Wolf, No Wolf

by Peter Bowen

  Bart pulled a yellow rescue blanket out of his Rover. He went to Clark Martin and covered him.

  “My superiors are gonna love my report,” said Harvey. “As I am the Agent in Charge, I hereby suspend myself pending investigation of this shooting. Thank you, Agent Wallace. Harvey Weasel Fat needs a drink. I’m locking this son-of-a-bitching gun in the trunk. Maybe this time they’ll fire me.”

  Du Pré waited while Harvey shed his belt gear into the trunk of his car. Harvey turned and looked over at the park. Bart was scribbling in a notebook.

  They went on into the saloon.

  Angela Green was sitting at the bar, and Susan Klein was with her. Both of them were crying.

  Du Pré mixed a couple of ditchwater highballs.

  They took their drinks to a table in the corner.

  “To brave men,” said Harvey.

  Du Pré nodded.

  They drank.

  “You know this was going to happen this way?” said Harvey.

  Du Pré looked down at his glass.

  “Thing about brave men,” he said, “is that you can trust them.”

  Chapter 38

  “WELL,” SAID MADELAINE, “YOU are coming? Yes?”

  “No, I am not goddamn coming,” said Du Pré.

  I got to shout, I’ll shout, he thought, I will yell very loud.

  “They call me, ask that you come.”

  Christ.

  “I am not going to Clark Martin’s funeral,” said Du Pré. “I did not go to Taylor’s, I will not go to this.”

  “You are wrong.”

  Madelaine was dressed in black. She had a little Bible and her rosary on the kitchen table.

  A shadow went past the window. Du Pré saw Benetsee’s shock of dirty white hair bob twice, and then pass the edge of the window frame. Du Pré threw open the kitchen door.

  “You old shit,” he said, “now what you want? You are never around when I need to talk to you. What you come here for?”

  “Go to funeral with you,” said Benetsee. “What you think? Du Pré, you know them Martin people, eh? Taylor, Clark, they are brave. You be brave, too.”

  “Christ,” said Du Pré, “I don’t got to have both of you, you know.”

  “You got both of us, sure enough,” said Madelaine. “You go get dressed now, get your fiddle. They were good warriors, now you go play a song for them and the ravens. Huh. I don’t think this is a good time to be late.”

  Du Pré put on his worn clothes and he walked out to the Rover. Madelaine and Benetsee were already sitting in it. Benetsee grinned and chuckled.

  Du Pré got in. He looked down at the console between the front seats. Madelaine had put his fiddle there.

  “I am not liking this,” said Du Pré. “I sort of helped kill them both, you know.”

  “Shut up and drive this or I will,” said Madelaine.

  The day was cold and overcast; it had rained in the early morning. The backs of the cattle in the pastures steamed in the gray light. The sky hung down low and there was no wind at all.

  Du Pré drove fast, not speaking. Benetsee and Madelaine chattered about good places to pick morel mushrooms. Asparagus. Logged places where stump mushrooms would grow by the hundredweight.

  When Du Pré got to the turnoff that went into the Martin ranch’s holdings, he stopped the Rover.

  “I don’t like this,” said Du Pré.

  Benetsee cracked him hard in the head with the knuckles of his left hand.

  “This white world is not good for very much,” he said. “Now, you just remember some Indian in you, I hit you till you do. Clark and Taylor are still around, won’t leave till maybe next spring. You don’t come and honor them, they will be hurt.”

  “Shit,” said Du Pré. He went on down the gravel road. It was four miles in to the main ranch house. The Martins had their own graveyard, a quarter of a mile from the dozen buildings of the old homestead.

  There were a couple hundred trucks and cars parked in orderly rows out in a hay meadow that shouldered over next to the creek. A straggling line of couples, families, and groups was moving toward the grove of birches where the graves lay.

  “Damn,” said Du Pré, “I will not take my fiddle.”

  “OK,” said Benetsee, “I carry it for you.”

  Du Pré pulled off and parked and got out and walked around and he opened Madelaine’s door and helped her down. Benetsee was on his own. Madelaine took his arm and tugged him along toward the birches over by the chuckling water of the little creek.

  They stood at the back of the crowd and listened while the minister spoke the simple burial service. Du Pré could see Morgan Taliaferro Martin standing with the wives of Taylor and Clark, and her grandchildren. Nine of them, the biggest two boys over six feet, gangly, with dark blond hair and big hands. Du Pré saw the little girl who had laughed as she danced with her father, his big boots under her tiny feet.

  Someone tugged at Du Pré’s elbow. He turned his head and there was Angela Green, Benetsee grinning behind her. The old man had lit a huge twist of sweet grass. The pungent smoke swirled softly in the still air.

  “You come with me,” whispered Angela. “The family wants you to play a song. One for the lost sons of the voyageurs.”

  Du Pré nodded. Angela led him around the crowd, up by a bower thick with red-purple lilacs. The bees in the flowers buzzed sleepily. Rain was coming.

  The minister stopped and Clark Martin’s wife came from the family group and she laid a bundle of flowers, iris and lilacs, on the coffin. Then some men in ranch clothes picked up the coffin and lowered it down into the grave.

  Du Pré checked his fiddle for tune. Pret’good.

  Morgan Martin looked at him. She nodded.

  Du Pré played a lament for a young voyageur lost beneath the dark waters, homeward bound to his love. The song spoke of hardship and courage and loss, and then how from this, friends, remembering him, sang to his love when they finally got home.

  It was a fairly long piece, and Du Pré let the last note fade and he put his fiddle to his side and he heard a faint sound that grew and grew. It came from the forest over the creek, the drone of the bagpipes, skirling.

  The piper played the first movement of “Brave Caledonia,” and then rolled gently to a long drone, and then to the sad “Flowers of the Forest.”

  Plenty sad music, thought Du Pré. Plenty sad time.

  Benetsee was behind him. Sweet-grass smoke purled out of the lilac bower.

  The Martin family walked slowly away, back toward the ranch house. The crowd didn’t move until they had gone up the steps and the door had closed behind them.

  “The Piper in the Forest,” Du Pré thought. One of my cousins does that song, plays it on the concertina.

  Du Pré walked back to Madelaine. She was praying, as always, for everybody.

  Du Pré waited until Madelaine lifted her head. Her eyes were bright with tears.

  “Ver’ nice,” she said. “Now you glad you come?”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “Where is Benetsee?” she said.

  Du Pré shrugged.

  He looked round for the old man but he had gone, drifting into the dark trees. He would make his own way home.

  We all got to.

  “OK,” said Madelaine. “We go now, the bar, get me some pink wine, maybe dance a little. You quit being so damn sad, Du Pré, everybody they do what they have to. It is over now, I think, yes?”

  It is not over, Du Pré thought. A song ends. Music never does.

  “Yes,” he said. “We go there. I could use maybe a little whiskey.”

  “You don’t have to be a deputy no more,” said Madelaine. “Bart, he don’t have to be Sheriff.”

  Bart was behind them a hundred yards or so, talking to Lawyer Foote.

  They walked a little faster and got to the Rover before many people had begun to drive out of the hayfield. Du Pré backed up and turned and bumped out on the road. There was a truck up ahead of them, moving fast.r />
  Angela Green.

  Well, Du Pré thought, I am going to quit this deputy shit right now. No more. No more of this.

  He sped down the county road toward Toussaint, the Rover sometimes going a little soft on the turns as the gravel rolled under the tires. There were no cars in front of the bar when he turned in and parked.

  Susan Klein looked up briefly when they walked in, and back down at the book she was reading.

  “How was it?” she said, when Du Pré and Madelaine came up to the bar.

  “Ver’ sad,” said Du Pré, “but nice, too. At the end of the service a piper started to play off in the woods.”

  “That music, it always makes me cry,” said Madelaine. “Maybe it is one of those Scots, my great-grandfather in me.”

  “They dumped some more wolves up there,” said Susan Klein. “You’d think the dumb bastards would know when to quit.”

  “Eh?” said Du Pré.

  “In this morning’s paper,” said Susan. “It’s on the table there.”

  Du Pré looked down at the Billings newspaper’s headlines. Some idiot reporter thought dropping wolves by night was just wonderful. So did the editorial writer.

  Du Pré sipped his drink.

  Chapter 39

  DU PRÉ WATCHED THE fire of the welding rod melting, through the thick, dark green visor on his face. He smelled the acrid stink of burning metal and felt the spatter of molten steel on his boots.

  He flipped up his heavy face mask and looked at the weld. Good and tight and well filled. He walked two steps to the water barrel and doused it, hissing.

  He ground the weld down and then he heated the spring with a torch and doused it several times to temper it.

  Looking good. These things they sit here, what, maybe seventy years now and I got to expect that they get a little bad.

  “Du Pré!”

  Du Pré turned and looked toward the bright light of the doorway. Booger Tom was outlined in it, Benetsee standing behind his right shoulder.

  “Ya kin leave off for a moment and come settle an argument,” said Booger Tom.

  Du Pré set the steel down and he took off the heavy leather welding coat and the mask and he put them on their pegs and he fished around in his shirt pocket for his tobacco and papers and he went outside with the little white bag in his hand.

  He rolled a smoke for Benetsee and one for Booger Tom and he lit them and then rolled one for himself.

  The July day was close and cloudy and promised hard short rain at sundown. Now, in the afternoon, silver sheets fell from the black clouds but the rain evaporated before it hit the ground. Thunder rumbled. A jet plane drew a white line high past the sinking sun.

  Du Pré fished around in his car and found his whiskey and a half-gallon jug of screwtop white he kept there in case he ran into Benetsee.

  They walked round back of the old place to the little creek and sat on log seats under the lilac bushes Du Pré had planted years before, when he and Bart had found out the sad story of Du Pré’s father and Bart’s brother, joined now in death, one made the other and it was all too late but for a good story, maybe.

  Bart’s Rover pulled in up front and some of Jacqueline’s many children ran laughing toward it. He never came without something for them, and he never talked down to the kids.

  “Which one a us is the biggest liar,” said Booger Tom, “me or ol’ Too Many Feathers here?”

  Du Pré looked at the two old monsters for a long moment.

  “I am just a brand inspector, deputy, fiddler,” he said finally, “and that is a question for an astronomer. It is too big, me.”

  Benetsee laughed and he washed out an old jam jar in the creek and he poured himself wine.

  Du Pré and Booger Tom passed the whiskey back and forth.

  “Benetsee and me been playing cards,” said Booger Tom. “We both cheat pretty good, so we’re about even.”

  “Him, he cheat more,” said Benetsee.

  “I don’t care which, you old shits, cheat more,” said Du Pré. “I got things, you know, to think on besides that.”

  Benetsee cut a willow stem and he began to notch it and he twisted the red stick in his old hands and the bark spun and he slipped it free. He carved a moment and put the bark back on and fingered the holes he had made. He made a couple bigger and then he began to play, a pipe tune, old Métis song, dance on the buffalo hide pegged to the ground.

  Song about people making their meat, in the fall, there, kill them buffalo, cut the meat into sheets, hang it in the sun and fire. Let it dry good, pack it away. Pound it to powder, mix with the dried chokecherry and Indian plums. Heat the marrow fat and pour it some salted over the mixed powdered meat and dried fruit. Eat it when the sun dogs ride the sky and the cold has claws reach through your chest to your heart.

  Du Pré got his fiddle, he tuned it a moment, and he played a slow song some voyageur had made up on a moonless night when the lake was smooth and full of stars and the loons called far off, and then he heard the loup-garou, the werewolf, scream in the dark and he knew it smelled his blood and was following. Song prays for protection all things that are evil, when they come they cannot find you.

  They heard Bart’s booming laugh and the squeals of the happy kids.

  Du Pré had a slug of whiskey. He rolled another smoke.

  His horses curled back on each other, up to the fence, curious about who was here.

  Benetsee played another tune. Du Pré listened, nodding.

  He finished.

  “That for Prairie Falcon Woman,” he said.

  Poor Corey, Du Pré thought, you did your best.

  “Yeah,” said Du Pré, “well, it be some quiet now, I think.”

  Benetsee laughed. He roared with laughter.

  “Sure,” said Booger Tom, “now maybe you just tell me which three of them packhorses you want and quit lyin’ by not even botherin’ to lie to me.”

  Du Pré laughed.

  “OK,” he said, “I want them two grullas and the big bay. I am about done with them welding anyway.”

  A couple of big helicopters whacked and whacked off in the distance, headed up into the Wolfs. Two smaller helicopters followed.

  “There they go,” said Booger Tom. “Don’t learn for shit, do they?”

  “I be there, a minute,” said Du Pré.

  He went into the shed and picked up two of the wolf traps, and he brought them out and set them down and he rolled them up in some canvas. And two more. Two more. Two more.

  They weighed fifty pounds apiece, with the long chains on them.

  Six wolf traps, all oiled and scraped free of rust.

  “I ain’t seen any of those since I was wet three places, includin’ behind the ears,” said Booger Tom.

  Du Pré nodded.

  Booger Tom and Benetsee walked back to the pasture with catch-ropes and they dropped loops over the necks of the grullas and led them out the swinging wooden gate. The tough little horses came willingly.

  Booger Tom and Benetsee tied them to a post and they went to the tack shed and came out with two packsaddles and blankets and ropes and they began to pack the horses.

  Madelaine came, parking her old car on the grass by the drive. She lifted saddlebags of food and such out of her trunk and walked back to the men.

  Du Pré knelt by the little creek. Brook trout darted in the water’s dapple.

  Drink this water all my life. Tastes of fish piss. I like it.

  Live under them mountain all my life.

  See that rain never get to the ground every summer.

  See them sun dogs in the cold black winter.

  My people they were here, they are here by maybe 1700.

  My great-great-grandpa he fight with little Gabriel Dumont, he come down here after the 1886 Rebellion, them Red River people, and he raise his family, pick them mussel shell for the button makers. Never know how to read and write, but he is a great fiddler. His name was Gabriel, too.

  Pretty fine country.
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  Du Pré stood up.

  “They drop them wolf off now,” said Madelaine. “Got the TV crews up there, you know.”

  Du Pré nodded.

  “Yeah, well, you know, my grandpapa he hunt down that last pair buffalo wolves with that Don Stevens,” he said, “long, long time ago.”

  Them wolves have names.

  Old Snowdrift and Lady Snowdrift, almost white wolves, them. Old Snowdrift the biggest wolf ever killed, I hear.

  Du Pré went out to the pasture and he whistled and his mountain horse, old Walkin’ Tom, came over, whuffling. The horse was getting old but was still sound and Du Pré had ridden him always and if he left without him the horse would grieve. Then he’d just jump the fence and come along anyway.

  Du Pré opened the gate and the horse followed him back to the tack shed. Du Pré saddled him. He put the food Madelaine had brought on the grullas, helped pack the old bay with the rest.

  He picked up his .270 and lashed it on to the bay’s load.

  Checked his saddlebags for tobacco and whiskey.

  They loaded the horses into Bart’s huge trailer and then Bart pulled it up to his ranch and on up the access road that led to the trail to the Wolfs, the quickest route to the pass above.

  They offloaded the stock and checked the knots and Du Pré swung up and he took the rope from Booger Tom’s hand. He leaned down to kiss Madelaine.

  Bart stood there, still the Sheriff.

  One of the big helicopters lifted off the top of the mountains, then the other. The little white ones were circling round the place they’d come up from.

  “OK,” said Du Pré. “Well,” he said, touching his hat with his hand, “I thank you. You know, this is my land here. And I like them wolf all right. And when I am ready, they can come back.”

  He chirred to old Tom and the string followed along.

  I got to write a song about this, he thought.

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