The Loop

by Nicholas Evans

  Occasionally, as they worked Joel would point something out and explain what was going on. How the males, sometimes as many as a dozen of them, were fighting to latch onto a single female, but how only one would succeed. He pointed the flashlight at a female for Helen to see. The crab had dug herself a shallow nest in the sand, as near to the water’s edge as she dared. You could see the eggs streaming from her, thousands of them in shiny gray-green clusters and the male, hooked to her, spreading his sperm on them, while the other males fought to do the same, oblivious to the humans who stood among them.

  Helen started to ask him something but suddenly heard her voice crack and she stopped in mid-sentence and realized that her eyes were running with tears. Last year she had watched this same scene in wonder. But the frenzy, the blind, primal ferocity of this ancient creature’s will to survive, to propel its genes across the centuries, for millions and millions of years, the immense, implacable power of it, now struck her with a fearful sadness.

  Joel saw her face contort and splashed toward her and took her in his arms. And she clung to him and sobbed into his chest like a desolate child.

  ‘What?’ he said, stroking a tangle of hair from her face. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s only a year, Helen. It’ll go so fast. I’ll come back and this time next year we can be here again. Tagging crabs together.’

  ‘Don’t joke.’

  ‘I’m not. I mean it. I promise.’

  She looked up at him and thought she saw a hint of tears in his eyes too.

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  ‘I love you too.’

  She would never forget how he looked at that moment. Like a frail ghost and suddenly somehow a total stranger. Then he smiled and the image was gone. And he kissed her, while the horseshoes churned and clattered heedlessly around them, their black backs glistening at the moon.

  He had been gone, now, for nearly two months.

  Helen finished her cigarette and called Buzz. He had been in the ark nosing for rats long enough and she was getting cold. She called him and started to walk back along the shore. Above her, high in the woods, an owl was uttering the same plaintive message over and over again.

  She picked up her bag outside the back door. The bug party around the outside light was still going strong. Buzz barked at them a couple of times and she told him to hush and nudged him through the screen door into the kitchen.

  She didn’t turn on the lights. There was too much of Joel everywhere you looked. In a vain attempt to convince her he was coming back, he had left a lot of his belongings. Books, a pair of boots, the Discman with its state of the art speakers, all his opera CDs. Since he had gone, she hadn’t trusted herself to listen to music of any kind.

  The red light on the answering machine showed there were three messages. She listened to them in the dark, looking out at the path of moonlight on the bay. One was from her father, hoping she’d gotten home safely and saying he was sure that she and Courtney were going to be friends. The second was from Celia, just to say hi. And the third was from her old wolf-buddy Dan Prior.

  They’d had the briefest of flings one summer when they were tracking together in northern Minnesota. He’d been one of the rare exceptions to the catalog of jerks she normally dated, but it had still been a mistake. They were cut out to be friends, not lovers. And like all the best men, Dan was happily married. Worse still, Helen knew - and liked - his wife and daughter.

  They hadn’t talked in about three years and it was good to hear his voice on the machine. He said he had a job for her, in Montana. Would she please give him a call.

  Helen looked at her watch. It was a quarter to one. And she remembered that it was her birthday.

  7

  Dan Prior stood sipping his third cup of coffee, apparently unaware of the giant Alaskan brown bear that towered right behind him. Both man and bear were looking toward the gate where the first disgruntled passengers from Salt Lake City were emerging. The flight had been delayed and Dan had already been there an hour, which wasn’t as long as the bear, who’d been shot on Friday, 13 May 1977, stuffed and set here on his hind legs to scare all visitors to Great Falls.

  Dan had spent most of the weekend cleaning up the cabin in which Helen would be living and trying to fix the carburetor of the old Toyota pickup he’d found for her to use. He hoped she wasn’t going to be too shocked by the state of either. The cabin belonged to the Forest Service and stood beside a small lake way up in the wilderness above Hope. No one had spent more than a night or two there for several years and, from the look of it, birds, insects and assorted small rodents had been throwing regular all-night parties.

  The pickup belonged to Bill Rimmer’s brother who kept a hospice for terminally ill vehicles in his backyard. Even with a new carburetor, its chances of seeing out the winter were slim. He would need to find her a snowmobile too.

  Dan scanned the faces coming through the gate and wondered if she still looked the same. He’d dug out a photograph the other night, taken five years ago in northern Minnesota, when they were working together. She was sitting in the front of a canoe, looking over her shoulder at him and giving him one of those slow, sly smiles of hers. Her eyes were a clear golden brown and slightly angled, so that she seemed almost elfin. She was wearing that old white T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and Danger: Alpha Female in red letters on the back. Her long brown hair had gone blond in the sun and she was wearing it the way he’d always liked best, tied up in a ponytail, so you could see the tanned nape of her neck. Dan had forgotten how stunning she was and sat staring at the picture for a long time.

  What had happened between them didn’t really qualify as an affair. Just one night at the end of a long summer’s field-work, the kind of thing that could happen when two people worked together out in the wild, living in such intimate conditions that it seemed almost perverse not to go that final step.

  Dan had always been attracted to her, more so, he knew, than she had ever been to him. It wasn’t just her looks. He loved her quick wit, that spiky sense of humor she used to deflect attention from something vulnerable. She mainly used it to mock herself. She also happened to be the smartest wolf biologist he’d ever worked with.

  At the time he’d been running a wolf research program at the university and Helen was one of the volunteer workers. He’d taught her how to trap and in no time at all she was better at it than he was.

  That one night, camping by a lake under a star-riddled sky, was the only occasion Dan had been unfaithful to Mary since they’d been married. He’d made the mistake of telling that to Helen the next day and that was the end of it. In hindsight, perhaps he should have casually conveyed that he did that kind of thing all the time. It had taken him a fair while to get over her, but in the end he had and they’d managed to remain friends and colleagues until he left to take up another post.

  Now, watching for her face in the crowd, he wondered if there might be a chance of rekindling things, at the same time telling himself not to be so damn stupid.

  Then he saw her.

  She was coming out of the gate, blocked behind a harassed woman with two small children, both bawling their eyes out. Helen saw him right away and waved. She was wearing blue jeans and a baggy beige army shirt. The only real change was the hair which was cut short, like a boy’s. She stayed blocked by the bawling kids all the way to where Dan stood waiting.

  ‘What did you do to them?’ he asked.

  Helen shrugged. ‘I said look at that guy over there by the bear and they just started to cry.’

  He opened his arms and they gave each other a hug.

  ‘Welcome to Montana.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ She leaned back, still holding on to him, and inspected him.

  ‘You’re looking okay, Prior. Power and success don’t seem to have changed you. I thought you’d be wearing a suit.’

  ‘I
dressed down for the occasion.’

  ‘But no cowboy hat yet.’

  ‘You know, I’ve got two of them at home and now and again I try one on and look in the mirror and see this funny guy looking back at me.’

  She laughed loudly. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  ‘It’s good to see you too, Helen. What happened to your hair?’

  ‘Don’t. I did it last week. Big mistake. You’re supposed to say how nice it looks, Prior.’

  ‘It could grow on me.’

  ‘I wish it would on me.’

  They went down the escalator to the baggage claim area and stood chatting by the carousel while they waited. He asked her if she’d ever been out here before and she said only once, when she was a kid. They’d come on a vacation to Glacier Park and her sister had gotten food poisoning and spent the whole week in bed.

  Helen’s bags appeared on the belt, two big duffel bags and a battered trunk which weighed about a ton and which she said had once belonged to her grandfather. They loaded them on a cart.

  ‘Is that it?’ Dan asked. She gave him a guilty look.

  ‘Well. Almost.’

  An airline official was making his way toward them with a crate that was barking loudly. Helen bent down and opened the caged door and one of the oddest-looking dogs Dan had ever laid eyes on came out and started washing Helen’s face.

  ‘This is Buzz.’

  ‘Hi, Buzz. Funny, Helen, but on the phone I don’t recall you mentioning Buzz.’

  ‘I know. Sorry. Listen, I’ll have him put down immediately.’

  ‘I’ve got a gun in the car.’

  ‘Fine. Let’s go do it.’

  Buzz was giving Dan a quizzical look.

  ‘Go on, admit it,’ Helen said. ‘Isn’t he cute?’

  ‘Yeah, well. Let’s hope that wolf thinks so.’

  When she stepped outside the terminal, the heat hit her in a wave. The temperature gauge in Dan’s car said it was in the low nineties but it wasn’t humid and Helen felt embraced by it. She kept the window down as they headed out onto the interstate and pointed south toward Helena. She was dying for a cigarette but too ashamed to light one up in front of Dan. Instead she made do with the smell of sun-baked grass that carried on a hot wind from the plains. Buzz sat blinking and licking at it with his head poked out of the window behind her head.

  ‘You see, we even named a town for you,’ Dan said.

  ‘You mean Hope?’

  ‘We all live in hope, Helen.’

  ‘Funny how they never named these places Despair or Misery.’

  ‘My dad grew up in a place in western Pennsylvania called Panic.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I swear. And just down the road was a place called Desire.’

  ‘Where the streetcars come from.’

  He laughed. He’d always laughed at her clunky jokes.

  ‘My mom always used to say, never marry a man out of Panic, but my old man claimed the church where they got hitched was technically nearer the other place so in fact she’d married him out of Desire.’

  ‘Are they still together?’

  ‘You bet. They get more in love every year.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Yep. It is.’

  ‘And how’s Mary?’

  ‘She’s fine. We got divorced two years ago.’

  ‘Oh, Dan, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yeah, well. I’m not and she sure isn’t. And Ginny’s okay, thank the Lord. She’s fourteen now. Mary’s still living in Helena, so it all kind of works out, you know, Ginny gets to spend time with us both.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  There was a pause and she knew what was coming.

  ‘How about you? I mean, have you . . .’

  ‘Don’t be shy, Prior. You mean how’s my love life?’

  ‘No. Okay, yeah.’

  ‘Well, let me see. We’ve been together, what, just over two years now.’

  ‘Really? That’s great. Tell me about him.’

  ‘Well. He’s got long, sandy-colored hair, brown eyes, doesn’t say a whole lot. And he’s got this thing about sticking his head out of car windows and thwacking the back of your legs with his tail.’

  Dan smiled.

  ‘No, I was living with a guy for a couple of years on the Cape. But he’s, well, kind of gone off somewhere. I guess you’d say it’s on hold.’

  She swallowed and looked away out of the window. There were mountains in the distance. Dan, bless his heart, seemed to sense he was on fragile ground and changed the subject. He started to fill her in on all that had happened since the wolf had first shown his face in Hope almost a month ago and soon had her laughing again with his account of the funeral Buck Calder had staged for Prince, the Hero of all Labradors.

  Calder had organized a preacher to come from Great Falls and do the honors, in front of family, friends and, of course, the press and TV cameras. The tombstone was made of black marble and had probably cost the best part of five hundred dollars. Instead of Dan’s idea for the epitaph, which Helen liked a lot, they had gone with something more resonant:Here lies Prince

  Who kept the wolf from the door

  And laid down his life for a child.

  Good Dog!

  Since then, Dan said, things had quieted down some. Every so often he would get a call from a reporter asking if he had located the wolf yet and he would play the whole thing down, giving the impression that it was all under control, that they were monitoring the situation constantly and that the fact that this wolf hadn’t been seen again almost certainly meant he was a lone disperser and was by now probably a hundred or more miles away, which Dan wanted to believe but didn’t. Just two days ago a Forest Service ranger hiking the backcountry due west of Hope had reported finding tracks.

  At the office he introduced Helen to Donna, who gave her a big welcome and said it was great that at long last Dan had seen sense and hired a woman.

  ‘And this is Fred,’ Dan said, patting the top of the glass case. ‘The only one who does any work around here.’

  A few minutes later, Helen bumped into Donna having a quiet cigarette in the restroom and gratefully lit one herself. One of life’s lesser-known truths, Donna confided, was that only the best kind of women smoked - and only the worst kind of men.

  Dan sent out for sandwiches and the two of them adjourned to his office where they spent the next couple of hours, with the help of maps and charts and photographs, going through what Helen would be doing once she got to Hope.

  They had flown the backcountry three times now, Dan said, and hadn’t picked up so much as a hint of radio signal. Whatever was out there almost certainly wasn’t collared, so Helen’s job was to trap, fit collars and then track to find out what was going on. Bill Rimmer, who was due back any moment from his vacation, had volunteered to help her set the traps.

  If there turned out to be a whole pack, Helen was to find out its size and range, what it was preying on, all the usual stuff, Dan said. As well as that, of course, the important thing was to try to build a rapport with the local ranchers.

  Finally, he sat up and put on a mock official voice while he went through the terms of her employment. The only way he was allowed to hire her, he explained, was on what was known as a ‘temporary’ basis. That meant she was employed for a fixed term of a hundred and eighty days, which he could then renew. She was to be paid a thousand dollars a month, no benefits.

  ‘No health insurance, disability or retirement pay, no rehire entitlement. Basically, being temporary means you don’t exist in the federal system. You’re invisible. We have temporary people who’ve been working for us for years.’

  ‘Do I get to have a scarlet letter T painted on my forehead?’

  ‘That’s entirely optional, Miss Ross.’

  ‘Do I get a truck or is it just a bicycle?’

  He laughed. ‘I’ll show you. Want to take a drive out there?’

  ‘To Hope?�
�

  ‘Sure. Not right up to the cabin. We can do that tomorrow. But I thought maybe you’d like to have a look at the town, then maybe we could go get something to eat. If you’re not too tired.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  As they went out to the parking lot, Dan said they could either check her into a hotel for the night or she could stay at his place. Ginny was at her mother’s, he said, so Helen could have her room.

  ‘Are you sure? That’d be great. Thank you.’

  ‘And this is what you’ve really been waiting to see.’

  He stopped by the old Toyota pickup. In the sunshine it didn’t look too bad. He’d taken it through the car wash and discovered that the paintwork when cleaned was more or less the same color as rust, which was handy. The chrome was even trying to shine. He slapped the hood affectionately and the wing mirror fell off. Helen laughed.

  ‘This is mine?’

  Dan bent down and picked up the mirror and handed it to her.

  ‘Every last bit of it. In fact it has to be. All federal vehicles have to be of US manufacture and I don’t have one available. I can only give you mileage. Thirty-one cents a mile.’

  ‘Gee, Prior, you sure know how to spoil a gal.’

  She drove. The steering felt like dancing on rollerskates, you had to plan each turn well in advance to have any chance of making it. But Helen soon got the hang of it and followed Dan’s directions out of town, heading with the sun toward the mountains.

  They had talked all afternoon and it didn’t feel wrong to be quiet for awhile. It was cooler now and the wind had blown itself out. On either side of the road, the land stretched away as far as she could see, cropped a pale gold and scattered with hay bales like giant Tootsie Rolls.

  Both sky and earth seemed to Helen immense, their every angle boldly drawn. The roads ran straight and purposeful to ranches confidently placed. She found herself both thrilled and daunted and somehow inconsequential to it all. And she thought of Joel, as she still did a dozen times each day, and wondered whether he felt anchored in his new world or detached as she now was in hers, a watcher wanting to belong but somehow always floating past.