Season of the Wolf

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

“Not as much as in some other species, but they’re not unheard of. Wolves do carry various diseases and parasites. Most commonly, Echinococcus granulosus, a tapeworm that can spread Hydatid disease. But that wouldn’t result in attacks against humans. Like I said, you can count the number of wolf attacks on people that don’t involve rabies and/or distemper on two hands. And you’d have fingers left over.”

  Steinhilber was about to respond when there was a knock at the door and Morris Deeds entered. “Sorry to interrupt, Doc,” Deeds said. “I need you, Robbie. Can you step out here for a minute?”

  She agreed, and passed through the door with him. A couple of minutes later she came back and beckoned to Alex. “You might want to be in on this,” she said. “I’m sorry, Norman, we’ve got to go. Dr. Conklin, it really has been an honor. If you’ll be in town for a little while, I hope we run into each other again.”

  Conklin smiled like she had offered him treasure. Alex understood how he felt. “I do too,” Conklin said.

  Outside, they passed a couple of other cops heading toward the doctor’s office. Robbie led Alex quickly to her Jeep, explaining as they went. Snow was falling at a steady pace, building up on the ground, on roofs and trees, and he zipped his coat against the chill. “They’re going to tell Norman and Dr. Conklin what’s up,” she said.

  “Which is?”

  “Which is, those people who went out earlier? The DOW trucks, and the hunters that followed them out? They’ve been attacked.”

  “Attacked?” he echoed. Then the meaning of her words sank in. “Oh my God. Wolves?”

  “Yes.”

  “Peter and Ellen were out there.”

  “Yes. And people I’ve known for most of my life, and a lot of visitors. I guess one of the people in the party managed to get in touch with Frank Trippi, and said the wolves were overrunning them. The call was dropped—or the phone was—and Frank couldn’t get back in touch. He went to see Morris, who told Alden Stewart. Word’s been spreading, somehow, and some of the other folks who came to town to hunt wolves are itching to get out there. But of course, the DOW, the mayor, and Deeds want a more organized party, since the last one wasn’t exactly a resounding success.”

  “They’re all dead?” Alex asked. His mind was refusing to process what she said. He heard the words, and understood them, but still he couldn’t bring himself to accept them.

  “They don’t know. They just know they can’t reach anybody. The DOW chopper was in touch by radio, but then the radio cut out and there was an SOS beacon, and then nothing. They have another one, but the snow and wind are keeping it grounded for now. So they want to send out some vehicles.”

  “Including you.”

  “That’s right. I’m the best they’ve got.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “I have to go, Alex. It’s what I do. And I owe it to my friends, my neighbors.”

  “I get it,” Alex said. Really, he wanted her to tell him she was retiring, that she’d had enough of killing and was going to stay indoors for the next thirty years.

  He knew how unlikely that was, though.

  They reached the Jeep and he took his usual position in the passenger seat. “I can take you back to your hotel, or—” She let the sentence hang there.

  “Do I get a choice?”

  “Of course.”

  “Peter and Ellen are out there. I’m responsible for them.”

  “You didn’t make them get in that truck today.”

  “I didn’t stop them.”

  “I’m not sure you could have. “

  “Maybe not. But I could have tried.”

  “So, you want to go along?”

  “I have to.”

  “Morris won’t like it. He doesn’t like you.”

  “I’m not that fond of him, either.”

  “I can tell. I’m sure he can, as well.”

  “I guess I’m an open book.”

  She eyed him for a moment, then returned her attention to the road. “I don’t know about that. You’ve got layers of mystery about you.”

  “That’s just…just because I haven’t told you everything.”

  “Hence the mystery.” They were approaching the lodge. “Hotel, or what?”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “That’s what I hoped you’d say.” She drove past the motel and into town.

  Alex could sense the tension in the air as they reached the small downtown area. There were no people walking casually on the sidewalks, no one carrying bags. Instead, people were gathered in anxious knots. Cars hurried down the street, their drivers grim-faced. Outside Town Hall, police cars and SUVs were parked willy-nilly. Robbie parked in the mix and climbed out of the Jeep, telling Alex to stay put.

  Chief Deeds and Mayor Stewart were locked in intense conversation with a man and a woman in DOW uniforms. Robbie joined them. Deeds called another cop over, and he spread a map on the hood of one of the cop cars. There was more discussion, and pointing fingers, and after a few minutes Robbie stalked back to the Jeep. “We’re riding with Morris,” she said.

  “Me too?”

  “Unless you want to change your mind.”

  “No, I’m in.” He didn’t like the idea of spending time with the police chief, but he figured it was a trade-off, because he got to spend more time with Robbie.

  He helped load Robbie’s gear into a department Tahoe, then took a seat in back beside Robbie. An officer named Honeycutt swaggered to the SUV and got in behind the wheel, moving with a sort of official crispness that felt practiced to Alex. Like he had an idea about how cops should move, and although it was artificial and forced, he was determined to live up to it.

  Deeds took shotgun. He turned around and fixed Alex with a stern glare as Honeycutt started the engine. His eyes were almost slate gray, echoing the sky outside. “You keep out of the way,” he said. “Stay in the vehicle unless you’re told to get out. You’re along because Robbie asked, and that’s the only reason. Clear?”

  “Clear, Chief,” Alex said.

  Deeds faced front again, and Honeycutt pulled in near the front of a procession of official vehicles. Alex counted nine, each containing at least three or four people. He saw Silver Gap PD, Larimer County Sheriffs, state troopers and DOW. Most were male and white, but not all of them. A DOW truck took the lead, and Deeds explained that they had GPS coordinates from one of the missing DOW vehicles.

  They were about ten miles from town when Alex heard Deeds’s name over the radio’s constant crackle. Deeds thumbed his mic and responded. “What is it, Althea?”

  “Charles Durbin just called in, from the Mountain High Lodge?” Alex stiffened at the familiar name.

  “Right, what about?”

  “He says Clara has gone missing. He hadn’t seen her in hours. She ain’t answering her phone.”

  “He try the church?”

  “Yeah. Reverend Calderon says he sent her into town with a shopping list and some money, but she never came back with the groceries.”

  “Hell’s bells, Althea. A few hours isn’t enough time to file a missing person report.”

  “I know that, Morris. But what with the wolves and all, he’s plenty worried. He sounded just about panicked on the phone. Wants a search party put together right now.”

  “He’ll just have to wait a little, won’t he? We’re stretched a little thin at the moment. I’m concerned about Clara and everybody else who’s missing, but right now we got a couple dozen people who need help.”

  “The phone’s ringin’, Morris, I betcha it’s him again.”

  “See who’s around. Maybe some of those guys that came to hunt wolves will go with Durbin to see if they can find her. Other than that, there’s not much I can do.”

  Finished with the call, Deeds turned to Robbie. “You’ve been with him all day?” A tick of his head toward Alex indicated who the “him” was.

  “Yes, Morris. Since first thing this morning.”

  “So if Clara went missing over the la
st few hours, I guess you’re in the clear,” the chief said. “And your friends went out with the hunting party, so they are, too.”

  “Small favors,” Alex mumbled.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  After a few minutes of quiet except for occasional bursts of staticky conversation over the radio, Honeycutt met Alex’s glance in the rear-view and took it for an invitation. “Hear you make movies,” he said. “You from Hollywood?”

  “I live in Santa Monica,” Alex said.

  “That’s Hollywood isn’t it? Same thing.”

  “It’s Los Angeles. Not precisely Hollywood, but not too far away.”

  “Do you know Vin Diesel? Or Chuck Norris, anybody like that?”

  “Sorry, no. I really don’t work in the movie business. I’m making a documentary, so—”

  “About the ecology or something, right?”

  “More or less.”

  “You must know George Clooney then, right? Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie? All those Hollywood liberals?”

  “Howie,” Deeds broke in. “He said he doesn’t know those folks.”

  “I’ve actually met Clooney,” Alex admitted. Robbie nudged his thigh, and he realized he should have kept his mouth shut.

  “Is he a queer? I heard he’s queer.”

  “As far as I’m aware, he’s an excessively successful and attractive heterosexual,” Alex said.

  “I don’t like that,” Honeycutt said. “I mean, I don’t like people being queer either. But I think a man ought to find himself one wife and settle on that. Like Chief Deeds, and Christy. You and Christy have a great marriage, Chief. Don’t you?”

  Deeds snarled something at Honeycutt, who lapsed back into silence. Staticky voices came from the radio and Honeycutt followed the DOW truck along narrow dirt roads, and the other vehicles followed them. The snow was building up and the sky had gone from gray to almost white, as if the color was being leached from the world.

  Then the DOW truck left the road and traveled overland, up a hill and down the other side. Honeycutt downshifted and took the ascent slowly. The mood in the vehicle was tense, but he thought that mostly emanated from Chief Deeds. Honeycutt was a little too anxious, a little too desperate to be liked, Alex believed, but he was young and in uniform and maybe that came with the territory.

  On the other side of the hill, the ground leveled out again and the path, clearly marked by dozens of tires, led into a canyon that Alex couldn’t even see until they were right on it. The trail wound into the canyon, where it was hemmed in by steep, rocky slopes and boulders that had rolled from them in earlier times, perhaps before the dawn of man but likely a blink of an eye in geologic terms, and then the brake lights on the DOW truck were burning and Honeycutt brought the Tahoe to a sudden, sliding stop behind it.

  The vehicle halted at such an angle that Alex could see around the DOW truck. What he saw brought bile to his throat. He swallowed, with difficulty.

  Earlier, during the necropsy of the wolf, he had whispered to Robbie, “Remind me never to do that again.”

  “I guess you’ve never shot an animal and field-dressed it,” Robbie said.

  “Remind me never to do that, too.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  There, the smells of death and blood and the hot stench of the bone saw cutting skull, the sight of the mangled fur and pink flesh and dark organs, had almost sent him running from the room. He had taken some comfort in the ease with which the others dealt with it, and he told himself that life and death were natural processes, each a part of the other, unable to be disconnected. Looking at it that way, clinically and philosophically, had enabled him to stay in the lab and get through the process.

  This was so much worse.

  Falling snow blanketed everything, but red had seeped through it like fruit juice through crushed ice. The first recognizable thing Alex saw was a foot, still booted, but severed at the ankle and lying on its side. Then the shapes under the snow took on form and meaning. Most of a body, torso and head and limbs, but the torso was split open in the middle, gaping toward the sky. Something that at first he thought was the bloody back of somebody’s head, until he realized it was the front, only all the things that made a face—eyes, nose, lips, ears—had been torn away, leaving pulpy flesh and white bone. The upper part of a man, clawing at the snow as if trying to free himself from its grip, except there was nothing below mid-chest except tatters of clothing and shredded flesh. Here a hand, there an arm, over there snagged on a tree limb, a single flap of skin that could have come from a back or a stomach. Bodies dangled out of open trucks, leaned against doors. Blood coated windows and shards of glass jutting up through the fresh powder. The stink of it filled the air; blood and death and shit, urine from the dead and the wolves that had marked their territory, claimed their kills. It was inescapable. Alex tried to breathe through his mouth but then he could taste it on his tongue.

  “Oh, God,” Chief Deeds said.

  “You okay, Chief?” Honeycutt asked him.

  “Had better days, son.”

  The other vehicles were stopped behind them now, doors opening and closing, people getting out. There was swearing and puking and somebody let loose a bloodcurdling cry of fury and frustration. Robbie got out of the SUV and checked her weapon. Alex started to slide out, too.

  “You sure?” she asked. “They might still be around. The wolves.”

  “I’ll stick close,” he said. “There a gun I can use?”

  “You know how to shoot?”

  “I have shot. Not a lot, and not well. But it’s not an entirely new concept.”

  “Layers of mystery,” she said. “Howie, is the back open?”

  “Should be,” Honeycutt said. ‘Fuckeroonie, look at all that, wouldya?”

  Alex accompanied Robbie to the rear hatch. “What did he say?”

  “I think he said ‘fuckeroonie.’”

  “Is he all there? Seriously.”

  “People react in strange ways to something like this,” she said, handing him a rifle.

  Suddenly her—what would you call it, macha—bravado got to him. “You see things like this a lot? Because I’ll tell you, I never have.”

  She caught his tone and winced, but didn’t let it knock her off her stride. “Think you can use this?”

  “If I have to.”

  “Okay, good.” She closed the back of the Tahoe. “Let’s go see what we can see. You can still stay here.”

  “I’m going.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  Robbie trudged through the snow. Alex followed, the rifle unfamiliar in his hands but somehow still a comfort. Could he shoot a wolf, if he had to? He thought he could. But that was something one didn’t know, not for certain, until he was tested. He hoped he wouldn’t be tested.

  Approaching the slaughter, the ripe smell of death was thickest in the air, overpowering the rest. It was a stench he had never forgotten, though his earlier experience with it had been in a landscape of utter black, not pure white. This was like a negative image of that, except for the red. Blood was blood was blood, and when it fled the body it did so in crimson streams, scarlet rivers, pools so dark they were almost black in the center and pinkish toward the edges.

  Everyone was out of the vehicles now, and they walked in near silence among the ruined flesh and spilled blood and jagged bone. Snow was falling, heavy and wet, soaking through Alex’s jeans and encrusting the stocking cap he had donned, and the slow, steady pace of it was somehow funereal and fitting. He recognized the truck that Peter and Ellen had jumped into, and he went to it. Peter was on the ground beside it. His mouth was open as if stuck in a scream. His eyes stared unblinking at the falling snow. His throat had been torn away and one hand was gone. The video camera was close to him, as it always had been since Alex had known him. He still had the gear bag strapped across his chest. Alex was ready to write it all off—ready to write the whole project off, at this point, it had been a
disaster from the start and had only gotten worse. But looking at Peter, or what was left of him, there on the frozen earth, he knew that Peter would have been filming until the end. Peter could be a pain in the ass and he was opinionated and full of himself but he was a filmmaker through and through, and he would have kept shooting and he would have wanted somebody, anybody, to view his footage.

  Alex retrieved the camera, brushing snow off it with his gloved hand. He looked at the bag, but that would be harder to get to. Even if rigor mortis had not set in, the cold would have and Peter would be stiff. Never mind, he told himself, if you want it later you can get it from wherever they take the possessions of the dead.

  Chief Deeds was eyeing him as he cleaned off the camera, and he wondered if he should explain that it belonged to him, that he had bought all the equipment just for this project, and Peter was only an employee. But Deeds moved on and Alex carried the camera back to the SUV and put it on the backseat, out of the weather.

  Police officers were unloading body bags from the back of one of their vehicles. That was something he could help with. He had done it before, anyway. He went to the cops and someone handed him a couple of bags, surprisingly heavy even when they were empty and he walked out with the others. On the way he saw that Robbie and some of the men had taken up positions along the perimeters, rifles in their hands.

  Watching for wolves.

  26

  By the time they got back to town, the snow was falling harder, and winds whipped out of the north, driving it sideways. There had been no survivors, and some of those who had gone out on the trucks were still missing. Bloody drag marks in the snow showed where they had been taken, but the trails had eventually been obscured by yet more snow, and some of the bodies had been taken apart on the way, so there seemed little hope of finding anything identifiable, much less salvageable. Given their concerns about the weather and impending darkness, the people calling the shots had decreed that the search for those victims would be called off, in favor of getting the remains they had collected back to town by nightfall.

  Alex and Robbie retired to her shop, where she dug a TV free from underneath canvas bags and paperwork and other things Alex couldn’t even identify. She had a rat’s nest of cables and Alex found the appropriate kind and plugged it into both devices, and in a few minutes they were watching the video Peter had shot. Even sitting in a moving truck, Peter had been a craftsman. He shot quick grabs of this and that—passing foliage and a bird in flight and a family of mule deer watching the trucks rumble past—as if they had been as artfully arranged and lit as big-budget studio footage. After a few minutes of that, the scene changed to a long shot of a ridgeline with something standing in the shadows of the trees.