The Wolfer

by Loren D. Estleman

  Fulwider frowned. "An hour. Perhaps longer. It depends on what you have to tell me."

  "Sorry." The wolfer sat down on the edge of the bed and started pulling on a tired-looking pair of calf-length moccasins decorated with porcupine quills dyed red and yellow.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Can't spare it. I got to get provisions and a fresh pack animal. One I had got stole in Bismarck. Then I got to ride out to Newcastle and see can I parley this Meredith into upping the bounty on this here wolf he wants so bad. One way or the other I'm going hunting in the morning."

  "Then we can talk when you get back."

  "If you care to wait." He drew his stiff buckskin shirt on over his head.

  "How long?"

  "Day, maybe. More likely a month. Time don't mean much to me, except when it's short."

  "Can't you be more specific?" Fulwider struggled to keep his frustration from showing. Westerners had no concept of deadlines or the impatience of editors.

  Standing, North drew on the heavy wolfskin and lifted his beaver hat from the bedpost. From scalp to sole nothing touched his skin that was made by man. "That's up to Black Jack."

  The journalist felt an attack coming on, but got out his handkerchief in time to stifle it. The effort brought tears to his eyes, but he had a proposition to make and didn't want to discredit it by exhibiting the state of his health.

  "Take me with you."

  For a space the wolfer favored him with his disconcerting gaze. Then he put on the hat. "I reckon not."

  "Don't turn me down until you've heard me out. I can ride and am perfectly capable of taking care of myself. I have been, for more years than you have been alive."

  "Years don't mean nothing. You stink city, Mr. Fulwider. There ain't no corner markets in the mountains."

  He couldn't hold back his anger any longer. "You can stop me from accompanying you, but nothing says I can't follow you."

  The wolfskin rustled. In a trice, North's wicked skinning knife was out and pricking Fulwider's flesh above his belt buckle.

  "That's the first wrong thing you said since you come in, Mr. Newspaper Writer." He spoke in that deceptively calm tone he had used after letting out the bully's intestines in the Dakota barroom. "It's up to you whether you leave here straight up or heels first. If I look back and see you on my trail I'll flay you breathing."

  Fulwider left, backing away on unsteady legs.

  For a long time after returning to his room, the journalist sat on the edge of his bed while his hands shook and his heart hammered at his breastbone. Then he unpacked his bags, transferring his clothes to the dresser slowly and methodically. When he was certain the wolfer had completed his business in town and started out for Newcastle he went out to get the lay of the community.

  After an hour he had visited every public building but one. A twin of the Assiniboin, this frame structure was known locally as Aurora's place although it bore no sign.

  Frilly curtains in its windows concealed the sort of activity one might expect of an establishment referred to as "the other side of Sin." He avoided such places out of revulsion sparked by weeks of personal debauchery following his bitter divorce two years before. He considered it a healthy sign, however, that the townsmen with whom he conversed spoke freely and knowledgeably about the services available there. Evidently, eastern hypocrisy had yet to move beyond the 98th Meridian.

  Most of all, Fulwider was struck by the dearth of women in town. In New York they outnumbered the men, but here (not counting Aurora's girls) there were at least fifteen males to every female. He had heard of soldiers stationed in frontier outposts drawing lots to see which troopers would allow themselves to be led at dances, but until now he had never understood their desperation. An avowed misogynist since the end of his own marriage, the newcomer was nonetheless depressed by the loss of his freedom of choice.

  The sun was perched atop the buttes west of town when he entered the local restaurant, a cramped place in the same building with the Timber Queen saloon, separated from it by a pine partition and run by a former trail cook with a peg leg and an apparently unsinkable sense of humor. Fulwider was just starting in on a surprisingly delectable beef stew when he spotted Dale Crippen in the doorway. He hailed the foreman with fork upraised.

  "Find any Wyatt Earps yet?" asked Crippen, seating himself opposite the journalist.

  "I may have found someone much better, if I could get him to cooperate." He told of the conversation in North's room, pausing only when the cook stumped over to take his companion's order.

  "He showed up at the ranch this afternoon," said Crippen, when Fulwider had finished. His scowl was ferocious. "Talked Nelson into doubling the bounty on Black Jack. Old Man Meredith wouldn't of went for it, but his son is too full of dime-novel nonsense and thinks North is Pecos Bill all over again."

  "I'm not quite clear yet on what you have against North."

  The speedy arrival of the foreman's dinner lightened his mood somewhat, and between jokes about its being the first veal he'd ever eaten that had died of old age, he described the wolfing process.

  Most wolfers, Fulwider was informed, were cowboys let go during the long winter months. Equipped with guns, pack horses and a minimum of supplies, these stalwarts would venture into the wilderness at the first sign of snow and not be seen again until the thaw, when they returned laden with gray furs and redeemed them for the bounty. As likely as not, they would immediately throw away this boon at the local saloon or hospitable house and be back at the ranch next morning to prepare for spring round-up.

  The rest were professionals, who appeared at the onset of winter festooned with leg-traps and strangling-snares, then vanished after the season's bounty was collected. They were an ornery, odious class shunned for their ill manners and distrust of soap. Crippen considered Asa North among this category.

  "Tell me something about wolves," said the easterner, fascinated by this glimpse into a world he hadn't known existed.

  "I reckon if the Devil ever decides to visit, he'll come dressed as a wolf." The foreman used a biscuit to mop the last of the gravy from his plate. "A live one on the loose is worth a couple of thousand dollars in lost livestock every winter. The rule out here is that no self-respecting cattleman will pass by a carcass without stopping to poison it and maybe account for at least one lofer."

  "Lofer?"

  "One of the kindlier names for the bastards. Who knows where these things start? Anyway, the trade in pelts hereabouts is lively. They make fine coats. Ever seen one of these?" He drew a pouch from his hip pocket and extended it.

  The journalist fondled the leather-like sack. Black, it was drawn with a thong and despite the thinness of the material it seemed sturdy though well worn.

  "Wolf scrotum. You won't find hardly a cowboy or a cattleman who don't keep his smoking tobacco in one like it. I don't use the stuff, but it makes just as good a poke. Been carrying this one ten years. Can't wear it out."

  Fulwider quickly returned the item. "What about Black Jack?"

  "You got to admire him," Crippen replied grudgingly. "He's the leader of a pack that comes down from the Caribous now and again and plays hell with every herd in the valley. It's been three years now, some say five, and no one's nailed him yet. He ain't your ordinary lofer. He thinks."

  "Is he any match for someone like North?"

  He pushed away his empty plate. "Reckon I'll know that soon enough. I'm going along."

  "How'd you get him to agree to that?" asked the other, astonished.

  "That was Meredith's only condition for kicking up the bounty. He ain't forgot that I had to boot out a couple of wolfers I caught butchering Newcastle beef last year. Besides, I'm the only one ever put a bullet in Black Jack's hide."

  "I thought you said no one ever had."

  "Didn't say no such a thing. Shooting him and killing him ain't the same."

  Fulwider acted on a hunch. "You'll need someone to take care of the pack animals. How about me?"
/>   "You?" A smile, half amused and half exasperated, stirred the foreman's moustaches. "You wouldn't survive two days."

  "Don't try to scare me. I've visited neighborhoods in New York where the murder rate is higher than in your Tombstone and Dodge City combined. Besides, you owe it to me to take me along."

  "I owe you?" Crippen's face flushed deep copper.

  "I came here on your suggestion," the journalist reminded him. "You said my chances of finding someone worth writing about here would be greater than in Deadwood. Now that I've found him you won't let me have a chance at him. Is all this I've heard about a westerner's word being his bond just another myth?"

  Crippen rose, and for a moment Fulwider wondered if he was going to strike him. Then he got out his poke and placed money on the table for his meal. "I'm meeting him in front of the hotel tomorrow, first light," he said. "Be there if you want, but don't blame me when he kills you." He went out, leaving the other to ponder the remnants of his stew.

  Chapter Four

  That evening, after many inquiries, Fulwider found someone who had the knowledge and was willing to give him advice about planning a wolfing trip, in return for a modest fee. This was a hideous old man with no teeth in a reeking little room above the livery stable who earned his keep shoveling out the stalls, and who used to wolf for Sir William Meredith before a fall from his horse crippled him. Afterward, the journalist used World expense money to purchase two horses downstairs and acquire sundry other necessaries just before the shops closed. He turned in early and was up well before dawn.

  The sky was turning pale when he returned to the hotel leading the animals—one for riding, the other loaded down with packs—and carrying a 50-70 Remington rifle. He had exchanged his city finery for stiff denim trousers, boots, canvas jacket with fur collar and wide-brimmed felt hat, and was feeling very rugged. Among the smaller articles stored in his saddle pouches was a bottle of strychnine crystals, which he had been assured was the most essential item in a wolfer's gear.

  North was tightening the strap that secured his own bare supplies to a muscular black with three white stockings.

  The roan beside it was equally substantial, though a bit too short and thick in the haunches to please the fancier of fine horseflesh. Neither was as handsome as Fulwider's matched grays. Amber eyes glared at him over the packs.

  "What the hell are you doing here?"

  The New Yorker had spent much of the previous night in bed fashioning the very explanation that fled from him the instant he met North's gaze. Desperately he fished for words.

  "I invited him."

  The wolfer looked at Dale Crippen, mounted upon a sorrel mare and leading a great gaunt gray conspicuous like

  North's black for its lack of unwieldy bundles. He was packing a Colt revolver on his hip and a Henry repeating rifle in a saddle scabbard. He drew rein in front of the hotel, challenging North with his eyes.

  "Did you think to invite a brass band?" The latter sliced through a dangling rope end with a single upward thrust of his fearsome knife. "I'm partial to slide trombones."

  "I'll see to him. You just tend to business."

  "He'll see to himself. In a wolf pack, when one member gets too old or too weak to hunt, he falls back and feeds on what the others leave. If he don't like it, they eat him. It's a good rule." He glanced back at Fulwider. "The minute you start yelping about home and Ma's cooking I'll cut you up in little pieces and swallow you raw."

  "There will be no murder done on this hunt," Crippen warned.

  "Ain't no murderers in the mountains. Just survivors." North had one foot in the stirrup when two men straddling slat-sided paints trailing a lathered pack horse slouched in from the east and dismounted heavily in front of the saloon. One, his impassive features all but hidden in shadow beneath the brim of a tall black hat, caught sight of the trio as he was hitching up and said something to his partner. He had dark, shoulder-length hair and dead black eyes like empty wells. The other, a slight fellow in a derby and ankle-length buffalo coat, glanced in their direction briefly, then turned back and stood watching them for what seemed a full minute, the rising sun blazing off his round corrective lenses. He seemed particularly interested in North. Then they both stepped up onto the boardwalk and into the dark barroom, which was just opening for business.

  "You serve liquor to injuns here?" North finished mounting.

  "If that law was enforced here the Timber Queen would be a dress shop," snorted the foreman. "You'll go a long way in Rebellion before you find someone who don't have redskin blood in his veins."

  "That include you?"

  "I was born in Philadelphia."

  Fulwider stepped into leather. Months had passed since he had last sat a horse and he was acutely conscious of the added height. "Do you know those men?" he asked Crippen.

  The foreman spat. It crackled in the icy morning air. "Half-breeds. That was Dick Lightfoot in the big hat. The other's Sam Fire Eye. They're the wolfers I run off Newcastle for rustling last November. If I catch them at it again I'll see they get a decent burial." He clucked his tongue and the sorrel started forward. North was already moving.

  It was iron-cold along the road that led to the Meredith ranch and the Caribous beyond, the sun's rheumatic climb over the crisp outline of the mountains having done little to dispel the clammy grip of a winter not yet done. The horses' hoofs rang when they struck bare earth frozen four feet down. Clouds of steam hung about their heads. Fulwider asked if this wasn't a dangerous time to be in the mountains.

  Crippen said it was, and described the tempestuous break-up now in progress, the ice cracking apart with tremendous reports and snow outcroppings weighing several tons toppling with the force of runaway freight trains to crush trees and abandoned trappers'shacks below. "We won't be going that high, though," he assured the journalist. "Wolves generally stick to the flatlands till warm weather."

  "Unless they're being chased," North put in.

  The foreman made no response, and the three continued in silence for three or four miles.

  "How much you know about this particular lofer?" Crippen asked then.

  North was studying patches of snow along both sides of the sunken path they were following. "He can't be poisoned," he said. "Won't go near the meat. Been shot at, never hit bad enough to kill. Digs up traps and springs them. He and his pack answer for several hundred head a year."

  "You been talking to someone."

  "I heard the same story a thousand times, about a thousand other wolves. They all got names. In Montana it's Old Three Toes, in Oregon Gus, in Dakota Pegleg—they're all older than dirt and smarter than some men. It's said. Ranchers always give then names, like they was pets. Makes them easier to deal with, I reckon."

  It was the cold, Fulwider thought, that drew Crippen out of his customary reticence on this occasion. It was he who kept the conversation from flagging, as North sank into monosyllable, and eventually to ill-tempered grunts.

  "Running shot," the foreman said. "Winged him, right hip. I was using a single-shot Springfield and wasn't packing no side arm. He went down rolling, but by the time I got reloaded he was up again and gone through the pines north of Gray's Lake. Would of had him even then, but my horse got tangled in brush and pulled up lame. It was right after that I got the Colt and the Henry repeater. Ain't had a chance at him since."

  "How did you know it was Black Jack?" asked the journalist.

  "By his size, for one, and by his black mantle. Covers his head and shoulders like a hood. There's others big as him, and there's lots with as much black in their coats, but he's the only one that's both. Also I seen his mate later, a good-size bitch and damn near pure white, though I didn't get a shot. There ain't two that color in a hunnert miles. If you see a pack moving along a ridge half a mile off and one of them is white you can bet it's Jack that's leading them."

  They were a mile off the trail that swung east to Newcastle headquarters when North peeled off to the west for a hundred yards, di
smounted, spent some minutes inspecting a ribbon of frozen gray slush and announced perfunctorily that he had found wolf tracks.

  "How can you be certain?" Fulwider interposed, after he and Crippen had cantered over to investigate. The prints in question were swollen by melting, and vague. "This close to civilization, wouldn't it more likely be a dog?"

  "No, sir." The foreman pointed. "See where he stuck his hind paw in the track made by the front? Same over here. A dog's would be a couple of inches inside."

  "Old one," commented the wolfer, more to himself than to the others.

  Crippen nodded. "Or sick. Hydrophobic, maybe, though they are too blurred to say for sure. That would explain its being so close to folks. They don't scare when they're like that."

  Fulwider wondered if some bizarre frontier joke was being carried out at his expense. "You aren't saying that you can determine whether a wolf is old or sick just by its track!" he demanded.

  No one replied. Crippen was watching North. "Which way you reckon?"

  The wolfer's eyes searched the sky to the south, a leprous silver over the mountains. Finally he pointed at a jagged peak that resembled a dog's molar. "There. Heading west."

  The foreman nodded again and leaned over in his saddle to spit. "Figures. They been doing most of their killing down by the lake."

  Fulwider squinted in that direction, but could see nothing beyond a flock of birds flapping westward. From this distance it might have been a swarm of mosquitoes.

  "How far to the river?" North asked.

  Crippen studied him, chewing. The upper half of his face was obscured by the shadow of his Stetson, leaving only his moustache and working jowl visible. "Ten, twelve miles. How'd you know there was one?"

  "Lakes don't just drop down like manure. They got to be fed." He mounted. "We'll camp just this side, cross over first light."

  Days were short at that elevation. It was well past dark by the time they reached the river, where moonlight slid along the rippling surface at the base of a gentle grade. The journalist, who hadn't eaten since the night before, forgot his hunger as he dismounted and pain rushed to every muscle and joint in a body pampered by years of streetcar travel. He had never before known what it was like to be too exhausted to eat.