The Loop

by Nicholas Evans

  Luke was shaking his head in disbelief. Helen tried to think.

  ‘I’ll call Dan.’

  She grabbed a flashlight and ran to the cabin. She snatched up the cell phone and punched in the number. She waited, hissing curses that it was taking so long to connect.

  Luke’s mother and Ruth were standing in the doorway now and Luke was lighting a lantern. Eleanor’s eyes roamed the cabin. It was the first time she’d seen her son’s new home. Then Helen realized that all this time on the phone she had been listening to total silence.

  ‘Shit!’ She slammed it down.

  ‘It still hasn’t re-ch-charged?’

  ‘No. Shit!’ She thought for a moment.

  ‘Luke, you go down to the clearcut with your mom and Ruth and try and talk some sense into them. I’ll go try and get the pups out.’

  ‘Helen, these guys are pretty fired up,’ Ruth said.

  ‘He w-won’t listen to us anyway.’

  ‘Then block the road. Do anything. Just stall them, try and buy some time.’

  ‘Helen, you’re the only one they might listen to,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘I’ll g-get the pups out.’

  ‘You’ve never done it before. You have to crawl right down into the den. With the mother down there, it can be dangerous.’

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  ‘Luke, come on—’

  ‘Helen, I can do it!’

  She hesitated. He was probably right.

  ‘C-come on, let’s go!’

  ‘You’ll need something to carry them in. Those bags of yours, the canvas ones.’

  Luke ran across the cabin, hauled them out from under the bunk and started emptying them.

  ‘Ruth, we need to get hold of Dan. Could you go into town and call him?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Helen scribbled his home number on a piece of paper and handed it to her.

  ‘Call the police too, the Forest Service emergency line, anyone you can think of. Tell them we’re at the big clearcut above the Townsend ranch.’

  ‘You bet.’ She was off at once, running to her car.

  Luke had the two empty bags. He was loading his rifle.

  ‘You won’t need that.’

  ‘No, but you might.’ He checked that the safety was on and held the rifle out for her to take.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Take it.’

  She did as she was told. She picked up the chain saw, locked Buzz in the cabin and followed Luke and his mother to the cars. Ruth was already driving away. Helen dumped the gun and chain saw in the pickup and took the jabstick and another flashlight over to Luke, who was climbing into his Jeep.

  ‘Go down into the den slowly. And be ready, she could come right at you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Keep the jabstick out in front of you. She’ll threaten you, but in the end she’ll make a break for it.’

  ‘Okay.’ He fired the engine and turned on the headlights.

  ‘Shall I bring the p-pups back here?’

  Helen hadn’t thought about it. But the cabin would be the first place anyone would look.

  ‘Take them to Ruth’s house,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And Luke?’ Helen said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Be careful.’

  He smiled and nodded then slammed the door. As he swung the car around, Helen and Eleanor climbed into Helen’s pickup. For a moment she thought it wasn’t going to start. But at the third try it did and soon she’d caught up with Luke and was following the glow of his tail-lights down through the winding corridor of trees.

  ‘Thank you,’ Helen said. ‘For coming to tell us.’

  Without taking her eyes off Luke’s car, Eleanor reached across and gently touched her on the shoulder.

  35

  The white wolf paused in the mouth of the den while the two biggest and bravest of her pups tottered between her legs and out into the moonlit world.

  The excavated earth around the den was packed solid as cement from the pacing of the two yearlings and was strewn with scat and bone shards. One of the pups tried his new teeth out on a piece but then dropped it, unimpressed. There was something near at hand that smelled better.

  The mother had smelled it too, all day. Perhaps she thought it was something the yearlings had brought, though they hadn’t been back since the humans came the previous night. Perhaps the humans had left it there. She had caught their scent long before she heard their voices and she’d lain still and listened to the scuffle and tramp of their feet outside the den. She’d heard the clink of something too and could still smell it out there, mixed with the waft of fresh meat. It had the same harsh, unnatural tang as the thing that had once snapped shut on her paw.

  It was a scent unknown to the two pups however. All they smelled was the meat. All day they had tried to leave the den and time and again she had stopped them and carried them back. But after so many hours of waiting in vain for the yearlings to bring food, and with six greedy mouths tugging at her teats, she was starving and at last relented.

  The first of the pups staggered with great purpose toward the smell and his mother followed, nudging the other pup before her to his first proper meal. Behind her, two other pups stood in the mouth of the den, blinking at the moon.

  There was a lump of pale meat and now she could smell and see others, the same, a few yards to either side. The tang she had smelled came from a line, a thing of humans, that ran between them. She hesitated, sniffed the air.

  By now the pup was sniffing the meat. He nudged it with his nose and nipped it, pulling it along the ground. As he tugged, his mother saw the line move and she shied, as she might at a rattlesnake. There was danger here, she now knew. And it was no snake. In a bound she was beside the pup.

  But the meat was already inside his mouth and he bit on it.

  Luke waved as he forked down off the road and Helen, behind him, flashed her lights and kept on toward the clearcut. He left the car in its usual hiding place, took the bags and the jabstick and headed off at a run through the trees.

  The going was tricky. He kept the beam of the flashlight low and ran in the pool it made. There were rocks and roots and tangles of blowdown and several times he caught a foot and fell headlong in the bushes.

  He tried to work out how much time he had.

  If they set out from The Last Resort, they would be coming from the north. They would use the road that ran from town due west alongside the Townsend property all the way to the forest, then turn left onto the logging road. But without knowing when they had left, it was pointless trying to calculate. All he knew was that he had to keep running.

  At last, through the trees ahead of him, he saw the moonlit glow of the clearcut. He turned off the flashlight and fished in his pocket for Dan’s nightscope, while he walked to the forest’s edge. He stopped there and switched it on and just as he found focus, the wolf started to bark.

  It was the alpha female. She was a few yards from the entrance to the den and barking right at him. There was a movement behind her and it took Luke a moment to realize it was the pups. They were scurrying down into the den. They were much darker than their mother and he couldn’t count how many there were. The mother was shepherding them in, but she didn’t seem to want to follow them.

  When the last one had gone, she started pacing to and fro, all the while looking toward Luke and barking. Every now and again, she kept going back to the same place and lowering her nose to sniff something. Then she would lift her head and bark and now she ended each burst of barking with a howl. Luke willed her to shut up. She was telling the whole world where she was.

  He put the nightscope away and stepped into the clearcut. The wolf was about fifty yards away and as he got closer, she seemed to grow less sure of herself. She kept running off a few yards, lowering her tail, and then seemed to get her courage back and turned and came back, barking and howling at him. In the moonlight, Luke could see something dark in the place
that she kept returning to. And now, in a pause of her barking, he heard a whine and a whimper that he knew didn’t come from her.

  As he walked the last few yards to the den, the mother ran off. She stopped about twenty yards away and stood watching him. She was suddenly silent. There was another whimper. He switched on the flashlight.

  ‘Oh God,’ he murmured.

  Helen had parked the pickup across the road and hidden the keys under a rock nearby. On its own, it wasn’t much of a roadblock, but the tall Douglas fir she’d cut down in front of it with the chain saw made it better. Now she was cutting a second and the chips were showering into the beam of Eleanor’s flashlight.

  In a minute she was through and she stood back and yelled for Eleanor to do the same. The tree leaned and creaked and toppled exactly where she wanted it and the forest repaired its bruised silence around them.

  They were a mile and a half north of the clearcut. Helen had chosen the place for its view of the road that wound up from the valley below in a series of steep bends. Any approaching headlights would be seen a long way off. So far there were none.

  Helen put the chain saw in the bed of the pickup. Eleanor handed her the flashlight.

  ‘Mind if I switch it off and save the batteries?’

  ‘No. I like the dark.’

  She seemed perfectly calm and Helen wondered how she managed it. Her own heart was on a rollercoaster. The two women stood in silence for awhile beside the pickup, staring at the moon. Somewhere far above them in the forest, an owl was calling.

  ‘Are you warm enough?’ Helen asked.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I’d give anything for a cigarette.’

  ‘I used to love to smoke.’

  ‘Well, they say only the best kind of women smoke . . .’

  ‘And the worst kind of men.’

  ‘So if we quit, does that disqualify us?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  They both laughed and then fell silent again.

  ‘Maybe they’re not coming,’ Helen said.

  ‘Oh, they’ll come.’ She frowned. ‘What is it, do you think, about these animals, that makes people hate them so much?’

  ‘About wolves? I don’t know. Maybe they’re too much like us. We look at them and see ourselves. Loving, caring, social creatures who also happen to be terrific killers.’

  Eleanor considered this awhile.

  ‘Maybe it’s envy too.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘That they’re still part of nature and we’ve forgotten how to be.’

  She seemed about to go on, when something down in the valley caught her eye.

  ‘Here they come,’ she said.

  A pair of headlights was coming around the first bend. Helen’s heart climbed back on the rollercoaster The women stood watching while another vehicle, then another came into view. And now they could hear their engines and dogs barking. There were more trucks coming now. Five, six . . . eight in all, winding up the road in convoy.

  ‘Well, here we go,’ said Helen.

  Buck hadn’t counted but he figured there were about twenty of them, including a good few he’d rather not have had along. The two Harding boys and the loggers they’d been drinking with in the bar were pretty far gone. Some had brought liquor along and he’d had to stop on the way up and tell them to quit whooping and singing or they could turn around and go home. On the other hand, there was safety in numbers. No one was going to put the whole damn town in jail.

  He and Clyde were leading in Clyde’s truck, with one of the loggers sitting wedged between them to make sure they didn’t get lost. He was one of the guys who’d come up here with Clyde last night to lay that damn fool loop thing. They should have just stuffed some poison down the hole or poured gasoline in it or something. Anyhow, they’d put that right when they got there now.

  Buck’s anger had refined itself. Shooting those two wolves, he was so fired up he’d hardly known what he was doing. It was like something bursting into flames in his head, an explosion of all the pressure that had been building inside him, months of being slighted, rejected and thwarted. But now the smoke had cleared and his anger glowed white-hot within him like a branding iron, searing and still.

  ‘Hey, look,’ Clyde said. He was peering up ahead. ‘There’s somebody already got here.’

  They were coming around the last bend and the road was leveling out. A couple of hundred yards ahead of them, there was someone with a flashlight. Then, in the headlights, they saw trees had been felled across the road and a truck parked behind them.

  ‘What the . . .?’ Clyde said. ‘It’s the wolf woman. Who the hell’s that with her?’

  Buck had already seen who it was. And now Clyde recognized her too. He looked at Buck.

  ‘What’s Eleanor doing here, for Christsakes?’

  Buck didn’t answer. She must have gone and told Helen Ross what was happening. His own damned wife.

  ‘Stop here,’ he said.

  They stopped about fifteen yards short of the roadblock and as they did, Helen Ross stepped over the trees and came toward them, shielding her eyes against Clyde’s headlights. Buck got out and walked slowly around to the front of the car. He stood with his back to the hood, waiting for her. All the other men were piling out of their trucks and coming up behind him to see what was going on. Abe Harding’s dogs were barking their heads off.

  ‘Hello, Mr Calder.’

  He just stared at her. He could tell the little bitch was scared.

  ‘I’m afraid, sir, this road has been closed.’

  ‘Uh-huh? On whose authority?’

  ‘The US Fish and Wildlife Service.’

  ‘This is a public road.’

  ‘I know that, sir.’

  Eleanor was coming up behind her now. No doubt thinking she could make a monkey of him in front of everyone. He didn’t look at her.

  ‘Craig?’ he called out, keeping his eyes on Helen Ross. ‘Is Craig there?’

  ‘Yeah!’ Craig Rawlinson pushed his way through the crowd.

  ‘Buck?’ Eleanor said. He ignored her.

  ‘Sheriff Rawlinson. Does this woman have the authority to close a public road?’

  ‘Not unless she’s got a piece of paper to prove it, she hasn’t.’

  ‘Buck,’ Eleanor said again. ‘Please. It’s time to stop.’

  ‘Stop?’ He laughed. ‘Honey, I haven’t even gotten started.’ The Ross woman turned to Craig Rawlinson.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re going to help these men commit a crime.’

  ‘You’re the only one who’s committing a crime around here, far as I can see. You’re obstructing a public highway.’

  Ross pointed at Buck. ‘This man has just shot two wolves . . .’ Everyone laughed ‘. . . You should be arresting him, not helping him kill more.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now turn around and get your truck out the way or I’ll arrest you.’

  He reached out to take her by the shoulder, but she lashed out and gave him a shove in the chest that made him stagger back. One of the loggers cheered sarcastically.

  ‘Feisty little thing, ain’t she?’ Wes Harding called out.

  Everyone laughed again.

  ‘Why don’t you all just grow up?’ Helen shouted.

  Eleanor stepped forward and put a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘What’s the matter with all you boys?’ Eleanor said. ‘I’ve known some of you since you were kids. I know your mothers. I think you’d all be better just going home.’

  The sound of her voice, the calm reasoning tone, made Buck’s blood seethe.

  ‘Will someone shut those damn dogs up? Clyde?’

  ‘Yessir?’

  ‘Get those fucking trees off the road.’

  Luke had tried for ten minutes to get the hooks out of the pup’s mouth, but all three barbs were deeply bedded in and he couldn’t loosen them without doing more damage. He managed to get all the meat out of the poor little thing’s throa
t so it didn’t choke, but that was all. In the end, he knew it was going to bleed to death and if he wasted anymore time, maybe all the others would be lost as well, so he put it back on the ground where he’d found it, attached to the line like a drowning fish.

  All the while, the mother wolf had been barking and howling at him from across the clearcut, pacing up and down, thinking no doubt that he was murdering her pup. He could even hear her now that he was down in the den.

  He was inching along the tunnel on his belly, pointing the flashlight ahead of him. It was narrower than the one he and Helen had gone down last summer and it seemed longer too, with bends where the digger had come up against rock. There was a faint smell of ammonia and the farther he went, the stronger it got. He guessed it was from the pee of the pups and that he must now be getting near to the nesting chamber.

  He held the jabstick out in front of him, in the beam of the flashlight, just in case the mother came in through the other entrance below the rocks. He had no idea how many pups he would find. Helen said there could sometimes be as many as nine or ten.

  Then suddenly he heard them whining and a moment later, as he slithered around the final bend, he saw them in the beam of the flashlight. They were in a dark furry huddle at the far corner of the chamber, squinting and mewing at the light. He couldn’t tell how many there were. Five or six at most.

  ‘Hey, there,’ he said softly. ‘It’s okay. Everyone’s going to be okay.’

  He put down the jabstick and the flashlight and pulled out the canvas bag that he’d stuffed down the front of his shirt. He opened it up and elbowed his way toward the pups. There were five of them and he wondered if he could take them all in one go. But the tunnel was narrow and he didn’t want to risk hurting any of them. He decided to take three first, then come back for the other two.

  He reached out and plucked up the first one. Its fur was soft and all fluffed up. It mewed at him.

  ‘I know, I know. I’m sorry.’