Season of the Wolf

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  She knew what it felt like to be prey. She didn’t like it.

  Peter was as bad as the rest. He was completely enraptured by the scene. When he remembered to shoot video, he did so with the camera pressed to his eye and his mouth hanging open, as if trying to swallow the testosterone floating through the air. His cheeks were flushed, and when he pulled the camera away the expression on his face, eyes slitted, nostrils flared, lips parted, was so similar to the one he wore when he came that she wondered if he was staining his shorts.

  What made the whole scene that much more awful was the grisly way the government hunters went about their task. They were occasionally throwing split-open rabbits, calves, and goats out of one of their trucks. The truck Peter and Ellen rode in, along with five other men in the bed, three in the cab, was sometimes close enough to the government trucks to hear the carcasses land with a wet thump. When Ellen first noticed it, she complained.

  “They’re probably poisoned, too,” Peter said.

  “You think?”

  “That’s what I’d do.”

  “What about other animals who eat them? There are other animals that eat meat out here, right? And birds, insects—aren’t they putting the whole ecosystem at risk?”

  “Like mankilling wolves aren’t? If they don’t stop these wolves, then this area will be crawling with hunters. They’ll do more damage to the environment than a few poisoned carrion-eaters.”

  “I guess,” she said, not entirely sold.

  “Anyway,” Peter went on, “I guess they think it’ll draw the wolves out. I hope they’re right—it’d be awesome to get the takedown on camera.”

  “You really have no compassion for the wolves, do you?” Ellen asked. She was beginning to think that Peter was more like other men than she had first believed. She thought of the cartoon of a fish eating a smaller fish, while being eaten by a larger fish, which was in turn being eaten by a still bigger one, and so on, ad infinitum. Peter, she had told herself early on, was an artist, a filmmaker, a creative soul who could see the inherently decent qualities in everyone. Since she had been with him, though—and especially here in Silver Gap—she had come to see him in a different light.

  Like the rest of them, he was enthralled by power. Who had it, how to get it. The powerful preyed on the less powerful, and down the food chain it went. He was intrigued by the wolves only because they had proven themselves capable of killing humans. Now he was caught up in the hunt, in the overwhelming force of humans who would, she had no doubt, destroy every last wolf.

  She had lived her life as an underdog, often taken advantage of, used, abused. But she had decided to claim her own power, to defend herself against Peter’s kind with any means necessary. So far he had not acted inappropriately—he wanted plenty of sex, but that was okay, so did she. He had never struck her or laid a hand on her in anger. If he ever did, she would remove it.

  But seeing his fascination with these hunters, his lust for the kill, she decided that their parting would come sooner than that, before he had a chance to devolve far enough to seek to cause her physical pain. Tonight, perhaps, back in their motel room, she would tell him she was leaving. If she could get a ride off the mountain, she would. Maybe Alex would help her out. He was—

  “Jesus!” Peter’s big hand clamped down on her shoulder, hard. In this case, she let it go; he hadn’t meant to hurt her, and he pulled it away in the same instant, using it to steady the camera he had raised to his eye.

  She didn’t have to ask what he was looking at. Everybody riding in the back of the truck was staring the same way.

  Up on a ridgeline, thirty feet higher than them and about twice that far away, stood a huge, black wolf. It looked like a shadow of a wolf there, dark against light. It watched the trucks below, and she could have sworn it understood what it was seeing. It didn’t flinch away, didn’t try to hide. Just stood and watched, as if observing the approach of visiting emissaries from another kingdom.

  “My goodness,” one of the hunters said. “Look at the size of it.”

  “Look at that chunk out of its ear,” another said. Her eyes drawn to it by the remark, Ellen saw what he meant. The animal’s right ear was almost bisected by it, giving the impression of a single ear on the left and two smaller ones on the right.

  “It’s a notch,” she said.

  “Notch,” the hunter repeated. The truck was still rolling, but he raised a rifle to his shoulder, sighting along its length. “This bullet’s for you, Notch,” he said. “It’s got your name on it.”

  He fired. The noise was not as loud as she had expected, flatter somehow.

  Then, as if that had been the signal, everyone was firing. The government hunters blasted away at the wolf, as did the civilians who had followed them into the wilderness. Peter was trying to capture it all on tape, but he was so caught up in the moment that he was swinging the camera wildly, and she knew the resulting footage would be unwatchable, vertigo-inducing. His tongue showed at the corner of his mouth, like that of an excited boy running a relay race in gym class. The racket of all those guns at once was deafening, and when it faded she wasn’t sure because it kept echoing in her ears, and the smoke that filled the air was acrid and burned her lungs when she inhaled it.

  As the volley began, the wolf turned and ran down the far side of the ridge, out of sight. Bullets chewed vegetation, cut small limbs from trees, flew off into empty air.

  No one seemed to care that thirty or forty shooters had failed to find their target. Instead, the hunters whooped and shouted and every vehicle’s driver pressed on its accelerator. Unprepared, Ellen fell back against the guy behind her. “Better hold on, little lady,” he said with a grin. He pushed her off, getting one hand firmly on her ass cheek as he did. “Ride’s about to get bumpy.”

  She swallowed her response, because he was right. The truck hit an uneven patch and she nearly flew from the truck bed. She grabbed onto the side as the vehicle left the road altogether, charging up the ridge, cross-country, along with the rest of them. The government trucks were in the lead, but not by much. All the wheels kicked up a dust cloud that swamped and overwhelmed the gun smoke.

  Ellen couldn’t see the wolf anymore, but she assumed that those in the government vehicles could. All the private trucks followed the DOW ones over the hill and down the other side. Brake lights flashed as vehicles fell into single file, or something approaching it, as they raced into a narrowing canyon with high, rocky sides. She heard the crunch of a collision, but nobody stopped.

  The truck she and Peter rode in wound up three from the end, because their driver risked a close encounter with a huge pine in order to cut off someone who might have edged him out. Peter was laughing out loud. Ellen was clinging to the side, hoping desperately that the thing could keep its wheels on the ground. The hunters gripped their guns and the truck with about equal ferocity.

  Then the front DOW vehicle stopped suddenly. Brake lights flashed again, and trucks skidded on dirt, unable to grip the surface, and slid into each other. She heard lots of banging and shouting and watched one hunter thrown clear out of the truck bed. He landed belly-down in some bushes, and it took him a full minute to gain his feet again. In that time, the truck Ellen rode in smashed into the one in front of it, popping the hood and knocking someone else out onto the ground. The truck behind rammed into them.

  “Why are we…?” she began.

  “Oh good Christ!” one of the men said.

  “What?”

  The man tried to speak again, but couldn’t. Instead, he pointed.

  Five or six wolves had appeared on the rock-strewn slopes around them. Then more, showing themselves as if they had simply manifested there, out of thin air. And still more came. Ten, fifteen, twenty-five. They kept coming. Thirty. Thirty-five. She lost count.

  A man in the front of the truck bed pounded on the cab’s roof. “Get us out of here!” he cried.

  The driver tried to accommodate. The engine revved, but they were trapped, s
queezed in front and behind by other vehicles. The wheels spun, throwing out dirt clods and dust. Another hunter hammered on the roof, swearing. Peter was aiming the camera at the wolves.

  Ellen gripped the steak knife she had stolen from the restaurant. Her only weapon.

  She saw the wolf they had called Notch, standing on a boulder, as if daring anyone to shoot.

  Somebody did, but the shot missed the big animal.

  As if that were the cue they’d been waiting for, the wolves charged.

  More gunfire rang out, an unbroken, roaring fusillade.

  Wolves fell, but there were more, always more, to take their place.

  The two men who had fallen from their rides tried to scramble back onto them. Ellen saw wolves catch one by the legs and yank him down. His scream was long and plaintive and filled her with a nameless dread. The second man was almost into his truck when a wolf leapt onto his back. Huge jaws snapped and the wolf tore off part of the back of his neck and head. Blood flew in a fine spray as man and wolf fell to the ground.

  Every driver tried to get his vehicle moving, but most were hopelessly trapped. Wolves swarmed into truck beds and open Jeeps like fierce waves swamping lifeboats. Gunfire and truck engines and shrieks and guttural roars filled the air. Ellen smelled blood and the thick, heavy scent of furred mammals. Panic welled in her, panic and hopelessness and a will to survive, somehow. The men around her were not even aiming anymore, just thrusting gun barrels out of the truck bed and squeezing triggers, and the smoke was gray and bitter and the sound tore at her ears, and then the first wolf jumped into the bed. The driver tried to free the truck from its prison of steel and rock but couldn’t, and then a wolf pushed through the open passenger window and in the cab. And Peter fell, his throat torn from him, blood arcing into the air and splattering Ellen like paint from a spray can. His camera spiraled up and then down, out of the truck and onto the ground, and a wolf caught Ellen’s left arm in its teeth, and she stabbed it and stabbed it and stabbed it with the little knife. It let go once and she thought she had won, she would survive this after all, until she realized it was only getting a better grip. Then there was another wolf in the bed and it had her by the ribs and then another one and there were no hunters left, only her, and she thought: at least I was the last girl standing, and then she—

  24

  Clara Durbin knew that Reverend Calderon didn’t like to talk about his worsening vision, but she also knew that it was worsening, significantly, so when he asked her to do chores that he once did for himself, she didn’t mind. She was happy to help, because anything she could do left him more time to interpret the Lord’s wishes and words and to minister to those in need.

  Today he had asked her to run into town for groceries. He gave her a list and some cash, and she kept cloth bags in the trunk of the Buick because she didn’t like those plastic ones they had at the store. She cruised down the road between the church and town, trees flashing past her window, listening to Christian music on the radio.

  Until she heard a siren. She glanced in the rear-view and saw a police car, the light on top flashing red and blue. She looked at her speedometer. Five miles below the limit, which was how she always drove.

  She sighed. At least she had not yet bought the groceries—she would hate to be sitting there while a police officer dressed her down and the reverend’s ice cream melted in the trunk. She found a spot where there was room between the road and the woods and pulled over. The police car drew in behind her, and that nice young Officer Honeycutt got out.

  She remembered his first name. Howard. He had stayed at the Lodge when he first came to town. Three weeks, he had been their guest, until he found a house to rent. He was an orphan, he’d told them, both his parents killed when he was just a young teenager. She didn’t recall now if he had told them how.

  Clara put her hands on the steering wheel. She’d heard somewhere that you should do that, so the police know you don’t have a gun. Howard knew she would never carry one, but she wanted to do things right. She waited, hands on the wheel, until he got out of his car and hiked up to hers and tapped on the window. “Mrs. Durbin,” he said. “You can come on out.”

  “Shouldn’t I open the window?” She wondered, briefly, how she was to do that with her hands on the wheel. With an elbow?

  “Better if you just get out.” He tugged at the outside door handle, but of course she kept her doors locked. “Get out of that fuckerfuck car right now!”

  At that, she took her hands off the wheel and pressed them against her lap. “I don’t like that kind of language,” she said. She was no prude—she and Charles ran a motel, after all, and people did all sorts of things in motel rooms. Left behind all sorts of souvenirs, too: condoms and pornography and enough bodily fluids to float an ocean liner. But she was a churchgoer and a God-fearing woman, and she didn’t have to approve of such goings-on, or the sort of language often used to describe it.

  “Come out of that fuckerfuck or I will shoot you in the head.” His voice had gone high, agitated, and when she looked again she saw that his gun was pointed at her.

  She lost control of her bladder, just a little bit, a little tinkle on the seat and on her skirt. And she thought, the skirt I can wash, but Charles is going to notice the seat. The gun didn’t move, so she unlocked the door. As soon as she had, Howard wrenched it open from outside and grabbed her by the arm, hauling her from the seat.

  “I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” she said. “I don’t think I was speeding.”

  He holstered the gun and pulled something from the waistband of his pants. Tape, she realized. Duct tape. He started to unroll a section of it. “Me to know,” he said. “Me to know.” He flattened her against the Buick with his body and pressed the tape over her mouth, then wound it around her head, catching hair. “You to find out. Me to know, you to find out.”

  Then he hauled her by the arms, half dragging her, back to his car. He popped the trunk and pushed her down into it, and when she tried to protest (though the tape made verbal complaint impossible) he backhanded her across the face so hard that she tasted blood. “You’ll find out,” he said as he held her down in the trunk. He closed the trunk lid over her, repeating the same three words over and over. “You’ll find out. You’ll find out. You’ll find out.”

  Then it was dark and his voice was muffled. Clara kicked against the inside of the trunk. She kicked and she kicked. But she heard the police car’s big engine catch and turn over and then she knew they were in motion.

  Still, she kicked as long as she could.

  PART THREE

  25

  The lab was cold, and in spite of state-of-the-art air circulation systems, Alex thought the smell might put him off eating meat for years to come.

  Dr. Steinhilber was the only medical professional in a hundred square miles, Robbie explained on the way to town, so he functioned as a medical examiner in some cases. He had a lab set aside with the appropriate equipment, including the stainless steel examination table on which the wolf carcass they had brought in was now lying. Alex and Robbie had been invited to stay for the necropsy, and another man, a scientist named Cale Conklin, had joined them.

  “Dr. Conklin is an expert on wolf behavior,” Steinhilber said. “He literally wrote the book.”

  “It’s such an honor to meet you, doctor,” Robbie said, pumping the man’s hand. She turned to Alex. “His book The Wild, Wild Wolf is one of my bestsellers. I didn’t know you were in town.”

  “Just got in this morning,” Conklin explained. He was taller than Peter, six-four or six-five, with an underfed mountain man vibe. His brown hair was curly and unkempt, his beard thick and shot through with silver. He wore a plaid shirt in browns, reds and yellows, faded blue jeans, hiking boots. He had little round glasses, wire-framed and thick-lensed, and he looked to Alex like someone who would be more at home in a tent than a building. “Given what’s been going on down here, I could hardly stay away.”

  “I’
m glad you’re here,” Steinhilber said. “Since I’m no veterinarian, much less experienced with wolf necropsies.”

  “Let’s just get started,” Conklin suggested. “I’m not a vet either, but I’ll help as much as I can.”

  That had been almost an hour earlier. Since then, the doctor had turned the wolf this way and then, poking and prodding, and they had weighed and measured the animal. She was just under six feet long and weighed 186 pounds. “That’s big for a wolf,” Conklin said. “Huge, in fact. Especially for a bitch.”

  Robbie rubbed her shoulders. “You’re telling me.”

  Conklin handed Robbie a digital camera and asked her to photograph the entire process. Once the measurements had been taken, the doctor started slicing into the wolf. He removed a bullet from near her ribs, though he said the mass of scar tissue built up around it indicated that it had been there for a long time, and was probably not the cause of death.

  With a bone saw, he cut off the top of the wolf’s head and dug a couple of specimens from her brain. “We’ll test these for rabies and distemper,” Steinhilber said. “In addition to running some bloodwork. Most of the brain will have to be sent over to the state, since they’ll want to do their own tests.”

  “We don’t know if this is one of your killers,” Conklin said. “And a wolf empties its stomach every six hours, so we probably won’t find anything. If we have DNA from any of the scenes—”

  Steinhilber cut him off. “I doubt that Morris Deeds and his men are quite that sophisticated.”

  “Well, if we can locate some, then we can compare it to this wolf’s DNA. But when and if we do find the killers, I’m certain we’ll find rabies and/or distemper.”

  “Why’s that?” Alex asked.

  “Because healthy wolves don’t attack human beings. They just don’t.”

  “Are rabies and distemper common in wolves?”