The Loop

by Nicholas Evans

  Not that the land he leased was bad. Far from it. Buck’s was the biggest and lushest allotment there was. And the rent wasn’t bad either. In fact, at under two dollars per cow-calf unit a month, it was cheaper than feeding a cat. But the Forest Service always made you feel they were doing you a favor, letting you use it. They were always laying down the law about some new thing or other and, in so doing, only helped deepen the resentment Buck and other ranchers already felt.

  It was the principle that Buck objected to. As a state legislator, and before that as a county commissioner, it had been his favorite topic. Many a time he’d banged the table and ranted at the scandal of the federal government owning so much of the West, land he and his forebears and many more like them had watered with their own sweat and blood. It was they who, against all odds, had civilized the wilderness, planted it with decent grass and grown the fillet steaks those goddamn pen-pushers ate - without so much as a thank you - in their fancy Washington DC restaurants.

  Most ranchers he knew felt the same way and for awhile Buck had believed it might be possible to get some kind of campaign going to change things. But it didn’t take him long to figure it wouldn’t work.

  That same independent grit which ranchers needed to survive out here also made them the most difficult critters on earth to organize. You could get them to agree, sign petitions, even now and then get them riled enough to come to a meeting. But deep down they were all resigned to the fact that ranching was, and always would be, a kind of cruel joke, devised by God to teach man the meaning of pessimism. Adversity was just part of the deal and the measure of a man was how he faced up to it on his own. And anyhow, when all was said and done, everyone knew that for all Buck’s spleen and speechifying, the government would go on acting in the same old high and mighty way and do as it damn well pleased.

  Recently though, things had gotten much worse. The federal agencies were forever coming up with new restrictions, cutting down the number of cows you could graze on your allotment, even telling you what you had to do with your own land. They came and tested the water in your creeks and told you it was dirty and you had to put fences up so your cows couldn’t get a drink. Then they’d come and tell you some rare varmint, some goddamn ferret or owl or something, was nesting on your property and would you mind not ranching it for a few years.

  Every damn thing a stockman did nowadays wasn’t just his business but the whole world’s. If you wanted to blow your nose or take a piss, you had to get the government’s permission and they wouldn’t give it until they’d consulted the so-called environmental groups. And then these goddamn bunny-huggers and Patagonia Patsies, who all lived in the city and knew less than jack-shit about anything, would have their say and the agency goons, who were all just like that themselves anyway, would take it as gospel and come up with some new harebrained scheme for making life more of a misery for ranchers. You could suffocate in all the paperwork they threw at you. There were regulations and limits for this, that and everything, plus a whole bunch of fines if you broke them. It made a man sick.

  Well, what the hell. Buck could take it. He knew for a fact that most of the agency guys he had to deal with were scared of him and he enjoyed giving them a hard time. Poorer folk, though, like the Hardings for example, were more vulnerable. It was hard to stand up to the feds when they knew you could be ruined by a fine or simply by the hours you lost in fighting all their bureaucratic bullshit.

  When Abe had come up to him at the fair, Buck had felt real sorry for him, not because of his worry about the wolves but because of how hunted and beaten the poor man looked. It almost made Buck feel guilty that he hadn’t done more to help him these past years.

  That was why he and Clyde were about to head over to Abe’s allotment to give him a hand gathering his herd. They had come up to their own lease first to fetch Luke, so he could help too.

  Below him now, Buck could see Clyde riding up out of the trees toward him. The two of them had split up so as they could comb the hidden corners of the pasture more quickly. The cows and calves, those he could see anyway, seemed fine but Buck had seen no sign of his son.

  ‘Find him?’ he called down to Clyde.

  ‘Nope. Don’t look like that tent of his has been slept in neither. ’

  ‘Where the hell’s the boy at?’

  ‘Beats me.’

  Buck shook his head and looked away, his good humor spiked, as it so often was, by thoughts of Luke. He waited while Clyde rode up the slope to join him and then, without saying a word, sharply reined his horse around and set off up the logging trail that traversed the forest to the Harding lease.

  It had seemed like a good idea to have Luke keep an eye on the herd. God knows, it was hard enough to find anything the boy could do and not get himself in a tangle. At first Buck had been impressed by how seriously he seemed to be taking it and even more so when he took to staying up in the pasture all night. But now he wasn’t so sure.

  Whenever Clyde came up here, Luke was nowhere to be seen. He only ever seemed to come back to the house when nobody else was there - except two days ago, when he’d shown up for breakfast with that cut on his face, saying how he’d ridden into a branch or something and set Eleanor off fussing again about how it wasn’t safe for him to be out here all night long on his own.

  Sometimes Buck despaired of the boy. He knew there was only pain to be had from comparing him to the son he’d lost, but he couldn’t help it. When he saw Luke messing something up, in his mind’s eye, Buck saw Henry doing it right. Beside Luke’s long face, silent at the supper table, he saw his brother’s smart grin and heard the echo of his laugh. What glitch of nature could bring forth two such different sons from the same seed?

  Although his own mortality did not yet figure largely among his concerns, Buck wondered what would happen to the ranch in years to come. Tradition said it should pass to his only son and heir. But tradition could make a monkey of a man. No one in his right mind could think Luke capable of running the place, even if he’d shown the slightest interest in doing so. And though Buck hadn’t put it in writing, nor even really confirmed it to himself, he was thinking more and more that Clyde and Kathy should be the ones to take over the reins when he let go.

  That this should come to pass, that the Calder place be run, after all these years, by one who bore a different name, was for Buck a source of shame. He had failed to produce a decent, living, male heir to continue the line and the whole world knew it.

  The trail was too narrow for the horses to go side by side, so Clyde rode behind, keeping his thoughts to himself, for which Buck was always grateful. Conversation wasn’t Clyde’s strong suit; indeed, it was sometimes hard to tell what was. Buck had always felt Kathy could have done better, but then that was how most fathers seemed to feel about their daughters.

  Both Clyde’s parents had died when he was a boy and he’d been brought up by an uncle and aunt on a ranch near Livingston. They’d apparently been hard on the boy, which maybe accounted for what Buck found most irritating about him: a kind of dog-like ingratiation. He was always so keenly tuned to Buck’s mood, always a little too eager to please. Whatever Buck’s opinion, it became Clyde’s as well and if Buck changed his mind, even if he argued that black wasn’t black after all, but white, then Clyde would soon be laboring through paler and paler shades of gray until he got there too.

  But, hell, if that was the worst of his faults, Buck should count himself lucky. Kathy had enough brains for both of them and the young fellow doted on her and the baby. He wasn’t afraid of hard work either. One day he might even make a decent rancher.

  Ahead of them along the trail now Buck heard the whine of engines, like wasps in a window. And as the trees opened up before them, he saw Wes and Ethan, Abe’s sons, churning up the pasture on their trail bikes.

  ‘What in God’s name do they think they’re at?’ he said quietly.

  A small band of frightened cows and calves was making a break for the trees and Ethan, the youn
ger of the two, was trying to head them off. He disappeared with a whoop into the forest, leaving a wake of blue fumes behind him.

  Abe sat watching from his horse at the foot of the pasture, occasionally yelling instructions that drowned unheard in the din of the engines. He gave Buck and Clyde a grim nod as they rode up.

  ‘Buck.’

  ‘Howdy, Abe. Sorry we’re late.’

  ‘Don’t make no odds.’

  ‘We were looking for Luke.’

  ‘Seen him as we was coming up here, ’bout an hour ago,’ Abe said, his eyes back on his sons, dodging feverishly among the trees. ‘Heading over toward Wrong Creek with that wolf woman.’

  ‘What the hell’s he doing with her?’ Clyde said.

  Abe turned his head away and spat out a cheekful of black tobacco juice. ‘Don’t ask me.’

  It was awhile before anyone spoke. Buck didn’t want his voice to show how mad the news made him.

  ‘So how’s it going?’ he said at last.

  ‘Four cows so far with no calf. Bags are all dried up.’

  ‘Reckon it’s the wolves?’ Clyde said

  ‘What else would it be?’

  Buck and Clyde made themselves useful and did the job Wes and Ethan had been trying to do. Within the hour, they’d ridden the whole of the allotment and every living cow and calf was gathered at the foot of the pasture. By the time they were done, Abe’s count of dried-up cows had gone up to six. Of their calves there was no trace, not even a bone.

  Abe hadn’t said another word, except to yell at his cows or his sons. He’d grown pale and quivered around the eyes, as if he was having trouble keeping the lid on things.

  The herd was tiny compared with Buck’s and once they were down from the higher trails where the cows could stray into the trees, the going got easy enough for Abe and his sons to manage the rest of the way to their ranch without help. Buck called Clyde and the two of them rode up beside Abe.

  ‘You okay from here on down, buddy? I thought we’d just go and have a look for that boy of mine.’

  ‘Sure. Appreciate your help.’

  ‘No problem. Maybe when the rest of us have gotten our herds down, we should all get together, have ourselves a talk about this wolf business.’

  ‘Don’t see what good talk’ll do.’

  ‘Can’t do any harm.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Okay. Well, see you, Abe.’

  ‘Yep.’

  They cut off along a narrow trail that wound up through the forest to the lake where the wolf woman had her cabin. Buck thought it was worth checking if Luke was there. Even if he wasn’t, they could leave a message on her door, telling him to get his ass back home right away. The boy had some explaining to do and whatever his reason for leaving the herd, it better be damn good.

  17

  Luke waited beside the pickup and watched her while she walked slowly ahead along the trail. She was turning the H-shaped antenna above her head while she thumbed through the frequencies on the little radio receiver that hung in its leather case from her shoulder. Buzz sat watching her too from the passenger seat, ears pricked as if he knew what she was hoping to hear in her headphones.

  They were parked to one side of the logging trail that snaked perilously up the south side of Wrong Creek, a forested canyon that had apparently played some cruel trick on whoever named it. Luke looked down over the edge of the trail where the land fell sharply away, thick with Douglas fir. He could hear the whisper of the creek a hundred feet below. This side of the canyon was still in shade and the air was cool and damp. Half a mile away, on the other side, a band of sunlight was deepening, setting ablaze the yellow leaves of the aspens.

  It had taken them a day and a half to reset all the traps and now they were out checking them. Wrong Creek was the next big drainage to the north and Luke was fairly sure it was here that the wolves had been when he’d heard them howl that time. It was the first place he and Helen Ross had come, driving up as far as they could in her rusty old pickup, then hiking up beside the creek.

  Almost straightaway they’d found fresh wolf scat and tracks. Then a flock of ravens had led them to the carcass of an old bull moose. Though there wasn’t much meat left, Helen said the wolves would probably be back. She pulled a couple of teeth from the jaw and said she was going to send them away for age analysis. She said if you sawed them you could age them by the number of rings, just like a tree. Then she sawed herself some bone samples and said she could tell the moose was in poor condition from the way the marrow had gone like strawberry jelly.

  Setting the traps had been hard work and Luke had loved every minute of it. She had shown him how to bed them and explained the whole process. The idea of a dirthole set, she said, was to make the wolf think he’d stumbled across some other animal’s food cache. The best place was on the upwind side of a trail, so he’d smell it as he trotted past. First he’d get a whiff of the buried bait - which smelled so foul you’d think it might send him packing - then he’d get a whiff of another wolf from the scat and urine and think, Aha! An intruder!

  Now you had him interested, but you had to make sure he only had one easy way of approach to get a better sniff. The real skill, she said, was to have him put his foot exactly where you wanted, so you laid sticks or rocks which he would step over and tread right onto the pan.

  The previous afternoon, when the traps were all set, he had taken her up to the abandoned den and rendezvous site. At the den she put on her little headlamp and got out a tape measure and slithered right down into the hole like a gopher. She was gone so long he started to worry, wondering what he would do if she got stuck down there. But then her boots appeared and she wriggled out backward, babbling with excitement and covered in gray dust, and handed him the headlamp.

  ‘Your turn.’

  Luke shook his head. ‘Oh, no. I d-don’t—’

  ‘Go on, I dare you.’

  So he handed her his hat and down he went. The tunnel traveled straight into the hillside for about fifteen feet and was so narrow he had to hunch his shoulders and use the toes of his boots to inch himself along.

  In the beam of the headlamp, the walls looked pale and smooth, as if they had been molded in clay. He had expected the air to be fetid or musty, but it smelled only of earth. There were no bones, no scat, no sign of wolf at all, except a few pale hairs snagged in the tree roots that hung from the roof. The end of the tunnel broadened into a chamber about three feet across and Luke stopped there and lay quite still, panting a little from the effort of the crawl. He thought of the mother wolf curled in this womb of cold earth, giving birth to her pups, pictured her licking their blind faces clean and suckling them.

  Then he switched off the lamp and held his breath enfolded in the silence and the darkness, and for some reason remembered something he’d read, about how life was a circular trip from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb. He had never understood why anyone should fear the perfect nothingness of death. He would happily have died right there and then.

  He was still thinking about this when he emerged blinking into the sunlight and saw her smiling at him. She said she’d thought he was going to stay down there forever and he just blurted out what was in his head, which was really dumb. But she simply nodded and he could see in her eyes that she understood. It was weird, but two or three times now, he’d gotten the feeling that they were somehow alike. As if they belonged to the same tribe or something.

  It was probably just wishful thinking.

  She’d helped him brush the dust from his back and shoulders and the touch of her hands felt good. Then he did the same for her, which felt even better. She stood with her back to him while he did it and he couldn’t help staring at the nape of her neck, where her hair tapered into a sunbleached down on the gold of her skin.

  He watched her now, ahead of him along the trail, still holding the antenna above her head. She was wearing khaki hiking pants and her pale blue fleece. She turned and started walking slowly back
toward him, chewing her lip as she always seemed to do when she concentrated.

  Suddenly she stopped and stiffened and he knew she’d heard something. Then she gave a whoop.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘W-w-which one is it?’

  ‘Five-sixty-two. That’s the one you set. Down by all that willow scrub, remember?’

  She came running back to him, grinning and holding out the headphones so he could hear too. Buzz started to bark inside the pickup and Helen told him to hush. Luke put on the headphones.

  ‘Got it?’

  For a moment he heard nothing. Then, as she adjusted the receiver, he heard the steady cluck-cluck-cluck of the signal. He grinned and nodded and Helen gave him a punch on the shoulder.

  ‘Hey, trapper, you got yourself a wolf!’

  It took them twenty minutes to get to where the trail ran out and Helen drove so fast, it seemed to Luke they were lucky to get there at all. All the way, she kept teasing him about how it was beginner’s luck and who did he think he was, anyway, breezing in and beating her to it after all the work she’d put in. Luke laughed and promised not to tell anyone.

  They parked at the edge of a clearcut and got out to fix their packs in the bed of the pickup. Across the clearcut, two loggers from the post and pole company were leaning against a half-loaded trailer, having a smoke. Luke didn’t know either of them. Helen waved and called hi, but they only nodded and went on smoking and staring without so much as a smile.

  Helen busied herself with her pack, carrying on a mock conversation with the loggers which only Luke could hear.

  ‘“Well, hi there, Helen! How’re you doing? Caught any wolves? Really? That’s terrific! Well, thanks. You too. Bye!”’

  ‘Have you seen them b-before?’ Luke asked quietly.