Thump. It rattled the glass in the window this time. I got up, went to the window, looked out. The night was bright enough so the yucca cast a pointed shadow and still enough that the shadow didn’t waver. No wind warned that a storm was coming. No lightning flashes illuminated the sky. The stars were all in place, the night was smooth as velvet. Bang it went again, unaccompanied by any flare that I could see. Were we resorting to bombs now to stop the drug traffic?
Thump. The thumps weren’t advancing or retreating the way thunder would. They stayed in place the way missiles being test-fired at a drone might. I remembered that I was in the shadow of the White Sands Missile Range where things that went thump in the night were missiles and antimissile missiles. Our government was making sure our defense system worked, keeping the volunteer army employed.
It was too noisy and too bright to go back to sleep and what could you hope to dream about after that anyway? Star wars? Refugees? I got up, threw on a T-shirt, jeans and running shoes, walked quietly as a ghost down the hallway and let myself out. It was bright enough to see any incoming rattlesnakes. I raised my arm and waved my hand, my moon shadow following in synchronicity. New Mexico is enchanted at night, so clear that you can follow the moon in all its phases and locate the constellations, so bright you can see where you’re going. The thumps in the sky stopped. Either the missiles had hit their drones or they hadn’t. The testing appeared to be over. I walked out into the desert until I couldn’t see the house anymore, couldn’t hear anything but silence, not a cicada, not a boom box, not a coyote, not an owl. I sat down on a rock near a juniper that was a hundred years old or more and looked toward the southern sky. There was one star brighter than all the others that had to be Sirius. I faced the Soledad peaks, silhouettes darker than the sky. “Aaahoooo,” I howled softly and then louder, “aaahoooo.” There was no answer.
******
In the morning over granola with a banana and my first cup of coffee, Juan’s second or third, I told him that I had to be in Albuquerque tomorrow. The missiles had kept Jayne awake, he said, and she had taken a Xanax and was sleeping in. Since it was the first time I’d been alone with Juan since I’d talked to Frank Boyd, I also told him that Agriculture or the FWS or whoever chose to take responsibility would not release Sirius until the calf-kill issue was settled even if I were able to get the charges against him dropped.
“I don’t care about dropping the charges,” he said. “I’m innocent and any jury is going to see that right off.”
There are some pervasive fantasies in this country. One, that wars win something. Two, that guns don’t kill people. Three, that everyone ought to get rich and star in their own movie. Four, that everyone deserves his or her day in court and when that day comes the case will be presented by a brilliant, committed lawyer, that a lifetime of wrongs will be vindicated by a wise judge and a sympathetic jury. The truth is litigation is largely a boring, time-consuming, expensive crapshoot. Juan had been through the process and had already lost once. What made him think he would win this time? The quality of his legal representation? His belief in his innocence? Ego? Romance?
“What happens if more cattle get killed?” Juan asked. “Then do I get Siri back?”
“I’m working on it,” I said. “In the meantime let’s just hope you don’t get charged with Bob Bartel’s murder.”
“Is there anything you can do about that?”
“I’m doing what I can. I made an appointment with Norm Alexander this morning.”
“Why are you going to see him?” Juan poured himself another cup of coffee, added a lot of sugar, a little cream.
“He could be useful as an expert witness. What you can do is keep quiet, stick around here and don’t answer any questions.”
“You got it,” he said.
******
When I got to Hardee’s I was grateful for Juan’s healthy interest in food. For one thing I got to eat it. The nurturing side of his character indicated he was either softer than your average criminal or more complicated. There wasn’t anything I’d want to eat at Hardee’s and the coffee had the oily charm of the fluids you pour in your car. Forget about herb teas. Norm Alexander had gotten there before me and was eating a greasy sausage wrapped in a dough parka. I’d eaten at Hardee’s once on a long road trip and knew their breakfast sausage/biscuit combination of slippery fat and sticky dough was unswallowable. Hardee’s had defeated me, I’ll admit it. But Norman Alexander didn’t seem to notice that what he was eating wasn’t edible. He didn’t seem to notice what he was eating at all. The breakfast biscuit was disappearing fast. The fact that he didn’t talk much helped. You can always tell who’s been talking during a meal because the talker’s plate is full when everybody else’s is empty, only at this meal Norm started out full and I started out empty. I hoped to change that in terms of information before the meal was over, but the odds did not appear to be in my favor.
“Eat here often?” I asked. It could explain his sour expression.
“Only when I come to town and that’s only when I have to.” He chewed at his biscuit, sipped at his coffee and didn’t say any more. Hardee’s was filled with men older than Norman Alexander, men who were white-haired and bald, men beyond retirement age, in fact, with nothing to do, who sat around drinking the coffee, reading the Soledad Times, talking about baseball and the prices cattle were bringing in. Norm was sitting at a distance, I’d noticed when I walked in, not a rancher, not retired, not a part of this crowd. He, apparently, had something to do, but I didn’t know what.
“You had something you wanted to ask me?” he said, finishing his breakfast biscuit, picking up a paper napkin in his left hand and wiping his mouth with it. His scarred right hand, I noticed, remained in his lap. It didn’t surprise me that he kept it out of view. It wasn’t something you’d want to look at across the breakfast table. Alexander was adept with his left hand, indicating that he was either a natural lefty or he’d made a good adjustment. I’ve read about the studies that show lefties are more troublesome and accident prone and die younger than right-handers. Alexander, however, seemed to be in control except for the jittery cricket itching to get out of his cheek.
“I’m interested in radio tracking and Charlie Clark told me you’re the expert.”
“Radio tracking? Why do you want to know about that?” He folded his napkin up into neat little squares.
“As you probably know, my client, Juan Sololobo, is under suspicion for the murder of Bob Bartel. Bartel was out in the field with his radio equipment the day he died. It’s possible I may need an expert witness.”
“Expert witness? What do I get for that?”
I shrugged. “Whatever the market will bear.”
“I don’t do that kind of work.” Guess he didn’t need the money. He tucked the folded-up napkin under his plate.
“Well, since you’re here and I’m here could I ask you some questions about the subject?” It’s a female trick, open your eyes wide and ask a man to tell you everything he knows. It doesn’t work as well as it used to.
“What is it you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“It’s a big subject.” He sipped at his coffee, glanced at the clock ticking on the wall behind me. “And I got started about thirty years ago when radio tracking was in its infancy.”
“The early sixties,” I said. “A lot of things got started then.”
“This was one of the few that actually had merit.”
To whom, I wondered, the scientists or the animals?
“I was one of the pioneers as a young biologist in Alaska,” Norm said. “The equipment we used back then was primitive. In fact we used to make it ourselves. I remember the first time we put a transmitter on a snowshoe rabbit and the rabbit ran into an electric fence and killed itself. It’s gotten more elegant now that the equipment is manufactured commercially, although there is always room for improvement. The electronic components of transmitters are smaller and lighter and biologists have
gotten able to track a wide variety of species, everything from whales to crayfish. In fact a fish can be tracked by something as small as a wire under its eye. Frogs, alligators, snakes, as well as wolves, leopards and grizzly bears—they’ve all been tracked.” Like Bob Bartel he got pretty verbal once he warmed to his subject. Enthusiasm for one’s work seemed to be a biologist’s trait. One not shared by all the professions. “The range has expanded enormously, too. A peregrine falcon was tracked for over 2,000 miles from Wisconsin into Mexico. There was a transmitter on a sea turtle in the Gulf of Mexico that was being tracked by satellite. It came off and washed up in Texas on Padre Island. A tourist saw it on the beach, didn’t know what it was, took it home and was using it as a doorstop. He was rather surprised when the FWS knocked on his door and wanted it back.”
“I bet. How do you get a transmitter on a large and unenthusiastic mammal like a cougar or a wolf?”
“You drop the animal…”
“Drop?”
“Shoot it with a tranquilizing dart. Darts take ten or twenty minutes to knock the animal out, and it used to be difficult to locate the darted animal because they’d run off. But now there are radios in the darts so researchers can find them. The darts have barbed tips so they stay in after the drug has been released. They’re too expensive to lose.”
“Do the tranquilizers hurt the animals?”
“No. I had wolves in Alaska that I hit over one hundred times. Didn’t bother them one bit. They forget what happened once the effect of the drug wears off. Once the animal is down and you’ve got the collar on, you want to take advantage of that to take blood samples and urine samples and do as many studies as you can.”
“So this transmitter that you put on the animal sends out a signal that a receiver somewhere picks up.”
“Of course. Like a radio station, every animal in a study has its own signal. Researchers in an area use similar frequencies so they can monitor each other’s collars.”
“How far do signals reach?”
“Ten to twenty miles in the air. No more than three miles on the ground,” he said with all the authority a male scientist can muster. “Signals can tell the researcher a lot. They can lead you to the animal, they can help you study migratory patterns, they can tell you how active the animal is.”
“Could you tell if an animal were being hunted?”
“Depends. Give me an example.”
“A mountain lion, say. The FWS has collared some mountain lions in this area. Say someone were hunting one, could a biologist tell by the signal that it was being hunted?”
“Absolutely,” Norm said, speaking with more vehemence than I’d seen yet. The cricket on his cheekbone picked up the beat. “No doubt about it. You know Buddy Ohles tracked and killed an FWS-collared lion about a year ago that a rancher over in Platinum complained about. Bob Bartel was furious and I would have been too, if it were my collar. Bob was a dedicated biologist and I had a great deal of respect for his abilities. His death was a terrible tragedy. He was fighting a futile battle, however. The lobos will not survive at White Sands. For one thing there is insufficient heterozygosity in the zoo population. Wolves can survive in the wild for a long time with fairly close inbreeding and every now and then some outbreeding, but inbreeding is debilitating for captive populations. Even in the best of circumstances, as in North Carolina where there was a receptive citizenry and a much larger and stronger gene pool, half the reintroduced wolves died. And with the kind of animosity the ranchers have here? The lobos will be reintroduced as an experimental population and any wolf that wanders off the White Sands range will be shot. The ranchers will accuse them of killing livestock, a charge that is almost impossible to prove or disprove. The ranchers will complain to the ADC, the Buddy Ohleses of this world will track the wolves and kill them. It is a pity that Bob Bartel died, even more of a pity that his life’s work will go for nothing.”
“What do you think should happen to the lobo, then?”
“It’s not what I think should happen, it’s what I know will happen.”
“What?”
“If they survive at all it will be as a zoo animal.”
“What brought you down here to the boot of America?” I asked. “Not ranching.”
“Obviously.”
“It doesn’t seem to be a place that’s crazy about science, not the physical sciences anyway.”
“America is inhospitable to science. We can’t get respect or decent funding, and we’ve lost our technological edge because of it. It will be the downfall of this country. I came here because I inherited a ranch. I was looking for someplace to settle after I left the FWS, and I’d had enough of Alaska winters.”
“So you retired to Singing Arrow?” I asked.
The cricket raised its legs, lowered them again. “Retired? Who told you that?”
“I thought you had.”
He brought his scarred right hand up and laid it on the table like a badge of service to a lost cause. “The government cut back on my funding and wouldn’t give me the support I needed. I quit,” he said.
15
I’D SEEN NORM Alexander for breakfast. I hoped to make it back to Albuquerque for dinner. In between I went out to the Phillips ranch hoping to catch Don and Perla in for lunch, an early lunch, I figured, since ranchers were likely to be out working by daybreak and hungry by noon. Perla, in fact, was making sandwiches on a table under the portal when I got there, baloney and American cheese on white. One blond toddler was sitting in his high chair, the other in her lap.
‘‘Don’s about to come in for lunch,” Perla said. “You eaten yet?”
“Not since breakfast,” I said.
“Well, okay, why don’t you join us then?” Although you don’t often find water in the desert, you do find hospitality.
“Thanks,” I said.
There was a quart-size jar of mayo on the table, another of Gulden’s mustard and a big jar of pickles. Something that looked like real butter sat in a plastic refrigerator dish next to a king-sized loaf of white bread from Skagg’s Alpha Beta. The gallon container on the table held milk, not Fort Worth tap water; real milk, not skim. Perla dipped a knife in the mayonnaise and began spreading it on a slice of bread. “Mustard? Mayonnaise? Butter?”
“Mayo.” I said.
A toddler pounded his plastic cup on his high chair and milk spilled out. “Now, Donny,” she said, “you’re never gonna live to ninety-five like your great-granddaddy if you don’t drink your milk.”
Perla took some baloney out of its plastic wrapper, put it on the bread. “Saw you at the funeral,” she said to me.
“Saw you, too.”
“The Bartels are good folk. We didn’t agree with him about everything but we’re real unhappy about what happened to Bob and his family, real unhappy.”
“So am I.”
Perla began peeling the cheese from its plastic slice by slice. The toddler on her lap reached for the mustard. I watched his fingers inching along the table. He smiled and gurgled happily when he got to it and plunged his fist in. I was curious to see what he would do next, throw it at his brother? He brought his hand back to his face, sucked at his fingers, spread Gulden’s all over his cheeks. Perla caught on to him. “Oh, Jimmy,” she said, “what am I going to do with you?” She wiped the mustard off Jimmy’s face and put some cheese on the baloney.
“How was your ride on Chili?” she asked.
“I apologize for taking him like that,” I said. “I should have asked you first.”
“Heck, he wasn’t complaining, he likes to run,” she smiled. “Anyways I mighta said no. Didn’t you say you didn’t like to ride?”
“I got thrown when I was a kid and never wanted to ride again, but I could get to like Chili.”
“A bad experience for a kid, that’ll do it, all right. Chili’s out there in the stable if you want to take him out.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said. “I have to get back to Albuquerque tonight.”
�
��I don’t envy you city dwellers. It’s a healthy life we got down here. Don’s granddaddy’s not the only one living to be ninety-five.” And ranchers ate balloon bread, processed cheese and baloney, too. “Don and me, we got a real home for our kids.” It was a tough world out there but they’d made an oasis in the desert, snug, settled, comfortable.
I brought the conversation around to the not-so-comfortable subject of predators. “I took Chili because I was afraid Buddy would shoot the wolf.”
Perla stopped spreading mustard and looked me in the eye. “You know we ranchers are on the way to becoming extinct ourselves. There’s a movement out there to get us off the federal lands, for people to stop eating beef, and now they want to bring the wolves back. It’s a well-known and documented fact that wolves will go to cattle. Those calves were expensive losses for us, five or six hundred dollars each. They can keep that varmint locked up and throw away the key for all I care, but it would have been cheaper if Buddy had just shot the thing. Wolves kill just for fun. Did you know that? Don’s granddaddy was around when the ranch was loaded with ’em and he told us that. They get into a herd, something snaps in their brains and they start killing.”
It was contrary to anything any naturalist had ever observed, but I kept my mouth shut.
“Wolves are prolific, too. They’re real stout about that, and they’re not gonna stay at White Sands either. They don’t belong anywhere near cows and people,” said Perla.
Some might say that people and cows don’t belong anywhere near wolves, but I didn’t say that either. “You don’t know for sure that Sirius killed the calves even if he was feeding on them,” I said. “Wolves eat carrion.”
“Well, we haven’t had any kills since that thing was locked up.”
“Are you sure? You’ve got a big ranch. Maybe you just haven’t found them yet.”
Perla shrugged, looked north where a dust devil was making its way down the road. “You can visit with Don about that. He’s comin’ now.”
Don’s Ford truck pulled up and parked. His dust devil, without a slipstream to keep it aloft, settled back onto the road it had risen from. Don’s cowboy boots emerged first from the cab followed by jeans, a holster, a plaid shirt and a big hat, all of which were covered by a thin layer of dust. A fat brown dog with short legs came next.
The Wolf Path Page 14