Season of the Wolf

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “There it is,” he said, braking the vehicle to a stop. “I’m not driving down there, but I’ll walk over and check it out. You can go with me or wait here, either one.”

  “Looks pretty deserted,” Harry said from the backseat.

  “It’s not like anybody would put out a sign,” Brad countered. “‘Abducted women here.’”

  “I’ll come with you,” Buster said. “But then we go home, right?”

  “Yeah, Buster. If she’s not in there, we’ll go home after this.”

  He killed the engine and opened his door. A blast of Arctic air struck him; the outside temperature had turned a lot colder just in the last forty-five minutes or so, and without the vehicle heater blasting it was a shock. He steeled himself against it. If Clara was in there, she was cold, too.

  The other guys got out and followed him, exhibiting more or less reluctance. Buster grumbled about the cold, but that was just Buster doing what he did. The snow was deep, reaching well past Charles’s shins, and he walked with big, awkward steps, lifting his feet high.

  “Hey, Charles,” Brad said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Look at the snow around the cabin door.”

  Charles looked. It took a few seconds to comprehend, but then it seemed obvious. The snow had been disturbed; even though it had clearly been some time since anyone had been there, and snow had filled in any tracks left behind, it was not the even, unbroken expanse that it was elsewhere.

  “Someone’s been here,” he said.

  “I think so.”

  Charles cupped his hands around his mouth. “Clara! Clara, are you there?”

  He waited, but heard no response. “Clara!” he called again. The others joined in, calling for Clara, but also calling Barb’s and Marie’s names.

  No sound issued from the cabin.

  They kept walking toward it, pushing through the snow, down the long slope. As he had expected, it was deepest at the low point.

  “Charles!” Buster said. He was a few paces behind, not yet all the way at the bottom.

  “What?”

  “Dude…”

  Charles looked at him. He was pointing to his right, and slightly ahead, up the opposite slope.

  Where the wolves had gathered.

  * * *

  A voice woke Clara.

  She tried to sit up, but dizziness took her and she slumped to the floor again. Her head was throbbing, and she saw a bloody spot on the planks where she had lain. She tried to put the pieces together. She had seen the mutilated bodies of women she had known, Barb and Marie, and had fought to keep from throwing up. Then the world grew dark at the edges, and she must have passed out. From the look of it, she had landed on her forehead, cutting it open.

  The quality of the light filtering in through the curtain had changed. Hours must have passed while she lay unconscious on the floor.

  She heard the voice again. It called her name.

  Charles?

  She tried again to sit up, managing this time, though the pain that wracked her every muscle was nearly unbearable. She heard other voices outside, coming closer, and she tried to call back to them, but the tape snugged tight over her mouth meant she could only whimper.

  If she could reach the window, maybe she could break it. Even with her hands tied behind her back, she could toss something heavy through the glass. That would get Charles’s attention.

  But it was all the way across the cabin from her. Sitting had been agony. Could she stand again? Somehow hobble all the way over there?

  He was just outside, though, not far away. Surely he could see the cabin, and if he saw it, he would come to it. Once she heard him right outside, she could pound on the floor, the wall.

  He would hear that. Then he would come in and untie her, and—

  She didn’t want to think about Marie and Barb, about what had been done to them, what they had suffered.

  For all the terror she had felt, she had hardly been hurt. And her deliverance was so near.

  But then the quality of the voices outside changed.

  * * *

  “Shit!” Brad said. “Who’s got a gun?”

  “Mine’s in the Jeep,” Harry said.

  “I think they all are,” Charles said. You didn’t leave your house these days without one, not in Silver Gap. But he had been so tired, so anxious to check the cabin and get home, he hadn’t thought to open the back and get them out.

  “What do we do?” Buster asked.

  The wolves eyed them from the top of the slope. There were five of them. One was already starting down, muzzle open and twitching as it tasted the air. The biggest one stood behind the others, mostly black with some gray streaks and lighter patches under its eyes. Its right ear had a chunk missing from it.

  “Maybe they’ll back off,” Charles said. “They barely outnumber us, and they can’t know we don’t have guns.”

  But a second one started down, just behind the first.

  Charles looked toward the Jeep. Could they run, uphill and through the snow, and make it in time?

  Then from the other side—between them and the Jeep—three more started their way.

  Their heads were massive, golden-eyed, with thick, snow-laden fur and pink tongues and teeth that looked, even from a distance, like they could crack concrete.

  “Make for the Jeep,” he said. “It’s not locked. Whoever gets there first, get a gun and start shooting.”

  “Shit, Charles,” Buster said. “Amelia’s gonna be pissed.”

  “I know, Buster.”

  “You think a loud noise might scare ‘em?”

  “You can try.”

  “Boo!” Buster shouted. He had a deep voice, basso profundo, Charles thought. One of the wolves twitched an ear at his cry, but that was the only visible reaction. “Shit,” he said again, his voice considerably softer.

  The wolves kept coming. He had thought they would charge, but so far they hadn’t. Their approach was almost cautious, as if—

  —as if they were waiting to see what the humans might do.

  Could they be that smart?

  The wolves came closer, then paused, all at the same time, tense and focused.

  “I think we better run,” Charles said. “They look like they’re gonna come at us.”

  The other men didn’t speak. They broke and took off in different directions, each one pushing through the thick snow as fast as they could, more or less heading for the Jeep.

  The wolves fairly glided across the snow, moving fast and with unerring accuracy. Brad was out in front, but a pair of wolves figured out where he would be before he got there, and when he did, they met him, leaping up and pulling him down. His screams had just started when Harry went down. The disturbed snow was painted with red.

  Buster made it farther. Charles, panting with effort, thought for a moment that he would reach the Jeep. He took huge strides, lifting his feet from the snow and planting them again, and he was making steady progress until a wolf got in front of him, snarling and snapping. It planted its feet squarely in his chest, shoving him backward. Buster fell and the wolf stood on him, lowering its muzzle and then raising it again, dripping now with Buster’s lifeblood.

  Then one was on Charles, tearing at his arm. “Clara!” he called out, in case she could hear. “I love you, Cl—”

  Before he could finish the name, another wolf caught his knee in its huge maw and crushed it. He fell in the snow. A third one appeared, and this one went for the throat.

  33

  “You don’t want to see him,” Dr. Steinhilber said. “He’s pretty messed up.”

  Robbie and Alex had arrived at his office just after he and Cale Conklin had finished up Gil Calderon’s autopsy. He had sent his nurse and medical assistant home for the day, hoping they would make it there before the storm made travel impossible. But, he told them, Conklin had been helpful, and the two men seemed to get along well. They had just put the corpse into a freezer drawer, and were washing up, when Ale
x and Robbie showed up.

  “It’s good to have another doctor to talk to,” Steinhilber said, settling in behind his desk. “Even if he is the wrong kind.”

  Robbie had taken one of the guest chairs, Conklin the other. Robbie laid her rifle across her lap. Alex leaned against the wall, arms folded over his chest. “The only real difference,” Conklin said, “is that I was able to repay my student loans after twenty years. I imagine you’re still paying on yours.”

  “If only I’d gone into neurosurgery, like my mother always wanted.”

  “Hey, the country needs as many rural GPs as we can get.”

  “Seriously,” Steinhilber said. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  “What brought you over here today?” Alex asked.

  “Actually,” Conklin said, “something we wanted to talk to you about.”

  “We?”

  “Had another conversation with my wolf-expert friends, and I wanted to talk over a theory with Norman. I think we’ve settled on a conclusion—a tentative one, at least. But the evidence all points in one direction.”

  “What is it?” Robbie asked.

  “It’ll seem like a pretty far reach,” Conklin warned. “But it explains some longstanding holes. So maybe it’s a good thing.”

  “Are you ever going to tell us, or just keep issuing disclaimers?” Alex asked. He said it with a grin, but the day had already been a long one, and he was tired of standing.

  “Okay,” Conklin said. “Well, almost. Gotta tell you first that these are still just theories, and still in the formative stages. I know, another disclaimer. It’s just that we haven’t yet had a chance to confirm any of this.”

  “Just tell them, Cale,” Steinhilber advised. “I think they get it.”

  “Okay,” Conklin said again. “Here’s the hole I mentioned. Up in northern Alberta, in Canada—up in the Pelican Mountains not far from a place called Horsetail Lake, a hiker found a bunch of old bones. Anthropologists studied them and determined that there were dire wolf bones and gray wolf bones, all mixed together. Also some they couldn’t definitively say came from what. This was about twenty-two years ago, so they were working with fairly current science but not the most up-to-date. The bones seemed to be from the same period, which didn’t make sense, because nobody thought dires and grays would hang out. Same place, same time just wasn’t likely. And then there were other issues, leading to the conclusion that the samples had somehow become hopelessly cross-contaminated. The DNA seemed to imply part dire, part gray. And of course, that was impossible. So cross-contamination was the agreed-upon conclusion. The matter was set aside, never to be resolved.”

  “Or so they believed.” Steinhilber said.

  “Right. What we seem to have here—hybrids, dire/gray crossbreeds—could account for what they took as testing errors.”

  “Makes sense,” Alex said.

  “But how did they get here?” Robbie asked. “Northern Alberta is a long ways off.”

  “It is indeed,” Steinhilber said. “And isolated. That’s key.”

  “Very remote. They could’ve survived there for a long time without ever encountering human beings,” Conklin said. “Or if they were seen, they were taken for ordinary gray wolves. They were shy, like all wolves, rarely spotted. If someone came across one of their kills, he would assume it was a gray. If you saw one in the distance, through binoculars, whatever, you would just tell yourself that it was a gray. Until we saw one close up, and dead, till we were able to weigh it and measure it and take samples, we thought it was a gray. A strange-looking one, maybe. But nobody would catch a glimpse of one of those animals and think, my God, that’s a cross between a dire wolf and a gray wolf! Just wouldn’t happen. So geography isolated them and simple human nature allowed them to remain undetected.”

  “Which still doesn’t answer the question of why they’re here,” Alex observed.

  “That’s where global warming comes in,” Steinhilber said.

  “What?” Robbie asked, sounding shocked. “Not you too, Norm.”

  “What do you mean?” Steinhilber asked. “Are you a denier?”

  “I don’t know, it’s just…”

  “I prefer the terminology ‘climate change,’” Conklin said. “Warmer overall, but some places will be colder. Some drier, some wetter. More extreme weather events. Global warming is just too limiting.”

  “But it is happening, Robbie,” Steinhilber said. “More and more carbon in the atmosphere. There are lots of reasons, including deforestation, automobiles, industry—”

  “There have always been warmer and cooler cycles though, right?” Robbie asked. “Ice ages and so on?”

  “Oh, without doubt,” Steinhilber replied. “The difference this time is that the warming cycle that used to take thousands of years is happening much, much faster—over the course of a hundred or so years. People have turned it—nonsensically, I think—into a partisan issue over the past few years. But really, the science is largely settled.”

  She smiled at Alex. He liked the way that looked. “I guess you have reinforcements,” she said. “How’s it feel?”

  “Appreciated,” he said. “I’ve been kind of an odd man out in this neighborhood.” The conversation made him think about his movie, which reminded him of Peter and Ellen, and the unbearable cost, beyond the financial, of the project. He hadn’t made up his mind how to proceed from here, if at all. Hadn’t had time to even think about it.

  “All right,” Robbie said. “Say I accept global warming. Climate change. How does it apply to the wolves?”

  “Let me take a crack at that one,” Alex said.

  Conklin made an offering gesture with his hands.

  “You’re postulating that they were up in Alberta, but we don’t know that they weren’t elsewhere as well.”

  “Good,” Conklin said. “Keep going.”

  “Well, everything you already said still applies. They stayed in the high country. Cold country. They weren’t seen often, and when they were, they were mistaken for gray wolves. By keeping to themselves, keeping away from people, they survived for thousands of years, a separate, unknown breed.”

  “We think they mostly stayed in Canada. Maybe remote parts of Montana, but for the most part, well to the north.”

  “And then,” Alex went on, “things started to warm. Here we’re seeing it reflected in the devastation caused by bark beetles. Farther north and at higher elevations, we’ve got glaciers melting, streams running faster. At any rate, what seem at first to be small changes can have big consequences.”

  “Such as?” Robbie asked.

  “Well, take here for example. Various animals depend on the trees for nutrition, for protection. The trees die, the animals have to move. If they’re already at the tree line, they have to move down the mountains. These critters are the bottom of the food chain, but when they relocate, so do the larger ones that prey on them. And the ones that prey on those, and so on, all up the chain.”

  “And wolves,” Conklin said, “are the ultimate predators. They go where the food goes.”

  “As they’re forced to lower and lower elevations,” Steinhilber added, “it was inevitable that they would encounter human beings at some point. We live at these elevations. Conflict was unavoidable.”

  “You really think there are a lot of these crossbreeds?” Robbie asked.

  “As I said, it’s all a theory,” Conklin answered. “Maybe not, maybe there are only a couple of packs. One up in Canada, another here. Maybe the rendezvous site you visited today has been used for a hundred generations.”

  “And I blew the hell out of it,” Alex said, guilt settling in on him again.

  “You did what you had to do. Like the good doctor said, conflict between man and wolf was bound to happen. It’s unfortunate, but climate change is having a lot of unfortunate effects and they’re just going to increase.”

  “I’m a wolf guy,” Conklin said. “I love ‘em. Literally. But I’m also a human being. When wol
ves and humans are up against each other for survival, I have to root for the humans.”

  “You make it sound like a war,” Robbie said.

  “Only halfway,” Conklin replied. “Wolves kill to eat, and sometimes for other reasons. The protection of the pack. They don’t know the concept of war. But self-defense? Oh, trust me, they get that. They completely understand that.”

  34

  Doctor Steinhilber said he had more to do at the office. He expected, given the worsening storm outside, that it would be closed for a couple of days, unless emergencies demanded otherwise. He would meet the others later at the Cup & Cow, weather permitting. “Weather,” he added with a chuckle, “and wolves.”

  “Don’t even joke about that, Norm,” Robbie said. “We’re going to get started on that meal. Join us when you can.”

  Cale Conklin accompanied them. It was a short walk, a block back to Main and then six down to the restaurant, passing Robbie’s shop on the way.

  But the wind howled with renewed ferocity and it blew stinging snow into their faces. They walked with eyes downcast, heads into the wind. There weren’t many people out, but they saw a woman Robbie called Mrs. Kuchar, sixty-something and pear-shaped, out walking a once-fluffy Keeshond, its fur matted with snow. Robbie waved, and the woman waved back, tugging on the dog’s leash. The dog had frozen, nose to the wind.

  Robbie must have noticed the tremble in the dog’s legs at the same instant that Alex did. She unslung the rifle from her shoulder and aimed it, cool and steady.

  Mrs. Kuchar was looking at the dog, saying something to it, but then she looked up and saw Robbie pointing a gun in her general direction. Her mouth dropped open and she released the leash.

  As soon as it felt the slack, the Keeshond unfroze. It barked once and took off—running not with the wind, but against it, which surprised Alex. He called to the woman, beckoned her. She was staring after her dog, though, and her dog was charging the wolf coming in from that direction.