldier?” said Bart. “I’m cold. I’m hungry. And you say he’s gone.”

  “You maybe call Corey?” said Du Pré.

  “You call her,” said Bart. “She likes reaming me out so much and I have a terrible headache. She’s at…”

  Bart read off the number. Du Pré hung up and dialed.

  “Agent Banning,” said Corey.

  “It is me,” said Du Pré. “I think maybe it is those guys, that Martin ranch out east, you know. This guy we are looking for he was dropped off by a helicopter, you know, picked up, I think, too.”

  “Yeah,” said Corey, “I know it’s them. Can’t be anybody else, but we haven’t got any proof. ”

  “You talk to them?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Corey. “I just did my best and the bastards looked at me like I was touched and needed some home cooking. Very clannish, they are.”

  “How come you don’t tell us this?” said Du Pré, suddenly angry.

  “Well,” said Corey, “I’m a manipulative female and I thought if I let you alone you’d sort of stir things up.”

  “You tell me, I would stir things up some time ago,” said Du Pré. “Don’t you do this again.”

  Silence.

  “Damn you,” said Du Pré. “Them Martins, you think they maybe shot some of those fool kids, too?”

  “You’re very quick, Du Pré,” said Corey Banning. “Now, don’t fuck up. There’s too many people over there who know. It’ll come apart. But you go stir the shit they’ll back into a circle, horns out, and it’ll be another six months before it loosens up. I got to get them before too much longer or I’ll be sent more help, and you know what that means.”