Weylyn didn’t find it funny. “I don’t joke about snow,” he said brusquely, pulling up the fur-trimmed hood of his coat and closing his eyes.
* * *
Five hours later, we arrived in Meltwater, a small town on the west end of Mammoth National Park. We had been set up in a log cabin just north of town at the foot of the Elders, the three highest peaks in the park. I could tell Weylyn immediately felt at home in this wild place. He didn’t even wait until the car had stopped before he jumped out and ran into the trees to gather firewood. “Why don’t you wait until we’ve looked inside?” I called after him, but he was already darting around, scooping piles of dead branches into his arms. “How about you, Merlin?” I asked the pig in the backseat. He grunted in affirmation and followed me into the cabin.
The interior was plain, but cozy. It had the most basic Western comforts: a wood-burning stove, running water, electricity, bed. The only adornment was a century-old quilt that hung on the back of the sofa, depicting wolves running through trees after fleeing deer. Stitched on the top left corner was a solitary wolf howling at the moon. I imagined that quilt had probably been there since the cabin was built, long before anyone really studied wolves in an empirical sense, back when wolves were something men wrote poetry about, not reports.
The door swung open and Weylyn came bustling into the room, his arms heavy with kindling. He was out of breath with excitement. “This place is incredible! I found three types of edible mushrooms and dozens of raspberry bushes. It’ll be a few months yet until we see berries, but imagine the kind of summer we’ll have! We can have cake with raspberry syrup every single day!” He dumped the pile of wood at the foot of the stove. “Do you have matches? I’ll get a fire going.”
His enthusiasm was so infectious that I let out a small laugh.
“What? Did I say something funny?” he asked.
“No,” I said, smiling. “I’m just glad you’re happy.”
“You seem rather happy yourself.”
I thought about it, smiled shyly, and nodded. It was quite possibly the happiest I’d ever been.
There was only one bed, and Weylyn insisted I take it. “I used to sleep in a cave with a wolf as a pillow. I have no problem taking the couch.” The bed is big enough for both of us, I wanted to say, but was afraid of sounding too aggressive.
I had never been very good at flirting. My sexy voice usually came out sounding slightly angry, which I think was some kind of unconscious defense mechanism. Quan once compared it to a dog. “They wag their tails when they’re happy and when they’re mad. How are you supposed to know the difference?” He quickly learned the difference when I grabbed his coffee and dumped it down a sewer drain. I liked Weylyn, and I didn’t want to scare him off, so I decided to play it cool and let things happen in their own time.
35
DUANE FORDHAM
I woke up on the couch the next morning with a headache, only it wasn’t really morning. It was just past noon, and it was freezing. I yanked my afghan around me and wandered over to the thermostat. I had the heat cranked all the way up, but it was only fifty-five degrees. Out the window, I could see the snow had stopped falling, but it lay in steep drifts that were probably up to four feet deep. My front porch looked like one lumpy mass of freezer burn. The thermometer hanging outside the window read twenty below.
After coffee and a hot shower, I pulled on thermal underwear, two pairs of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, a fleece pullover, and wool socks. To go outside, I added a fur-lined parka, waterproof pants and boots, leather gloves, and a wool hat. The front door required a bit of a shove, but I managed to open it without too much snow spilling back inside the house. I grabbed a shovel and went to work carving a path for myself down the porch steps, around the side of the house, and down the hill to the barn. I had drunk three cups of coffee, but my head was still pounding. There was a time in my life when I could drink half a bottle of Southern Comfort and go mountain climbing the next morning. At forty-one, those days were long gone. If country music has taught me anything, it’s that getting drunk probably isn’t the best method of dealing with heartbreak. But I’m a traditionalist.
I was halfway down the hill when I heard a low, mournful bellow coming from the barn. I wasn’t unfamiliar with the sound. Primrose had bawled like that after I had sold her last calf to a neighboring rancher.
I ran. Or tried to. It was more like plowing the snow with my legs. I dug in there with my hands to loosen it up, but it was slow going. Rosie’s heartsick song continued until I finally managed to reach the door. I shoveled the nearly five feet of snow that was holding it shut out of the way and shoved it open.
Primrose stood in the middle of the barn standing over the body of her newborn calf, its coat still sticky with fluid. It didn’t move or appear to breathe. Then I saw the wolf, a young male. It was lying on its side with a huge, gaping wound in its abdomen. I approached Rosie slowly so as not to spook her and noticed red on her right horn, not red tinsel or ribbon, but blood, cracked and crusted like it had been there all night. I bent over the calf and Primrose bellowed again, this time like she was pleading me to save it. But I couldn’t. The calf was dead—Maisy, that’s the name I had picked out for her. Maisy was a beautiful calf, coal black with round eyes that were wide with fear. I found myself crying. If I had only been sober, maybe I would have heard the attack and stopped it before it was too late. Rosie had done the best she could without me.
I left Maisy where she was to give Primrose a little more time to say good-bye, wrapped the wolf’s body in a tarp, and dragged it to the far end of the pasture. The ground was too frozen to bury it, so I left it in a snowdrift, hoping it would act as a warning to the rest of its pack. If they decided not to heed it, then they’d have me to answer to.
36
MARY PENLORE
I woke at the stinging hour of 4:00 A.M. to meet my fellow researchers. Hitchhiker’s Road was closed for the winter, so instead of meeting at the main outpost, we met at an old brick building on the bank of a hot spring called Roslyn’s Cauldron. Vapor rose from its glassy surface like exorcised spirits searching for a new place to haunt. There I was met by three strangers, two men and a woman, cocooned in green parkas. Apparently, my reputation preceded me. “This must be the Lobo Girl!” said a bearded man, early fifties, who I knew as zoologist Kurt Dobbs. He was famous in the scientific community not for his research but the three fingers he lost in an altercation with an alpha female. Wolves rarely approach humans, so Dr. Dobbs must have done something to provoke her, although he was all too quick to let the wolf take the blame.
“People usually call me Mary,” I said firmly and held out my gloved hand. For someone with only a thumb and index finger, Dobbs’s grip was surprisingly strong.
“Impressive,” he said condescendingly. “Most feral children never learn to speak.”
“Self-taught. Imagine what I could have done at the school you went to.”
Dobbs’s eyes burrowed into mine. “You should know, I wasn’t included in the selection process. If I had been, you’d still be picking bugs out of swamps.” He turned to the other male researcher. “You attach the toboggan to the Vmax?”
The other researcher nodded.
“Good. I need a cigarette. Meet me out there in three.”
When Dobbs left, it wasn’t just me who sighed with relief; so did the other woman. “I was hoping he’d get here late so I could warn you. He’s been in a bad mood ever since he lost his fingers.”
“But that was years ago.”
“I know,” she said wearily. She had long, inky hair and a cinnamon complexion. Her high cheekbones suggested Native American heritage. I guessed Flathead because the reservation was not far from the park. “I’m Elka, by the way.”
“And I’m Griffin,” the male researcher cut in. He was late thirties or maybe early forties with peppered hair that most people his age would dye. He had the perpetually windburned face of a professional skier without the physique
and wore glasses that probably fogged up every time he walked indoors. “So. Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“Your story. Did you really live with wolves?” They examined me skeptically.
“Only for a few weeks,” I said, now embarrassed. “I went to public school. My dad was a butcher.”
Griffin laughed. “You don’t have to convince us. Just him.” He nodded out the window at Dobbs, grabbed his pack, and headed toward the door. “Welcome to the team, Lobo,” he added. Outside, the two men jetted off on their snowmobiles, Griffin pulling a large sled behind him.
“What’s the sled for?” I asked Elka.
Her eyes landed on a picture of a wolf taped to the wall. Out of the nine pictures that hung there under the heading Nomad Pack, this wolf was the biggest, almost certainly the alpha male. “It’s for Amarok,” she said with the reticence of a woman in mourning. “Come on. I’ll take you to meet the family.”
* * *
I was assigned to the Nomads, one of five packs that called the park their home. It was a two-hour hike to where Elka’s tracker said the pack was located. “Normally, we’d take one of the snowmobiles, but Dobbs doesn’t like sharing,” she explained as our boots dragged through over a foot of powder, leaving tracks that looked more like skis than feet. The sun flared over the tremendous glacial peaks that rose on either side of us, artifacts of an ice age long gone. Every summer, a little more of the ancient ice tumbles down the mountainside to melt in puddles like common snowmen. As the glaciers slowly vanish, the forest grows: red cedar, cottonwood, hemlock, lodgepole pine—whose bare trunks extend a hundred feet or more before their branches bear needles. I craned my neck to see the underbellies of branches that cradled soft bundles of snow. It was likely the only green I’d see until the May thaw.
The pack had settled in a valley near Compass Lake. Elka said they had a fresh caribou kill and would likely spend the next day or two sleeping it off and coming back for seconds. When they did relocate, it would probably be to one of the park’s other lakes. “We call them our swim team,” said Elka. “When they settle, it’s never farther than eight hundred meters from a lake.”
I could see why. Compass Lake was a perfect coin of cerulean glass in the purse of five snow-swaddled peaks, a blue gem in a white crown.
Elka’s GPS led us the next two miles to the Nomad pack. When we reached them, they were sprawled out on the snow, bloody, like victims of a massacre, only the blood was that of the caribou carcass that lay hollowed out next to them.
“Wow. That’s a big girl,” Elka said, meaning the caribou. “Timber probably took her down. She’s the fastest.” Elka pointed the wolf out to me. She was small, a natural sprinter with long, muscular hind legs. She lifted one and licked at the matted blood.
Quill, a female with a black-tipped tail, lounged next to her. Her three nieces were tugging on her ears and tail to get her to play. She snapped at them, clearly not in the mood. “Quill is Amarok’s sister. And that’s Astrid, Wisp, and Rabbit.” Elka tried pointing to the right pups as she said their names, but they were wiggling too much for me to tell which was which.
“And that old girl over there is Cinder.” Cinder’s once jet-black coat was white around the muzzle and neck. Her eyes blinked lazily as she watched the pups. “She’s the grandma, Amarok’s mother. She used to be the alpha female before Amarok’s father died, but the other wolves still hold her in high regard.”
A coal-colored wolf with amber eyes paced back and forth next to the carcass. “That’s Amarok’s brother, Peat, the omega. He’s not allowed to eat until the others are finished.” Peat tried his luck and crept toward the carcass, but a large female snarled at him and he backed off. She was light gray save a dark patch that extended from the beginning of her snout to the base of her ears like a veil. “That’s Widow,” Elka explained, “the alpha female. She probably thinks Amarok is coming back, so she’s making Peat wait.” Peat sulked away from the rest of the pack, his skin stretching against his bones as he walked. He sat down, keeping his eyes on the caribou and panting heavily.
“How long will it take them to realize Amarok’s not coming back?” I asked.
“Tomorrow, I’d guess. Widow will take it hard. As far as alphas go, they were very close.”
“Do you think Peat will transition into the alpha role?”
“I doubt it. He’s an untouchable, an omega for life.” Peat rested his chin on his paws, his bony shoulder blades spreading like gargoyle wings behind his head.
We had been standing for only twenty minutes before the cold started to gnaw through my parka. I had already lost feeling in my fingers and toes, and my bottom lip was cracked and bleeding. Elka noticed me trembling. “Don’t worry, Mississippi. You’ll get used to it.”
“Mississippi … Tell Dobbs I like that better than Lobo.”
“Tell him yourself. He finally stopped calling me Pocahontas just last week.”
I closed my eyes briefly and imagined wiggling my toes into warm, yellow sand.
* * *
Hours later, I arrived back at the cabin. Weylyn was curled up on a quilt by the fire with a stack of papers in front of him. He looked up at me and smiled. “Welcome home! I figured you might want a bath, so I turned on the hot water heater. And there’s coffee in the pot.”
“Thanks,” I said through chattering teeth. I walked to the kitchenette and tried to pour myself a cup, but my hand shook so badly only half of it made it inside the ceramic wall. I didn’t care. I gulped it down, nearly burning the roof of my mouth.
“Why don’t you join me by the fire and get warm?” Weylyn scooted over to make a spot for me next to him on the quilt. I took off my boots and lay down with my toes precariously close to the flames.
“How was your day?” Weylyn asked.
“Cold,” I said as my toes tingled back to life. “And kinda sad.”
“Sad?”
Before I left for the day, I had seen Griffin drag Amarok’s body back to camp. He had a three-inch hole in his side, gored to death by the horn of his prey. “Hey! Where’s the cream filling?” Dobbs mooed and looked right at me. I said nothing and went inside to fetch a tarp.
“The alpha male of my pack was killed by cattle. They found him lying just outside a pasture,” I elaborated.
A familiar expression crossed Weylyn’s face, like a door closing on a memory. “That’s a shame.”
“Yeah.” I expected Weylyn to ask more questions about the wolves—he was practically part wolf himself, after all—but he didn’t. He just went back to scrawling something on a piece of paper in his lap as if I had never brought up the subject.
“What are you writing?” I asked, trying to hide my disappointment that he hadn’t been more curious about my work.
“Well, first I wrote my name. I don’t have a phone number, so I skipped that. Now I have to write my address. What is our address?”
“I mean, what are you filling out?”
“Oh! A job application for a logging company.” I must have looked surprised, because he followed it up with, “It’s time for Weylyn Grey to make an honest living. I even listed it in my ‘skills’ section just so there was no confusion.” He proudly held up what looked like a résumé and pointed to his list of “special skills.” Honesty was one of them, along with positive attitude and punctuality.
“I’m not sure those count as special skills, Weylyn. Those are qualities they just expect you to have.”
Weylyn lowered the résumé, disappointed. “Then what qualities do I have that they wouldn’t expect?”
“Weather manipulation?”
Weylyn looked unamused. “I’ll just put wilderness skills.”
“Fifteen Glacier Road West. That’s our address.”
“Thanks,” he said and copied the address with the careful penmanship of a man with something to prove.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired in my whole life,” I groaned and closed my eyes. My whole body ached,
and my thawing fingers and toes felt like they were on fire. It was possible my toes were on fire, but I was too tired to sit up and check. As I drifted to sleep, Weylyn gently pulled the wet socks from my feet and carried me to bed. After he tucked me in, I could swear I felt him kiss me lightly on the forehead, but I may have already been dreaming.
* * *
I woke that night to a deep, subterranean silence. At first, I thought I had gone deaf, but a quick cough eased my fears. Out the window, snowflakes drifted softly, emitting a faint bluish glow like embers of a dying star. I pulled another blanket over me, my fourth, and was about to close my eyes when I saw something move outside.
The markings on her face were unmistakable. It was Widow. She stood as still as a statue, hot puffs of air jetting from her nostrils, her eyes fixed on the cabin. I thought she was looking at me, then realized she was peering into the next window over, Weylyn’s.
The next morning, I decided it was a dream. Weylyn was still fast asleep when I left, so I made sure to lock the door behind me. My dreams would have to find another way in.
37
DUANE FORDHAM
“You got a permit?” asked Gus as we sat on a felled tree to eat our lunches. It was one of those days that looks like summer from the tree line up even though there’s snow on the ground. Supposedly, it was meant to stay like that all week. Lindsay, the owner, said he wanted one hundred loads of lumber before the next snow.
“A permit for what?” I asked as I popped open a Coke.
“Wolf hunting. State issued over three thousand just last month.” He peeked inside the sandwich his wife had made for him. “Shit. Tuna. You like tuna? I’ll trade ya,” he said, waving his sandwich in the air like a flag.
“Sure. Why not?” I said and traded my sandwich for his.
“You’re one helluva guy, Duane. Thank—what the hell is this?” Gus parted the two pieces of bread to reveal a creamy lump of tuna salad.
“You didn’t ask what kind it was.”
“You son of a bitch.” Gus sloppily mushed the sandwich back together and shoved it back at me. “Tomorrow, pack turkey on rye. And a pickle.”
Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance Page 17
