Season of the Wolf

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “What is it, Frank?” Alden asked.

  “I got the TV on in the P.O.,” Trippi said. He gestured toward the southeast corner of the room, which was where he kept the set at the post office, and Alden noticed that his wrist was wrapped in an Ace bandage. “It’s been quiet today. Anyhow, I was watching Fox News and they mentioned Silver Gap.”

  “They did?” Morris said, excitement evident in his voice. He was a big Fox News fan.

  “Uh-huh,” Trippi said. “And I checked CNN and we was on there too.”

  “What about Silver Gap?” Alden asked, afraid he already knew the answer.

  “Wolves,” Trippi said. “They’re sayin’ we got wolves. People from all over says they’s comin’ to Silver Gap to hunt ‘em.”

  “That didn’t take long,” Morris said. “Figure Doug Wolters wants his face on TV?”

  “Could’ve been someone at DOW,” Alden admitted. “But it could just as easily have been someone calling her sister or his grandma in some other state, and that sister or grandma calling someone else. Doubt there’s any way to find the source. We just have to deal with it.”

  “How, Alden?” Trippi asked.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem for you, Frank.” He turned to the police chief. “But you might want to think about hiring someone to replace George Trbovich, Morris. I expect things are going to get ugly in Silver Gap, and I expect it’s going to happen fast.”

  17

  Alex would have been happy walking through these woods even if he hadn’t been accompanied by what he believed, given his limited experience, was the most attractive woman Silver Gap had to offer. The pines didn’t offer their usual cool, verdant comfort because bark beetles had killed them from the inside out, and what should have been lush and green was instead reddish and brown and skeletal. But the earth and rocks were unscarred and the quiet—especially compared to Los Angeles and its environs—was unworldly.

  They hadn’t gone far from town. Robbie had said she couldn’t, explaining without excessive pride that she was the best tracker, hunter, and rifle shot in town, and might be needed in a hurry. She had pulled on a down vest, loaded Alex and a couple of rifles into her ancient red Jeep Wrangler with no roof, a winch on the front, and gas cans strapped to the roll bar, and driven out of town, taking a right on a narrow country road a couple of miles out. That road passed a few houses, some of them the sorts of comfortably worn places he had dreamed of living in, back when he was too young to know how much wealth he would inherit. Then the pavement ended but the road kept going. It was graded dirt for a while, passing another house or two, and then it started climbing. Before long it was a pair of rock-studded dirt ruts that only a high-clearance vehicle could navigate. Robbie drove it fast, as though she had taken it a hundred times.

  The farther from town they got, the more her spirits improved. Soon she was smiling and talking casually, telling Alex about what they were passing, pointing out hills and meadows that had special meaning to her. Then they crested a little rise, and all the pines on the other side were shades of umber and orange, like survivors of a fire. “This what you were looking for?” she asked.

  “It’ll do for starters, yeah.”

  She pulled the Jeep off the little trail and killed the engine. “You want to look around?”

  “Yes.”

  “Knock yourself out.” She unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed out without using the door. Alex didn’t think he could do it as impressively, so he got out the regular way. When he had his feet on firm ground, she was slinging a rifle over her shoulder. “You want one?”

  “I’d be more likely to shoot myself than anything else,” he said. “You think we’ll need them?”

  “Ordinarily, I’d say no,” she said. “Although I wouldn’t come out here without one. But there have been at least three wolf attacks in the last twenty-four hours or so. You don’t want to carry one, it’s okay. Just stay close to me.”

  Alex had no problem with that instruction. He had liked watching her drive, the way she smiled in fierce concentration when the road required careful navigation, climbing up a rocky step in low gear with the four-wheel-drive activated, the way her breasts bobbed when she took a bumpy path at high speed. She had lines at the corners of her eyes and around the sides of her mouth, and when she smiled broadly or laughed, dimples split her cheeks.

  Her features were broader than most of the professional beauties he’d known in L.A., but they worked well together and made her feel somehow more real, more present. He had known women who were regularly on magazine covers or splashed across movie screens sixty feet wide, but in person they were like vapor. Robbie Driscoll was solid; flesh and bones and muscle and blood and hair. That hair was mostly a kind of summer straw yellow, but shot through with darker strands, light browns and coppers, and that flesh was tanned but not leathery or artificially bronzed, and that solidity was something that, in spite of himself, he couldn’t stop thinking about holding.

  “You said you wanted to do some research?” she said.

  “That’s right.” He’d been lost in reflection, he knew, and he hoped she didn’t ask him what he’d been thinking about. He’d have to say it was the trees, and since he’d had his back to them and been facing her, it might have been a hard sell. He got his backpack from the Jeep, and she didn’t ask.

  He took a few core samples and scraped some bark into plastic bags, marking each specimen with the date and approximate location. With a digital still camera, he shot photos of the trees, mostly longer shots encompassing as much of any individual tree as he could, but also close-ups of the needles and the telltale holes that bark beetles had left in the wood. He wished there were a way to capture the absence of the typical fresh pine aroma.

  After a while, he noticed that Robbie was holding the rifle in her hands, and her forehead was furrowed. “Something wrong?”

  She held a finger to her lips and walked closer. Her footsteps were silent. “You haven’t heard it?” she whispered.

  “Heard what?”

  “Something’s coming.”

  Two days earlier he wouldn’t have been alarmed at the sound of those two simple words. Now he was. Robbie was too, from the alert tension in her jaw, the shifting of her green eyes. “What?”

  “I’m not sure.” They were quiet for several seconds, and then he saw her flinch. This time he heard it, too: the crackle of fallen twigs and needles.

  “Wolves?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so. But I don’t want to take a chance.”

  They had wandered a good distance off from the Jeep. “What do we do?”

  She pointed out a cabin he had been entirely unaware of, half-hidden by trees on a nearby hillside. A rutted dirt track led up to it. “Maybe we can hole up there until we see what it is.”

  “You probably wish I was carrying that gun.”

  “Damn skippy. Come on. Quiet but quick.”

  She led the way and he tried to follow in her path. He made more noise than she did, but not a lot, and he was relatively proud of his amateur woodsmanship. They reached the cabin after a hurried three-minute hike. It was rustic, not a place somebody lived, but a pinewood hunting cabin, probably used only a few times a year. The only door was padlocked shut, and shutters over the windows were bolted on the outside.

  “We could shoot the lock off,” Alex suggested.

  “If we have to, yes. But that’ll let everything in the whole forest know where we are. So far it just sounds like one animal, and I’m not sure what.”

  His heart was thudding in his chest and ribbons of sweat pasted his cotton henley shirt to his ribs. If wolves did come, would she be able to hold them off? Would shooting one or two convince the rest to seek easier prey? Or could a whole pack take them down, even though he was here with the apparent offspring of Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley.

  Whatever it was, it did not seem to be taking special pains to stay silent. They huddled near the corner of the cabin, using the building for cover. Tens
ion grew in Alex as he thought about what might be out there—what might, in fact, be circling quietly behind them while the one in front made all the noise.

  Then Robbie relaxed visibly, lowering the rifle’s barrel toward the ground. “What?” Alex asked.

  “It’s just an old elk,” she said.

  “That’s good, then. Right?”

  “It’s good. Mostly,” Robbie said.

  “Mostly?”

  He could see it now, passing between the trees, twenty yards away. It knew they were there but it didn’t panic, just kept going on the path it had probably followed for years, if not decades. It was a big animal, powerfully muscled. Scars from battles fought branded its haunches and sides and left a deep, graying smudge on its muzzle. Battles won, or at least survived. Alex didn’t know much about elk, but he could tell this one was old. It had a rack of antlers that would have looked impressive on any wall, but he glad it was here, in the wild—where it belonged—and not dead, stuffed, and mounted.

  “Go on, granddaddy elk,” Robbie whispered. “Get back to your herd.”

  “Wait,” Alex said. “What was that you said about ‘mostly’ good?”

  “It’s not with the herd,” she said. “It’s alone.”

  “So?”

  “So wolves eat elk. Especially injured elk.”

  “You think they’re watching it?”

  “It’s possible. One or more could be nearby.”

  “And we wouldn’t see them?”

  “Eventually, we’d see them. By then, it could be too late.”

  Alex considered the implications of that statement. The memory of Mike Hackett’s remains made those implications breathtakingly clear. “Maybe we should head back to town.”

  “Do you have everything you need?”

  “I’ve got a start, but no. Not everything.”

  “Then we’ll stay. I don’t know how much time we’ll have, but once I hear from town officials, we might not get another chance to get out here.”

  “As long as you think it’s safe.”

  Robbie touched his arm. The contact was fleeting, but he felt it long after she had moved her hand away, and he liked the sensation. “Alex,” she said, “You can be eaten by a wolf in town. You can catch a deadly virus. You can be hit by a truck. Out here, you can still be eaten by a wolf, but the other two are less likely.”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  “So we’re staying,” she said with firm finality. “Get to work, professor. I’ve got your back. It’s what you’re paying me for, right?”

  He got to work, reflecting, as he did, on the warm comfort he took, knowing that Robbie Driscoll—Silver Gap’s best hunter, tracker, and rifle shot, after all—had his back.

  18

  They followed the general path the big elk took, keeping it in sight as they headed toward another stand of beetle-damaged trees. Alex was fascinated by the huge animal. He would have had a hard time negotiating the forest with a two-foot spread of antlers on his head, but to the elk, with his thick, muscular neck, that was just part of life. The elk moved easily between the pines, occasionally flicking its ears this way or that to pinpoint a sound, or glancing back toward the humans, but not spooked by anything.

  “I guess I’m getting soft,” Robbie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was a time I would have taken him without thinking twice. Now, I’m happy just to watch him.”

  “Is it still elk season? That’s what Hackett was after, right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Season’s still on, but I don’t have an elk tag this year. That’s okay, there’s plenty of meat in my freezer.”

  “You’re not a sport hunter?”

  “Not for years. I either hunt because I need meat, or because somebody’s paying me. It’s my profession, not my hobby. And I’ll tell you, I’m losing my patience for clients who are just out for trophies. These creatures deserve better than that.”

  They walked on a little farther, skirting the rim of a deep ravine, approaching another patch of rust-colored trees, when Robbie put a hand on Alex’s shoulder. “That’s weird,” she said.

  “What?”

  She pointed toward the elk, who was heading back in their direction, but on the far edge of the ravine. “Granddaddy elk went around,” she said. She indicated the slope into the ravine. “This isn’t even remotely too steep for him. If he’s going over there, why didn’t he just go down this side and up the other? He’s traveled well out of his way, for no reason. Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Just following a known path, maybe?”

  “But if that’s the case, if this is a regular route for him, why wouldn’t the path go through the ravine? One thing about animals, they don’t do nearly as many things for totally arbitrary reasons as humans do. If they make a conscious choice, there’s a purpose for it.”

  She veered off course, stepping down the slope. Alex didn’t mind diverting from their agenda for a little while. It was obvious that they would be able to find plenty of damaged trees to shoot, and he appreciated the insights she offered into the forest and its inhabitants. She was coming at it from a much different perspective than he—a perspective gained through on-the-ground experience.

  After about ten steps, she threw a hand up in warning, and froze. Alex was off-balance, in mid-stride, but he brought his foot down and followed her example. Slowly, she moved her hand, extending it down and to their right, pointing. “Wolf,” she whispered. “Do you see her?”

  He didn’t, at first. The ravine was choked with brush and trees, and the only thing moving was a dark brown bird flitting from branch to branch. But he kept looking, trying to divide the ravine floor into quadrants and scanning each quadrant separately, and then there it was, stepping between a couple of low-lying bushes.

  Even from this angle, the wolf looked bigger than he had expected. Its fur was dark gray, almost black except on its long legs, where it bleached to near-white, and shaggy, with a thick tail. It was taller in front, at its powerful shoulders, than in the rear, though not by much. Its ears pointed up. From here, its eyes looked red, but he thought that must be an illusion, a trick of the light. It was aware of them, looking up at them, though not letting their presence interfere with its plans. To Alex, the animal seemed alert, even intelligent.

  “That’s why the elk skirted the ravine,” Robbie said in a low voice. “He knew the wolf was down there.”

  “Should you shoot it?” Alex asked. The thing was more than a hundred feet away, and downhill, but looking at it—knowing it was watching them—made the fine hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  “She’s old, and hurt,” Robbie said. “Look, she’s limping.”

  Alex saw it, then. Not a pronounced limp, but enough to give it a slightly clumsy appearance as it passed through the brush. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “If she had tried to take the elk, she probably wouldn’t have survived the fight,” she said. “That elk was a tough old bastard. I think this wolf left the pack to die, not to hunt.”

  The thing shot them a final glance, then disappeared into the trees. “Anyway, wolves don’t attack people,” Robbie said. “I mean, not without good reason. There are no documented attacks in North America by wolves that weren’t somehow prompted by the human victim. They know what they like to eat, and we’re not it. That one’s done, though. She’s not going to hurt anything bigger than a field mouse, and not even that for long.”

  “Have you seen a lot of wolves?” Alex asked.

  “Not in Colorado, but out of state, sure. I’ve seen my share. There was something strange about that one. I can’t put my finger on it, but it didn’t look quite right to me.”

  The elk was gone, having disappeared behind a ridge on the other side of the ravine. The wolf was out of sight, too, and though the thrill of seeing the two wild animals had not waned, Alex was beginning to feel the weight of responsibility bearing on him. He wanted to finish up and get back to town, see what Pet
er and Ellen were up to, and move forward with the project.

  Robbie didn’t argue when he suggested stopping at the next stand of red pines. “This is so sad,” she said. “All these dead trees.”

  Alex took a knife and peeled back some bark from one of the nearby pines that had not yet died and changed color. He showed her beetle larvae, smaller than grains of rice. “Here’s the culprit,” he said. “Bark beetles infest the trees and lay eggs. The larvae grow up feeding on the trees, interfering with the flow of nutrients. That kills the tree. By then, the adults have moved on to another one, and when the larvae reach adulthood they do the same. It’s still spotty here, but these forests will likely be fully infested soon, and within another year or two it’ll be hard to find a living tree.”

  “Where did they come from? The beetles, I mean?”

  “They’re indigenous,” Alex said. “They’ve always been here, but in the past, cold winters have killed them off every year, preventing widespread infestation. They can’t survive temperatures below about minus twenty. These last several years—last decade or more, really—winter temperatures have been staying milder, allowing the beetles to get a better foothold.”

  “So, global warming?”

  “I prefer the terminology climate change, but yes. That’s ultimately what we’re talking about. And it’s even worse than what I’m saying, because it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning, healthy trees—forests—are a great carbon sink. They suck in carbon from the atmosphere and hold it, keeping it from contributing to warming. But only when they’re alive. Dead trees release the carbon they’ve held in, making the whole situation that much worse. Nature’s just full of tricks like that.”