The Loop

by Nicholas Evans

The waitress appeared and Buck ordered two wheat-beers.

  ‘Thanks, Mr Calder, but—’

  ‘Buck.’

  ‘Yeah, well, anyway. Thanks, but I ought to be going.’

  He turned to the waitress. ‘It’s okay, sweetheart. Bring two. I’ll drink them both.’

  He eased himself onto the bench on the other side of the booth. Helen warned herself to go easy. However much she might dislike the man, he was Luke’s father. To upset him wouldn’t be good for either of them.

  ‘I wanted to talk about Luke,’ he said.

  Helen gave a little laugh. Here we go again, she thought.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’

  ‘Oh. Nothing.’

  He looked at her for a moment, with a faintly knowing smile.

  ‘I want you to know, whatever idle tongues may be wagging—’

  ‘Mr Calder—’

  ‘Buck.’

  ‘Buck. I really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.’

  The waitress arrived with the beers. He thanked her and waited for her to leave before he went on.

  ‘What I wanted to say was, just how grateful Eleanor and I are for all you’ve done for the boy, letting him work with you and all. Of course, it means we don’t see to much of him right now, and I have to say, I’m going to need him around now we’re getting into calving, which I hope you’ll understand. ’

  Helen nodded.

  ‘But his mother was only saying the other night that she’s never seen the boy so happy. He seems at last to have grown up a little. Even his stutter seems to have gotten better. So, thank you.’

  He took a drink. Helen didn’t know what to say. As usual, the guy had taken her by surprise. Perhaps she should curb her natural urge to flee and instead, while the going was good, broach the subject of Luke going to college.

  ‘You handled yourself real well, up there on the stand,’ he said.

  Helen shrugged and smiled.

  ‘No, I mean it. You were impressive.’

  ‘Thank you. So were you.’

  He nodded graciously. Neither of them spoke for a moment. The music they were playing was that stuff they made for insomniacs, a soothing blend of electronic waves and the moan of killer whales. It always made Helen feel edgy.

  ‘You know, I reckon if you and I hadn’t gotten off on the wrong foot, we might have been friends.’

  ‘Hey, we’re friends. As far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Okay, then. More than friends.’

  She pretended to look puzzled. He gave her a slow smile. Then he reached beneath the table and put his hand on her leg. Helen took a deep breath and stood up.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m going home.’

  She put her coat on and got some money from her bag to pay for the drinks. He was sitting back watching her, smiling, totally unfazed. He was just making fun of her. She thought about throwing the untouched glass of beer over him and only narrowly decided against.

  ‘Bye,’ she said and walked away.

  It was snowing hard. Hurrying across the parking lot, she slipped and nearly fell. She was so shaken and angry that it took her a long time to find her car keys. How dare he? She wanted to kill him.

  As she put the key in the door, she felt a hand on her shoulder and gave a little yelp of fright.

  He turned her around and took hold of her arms below the elbows, pinning her against the truck.

  ‘Why settle for a boy when you can have a man?’ he said.

  She tried to keep her voice steady. ‘Get your hands off me. Now.’

  ‘Come on, we both know you’re hot for it.’

  He leaned his face toward her and she felt his warm, beery breath on her face. She brought her knee up sharply between his legs and shoved him hard in the chest. He reeled backward, slipped in the snow and fell heavily, his hat rolling off to one side.

  Helen climbed quickly into the pickup, slammed the door and locked it. Thank the Lord, the engine fired first time. He was still lying there, moaning and clutching his crotch. She lowered the window.

  ‘Don’t ever touch me again.’

  She hit the gas pedal and the Toyota slithered off. Suddenly, through her shock and outrage, something he’d once said came back to her. She braked hard and skidded to a stop, then reversed back so that she was looking right down on him from the window.

  ‘Wanting something can be better than getting it, remember? Think of it as a favor.’

  And she drove off, showering him with wet snow from her wheels as she went.

  They finished supper in silence. Or rather, Luke finished his while she shifted hers around on her plate. The plan had been for Helen to get something fresh in town after the court case finished, but she’d forgotten, so Luke had cooked the usual pasta and mixed in a can of tuna, some cheese, then a can of sweetcorn. He still wasn’t much of a cook, but it tasted okay.

  He could tell something was wrong as soon as she came in, but whatever it was, she wasn’t letting on. Maybe she was still upset about what Abe had called her in court yesterday. About what had happened there today, she had told him little more than the verdict and the encounter afterward with their logging friend. Luke had figured on telling her his worries that something funny was going on with the wolves, but it didn’t seem the right time. She pushed her plate away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t great.’

  ‘No, it was fine. I’m just not hungry.’

  ‘When I get to college, I’m going to take cookery class too.’

  She tried to smile. He got up and went around to her side of the table, stepping over Buzz who was in his usual place, flat out by the stove. He squatted beside her and took both her hands in his.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  She shook her head and bent forward and kissed his forehead.

  ‘Tell me.’

  She sighed. ‘Luke, I don’t think you should stay up here anymore.’

  ‘W-why?’

  ‘You know what people are saying.’

  He nodded. ‘I d-didn’t know if you knew.’

  She gave a wry laugh. ‘Oh, I know all right.’

  She told him about the anonymous calls to Dan’s office. Luke wondered who it could be, but couldn’t think of anyone that mean.

  ‘So are you saying we should stop seeing each other?’

  ‘No. Oh, Luke, I don’t know.’

  ‘If it’s making you unhappy . . .’

  She stroked his face. ‘I couldn’t bear not seeing you.’

  ‘Does what other p-people think change what we have?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How can it?’

  ‘Luke, there are just some people who always try to destroy what they don’t understand or what they can’t have for themselves. ’

  ‘B-but if you listen to them, they win.’

  She smiled down at him. Sometimes, with just a look, she could make him remember how young he was and how much he had yet to learn of the world’s hurtful ways.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Oh Luke, please—’

  ‘It’s okay. Y-you don’t have to say it too.’

  ‘The last guy I said it to left me. For a Belgian bimbo.’

  ‘I don’t know any B-belgian b-bimbos.’

  It almost made her laugh.

  ‘Listen, I’m not going to be able to come up here much anyhow for a few weeks. My f-father wants me to help with the calving.’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘You spoke with him? What did he say?’

  She shrugged. ‘Just that.’

  The wolf lay halfway up a narrow gully, wedged between two rocks like a piece of flood-jammed timber. His nose was stretched out on his paws as if he were about to pounce and his eyes were open and frozen a solid, dull yellow. His fur was covered in a thin blanket of spindrift that had swirled down the gully. How long he had been dead, it was hard to say.

  They had picked up the signal shortly after dawn, not the usual, intermittent beep, bu
t a single sustained note that told them something had happened.

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean he’s dead,’ Helen had said, as they loaded their skis and the rest of the gear onto the snow-mobile. ‘The collar might just have come off. It happens.’

  But she didn’t believe it. They’d gone on the snow-mobile as far as they could up the trail that ran beside the creek, the signal getting louder all the time. Both of them were aware it was the last time they would be tracking together for a month or more and they hardly spoke. When the going got too difficult, they put their skis on and threaded their way through the trees and rocks. There were fresh wolf tracks but only the one, unbroken signal. The pack had moved on.

  It was Luke who saw the body first. When they climbed up through the rocks they found a crevice, littered with scat and pieces of bone. It seemed the wolf had sheltered there for some time. In a patch of fresh snow among the rocks, they could see the tracks of several wolves. Perhaps they had come to pay their last respects.

  His body was frozen hard and it took them a long time to lever him out from the rocks without damaging him further. They laid him down beside the creek.

  ‘Look at his foot,’ Helen said. ‘That’s what’s killed him.’

  They knelt down to examine it. The whole paw was stripped of fur and was swollen to at least three times the size of the others. There was a deep open gash which went all the way around it.

  ‘You poor old fella. What have you been up to, huh? It looks like he’s been caught in a trap or something.’

  ‘Or a snare, like Buzz,’ Luke said. ‘Same f-foot too.’

  Helen took off the collar and stopped the signal. She stood up and sighed.

  ‘And then there were seven.’

  ‘I don’t reckon there’s that m-many anymore.’

  She looked at him. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Remember when Dan and I w-went flying, how we only saw five of them? And he said the others were p-probably in the trees or somewhere? Well, these last few days, while you’ve been in court, I’ve g-gotten the feeling that’s all there is now. Maybe not even that many. I know a lot of the time they go in each other’s tracks, b-but when they separate, it looks like there’s only three or four of them, far as I can tell. And I heard them howl and it wasn’t the same. K-kind of thinner.’

  They carried the dead wolf to the snowmobile and took it back to the cabin. Helen called Dan and he said he would have Donna drive out right away and pick it up. He’d get Bill Rimmer to have a look, then send it up to Ashland for a full necropsy report. Helen told him it looked like a snare wound.

  ‘Luke thinks someone’s trying to get rid of them,’ she said.

  ‘Poachers set snares for all kinds of animals. Poison’s still the best way to kill a wolf.’

  ‘Except it kills lots of other animals too and tells the whole world you’re there.’

  ‘So does a snare. I think the boy’s being a little fanciful.’

  Helen told him what Luke had said about never seeing more than four or five sets of tracks. When Dan replied, his voice had gone hard.

  ‘Helen, I don’t want to sound ungrateful for Luke’s help, but you’re the goddamn biologist. It’s you we’re paying, not him.’

  It was stupid of her, but until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to her that Dan was jealous. She’d lost him. Luke was now her only ally.

  31

  As a young girl, Kathy had always loved calving time. It was the most exciting time of the whole ranching year. She and Lane would hear her daddy and the calving crew guys down in the kitchen in the middle of the night, laughing and fixing food for themselves, and lie awake listening to the moan and bellow of the cows down by the corrals. The girls used to stand on tiptoe at their bedroom windows, peering down at the men working under the arc lights, hauling the calves out of their mothers, all squirmy and covered in blood and slime and laugh out loud as the little things tried to stand and totter on their spindly legs.

  When the girls got older, sometimes their daddy would let them come outside and help, even when they had to be up early for school and their mom had said they couldn’t. He would come and get them when she was asleep and make them wrap up warm and tiptoe down the stairs.

  Kathy remembered them both crying one time, when a calf came out dead and their daddy had told them not to be silly because it was just God’s way of dealing with those who were too weak for the world.

  Their mom had some crocus bulbs growing in a pot in the kitchen and the two girls snipped all the flowers off and drove up to the dump with one of the hired hands on the old red John Deere and the three of them had stood and said a prayer over the poor little body and then scattered the crocuses over it. The next morning, when she found her flowers all beheaded, their mom had been furious.

  Now, since moving up to the red house, Kathy didn’t like calving time at all. It meant that, for more than a month, Clyde would be sleeping down at the main ranch house, working his shifts on the calving crew. Kathy saw him when she drove down to help her mother fix the men’s midday meal or whenever he dropped home for a change of clothes. Generally he was too frazzled to pay anyone proper attention, though he often seemed to expect Kathy to jump straight into bed with him, even when she wasn’t remotely in the mood.

  Calving had been going for little over a week now, but already she was bored and lonely, especially on those long evenings when there was nothing good on TV. So if she saw a light on in the wolfer’s trailer, she would find some excuse to go over and visit with him.

  She would take the laundry she’d insisted on doing for him or take him some leftovers, soup or maybe some cookies she had baked. And if the baby was awake and not hollering, because she knew the old man liked him, she would take him along too.

  Of course, old Mr Lovelace wasn’t everyone’s idea of company. The first time she went, he didn’t even ask her in and when at last he did, the trailer smelled worse than a hog pen. But she soon got used to it, simply for the sake of having someone to talk with. And despite his grouchy way, there was something about the old man that she liked. Or maybe she just felt sorry for him. Whichever it was, anyhow, she could tell he’d taken a shine to her.

  He’d been away for a couple of days, up in the forest, and after she’d noticed he was back, she’d given him a short while to get settled, then carried over a bowl of stew. He’d shoveled it down in about two minutes flat and was now mopping the bowl clean with some bread she’d also brought.

  Kathy sat on a wooden stool with Buck Junior on her knee, on the other side of the trailer’s narrow table, its top stained with things she didn’t dare imagine. The old man ate ravenously, almost like a wolf himself, she thought. The lamplight cut crags and hollows in his ancient, grizzled face. Little Buck sat still and silent, his eyes just above the level of the table, following every move the wolfer made.

  ‘That was good.’

  ‘Like some more? There’s plenty.’

  ‘No, ma’am. I’m done.’

  He poured himself some coffee, not bothering to ask her if she wanted one because she always turned it down. She didn’t like the look of the mugs he used. They sat in silence while he stirred three spoons of sugar into it, all the while watching the baby, like he always did.

  It was often hard to tell when he might be in the mood to talk. Sometimes he barely said a word and Kathy ended up doing all the talking. She had learned early on the subjects to steer clear of. Once she’d made the mistake of asking him about his wife and he’d clammed right up. The same had happened when she asked how many of the wolves he’d managed to catch.

  At other times though, you couldn’t stop him. It was like taking a cork from a barrel, just kept flowing, especially when he got onto the subject of his daddy. Kathy had always enjoyed hearing about the old times. In her head she pictured old Joshua Lovelace looking like the old ‘griz’ hunter in Jeremiah Johnson. Usually, if she was going to get him talking, all it needed was a little prompt and she tried it now.


  ‘You know you told me about that thing your daddy invented?’

  ‘You mean, the loop?’

  ‘The loop, that’s it. What exactly was it?’

  He went on stirring his coffee for a moment.

  ‘Want to see it?’

  ‘You’ve still got it? Really?’

  ‘Still sometimes use it.’

  He got up and went to one of his cupboards. He had to get down on his knees to reach deep inside it and pulled out a coil of wire with small, slender cones of metal attached to it. He brought it back to the table and laid it in front of her. He stayed standing while he undid the two leather thongs it was tied with. Then he uncoiled a few feet of wire. The baby reached out toward one of the metal cones.

  ‘No, honey,’ Kathy said. ‘Don’t touch.’

  ‘That’s right, don’t you go touching. These things may look like toys, but they ain’t. I’ll show you.’

  There was a piece of bread left on the table and he picked it up and started to slide it carefully over the point of one of the cones.

  ‘My daddy used to say chicken was best, and that’s what I use if I can get hold of some. But pretty much any kind of meat’ll do. So you have to imagine this bread here’s a chunk of meat. And what you do is lay the loop of wire around the den, just when the wolf pups are about three weeks old and thinking about venturing out into the world. And then . . .’

  He stopped and Kathy, who’d been watching what he was doing with his hands, looked up at his face and saw he was staring in a strange way at the baby. Buck Junior was staring right back at him.

  ‘And then . . .’

  ‘Mr Lovelace? Are you okay?’

  His eyes shifted up to look at Kathy and it was as if he had no idea who she was or what she was doing there. He looked down at his hands again and it seemed to make him remember what he’d been saying.

  ‘So. The pup smells the bait. And ’cos he don’t know no better, he takes this into his mouth, the narrow end first. That’s important, ’cos you don’t want him triggering it till it’s gotten right down . . .’

  He was looking at the baby again.

  ‘Right down?’ Kathy prompted.