The Loop

by Nicholas Evans

  Kathy had always been too impatient. Even when she was old enough to know better, she couldn’t help finishing his sentences for him when he blocked. Since he’d graduated from high school, a couple of months ago, she’d hardly seen him. He was getting to be more of a loner than ever, it seemed to Kathy, always off on his own in the wilderness with only that funny-looking horse of his for company.

  Anyway, he was coming to supper and that was fine.

  Her mother asked how the baby was and Kathy said he was just great and that she’d better get off the phone because it was coming up toward his feed time and she still had things to do.

  It was just as she hung up that the dogs started barking.

  Normally, she wouldn’t have given this a second thought. The dogs were forever hollering and taking off after some varmint or other, But there was something about the noise they were making now that made her look out of the window.

  Maddie, the old collie, had her tail tucked under her and was slinking off around the side of the barn, muttering over her shoulder. Prince, the yellow Labrador that Kathy’s father had given her when they first moved up here, was pacing to and fro with his hackles up. His ears alternately pricked and flattened as if he were unsure of himself and he punctuated his barking with worried little whines. His eyes were fixed on something beyond the house, something up toward the meadow.

  Kathy frowned. She’d better go see what was spooking them. The pan in which she was cooking the corn started to hiss and she went over to the stove and turned down the heat. When she came out through the kitchen screen door and stepped down into the yard there was no sign of the collie. Prince seemed relieved to see her.

  ‘Hey you, what’s going on here?’

  The dog started to come toward her, then seemed to change his mind. Perhaps her presence gave him that little extra courage he’d been lacking, for now he took off in full cry around the side of the house, kicking up the dust as he went.

  It was only then that the thought struck her. The baby. There was something on the porch, getting at the baby. She started to run. It must be a bear. Or a mountain lion. God, how could she have been so dumb?

  As she came around the corner of the house, Kathy saw, directly below the porch, what at first she took for a big, black dog, a German Shepherd maybe. It turned to face the Labrador’s charge.

  ‘Get out of here! Git!’

  The animal glanced at her and she felt the yellow flash of his eyes upon her and knew in that instant this was no dog.

  Prince had skidded to a halt before the wolf and had lowered himself, his front paws splayed so that his chest was just inches from the ground. He had his teeth bared and was snarling and barking but with such timid bravado that it seemed he might at any moment roll over and submit. The wolf stood very still, but somehow at the same time seemed to make himself bigger so that he towered over the dog. His tail was bushy and raised high. Slowly, he curled back his lips and snarled and his long incisors showed white.

  Then, in a single lunge, he had his jaws on the Labrador’s throat and swung him off his feet and through the air as if he were no heavier than a jackrabbit. The dog yelped and Kathy had a sudden image in her head of the wolf having already done the same with her baby and she screamed and jumped onto the end of the porch.

  The buggy was at the far end and it seemed like a hundred miles away as she ran toward it.

  Oh God, please. Don’t let him be dead. Please don’t let him be dead.

  She couldn’t tell whether the buggy had been disturbed, but even through the dog’s shrieking, she knew her baby inside was silent and the thought of what she would find made her sob.

  When she got there she hardly dared look. But she forced herself and saw the child staring up at her, his face breaking into a gummy grin, and she cried out and reached down and snatched him up. She did it with such sudden violence that the child began to cry and she held him to her so hard that he cried even louder. She turned, pressing her back to the wall, and looked down from the porch.

  The wolf was standing with his head lowered over the Labrador. Kathy could see right away that the dog was dead. His hind legs gave a final twitch, just like they did in his dreams when he slept in front of the fire. His throat had been torn out and his belly gaped like a gutted fish. The bleached grass under him rivered red. Kathy screamed again and the wolf started, as if he’d forgotten she was there. He stared right at her and she could see the glisten of blood on his face.

  ‘Get out of here! Go on! Get out!’

  She looked around for something to throw at him but there was no need. The wolf was already running off and within moments he was ducking under the fence and loping up among the cattle who had all quit their grazing to watch the spectacle below. At the top of the meadow he stopped and looked back to where Kathy still stood over the dead dog, clutching her baby and crying. Then he turned and vanished into the shadow of the forest.

  2

  The offices of the US Fish and Wildlife Service Wolf Recovery team were on the third floor of a plain red-brick building in a quiet part of Helena. There was no sign outside that told you this and if there had been it probably wouldn’t have lasted long. There were people around here who didn’t much like any federal agency, least of all one whose sole purpose was to protect a creature they considered the most loathsome God ever came up with. Dan Prior and his team knew from experience that when it came to wolves it was best to keep the profile low.

  In the outer office stood a glass case from which a stuffed wolf looked, more or less benignly, on their labors. The plaque on the side of the case said its occupant was Canis Lupus Irremotus, Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf. But, for a reason no one in the office could now recall, the wolf was more informally known as Fred.

  Dan had gotten into the habit of talking to Fred, particularly on those long nights when everyone else had gone home, leaving him to unpick yet another political tangle in which Fred’s more animated brethren had snagged him. On such occasions Dan would often come up with other, more vibrant names for his silent companion.

  Tonight was definitely not going to be one of those nights. In fact Dan, for the first time in living memory, was leaving early. He had a date. And because he’d made the mistake of mentioning it, everyone in the office had been teasing him about it all week. As he came out of his office, stuffing some papers into his bag, they all chanted in rehearsed unison, ‘Have a nice time, Dan!’

  ‘Thank you very much indeed,’ he said, through clenched teeth. Everyone laughed. ‘Will someone tell me, what’s so goddamn fascinating about my private life?’

  Donna, his assistant, grinned at him. She was a big, gutsy woman in her late thirties, who ran the office with a calm good humor that even in the most frenzied moments never seemed to desert her. She shrugged.

  ‘I guess it’s just that you never had one till now.’

  ‘You’re all fired.’

  He gave them a dismissive wave, told Fred to wipe that grin off his face and was just reaching for the doorknob when the phone rang.

  ‘I’m gone,’ he mouthed to Donna and out he went.

  He pushed the elevator button and waited while the cables clunked and whirred behind the stainless-steel doors. There was a ping and the doors opened.

  ‘Dan!’

  He waited with his finger on the button, keeping the doors open, while Donna hurried down the corridor toward him.

  ‘You know that new private life of yours?’

  ‘You know, Donna? I was just thinking of giving you a raise.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I thought you’d want to know. That was a rancher called Clyde Hicks from Hope. He says a wolf just tried to kill his baby boy.’

  Twenty minutes and half a dozen phone calls later, Dan was in his car and on his way to Hope. Four of the calls were to game wardens, Forest Service rangers and other Fish and Wildlife people in case any of them had heard anything about wolf activity in the Hope area. None had. The fifth was to predator-control agent Bill
Rimmer, asking him to meet him in Hope to do a necropsy on the dog.

  The last call was to the lovely and formidable Sally Peters, the newly divorced marketing director of a local cattle feed company. It had taken Dan all of two months to summon the courage to ask her out. After her reaction just now when he’d told her he wasn’t able to make dinner, next time, if there was one, it would take longer.

  It was about an hour’s drive from Helena to Hope and as he swung west off the interstate toward the mountains, now darkening against the pale pink of the sky, Dan reflected on why it was that anyone who worked with wolves ended up getting screwed by them.

  Over the years, he’d met a lot of biologists who specialized in other animals, from pygmy shrews to penguins, and though there were one or two damaged souls among them, on the whole they seemed able to stumble well enough through life like the rest of humanity. But wolf biologists were walking disaster areas.

  In every league - divorce, nervous breakdown, suicide - they came out tops. By these standards, Dan himself had nothing to be ashamed of. His marriage had lasted nearly sixteen years. It was probably some kind of record. And even if Mary, his ex, didn’t speak to him, Ginny, their daughter - who was fourteen, going on twenty - thought he was an okay dad. Hell, she adored him; and it was mutual. But apart from Ginny, what, really, at the age of forty-one, did he have to show for all these years of devotion to the welfare of wolves?

  To avoid answering his own question, he leaned forward and switched on the radio. Hopping through the commercials and the relentless country music (which, after three years in Montana, he still hadn’t learned to like), he settled on the local news. The last item did little to improve his mood.

  It was about a ‘wolf attack’ on a ranch near Hope and how the baby grandson of one of the community’s most prominent figures, Buck Calder, had only escaped certain death because a pet Labrador had bravely laid down his life instead.

  Dan groaned. The media had it already. That was all he needed. But it got worse. They already had a phone interview with Calder himself. Dan knew of him but had never met him. He had the deep, seductive voice of a politician. All daggers dripping with honey.

  ‘The federal government let loose all those wolves down there in Yellowstone and now they’re everywhere and threatening mothers and babies. And are we allowed to defend them and defend our livestock and our property? No sir, we are not. And why’s that? Because the federal government tells us these animals are still an endangered species. I tell you, there’s no more sense than justice in it.’

  The report ended and Dan switched off.

  The guy had a point. Until recently, the only wolves in the region had been the few that had ventured down the continental divide from Canada. Then, after years of furious debate between environmentalists and ranchers, the federal government decided to give wolf recovery a boost. At huge expense, some sixty-six wild Canadian wolves were captured, trucked to Yellowstone Park and Idaho, and released.

  In response to local anger, ranchers who lived in these so-called experimental areas were allowed to shoot any wolf they found attacking their livestock. But the released wolves had multiplied and because they weren’t too good at reading maps (or perhaps because they were), they had spread to places where shooting them earned you a $100,000 fine and even a spell in jail.

  Hope was one of these places. What’s more, it was wolf-hater heartland. If a wolf had indeed shown up there today, it needed its head examined.

  About ten years ago, Fish and Wildlife had held public meetings all over the state so that people could vent their feelings about federal proposals for wolf recovery. Some of these meetings had apparently gotten pretty stormy. But the one they’d held in Hope community hall beat all records.

  A group of young ranch hands and loggers had stood outside with guns and yelled abuse all the way through. Those inside, where guns were banned, were just as scary. Dan’s predecessor, a legendary diplomat, had managed to keep the lid on. But afterward, two loggers had shoved him against a wall and threatened him. He came out several shades paler than he’d gone in, only to find someone had poured a gallon of red paint over his car.

  In the far distance now, Dan saw the town looming.

  It was the kind of town you could drive through and barely know you’d been there. One straight street, a couple of hundred yards long, fishboned with a few side alleys. At one end stood a rundown motel and at the other a school, and in between you could find a gas station, a grocery, a hardware store, a diner, a laundromat and a taxidermist.

  Many of the town’s five hundred or so population lived scattered along the valley and to service their various spiritual needs there were two churches and two bars. There were also two gift shops, which said more about optimism than sound business sense; for although summer tourists often passed through Hope, few chose to linger.

  In an attempt to remedy this and to meet demand from the modest but growing band of subdivision newcomers, one of these shops (and by far the better) had last year installed a cappuccino bar.

  The shop was called Paragon and on those rare occasions when Dan was passing through, he always made a point of dropping in, not so much on account of the coffee, which was good, as of the woman who owned it.

  She was a handsome New Yorker called Ruth Michaels and, from their two or three encounters, he’d so far established that she used to run an art gallery in Manhattan and had come to Montana on vacation after her marriage broke up. She’d fallen in love with the place and stayed. Dan could imagine knowing a lot more about her.

  Cappuccino hadn’t exactly taken off with the locals who mostly preferred their coffee weak and stewed, the way they did it over the street at Nelly’s Diner. As he drove by, Dan was sad, but not altogether surprised, to see Ruth had a FOR SALE sign stuck in the front window.

  Ahead, he could see Bill Rimmer’s pickup parked where they’d arranged to meet, outside a forlorn bar, aptly named The Last Resort. Rimmer got out to greet him. He was a born and bred Montanan and with his Stetson and droopy, blond mustache, looked it. At six foot six, he always made Dan feel like a midget. He was a few years younger than Dan and better-looking too; in fact, come to think of it, Dan couldn’t figure why he liked the guy so much.

  He got out of his car and Rimmer slapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘How’re you doing, old friend?’

  ‘Well, Bill, tell you the truth, I had a better date than you lined up for tonight.’

  ‘You could break a man’s heart, Dan Prior. Shall we head on out there?’

  ‘May as well. Everybody else is. Did you hear the radio?’

  ‘Yep. And I heard there’s a TV crew up there too.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘That old wolf sure chose a good spot to make his debut.’

  ‘Come on, Bill. We don’t even know it was a wolf yet.’

  They climbed into Rimmer’s pickup and pulled out down Main Street. It was nearly seven-thirty and Dan was starting to worry about the light. It was always easier to check out the scene of a depredation in daylight. He was even more worried about all the people who had been trampling over the scene of the so-called wolf attack. If there were any tracks they were probably all scuffed up by now.

  He and Rimmer had started their jobs at virtually the same time. Their predecessors had both been centrally involved in the release program and had quit not long after for more or less the same reason. They were ‘wolfed out’ - tired of being yelled at by ranchers for not doing enough to control the spread of wolves and by environmentalists for not doing enough to help it. You simply couldn’t win.

  Rimmer worked for Animal Damage Control, a division of the Department of Agriculture, and was usually the first person to get the call when a rancher was having trouble with predators, be it bear, coyote, mountain lion or wolf. He was judge, jury and, where necessary, executioner. A trained biologist, he kept his love of these animals to himself. And that, along with his skill with rifle and trap, had helped him earn
the respect even of those who harbored a natural mistrust of all federal employees.

  He dressed like a cowboy, and that, along with his easy, laconic manner, gave him the edge over Dan when it came to placating irate ranchers who’d lost (or thought they’d lost) a calf or a sheep to a wolf. To such people, Dan would always be an East Coast outsider. Their main difference, however, was that while ranchers saw Rimmer as the man who could help solve their problem, they saw Dan as the one who’d caused it. Dan always felt happier when he had Rimmer alongside, especially in situations like the one they were headed for now.

  They swung off the last stretch of blacktop and onto the gray gravel road that wound up the valley toward the mountains. For awhile they traveled without talking, listening to the scrunch of the car’s wheels that left a drift of dust behind them. Through the open windows the evening air was warm on Dan’s forearm. Between the road and the darkening green of the cottonwoods along the river a hawk scoured the sagebrush for an evening snack. It was Dan who broke the silence.

  ‘You ever hear of a wolf trying to take a baby?’

  ‘Nope. Likely it was the dog he was after all the time.’

  ‘That’s what I figured. What about this Calder guy. Have you met him before?’

  ‘Couple of times. He’s quite a piece of work.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Rimmer grinned, without looking at him, and with one finger eased the brim of his hat up his forehead a little.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  The gateway to the Calder ranch was a massive structure of weathered lodgepole, its crossbar mounted with the skull of a longhorn steer. It reminded Dan of the entrance to a wild west rollercoaster ride called the Canyon of Doom on which he and Ginny had scared themselves witless last summer in Florida.