Wolf Stalker

by Gloria Skurzynski

  “Why, Dad? I don’t want anything to mess up those wolf negatives!”

  “Because there might be a chance—just a small chance—that we could see something on the pictures of the guy with the gun. I know it’s a long shot—” Steven laughed. “Yeah, it really was a long shot for your camera, wasn’t it—300 or 400 hundred yards? Or maybe more than that. And he was hiding in shadow. But sometimes—you never know—pictures can be computer-enhanced to bring out details you wouldn’t otherwise see. Where’s the film?”

  Jack handed over his camera, then crossed the room to stick his head under the cold-water faucet at the small sink. The sink was the only “facility” in the cabin. For showers and other plumbing, they needed to hike across the parking lot to the bathhouse. Jack felt pretty grimy and he smelled like a campfire, but since Steven seemed to be in a hurry, he just doused his face with cold water. That woke him up fast.

  He was rubbing his head with a towel when Olivia came back into the room. “Before you guys go,” she said, “we need to coordinate our plans. Troy’s going with me. Jack’s going with you, Steve. What about Ashley?”

  “I guess she better come along with Jack and me,” Steven answered.

  “OK. Let’s all try to meet at the hotel lobby by 5:30. These kids need a good meal. Troy, come on. We can leave now.” As Troy followed Olivia through the door to the outside, he asked her, “Can we call the police about my mother before we go see Silver?”

  Steven shook his head slightly, a look Olivia caught. “Why don’t we wait till a little later for that, Troy?” she suggested. “We want to get to the wolf pen before the sun’s too low.”

  After they’d gone, Steven asked, “Ready, kids?”

  “Ready.” Their parkas would be too warm now, so both of them pulled on the thick sweatshirts Olivia had packed for them. While they walked along the paved road toward the administration building, Steven remarked, “Poor Troy. He keeps asking, and I hate to have to keep telling him—we still don’t know what happened to his mother. The longer we don’t hear anything, the more likely it is that she just took off and abandoned him.”

  “No way, Dad,” Ashley said. “Last night Troy told us all about his mom. She’d never just leave him.”

  Steven didn’t answer, but he looked down at Ashley in that grown-up way both kids hated, as though innocent children couldn’t possibly understand the ways of the real world. Jack was about to add, “She’s right, Dad,” but his father’s expression dampened the words before they came out. Sometimes it was adults who just didn’t understand. Or didn’t trust enough.

  As they neared the building they saw Mike hurriedly crossing the road toward them.

  “Hey, Mike. What’s the rush?” Steven asked him.

  “Tryin’ to get away from those guys.” Mike tossed his head toward a rusty pickup truck, with huge tires, peeling out of the parking lot. Inside the cab, three big men were crammed together.

  “Who are they?”

  “A posse of angry ranchers.”

  “What’d they want from you?” Steven asked.

  “I didn’t wait to find out. Soon as I opened the door and heard them yellin’ inside about wolves endangering their livestock, I just turned around and scooted right back out.” Mike grinned guiltily over his narrow escape. “I did hear one thing, though, before I closed the door. They were saying George Campbell’s dog, the one that got killed by the wolves, was worth a thousand dollars.”

  “A thousand? We heard him say 500 on the radio,” Jack mentioned.

  “Shoot! I know for a fact,” Mike told them, “Campbell got the dog from an old rancher who lives out past Gardiner, and that rancher never charged more than 20 bucks for a weaned pup. I have an idea the price goes up every time George Campbell tells his story.” Mike chuckled, then asked, “Where are you guys off to now?”

  Steven held out his hand to show Mike the roll of film and answered, “Jack and I need to develop this. He took a few pictures that might show something useful, if we’re lucky. But probably not.”

  “How ’bout if I borrow Ashley for a while?” Mike suggested. “I’d like to check out what each of the three kids remembers about the shooting, one at a time. I can take her to the ice-cream shop—”

  “Yes!” Ashley cried. “I’ve got a great memory! I’ll tell you everything that happened.”

  Steven rolled his eyes. “Ashley’ll confess to anything if you buy her a chocolate sundae. We’re meeting at the Lodge at 5:30, Mike.”

  “Sounds good. See you then.”

  The darkroom was located in the basement—dark-rooms were almost always in basements, because less outside light reached them that way. After Steven checked all the equipment and jugs of chemical solutions, he turned out the lights to begin processing the film.

  Jack remembered the first time his father had taken him into their darkroom at home. He’d been not quite eight years old, and excited to be initiated into the mysteries of his father’s work. The total blackness hadn’t frightened him because he could sense his father’s nearness, and all the while, Steven kept talking, explaining everything he did.

  At that time Jack had been reading a book about the first Indians who’d lived near the Teton Mountains, deep inside caves lit only by small, smoky fires. If the fires went out, the caves became so black that nothing real could be seen, but after a while, the eyes of the imagination played tricks, and real-looking images would appear before them in the darkness. They thought it was magic. Then Indian fathers would tell their sons about hunting with spears and arrows, and teach them to beg forgiveness of the animals they killed for food.

  Two thousand years later, when Jack first stood in the total blackness of his father’s darkroom, and Steven explained to him how to develop film, he’d thought of those early Indians in their dark caves. Because images began to appear to Jack then, growing clearer and clearer in the developer trays. They were the animals Steven had captured on film with his camera. Watching them come forth from blank paper, shaping themselves into bears and cougars and bison right in front of his eyes—it had seemed like magic to Jack, too.

  Now he waited, hoping that his own pictures would turn out perfect. In his mind’s eye, in this darkness, he remembered how the wolf had stared at him with those yellow eyes, alert and unafraid. He wanted to show his mother just how majestic the wolf had been before the bullet slammed against his body. As his father lifted the strip of color negatives from the stabilizer solution, Jack crossed his fingers. Were they any good?

  He lost all track of time. After the negatives dried, his father let Jack put them into the enlarger. There were ten prints. The four of the mule deer when the wolves had chased it across the creek were too out of focus to be any good. There were three of the wolf, and three others of where the gunman had stood. The rest of the negatives, blank because they were unexposed, Jack threw away.

  They loaded paper into the tube and began to process the prints. When the lights came on and the prints emerged from the processor, Jack let out the breath he’d been holding. The wolf pictures were going to be beautiful! He waited for his father to exclaim over them, but Steven just stood there, acting puzzled.

  “I don’t get this,” Steven said.

  “Dad!” It was a cry of disappointment. “What about my wolf shots? Are any of them any good?”

  “What! Oh—Jack—they’re so good I’ll need a half hour just to tell you how great they are. It’s these other pictures I can’t figure out.”

  “I know the deer pictures are out of focus—it was moving too fast.”

  “No—these.” Steven held up the strip of negatives to examine them. “First I thought maybe it was a flaw in the film, but the negatives are fine. Look at that—” He pointed. “In the negs it’s a little green dot; in the prints it’s a bright red dot. It’s on all three pictures of where you said the gunman was standing.”

  Lifting the wet prints carefully, one by one, touching them only on the corners, Jack saw what his father mea
nt. Each of the three prints showed foothills, a clump of pine trees—and a red dot in the middle of the trees. The dots were tiny, like pinpoints of red light, although one of them seemed to have a small halo around it.

  “Maybe it’s sun reflecting off something,” Jack suggested, but Steven answered, “No, sunlight reflects white, not red. Oh well, you ought to be really happy with your wolf pictures, son. As soon as we get home, I’m going to enlarge them and frame them for your room. But we gotta go now to meet your mom and Troy and Mike and Ashley, so we’ll let these prints dry and pick them up later.”

  “Take the negatives!” Jack insisted. Prints weren’t too important—he could always make extra prints, as many as he wanted. Negatives, though, were irreplaceable.

  Everyone met in the hotel lobby and then hurried across the street to the restaurant, because by that time the kids were really starved. At least Jack was; Troy looked gloomy and Ashley had already eaten a chocolate sundae, so maybe she wasn’t too hungry.

  After they ordered, Mike said, “Take a look out the windows, guys. We have visitors.”

  A herd of elk had arrived at the restaurant for dinner, too, but they were dining on the front lawn, literally. A big bull elk, with an impressive rack of antlers, lay comfortably on his belly, chewing his cud and wiggling his ears to drive away flies. His harem of three elk cows stood nearby, heads down, munching the lawn. Two middle-size calves faced away from them, providing a super view of their pale rumps to the watchers at the restaurant window.

  Olivia put her arm around Troy’s shoulders. “These are the animals I work with, Troy, down at the Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole. Every winter whole herds of them migrate from Yellowstone to get fed at the refuge. And they don’t just come from here. They come from all the higher ranges in the Tetons, too. We get 10,000 head of elk coming into the refuge every winter, and for each animal, each day, we put out 10 pounds of hay.”

  “Hay! That’s a lot!” Ashley joked.

  Troy didn’t answer.

  A day ago Jack would have thought he was just being surly; now he realized how much Troy was hurting inside, about his mother.

  “If we didn’t help feed them, a lot of the elk would starve over the winter,” Olivia said.

  Across the road an even bigger bull elk, with even grander antlers, shook himself and pawed the ground with his right front hoof. He seemed to be putting on a lusty display for the benefit of the cows. As he bent down to scrape his antlers against the grass, his powerful shoulder muscles bunched up; then he lifted his head and bugled. Even from inside the restaurant, with the doors and windows closed, his bugling sounded impressive.

  “I like wolf song better,” Ashley admitted.

  Their food arrived then, and the six of them sat around the table, eating and talking—all except Troy, who didn’t do much of either.

  “How were Jack’s pictures?” Olivia asked.

  “Your son,” Steven answered, “is one of the world’s great junior photographers. As soon as we’re finished here I’ll go get the prints of his wolf pictures. But you know,” he said, turning to Mike, “there’s something that’s weird about the other pictures—the ones Jack took of the mountain. Right in the middle of all three prints is a little red dot. I can’t figure out what it came from.”

  Mike shrugged. “Maybe somebody dropped a bandanna on the ground.”

  “No, it looked more like a light.”

  “Ashley said she saw a shirt through the binoculars—” Olivia began.

  “The shirt wasn’t red, Mom. It was blue plaid. Too bad I couldn’t see the face of the person wearing it.”

  “I couldn’t guess what the red spot was, then,” Mike said. “But I have to tell you, your Ashley makes a great witness. She convinced me you kids heard only one shot. And then she came up with a question that got me thinking.”

  “What question was that?” Troy asked, talking with his mouth full.

  “Ashley wanted to know why we couldn’t take the bullet fragment from the radio collar and the bullet from the wolf’s wound and see if they matched. In the first place, we don’t have the bullet that hit the wolf’s side. It was a grazing wound, so the bullet just skimmed off somewhere.”

  “Good thing it did,” Olivia said. “If it had penetrated, Silver would have died.”

  “Right. Silver is one lucky wolf,” Mike continued, “in a lot of ways. Because that first bullet, the one that hit the collar, is what we call a hot bullet—it was made to fragment on impact at close range. Looking at the way it tore up the battery pack, I’d say that bullet came in at an angle, too. When it hit, it blew into fragments, but the battery pack absorbed most of the energy. I’m sure Silver got knocked down from the impact—you know, like when a policeman wearing a bullet-proof vest gets shot at? The bullet doesn’t go in, but it slams him to the ground.”

  “I did notice he had some blood spots around his collar,” Olivia said.

  “I guess it was from a few tiny bullet fragments striking him through his thick fur.”

  Mike put down his fork and added, “Anyway, I started to wonder just when that first shot was fired. The one that hit the collar. Was it yesterday, or even before that?”

  This time they all stopped eating to pay attention to Mike.

  “I realized,” he went on, “that this was the same wolf whose signal stopped transmitting a couple of days ago. His radio collar went silent on the day George Campbell’s dog was attacked. So I thought, is that just a coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe not. And then—”

  “I asked him about the hair,” Ashley said. “I said, ‘What color was that hair that was stuck on Silver’s collar?’”

  Olivia frowned. “What are you suggesting, Mike? That it was dog hair? Golden retriever?”

  “Could have been. I think it might be smart if we paid a visit to George Campbell and picked up a sample of his dog’s hair to see if it matches.”

  “His dog is dead,” Troy said.

  “Dogs shed hair. If he stayed in a doghouse, there’d be plenty of hair inside it. Most likely it won’t match what was on Silver’s collar, and even if it does, I don’t know just what that would prove, exactly.”

  “Well, if it was the dog’s hair, that would prove the collar had to be shot before the dog attack, wouldn’t it?” Jack exclaimed. “The hair wouldn’t stick to the radio collar if it was smooth. Only if it had jagged edges from being blown apart.”

  Mike shrugged. “It’s a mystery. And there’s another mystery we didn’t tell you kids about. You know how we went searching for the dog’s remains yesterday? We rode to the exact place where Campbell reported the attack happened. Well, we didn’t find any dog remains.”

  “We went back and forth along the border between Gallatin National Forest and Yellowstone National Park—” Olivia began.

  “Three times,” Steven broke in. “We split up and scoured the whole area, a good couple of miles in all directions from the spot Campbell pointed out on the map in Mike’s office—”

  “That’s why we were so late getting back,” Olivia continued. “We searched it thoroughly, but we couldn’t find a thing. I guess Mr. Campbell was mixed up about where it actually happened. I mean, there’s no visible boundary marker that a person would notice, especially with a pack of wolves chasing him.”

  “Anyway, I know where Campbell lives,” Mike said. “Anyone want to come with me? We can all drive there in the park van.”

  Jack, Troy, Mike, and Steven all shoved back their chairs at the same time and stood up. Olivia got up, too, and answered, “Definitely. There are a lot of questions I’d like to ask Mr. Campbell. Like, how old was his dog, and was it in good health? Wolves often attack an animal when they sense it’s weak—if it’s sick or limping or something.”

  “Yeah, and I’d like to ask him if he saw any of those demonstrators in the woods the day his dog was attacked,” Mike added. “If it turned out to be the same day the wolf’s collar got hit, Campbell might be able to give us a lead on who did the sh
ooting. A militia member, or an angry rancher, or anyone he noticed carrying a rifle—”

  “Dad, please, let’s pick up my prints before we go,” Jack begged.

  “Good idea,” Troy said. “I want to see the pictures of my wolf.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Go on, keep them,” Jack told Troy. “I can make a ton more prints if I want to.”

  “Thanks!” Troy clutched the wolf pictures as if it were Christmas and he’d just been given the keys to Wal-Mart. He stared at them for five full minutes as the van wound along the road toward the park’s north gate. Then, with much less interest, Troy examined the other three pictures.

  “Weird!” he said. “Red dots in the middle of each picture. Must be something wrong with your camera.”

  “No way,” Jack argued. “If it was the camera, there’d be red dots in the wolf pictures, too. And they are fine.” More than fine, he added in his own mind. They’re the best I’ve ever taken.

  Troy shrugged and handed the prints back to Jack, except for the wolf pictures, which he continued to grip tightly in his hand.

  “Let me see,” Ashley said. “The red dot ones.” She studied them for a long while before shoving them into the pocket of her sweatshirt. By then, her lips and eyes had both started to pucker. “How much farther?” she asked, looking more and more uncomfortable. No wonder, Jack thought, since she’d had a full dinner on top of a chocolate sundae, and the road kept twisting and turning enough to make anyone a little carsick. Jack was glad Ashley had picked the seat right next to a back window. If she really felt bad, she wouldn’t have to crawl over him to reach fresh air.

  “About ten more miles,” Mike answered. “The last part will be on an unpaved road.” He glanced at the rear-view mirror to check Ashley—from the sound of her voice, he must have been able to tell she was queasy. Mike probably had kids of his own, Jack thought, who got carsick on roads like these. “George Campbell owns a run-down little ranch a few miles from here. He stays on the ranch but he doesn’t raise cattle anymore. I don’t know how he makes a living.”