The Ides of Matt 2015

by M. L. Buchman

  Technically, he had another day down. Instead, he hit the bookstore for a wilderness guide. Flora and Fauna of the Lolo Forest was perfect. Then he spotted a title on wolves and grabbed it too. It had become clear that Wolfgirl was gone from his life, but he wanted to read up on them anyway. Tom went through the grocery store, loaded up his pack to a ridiculous weight, and struggled back up to the summit.

  And Wolfgirl had left him a note with the substitute lookout.

  Hi! and a line-drawing of what he now recognized as a wolf’s paw print for a signature. Later that afternoon, he’d been idly doodling between lookout duties, and had drawn wind-blown hair around the paw print as if it was a face.

  He didn’t know why it mattered, but it did.

  Shit!

  7

  It was late afternoon and Patty should have headed down the trail and into town. She hated to be away from the mountain and her wolf dens. There were two packs. One pack of six had a dozen pups just starting to peek their noses out of the dens. The other was a threesome led by a great, black-furred male; the smaller pack had just five pups as far as she could tell. The two groups had very little to do with each other except for the older female of the threesome, gray in the muzzle, who hunted across the range. It was her tracks that crossed the trail back and forth. All the other wolves hunted down the valleys on their own sides of the ridge.

  Patty had spent three intense weeks trying to track that lone female and discover what she was doing on both sides, but hadn’t found out yet. Patty monitored the packs nonstop, except for an afternoon, going up to the lookout tower, only to discover that was Fireboy’s day off the mountain.

  Quite what had drawn her up the mountain that day was unclear. She’d only shared a cup of coffee and a few jokes, but he’d stuck in her mind. One thing she’d learned in the Army was to pay attention to those little things. In Iraq, wondering about that unexplained cardboard box along the roadside, could be someone’s groceries, could be an IED. Don’t remember that pile of cut wheat stalks off the side of the road at the junction? Turns out to be perfect cover for a shooter.

  Now she was back again, to find out what had stuck in her mind about Fireboy. She thought about kicking the timber at ground-level a couple of times to announce she was coming. Then she remembered his seriously cute, “Holy crap!” when he’d discovered he wasn’t wearing anything but very tight briefs and binoculars.

  Patty kept her gait light on the stairs and moved upward silently despite her heavy pack which had become like a second skin. On the way up, she could only marvel at the view after having her head down in the woods for three weeks. She so loved being out here.

  Up at the catwalk level, she could see through the broad windows into the cabin—it was a very fine view indeed. He was wearing shorts, but that was all. It was June 21st according to her observations log book, mid-summer’s eve, and the late afternoon sun was warm.

  The stairs had landed her at the north side, close beside the door. Fireboy was facing away from her doing a slow methodical scan of the hills to the south. Now only ten feet away, she could see the definition of his shoulder muscles put on display by his raised arms.

  Clean, no tats, like a canvas not yet written upon. Beneath her shirt she wore a lone she-wolf face on her left shoulder blade. Eyes closed, howling a song of purest joy.

  He slowly turned in her direction as he inspected his way around the hills. The abs definition from the side was just as nice.

  Then facing her…and finally the fat end of the binocs lined up on her face and she smiled.

  “Holy crap!” just like the first time. He jerked down the glasses and looked at her blankly.

  She didn’t know what response she wanted or expected from him. But it was a good one when it came—

  “Wolfgirl!” His smile was huge and welcoming. Then he raised the binoculars again and got points for not aiming them at her breasts. “My, what big teeth you have.”

  Patty laughed. It was something she hadn’t done in a long time. Not since before her commander had almost succeeded in raping her—“because deep down she really wanted it”—before she succeeded in breaking his face—“because deep down he really wanted it.” Not since…she didn’t know when.

  8

  Tom was glad it was the end of the afternoon watch, his last scan of the peaks and valleys for the day. She was actually here, standing in his doorway as if that was somehow completely normal. Only habit reminded him to call in an end-of-day report of “no smokes, no fire activity, Gray Wolf Summit out of service.”

  He thought about all of the clichés. “You’re here!” “Wasn’t expecting you!” Really wasn’t.

  He also hadn’t known quite how beautiful she was. He’d seen her face before, clear skin, dark eyes of unfathomable depth. Even in the three weeks since he’d last seen her, her hair had grown and now looked just a little out of control, a touch wild. She was what the guys at the shop would have called a “solid gal.” Not heavy—there was not an ounce of heavy anywhere on Wolfgirl—but not slender or model frail either. She was the kind of woman who had the strength to do something other than look good in clothes. The chest and waist belts of her pack stretched her thin cotton t-shirt tight over her breasts. Very nice.

  Say something you idiot!

  “Was that you I heard howling at the moon last night?”

  “Might have,” that grin lit up her face even brighter.

  Forget pretty, plug in gorgeous with that smile.

  “Catch any fires yet?” she asked.

  He slapped a hand tragically to his chest, and realized that once again he was mostly unclothed in front of her. Go with it. “Not so much as a firefly,” he moaned like a player in a Shakespearean drama.

  “Not much of a Fireboy, are you?”

  He tried to sigh tragically.

  Must have worked; that surprising, musical laugh reemerged.

  “How goes the wolf hunt?” he wanted to keep her talking.

  “Fucking awesome!”

  “Drop your pack…” please stay awhile, “…and tell me.”

  She did, dropping it with a heavy thunk that seemed to shake the cab with its weight. She pulled out a water bottle and turned to point north.

  Then she cursed, “Do you have a map?”

  Now it was his turn to laugh. There was the drawing around the whole top of the wall. There was the wide area map mounted on the Osborne finder that gave him the area for fifty miles in every direction. And on the main desk he kept a 7-1/2-minute quadrangle map rolled out. It showed the area for seven-and-a-half miles north of Cougar Peak—the area he’d known she was tramping.

  “Do you have the fifteen?”

  He pulled out the larger area 15-minute map.

  For the next half hour she led him on a tour of a vast range of hills and valleys, amazing him with the amount of territory she and the wolves covered. Her hard-bitten nails tracing the lines of brutal climbs that had nothing to do with fire-tower trails or logging roads. She’d been hiking straight through brush. The excitement in her voice was so true and pure and it evoked a whole series of emotions.

  At first, awe that anyone could care so much about…anything. She was pulling out her log book to trace the wolves’ movements more accurately over the terrain of the map.

  Then it was discomfort and finally a shame that had him shuffling foot to foot. He cared about nothing this much; the past few years he’d mostly felt…just blank.

  What the hell was he doing with his life?

  A college degree he couldn’t imagine ever using, a career that included wiping blood, vomit, and empty beer bottles out of shattered cars before he could even work on them, and now sitting alone watching a forest that might never catch on fire. Even if it did, the more experienced spotters at Cougar Peak or Old Crag would probably spot it long before he did.

  But finally
Wolfgirl overwhelmed his sense of uselessness. Her excitement swept him aboard.

  When she spotted Dutcher and Dutcher’s The Hidden Life of Wolves on his desk, she cried for joy and dragged it onto the map to flip pages searching for pictures that would show him what The Messenger—as she’d dubbed the traveling female—looked like. He’d barely been able to focus on the pictures as they rubbed shoulders and jostled together hip to hip while she told more stories.

  He’d made dinner, that she’d bolted, and they’d made love on his narrow bunk as the sunset filled the fire tower with the colors of fire. She rose over him, feral, powerful, as wild as her wolves. The red-gold light played over her skin as she threw her head back and cried out when he sheathed himself and entered her.

  Tom half expected her to howl, instead she groaned like her heart had been ripped from her chest. He leaned up to bury his lips and his face between her breasts and she pulled him in with a truth, with an honesty of emotion he’d never found in a woman before.

  This was not a woman who revved his engines or fit him like the seat of a Porsche 944 Turbo. She was too primal, too purely herself for that.

  When their climaxes ripped through them he felt every jolt through her body as if it was his own.

  And after their pulses peaked then slowed and their bodies both shuddered until she finally lay still upon his chest, then she wept.

  He held her, stroked her hair, and whispered in her ear that she was okay.

  Okay? She was life-changing amazing, but that wasn’t what she needed to hear right now as the sobs wracked her, as the smell of salt tears washing against his cheek threatened to overpower the scent of the forest that clung to her hair.

  They slept clinging tightly to each other.

  In the middle of the night, she woke him, and by the light of the stars she lay beneath him and they were as gentle with each other as they’d been frantic earlier.

  Tom woke alone with the sunlight streaming over him.

  A note rested on the open page of The Hidden Lives of Wolves.

  I owe you three pounds of oatmeal,

  a half bottle of maple syrup,

  and a box of energy bars.

  You’re very pretty when you sleep.

  Again, the paw-print signature.

  This time there was a radio frequency.

  She’d left the note on the picture of the wolf he’d chosen as prettiest in the whole book. It was a close-up of a black-furred wolf. Just her face, with her chin resting on the snow, yellow eyes looking right at the camera.

  9

  Patty went back to him whenever she could tear herself away.

  Talked to him by radio on other nights when he wasn’t on fire watch and the wolves weren’t on an active hunt.

  June passed into July.

  Fireboy’s first fire sighting had them talking for hours over their radios. She normally limited herself to fifteen minutes to conserve batteries, but he’d been so excited she couldn’t help herself and let him roll. She’d been very attentive the next day to make sure that her solar battery charger was always aligned to best advantage to the sun.

  Something was changing inside her. Patty had come to the wilderness for her wolves and the silence of nature, but like a bear to a honey trap, she couldn’t resist circling back to the fire tower atop Gray Wolf Summit.

  It wasn’t even the sex.

  Okay. It wasn’t just the sex.

  When they were together, nothing else existed. There were visits when they hardly spoke a word. She would track him to his cabin atop the summit, take all he could give her, sleep in his arms, and be gone back to the wolves by daybreak. Such a heavy sleeper, he rarely woke to see her off. But when he did, he always caressed her gently and kissed her sweetly. One of those wordless nights he’d spent hours tracing every line of her wolf tattoo as if stamping its joy onto her soul more deeply than the tattoo artist had.

  Other visits, they might not make love at all. Just watch the sunset, curl up in each other’s arms, and sleep. They talked of nothing and everything, but only about the present. Neither of them had a past or future. Neither of them even had a name.

  Patty was not her mother or her grandmother or even her great-gran. They had all married their men at sixteen or seventeen and given birth well before the acceptable nine months had passed.

  The one thing Patty knew for certain, being with a man for more than a time or two was too great a risk. Too dangerous. But again that bear to the honey trap; she could no more resist Fireboy than he could her.

  He’d taken to doing the town food-run for both of them so that she didn’t have to leave the wilderness. On his way down the mountain, he would radio, gather what little trash she couldn’t burn, and bring back an extra twenty pounds of supplies. He never stayed away overnight, though she never let him return directly to the tower unrewarded.

  If the wolves were running that night, she’d sneak him into one of the blinds she’d created along the primary trail. He’d been nervous as hell the first couple times, even after she assured him that wolves didn’t attack humans. But as they watched The Messenger through the view screen on her night-vision camera—and the female had given them little more than a sideways glance—he’d settled down. When the wolf was gone, they made love among the soft ferns with the rich smell of the forest duff wrapped around them.

  “Wolfgirl!” the radio snapped at her early on a hot August afternoon.

  A startled rabbit leapt and bolted from close beside Patty’s position.

  The Messenger shot after it, but Patty knew the wolf would be too late.

  “What?” she yelled back into the radio.

  “Where are you?”

  “Go away!” She began gathering her camera gear and was about to shut off the radio in frustration—the rabbit would have made a great catch and she knew how hard it was getting for the old wolf to hunt. This wouldn’t be her last season, but the end had just come a little closer.

  “Where are you? It’s important,” he shouted at her.

  “Head of Long Tail Creek, about two hundred yards above the western den.”

  “You need to get out of there. Get up onto the ridge trail. Either get to me or get off the mountain.”

  “Why?” But she heard why. She found a break in the forest canopy and caught a glimpse of a black airplane painted with orange-and-red flames like a sports car. Even as she watched, small figures dressed in yellow tumbled out of the rear and then popped open parachutes.

  Two smokejumpers. Four.

  The plane circled back, four more.

  And a third time.

  Two smokejumpers is what they sent to stop a typical small fire, under an acre. Four could beat down a half dozen acres. A dozen smokies was very bad news indeed.

  A helicopter came in. Instead of delivering more smokejumpers up high, it came in so low that she had to cover her ears as it by passed overhead and continued down into the steep valley. Then there was a high whine, momentarily louder than the roaring engines and the pounding rotors, and a shower of red retardant sheeted from the sky down onto the forest in the valley far below her—but not that far.

  The wind, almost undetectable down here in the trees, was brushing downslope, which would explain why she hadn’t smelled any wood smoke. Even though the wind might be washing down the hill, fire loved to climb.

  Patty was a dozen scrambling steps upslope before she caught herself.

  The Messenger hadn’t smelled the wood smoke either. And if she hadn’t, then the wolves in the den down below hadn’t.

  It was absurd, she was human, they were wolves. But she knew them, had named and cataloged each one, knew them by their markings, their behaviors, even the half-grown pups. Of them all, only The Messenger remained nameless to her.

  Another helo roared by low overhead, another sheet of red cascading from the
sky.

  “Wolfgirl, tell me you’re on the move.”

  She wasn’t. She was frozen between escape and saving—

  Patty plunged down the slope, smashing a shoulder against a tree to slow herself down when her speed went out of control, jumping over a boulder that threatened to kneecap her and landing a dozen feet below in a roll that was only broken when she tumbled into a blackberry patch. Cursing and bleeding from a dozen scratches, she circled wide below the den.

  The roar of chainsaws and heart-stopping thunder of crashing trees below told that the trouble was far closer than she’d like.

  Approach the den from below.

  The pack was out front, agitated by the noise, but not frightened by the fire they couldn’t smell. Blackthorne the big male pacing back and forth. Mariko, the small pack’s second female—Blackthorne’s true love in Shogun—was guarding the pups, keeping them confined in the cave.

  Patty climbed back toward them.

  “Shoo! Move!” The massive black pack leader turned to face her but, other than a worried snarl, made no effort to move off. She didn’t dare move any closer, he might attack her in simple panic. Then she had an idea.

  Patty pulled out her can of bear pepper spray. She shot the smallest squirt she could upslope and a bit to the side.

  She heard a sharp Yip! from Blackthorne just as she realized her mistake. The rising heat of the fire below them was now actively pulling air downslope to feed itself. The pepper spray she’d shot near the wolf was also dragged right back down on her.

  It wafted into her face.

  She cried out in pain as it hit her eyes and nostrils despite her raised arm. Diving down, she rubbed her face in the soft ferns and cool earth. She screamed out the pain that even that small amount of spray had caused.