“What are you talking about, Frenchy?”
“It's hard to get the outline of a thing in the brush.”
They went after the animal then, never losing him again, never quite getting in a position for a shot at the canny beast. It was a ten-hour, frustrating, foot-smashing, weary chase. But the wolf wasn't hard to follow even in the dark. It was a gray wolf that sometimes flashed white in the clear night. A dozen times they were near to having shots, but every time the animal melted away and had to be picked up again.
It didn't really move fast, but it was tireless, and it kept them at a dogged run most of the night. Several times, as if by mutual agreement, both parties stopped and rested. The wolf with the white slash on the top of his head was always to be seen, and the men never took their eyes off it in the pulsating dark. Pidgeon got a close look at it only once, and the wolf seemed to look at him with a man's eyes.
“He's an odd one, Ribaul,” Pidgeon said. “A wolf that sometimes travels in a truck and hunts with a rifle, he isn't the kind of wolf you meet every day.”
“Only a special kind of wolf can do that. And I won't say what it's called.”
“If you don't want to look down the wrong end of a rifle barrel at a cross-eyed sheriff, you'd better say what it's called. What kind of wolf might do that?”
“Loup-garou?”
“What's its name in English?”
“I don't know. I never heard it in English.”
They went after the wolf again for what was left of the night. Pidgeon, using Ribaul as his left hand, working with definite aim, pinned the wolf against the very wide, clear slope he couldn't have missed. It was then that Ribaul, who should have been a hundred yards away, nudged Pidgeon's arm. The shot went high, and the wolf was away.
“Ribaul, you open-ended idiot! If you've only a notion, it better be a good one.”
“Mr. Pidgeon, I'm ashamed to say what it was.”
“You made me miss the wolf! Why? Why?”
“I had a sudden notion that he wasn't a wolf at all. I looked at his eyes, and at the blaze on his head, and I wasn't sure whether he was a wolf or a man. If you'd have killed a man, there'd have been trouble.”
“Ribaul, couldn't you see what he was?”
“I could see every hair on him. I could even see the pulse move at his throat. But he looked like a man that I know. He is a man sometimes. He is loup-garou.”
“Tell me what that is, Ribaul, or, trouble or not, I'll kill me a man right here.”
“Oh, he's a wolf part of the time. And sometimes he's a man. If I am wrong, then I have caused you to miss a wolf. If I am right, then I have saved you from killing a man.”
“Let it go. Since it spent the night mostly on its own terms, it may have brought us near where it dens.”
“A male will hardly den this time of year. Just lay up somewhere in cool rocks.”
“Let's find out where. I'll take the draw. You take the thicket. I'll show you that I'm not such a bad tracker myself.”
And Pidgeon wasn't a bad tracker. He picked up deep and firm wolf tracks almost at once. The hair was prickling on his neck with the feeling that the wolf intended to leave tracks that could be followed. There was a big old truck half-hidden in some shrub in the rocky meadow just above the draw. “Ah, the wolf's own transport,” Pidgeon grinned the words to himself. It was moist in the draw, and the wolf, from his tracks, was very heavy. It would have gone far over a hundred and fifty pounds, and whoever heard of a wolf that big? The draw narrowed sharply, and the wolf kept to it. The soft, white lime sand on its floor left very clear tracks, show tracks, the biggest wolf tracks ever seen, and the clearest.
The wolf at a slouch-walk leaves the hind foot ahead of the front-foot track. It is a five-toed track of the front foot, and a four-toed track of the hind foot (one of the back toes is small and rudimentary, and it does not track). The front paw is always the broader of the two. This wolf had very heavy front paws, almost as broad as those of a mountain lion.
It was the coolest hour out of the twenty-four, and almost daylight.
Front foot, back foot left; front foot, back foot right, Pidgeon found himself chanting it. Front foot, back foot left; front foot, back and that is where the sequence stopped—
Stopped completely. Pidgeon stood erect and closed his eyes for a moment. Nothing that he'd ever known had prepared him for this.
“The light is still pretty dim, and besides I'm tired,” he told himself, but he lied when he told it. He reasoned with himself a moment, and then he picked up the trail again.
Well, it was a back foot, in a manner of speaking. In other circumstances there wouldn't be anything frightening about such a well-known sort of print. But the print wasn't that of a wolf's back foot. Nor was the next one, nor the next. The wolf tracks had turned into man tracks. Well, the world has to have its back broken somewhere.
Pidgeon followed the tracks of the man till the draw ended in a rock spread and no more tracking was possible. Pidgeon called to Ribaul. After a while the Frenchman came to him from an upper thicket. Ribaul took it all in with quick eyes, and he rubbed his head.
“Was Jules Lamotte here with you?” he asked Pidgeon. “Why didn't I see him if he was here?”
“I haven't seen Lamotte for several weeks,” Pidgeon said with difficulty. “I haven't seen him a dozen times in my life. I hardly know him. Are those his tracks? They may be old tracks. I believe that he lives near here. He may have made those tracks yesterday on his normal business.”
“He does live near here,” Ribaul said. “And his tracks were not made yesterday. They were made short minutes ago.”
“I didn't see him, Ribaul. What kind of man is he really?”
“He has a laugh with hair on it.”
“That's no crime, though perhaps it should be. And what else?”
“He's a man who has mutton, and does not keep sheep. And this is his place we come to.”
Jules Lemotte was a big, sharp-muzzled man, with a sudden slash of white in his mouse-gray hair. He met Pidgeon and Ribaul in his kitchen doorway. “You are halfway welcome,” he said. “Did you kill the wolf?”
“No, the wolf still escapes us,” Pidgeon said. “Didn't you see us, and the wolf? We found your tracks, just where we lost those of the wolf, fresh tracks.”
“I have not been out of my house last night or this morning.”
“Then someone else has been wearing your feet,” Ribaul challenged.
“What? Both of them?” Lamotte asked with a touch of harsh humor.
“Yes. Or all four,” Ribaul said.
“Can you explain what he means, Mr. Sheriff?” Lamotte asked.
“Ribaul believes that the wolf is loup-garou. I understand that it's French.”
“It's a child's story, and not necessarily French,” Lamotte said. “Madelon, make breakfast for two new-come ones! Madelon! Do you hear?”
“I hear,” she called from within, and she came to the kitchen. “Oh, for them,” she said. “All right.”
Pidgeon had never seen Lamotte's wife before. She was a good-looking woman. She made a heavy country breakfast for them and they were soon sat down to it.
“How is it that you have mutton, Lamotte?” Pidgeon asked him. “I did not know that you had sheep.”
“I do not. How is it that I have coffee? I have no plantation.”
“Who are the three men in the picture there on the wall?” Pidgeon asked.
Lamotte looked at it puzzled.
“Oh, my brothers, I suppose,” he said. “I don't remember ever seeing that picture before.” Why should a man say “my brothers, I suppose”? They were three bristly men in the picture, and they looked enough like Jules Lamotte to be his brothers.
“They say you left your old place because of some kind of trouble,” Pidgeon said.
“They don't even know where my old place was,” Lamotte answered. “Yet they're partly right. A settled man doesn't change his abode in midlife if everything is peac
eful.”
“Yours is one of the places that the wolf hasn't bothered, Lamotte.”
“What could he bother here? I raise grain and cattle, not sheep.”
“Did you hear anything, Lamotte, during the night and dawn?”
“You two men clattering around the rocks out there, trying to clatter quietly.”
They ate pancakes and drank a little morning whisky and were not really unfriendly.
“Is that your big truck in the rock pasture?” Pidgeon asked.
“Yes, I seldom use it though.”
“Does anyone use it?”
“Why would anyone use that big old truck?”
“Have you an enemy, Lamotte?”
“I think so, yes. Or a friend who intends to kill me.”
“Will you tell me who it is?”
“No. It's a private matter. You are welcome to stay. I must go check on a calf.” Lamotte went out of the house, walking stiffly as though he had perpetually sore ankles.
“He lied to you, my husband,” Madelon Lamotte told them some time after Jules had gone. “He said that he had not been out of the house the night past. Yet he did leave yesterday, and he was gone the whole of last night. He arrived back in a daze, but only just before you two came. I feel that he isn't well, even he isn't sane. It's though he had two different natures.” “Which two different natures, Mrs. Lamotte?” Pidgeon asked.
But Jules Lamotte came back in then, and Madelon did not tell what she meant.
Later that day, after he had slept for a few hours, Pidgeon got certain equipment and then drove and walked to the last draw in which he had tracked the night before. He had to know whether those tracks would appear different by daylight. They didn't. The only things that struck Pidgeon in a different light were his own tracks of the night before. How he had skittered about when he came to the spot where the tracks changed! What a wild little dance he had done!
But all else was as he had remembered it. There were the wolf tracks; and then there were the man tracks. There was no other ending to the wolf tracks and no other beginning to the man tracks. If one set didn't turn into the other in full stride, then evidence was meaningless. Pidgeon took pictures of them from different angles, thinking that the various shadings might tell something. He also went and got pictures and tire tracks of Jules Lamotte's heavy truck. Then he drove to Yellow Knife and went to the store.
All of them were there, Scroggins the storekeeper, Kenrad, Ragley, Tadler, Corbey, Boston, Danby. The store was the club, the place where they talked and played dominoes and checkers.
“I've been out with the French tracker after the wolf,” Pidgeon said.
“We will help you skin him,” Tadler grunted. “Let's see how big he really is.”
“We can't skin it till we kill it. I had one shot. Ribaul made me miss.”
“Why'd he do that?” storekeeper Scroggins asked.
“He said that it was loup-garou and that if I shot it I'd be shooting a man.”
“I say shoot it anyhow,” Tadler harangued. “Get rid of the wolf no matter what he turns into. I say shoot every man that even looks a little bit like a wolf.”
“Then I'd have to shoot several of you here present,” Pidgeon said.
“It's mostly the French that turn into wolves,” Ragley told them. “The French are superstitious; they believe in that stuff. Down in Beauregard Parish one time there was a big wolf came into the country with a funny look in his eyes and a white blaze on his head.”
Pidgeon was startled. Had Ragley known that the present wolf had a funny look in his eyes and a white blaze on his head? Another man had come into the store quietly.
Pidgeon didn't look around, but he knew that it was the man with the funny look in his eyes and the white blaze on his head. There was also the impression of several other men now standing outside the store.
“The hardest thing, when a man turns into a wolf, is right at the ankle bone,” Corbey said. Corbey was a crafty old swindler and he was about to wrap his tongue around something rich. “It hurts there at the ankle. You see, what appears to be a wolf's knee has its bend opposite to a man's, but that is really the same as a man's ankle bone, not his knee bone. The wolf's real knee is hidden up in the haunch. When a man turns into a wolf his ankle bone has to expand about eight inches. You find a man who turns a lot and you'll find a fellow who always has sore ankles.
“The rest is easy. Watch one change sometime and see how slick he does it. He kind of softens his skull, and part of it flows forward and part of it flows back. Then he lets his eyes roll around to the sides of his head. He sharpens his muzzle and does all the other little things. Then he goes down on all fours just like he was unhinging himself. He begins to shiver: that's the way he brings the hair out of his hide. After that he lacks just one thing for him to be a total wolf.”
Well, someone had to ask it.
“What's the one thing he needs to make himself into a total wolf,” Pidgeon asked, “after he has gone down on all fours and shivered his hair to the outside of his hide?”
“The tail,” said Corbey, and licked his lips. “It sounds like a cork popping when he brings it out. The tail's the last thing to go back in too. And after he changes quite a few times, man to wolf and wolf to man, why his tail gets where it won't go all the ways back in anymore. I maintain, Sheriff, that there's a way to put this knowledge to test.”
What was Corbey getting at? There was dark lightning bouncing around that store. There was musky excitement beginning to rise, and the feeling got riper by the minute. Something was brewing, and it was these fellows' kind of thing.
“Men, this becomes a community effort,” Corbey was crowing. “Sheriff, we got to get every man-jack in the neighborhood together and make them strip. Sheriff, one of those men is going to have a tail!”
Coruscating coon dogs! Was Corbey kidding? Dammit, would the laughter never come? What was holding off the howling glee? One or two of them may have quaked a bit, but they would not be caught in open laughter. They were all long-faced and serious.
“Sheriff, I believe that it's your duty to set the example,” Ragley gruffed.
“Drop your pants, Sheriff!” Boston barked. “We'll have first look at you.”
Were these men serious? They looked murderous in their intensity.
“I'll not be first,” Pidgeon said. “I stand on privilege. I'll be last.”
“Nobody leaves alive till he's been examined and certified,” storekeeper Scroggins stated harshly, and he produced a long gun from behind his counter. “Who'll be number one, do the manly thing, and prove he's not the wolf?”
“By damn I will!” Ragley swore. Ragley was never a backward man. He dropped his pants. The examination was thorough and minute. Clothed or stripped, Ragley was curiously shaped, awkwardly articulated, sometimes coming to points or knobs. But he didn't have a tail.
“You, boy,” Scroggins called to an eleven-year-old who looked in. “This is a man's meeting for men only. Boy, go out and round up every man in the neighborhood. Tell them to come to the store and be examined right now.”
“Whaffor?”
“Tell them that we're going to nail down the wolf. Tell them, boy, that we're going to find out which one of them wears the tail.” The boy left running.
Boston dropped his pants. No tail. Then it was like a dam bursting the way the pants and overalls came down in a sudden flood. The new men were already coming in. There must have been thirty of the finest men in Royal Parish who dropped their pants within thirty seconds. Tadler, one of the prime inspectors, was near-sighted and he had to get very close to the work. But he was conscientious and he never left a man till he was sure. No tail in the lot. Ribaul came in.
“Ribaul, have you a tail?” Scroggins thundered at him, gun in hands.
“No. I never learned how to grow one.” But Ribaul submitted when it was explained to him. He didn't have a tail either.
“And now you, Sheriff Pidgeon,” Scroggins said in his
gun-barrel voice.
“This isn't happening. This can't be happening,” Pidgeon moaned.
But Pidgeon submitted, in that most shameful moment of his life. And, to the disappointment of many, he didn't have a tail either. He'd made all the fuss over nothing.
“And what are you waiting for?” Ragley asked the big Frenchman who was standing there. It was the man with the funny eyes and the white blaze on his head, the man Jules Lamotte.
“For tobacco, salt, coffee, rubbing alcohol, nails, several things,” big Lamotte said. “I've no more time. Your games should be finished by now.”
“How about some mutton, Frenchy?” storekeeper Scroggins asked.
“No. I have plenty of mutton,” Lamotte said. Scroggins, the gun under his arms, filled the Frenchman's order from a written list.
“Why don't you drop your pants like an honest man, Frenchy?” Ragley asked. “Don't you get the idea? Didn't you hear us and see us?”
It was like an explosion the way Lamotte laughed, like a wolf laugh, a laugh with hair on it. There were three big men waiting in the doorway for Lamotte. Pidgeon believed that they were the three men in the picture in Lamotte's kitchen. Lamotte got his things.
“What's the rubbing alcohol for?” Ragley asked him.
“I have sore ankles,” Jules Lamotte said quietly, “always sore ankles.” Lamotte left them there, going out with his high-gaited walk. And if he had a tail, it was still in his pants when he left.
“He's your man, Sheriff,” Kenrad said. “He's your wolf.”
Pidgeon looked after Lamotte. Then he was startled. Lamotte was walking alone. The three men were not with him, and there was nowhere they could have gone.
Pidgeon walked out. A ways further on, he met and spoke briefly with Clela Ragley, the young daughter of rough Ragley himself. She had an idea about using a wolf bait. Pidgeon went on about other things. He would solve this yet. After you've been a fool a couple of times, it gets easier. So he made a fool of himself again after dark.
Pidgeon met Clela Ragley by the road in the dark that night. She went into that rough double section of land that seemed to be the hold of the wolf. And Pidgeon followed her at about fifty yards. And the wolf was there. Turpentined tomcats, how he was there! The whole air was full of the wolf. Pidgeon was downwind of it, and now he moved to full windward of the wolf. It was very near, and Clela was upwind of it. She waited in the clear, and Pidgeon watched what would happen. He had a rifle cradled in his elbow, and he wondered what he would do if it was a man and not a wolf that they flushed. Pidgeon again had the feeling that the setting was contrived, that the wolf was announcing his presence as powerfully as possible. Whom was baiting whom here?
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 206
