Lone Wolves

by Chesbro, George C. ;

  Mary stared at her husband for some time before turning and walking slowly out of the room. A half minute later she reappeared in the doorway.

  “Garth?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you still own the claim where you spent the summer with the grizzly sow and her cubs?”

  “Yes. I never mentioned it because Alaska’s a very long way away, the area around Chicken is rough. It’s not the sort of thing I thought you’d have the slightest interest in.”

  “Would you take me there some time? Show me how to live in the bush and pan for gold? I’d like to learn.”

  Garth smiled warmly. “Sure,” he said, and took his wife in his arms.

  LONE WOLF

  He hadn’t thought they’d risk releasing the animals, for free of their brutal handler and running as a pack they would be unpredictable, seemingly posing as much danger to his hunters as to him; but when he saw the three dark shapes glide through a patch of moonlight next to the high-voltage fence separating him from the river on his right he knew he’d been wrong, had underestimated the hatred and desperation of the men who would kill him. He cut to his left, started to climb the steep embankment toward the rock face fifty yards above him, grimaced with pain when he felt his left ankle give and twist in the loamy soil. He went down on his right side, brought his left leg up, and tentatively touched the ankle. It did not seem broken, only sprained, but in his situation it made little difference, for immobilization here among the trees and thick brush surely meant death, if not in a blunt needle-spray of gunfire, then with his throat torn out by the fangs of the creatures who might or might not be stalking him in their mutilated silence. He willed himself to move, rolling over on his back and awkwardly crab-walking up the slope, dragging his left leg. He expected at any moment to hear a rustle in the brush that would presage his death, but there remained in the woods only the sound of his own heavy breathing as he struggled upward. Then he emerged from the tree line at the edge of the sloping field of broken rock at the base of the sheer wall of trap rock that was the eastern face of an abandoned quarry that formed the western boundary of Floyd Kunkel’s inherited riverfront estate. He twisted around onto his stomach and snaked his way through the sharp riprap up to the base of the escarpment, where, exhausted, he sank down behind a large boulder and gasped for breath. He wiped his bleeding palms on his thighs, and then gently kneaded his sprained ankle as he looked around him. From here he could see above the trees to a shimmering, silver-coated section of the river near where Mary had been the first to sight the exhausted animal swimming in the middle of the deep channel, struggling against both tide and current, directly in the path of an oncoming tanker.

  “Garth,” Mary cried, pointing to the bobbing patch of dark fur off their starboard side, “there’s a dog out there! We have to save it!”

  Garth Frederickson glanced up at the steel shrouds on either side of the fourteen-foot catamaran where plastic telltales fluttered in a wind that remained between fifteen and eighteen knots, coming directly from the southwest. In order to avoid the tanker approaching from the north, he had just tacked out of the deep channel, sailing to the port side of a large, green buoy that marked the edge of the shipping lane in the vast, four-mile-wide section of the Hudson River between Piermont and Haverstraw, New York, that the first Dutch settlers had called the “Tappan Sea.” They were on a run, with the wind at their backs. Their speed would increase considerably if he fell off to either port or starboard, left or right. On their port side, across the river, was Rockland County and their home in Cairn; to fall off to starboard was to invite an abrupt and brutal end to their lives.

  “The tanker’s too close, Mary. There isn’t time.”

  “There is if you turn now! We’ll be on a reach! We can make it! You can’t just let it be run over!”

  “I’m not about to risk my wife’s life for a dog.”

  “They’ll turn when they see our sail!”

  “That’s a seventy-five-ton tanker, Mary, not a sports car. In the position they’re in now and at the speed they’re traveling, they can’t swerve to avoid the dog or us. The ship’s too big. You know that.”

  “Garth, listen to me,” Mary Tree said in a voice that had suddenly grown low and husky, quavering and desperate. “You know how crazy I get about animals. It’s just very important to me for us to try to save that dog. Please just try.”

  Garth turned his head slightly in order to look at his wife, who was sitting next to him on the port side of the catamaran. Strands of her waist-length, silver-streaked blond hair had worked free of the cotton band that held it in a ponytail and were whipping across her face. Tears welled in her sea-blue eyes, rolled down her cheeks. She was rhythmically pounding her fists in helpless frustration against the front of her heavy life jacket. Garth knew what he had to do. His wife’s exquisite madness was the sometimes-dark engine that powered her music, and her vehement passion for small as well as great things was one of the reasons he loved her so much. At this moment the most important thing in the world to her was not her life, or even his, but saving an animal that was on some inexplicable and hopeless mission, swimming, struggling against the tide, toward its certain death. He would feel bad if the dog were run over and ground up by the tanker’s propeller blades, but it was Mary who would enter the soul and body of the dog in recurring nightmares, Mary who would suffer the bone-smashing collision with steel, feel the river filling her lungs, hear through the water the deadly song of whirring blades of steel.

  “Swim to the buoy,” he said as he swept her off the catamaran with his left arm at the same time as he pulled on the tiller to turn the cat ninety degrees to starboard.

  He ducked under the swinging boom, slid across the cat’s canvas trampoline to the opposite side as the wind filled the sail and the starboard hull began to lift out of the water. He sheeted out the sail slightly, released the traveler to the three-quarter’s mark, and then anchored his feet in the hiking straps and leaned far back in order to counterbalance the force of the wind that was sending the cat streaking like some misshapen white arrow directly into the path of the oncoming tanker. Mary shouted something at him, but her words were lost first in the hiss of the port hull slicing through the water, then drowned out completely by the ominous, deep-throated bray of the tanker’s horn warning him away.

  Despite the brisk breeze, the surface of the river was relatively smooth, allowing Garth to plane, flying the starboard hull on which he was sitting a foot or so above the water and increasing his speed. He glanced up once at the tanker, which had become a moving wall of steel filling the horizon, then looked away, focusing his vision and all his concentration on the furry, dark head bobbing just above the surface seventy-five yards away. He had dismissed from his mind fear of being crushed by the tanker the moment he had committed and veered sharply to starboard; he would simply either make it under the bow of the tanker or he wouldn’t, and it wouldn’t take many heartbeats for him to find out which was going to be the case. The task at hand required all his attention, for it was a complicated one; if he miscalculated, he could shoot right past the dog, which would make it all a wasted exercise; or the sudden addition of weight as he pulled the dog from the water could cause the cat to flip backward, and they would both die anyway.

  The tanker was almost on him now, its great horn wailing its mournful dirge even as the ship’s bow wave rolled under his port hull, lifting the cat slightly. Above him, at the edge of his peripheral vision, he glimpsed perhaps a half-dozen men standing at the railing, shouting and waving their arms, urging him on. The tip of the flying starboard hull passed just in front of the dog’s head. He sheeted in the mainsail hard, causing the hull on which he was sitting to begin to rise even higher into the air. The small cat would have flipped over if at the same time he hadn’t arched his back, reached down and grabbed a handful of fur and skin on the neck of the animal struggling in the water behind and below him. Pain shot up his arm and into his back as the sudden tug of th
e animal’s weight combined with the speed of the catamaran insulted bone and muscle and threatened to pull his right shoulder from its socket. The raised hull of the cat abruptly slammed down into the water Garth hauled the animal up out of the water and onto the center of the trampoline. He sheeted out instantly and shifted his weight to prevent the cat from flipping over backward, and then the surge of the ship’s bow wave carried him away from the tanker, just inches from the painted steel wall that now rushed past him. When the wake had passed he came about and began the series of short tacks that would take him back to the green buoy where Mary was, and as he looked into the glazed, golden eyes of the exhausted animal beside him, noted the long, spindly legs and large feet, he realized that the animal he had rescued from the river was not a dog.

  “It’s a wolf,” Garth said to his wife the next day when she came around the side of the house to the area where he had staked the animal next to the river on a heavy chain wound around a boulder erupting from their beach a few yards above the high-tide mark. He had been working the animal all morning, repeatedly wrestling it to the ground, cuffing it sharply on one side of the head and then the other when it tried to resist.

  He waited for a response, but Mary Tree simply stood and stared at him, her limpid blue eyes moist, her face a kind of diary of unspoken thoughts. Garth straddled the wolf, squeezing its rib cage with his knees, and smiled at this woman whom he loved so much, the only person besides his brother who had ever made him feel complete. He had always found this professional folk singer terribly fragile, often conflicted and inarticulate without a guitar in her hands and with no music to accompany her words. She had spoken little since the day before when he had picked her up at the buoy, but she had expressed her feelings most adequately with her body, clinging to him throughout the rest of the day and into the night, repeatedly taking him into her until finally, exhausted, they had fallen asleep.

  At last she said in a small voice, “A wolf?”

  “Yep. Somebody’s idea of a pet.” He grabbed the thick leather collar he had put around the wolf’s neck, brought the animal’s head back, then used the fingers of his left hand to part the fur on its throat to reveal a circular scar the size of a quarter. “Its vocal cords have been cut. I guess his owner didn’t want him bothering the neighbors.”

  Mary winced, put a hand to her cheek. “My God. How cruel.” She came forward, knelt down on the sand beside Garth, a few inches from the large, dark gray head with its bright golden eyes. “It’s beautiful.”

  The animal started to turn its head in Mary’s direction. Garth pressed down on the back of its neck, and then cuffed it lightly on the side of the jaw. “Yes. It’s most likely a hybrid, with a little dog in it—but not much.”

  “Is that why you play so rough with it?”

  “I’m not playing. Remember that this is a wolf, Mary, not a dog. They may look alike, but there the similarity ends. This fellow can snap your face off, and it will if you don’t constantly pay attention to what’s happening when you’re around it. You can’t domesticate a wolf. You can live with one, but you have to know the rules. The first rule is that you must physically dominate it, and you have to keep doing it, because a wolf will keep testing you. This morning’s workout was intended to show him who’s leader of the pack around here.”

  Mary reached out and stroked the animal’s fur, then rested her head on her husband’s shoulder. “Garth, I … I …”

  “I know what you want to say, Mary. It isn’t necessary.”

  “Yes it is. I have to get it out. I can’t imagine what I was thinking about yesterday. I just kind of went out of my mind when I saw this guy out there in front of the ship. But that’s no excuse for the way I behaved. I can’t believe I made you … Garth, I almost killed you.”

  “Hell, you could have been killed too. You weren’t exactly expecting me to dump you in the river. Besides, you didn’t make me do anything. I wasn’t very happy with the situation either. It was the right thing to do, and we did it.”

  “You did it. And I not only let you risk your life, I damn well insisted on it.”

  “Mary, I really do under—”

  “Oh, Garth, I love you so much. Truly, I don’t know what I’d do without you. In so many ways, I feel I owe you everything.”

  “Come on, sweetheart, you were famous long before my brother introduced us.”

  “When you met me I was a has-been, and hiding out here in Cairn. You gave me back my confidence.”

  Garth waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, kissed his wife the cheek, and then, still keeping a firm grip on the wolf’s collar, stood up. “Move back a little. I want to take our friend here to the vet get his shots, in case he hasn’t had any, and I have to go get the muzzle I bought him.”

  “I’m all right here. He seems friendly enough—which is a wonder considering the way you’ve been swatting him around. Let me stay here with him. He has to get used to me as well as you.”

  Garth thought about it, nodded. “Okay. Scratch him behind the ears; he likes that. But keep a firm grip on the chain, right behind his head, and don’t put your face close to his.”

  When Mary gripped the chain as he had instructed her, Garth released his hold on the animal’s collar, and then went back up the beach and into the boathouse to get the muzzle and heavy leather leash he had purchased earlier in the morning. When he returned he found Mary staring down at a stain on her pants leg.

  “Garth,” she said with a nervous laugh, “he peed on my leg!”

  Garth walked quickly to where Mary was standing, grabbed the wolf’s collar, and forced it down onto the sand. He turned it over on its back, sat on its stomach, and then gripped its throat with both hands.

  “Garth—?!”

  “I know what I’m doing, Mary. I’m not punishing it—but you have to do exactly as I say. Bite him on the nose. Hard.”

  “What?! I can’t do that.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to if this animal is going to stay with us. When he pissed on your leg, he was challenging you. That was his way of seeing if he could push you around. Now you have to push back—only harder. If you don’t, you’ll constantly be in danger. I’ll turn it over to the animal shelter rather than risk having it attack you, and they’ll almost certainly end up having to put it down. This animal could be a big problem. If you want him to live, you have to show him you’re the boss, if you want yesterday’s rescue to mean anything, you’ll do as I say.”

  Mary slowly knelt down, bent over toward the wolf’s head, hesitated.

  “Do it!” Garth said sharply. “It’s for his own good! Bite him hard!” Mary closed her eyes, opened her mouth, closed her teeth gently on the moist, black leather nose, then snapped her head back in alarm when she heard an anguished, raspy whimper from somewhere deep within the animal’s chest.

  Garth released his grip on the wolf’s throat, got up off its stomach. The animal turned over, but remained flat on the sand, its head down between its forelegs. Garth grunted with satisfaction, and then fitted the muzzle over the wolf’s jaws and replaced the tether chain on the collar with the leather leash. “That wasn’t very hard,” he said, stroking his wife’s cheek, “but I think it may have done the job.”

  “How do you know so much about wolves? Mining for gold in Alaska?”

  “Partly. Actually, it was my brother who taught me that little trick.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Uh-huh. You know the story about the lobox, but you’ve never seen it. One of these days we’ll visit one of the closed, experimental breeding pens at the Bronx Zoo and I’ll show you the fellow he took on. In the meantime, we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do with our own beastie here. Call The Journal News, have them run an ad in the Classified—make it an eighth of a page, with a border around it. Have it read: ‘Unusual Pet Rescued From River. For Information Call—’ and give our number.”

  “You’re going to give him back?”

  “Hardly. You mig
ht also want to make a run to the butcher.”

  “Meat for the wolf?”

  Garth laughed, and described a circle in the air with his finger to include the three of them. “Wolf has already had tonight’s pork chops for his breakfast,” he replied, and would later recall his words with a certain grim amusement when he was trapped with an entire pack of the creatures that could, sooner or later, be considering him as a candidate for a meal.