by John Benteen
She shook hands with him like a man. “I’m Fairfax Randall, secretary of our association. I’m glad you and Mr. Gilbert both got here in time for our meeting.”
“Gilbert?” Cutler repeated.
“Yep, John, I’m here, too,” that mocking voice came from across the room, and Gilbert stepped out of a corner.
“I see,” Cutler said thinly. He followed Fairfax Randall to the front of the room, where she had been addressing the men on the benches like a teacher talking to her class.
“Gentlemen, Mr. Cutler, of whom you’ve all heard, I’m sure. Mr. Cutler, the Davis County Stockraisers’ Association . . . Tom Fellows, our president, Jud Bobbitt, the treasurer, Sam Kelly . . .” She reeled off names. Cutler looked them over. They bore the stamp of cattlemen, all right, and they bore something else, too—the mark of poverty. Even in their town clothes, they were shabby, down-at-the-heels . . . “And,” Fairfax Randall concluded, “the young gentleman who let you in is my son, Jess.”
Tom Fellows stood up, a lanky, weathered man in his early forties, sweating and uncomfortable in suit and tie. “All right, Fair,” he said. “I reckon I better take over now. Let’s git down to the real important part of the meeting. Mr. Cutler, Mr. Gilbert, why don’t you two sit up here in the front row?”
Cutler nodded, sat at one end of a bench. Gilbert shambled across the room, grinned at him, took the other. Cutler could smell him in the heat: the rank taint of many wipings of a skinning knife on leather, the usual odor of the wolfer. Then Fairfax Randall sat down between them, and the fragrance of her light perfume covered Gilbert’s stench. Cutler grinned a little as she wrinkled her nose and slid closer to his end of the bench.
“All right,” Fellows said. “For six months now, the Victorio Wolf’s been givin’ us fits. Fall’s comin’ on, and we got to make our roundup and sell our gather. At the rate the wolf’s been killin’, we’ll be lucky if we got anything left to sell, and all of us have got mortgage payments comin’ due to Gustav Holz. Somebody’s got to git that wolf and git him quick, or he’ll ruin every one of us. Now we’re in luck. We got not one but two expert wolfers here. Fair Randall got in touch with Mr. Cutler, and Mr. Gilbert here come in on his own, but he’s got quite a reputation, too. We’ve all dug down in the sock and scratched up two thousand dollars to put up as bounty money on that lobo’s ears. Now, what we got to decide today is whether Mr. Cutler goes after him or Mr. Gilbert or both . . .”
“Both won’t work,” Gilbert called out. “Got to be one or the other. Two wolfers can’t work the same range. Not when they work different, like me and Cutler.” He stood up. “You give me exclusive rights to go after him, I’ll guarantee to stretch that loafer’s hide within a month. Not only that, I’ll clean out every other wolf and coyote on your land, not to mention bobcats and pumas. Take care of the eagles and the hawks along with ‘em. When I git through, you’ll not only have your Victorio Wolf, there won’t be another meat-eatin’ critter left on your range.”
Fellows looked impressed. “That sounds good to me, Mr. Gilbert. A tall order, though. How you go about it?”
“Poison,” Cutler said. He stood up. “Poison’s what he uses.”
“Why, shore,” Gilbert said. “That’s why they call me ‘Strick.’ Short for strychnine. And believe you me, folks, ain’t nothin’ at’ll clean up a range quicker than strychnine and cyanide in ole Strick Gilbert’s special baits. It’s a lot faster and surer than Cutler’s steel traps.”
“Poison . . .” Fair Randall said, distaste thick in her voice. “You just spread it all around, Mr. Gilbert?”
“That’s right, ma’am. The secret’s to lay it down thick. I got a way of hidin’ it inside of chunks of beef and flavorin’ that beef with scent that no wolf can resist, a special formula I worked up myself. Put down enough of it and sooner or later that Victorio Wolf’s gonna sample it and ...” He snapped his fingers. “One bite’s all it takes. Meanwhile, it gits the other varmints, too.”
Fellows turned to Cutler. “That what you aim to use, Mr. Cutler?”
“No,” Cutler said. “I don’t use poison.”
“Why not?”
John Cutler sucked in a long breath, turned to look at the ranchers on the benches. “Because I don’t believe in it,” he said. “Any of you ever seen an animal that’s taken a bait of strychnine? It dies hard, mighty hard. I . . . saw a man die of it by mistake one time. Since then, I wouldn’t touch the stuff.”
“A man die of it—” Fellows looked at him.
“That’s right,” Cutler said thinly. “I . . . used to have a ranch, over in Arizona. I bought some of it one time to get rid of coyotes. Put some in every line cabin. One of my riders got hold of it by mistake one time, thought it was soda, put some in some biscuits he was cookin’ ... I come in to find him rollin’ on the floor, screamin’, in convulsions . . . He . . . kept beggin’ me to shoot him, put him out of his misery ... I had to listen to that until he finally died. The next day I got rid of every bit of poison on the place, and I’ve never used any since.”
The room was silent. Then Gilbert said, wryly: “Me, I know how to use it. I don’t put it in biscuits.”
Cutler turned on him. “No. You’re a good poisoner, Strick, the very best. You know your stuff all right. But it just so happens that I hate the stuff. I hate what it does, the way it kills, slow and hard, anything and everything that eats meat.”
His eyes swept the room. “Maybe y’all think it would be a good idea to wipe out all the predators in the Davis Mountains. Maybe you think it would increase your calf crop and make you rich. Well, it might for a season. Then it’d have the opposite effect.”
He paused. “You think about it. What keeps down the rats, the mice, the prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, and the jackrabbits? Coyotes, wolves, bobcats, the like. Sure, they take a calf now and then, but they eat a thousand times more weight of other vermin than they do of beef. You clean ‘em all out and you’ll see some strange things happen. Things that might ruin your range.”
They were listening closely to him, and he disregarded Gilbert’s angry gesture.
“There are a lot of critters that compete with cows for grass. You don’t know how many until you wipe out their natural enemies and give ‘em a season or two to breed. And then, when a plague of jackrabbits and rats and gophers has fought for every root and stalk of grass, you’ll see. When there’s nothin’ to check the deer up in the mountains and their numbers seem to explode overnight . . . When even all the skunks and harmless ground critters like that are gone, the ones that eat the locusts and the crickets . . . And the eagles and hawks that feed off of rattlesnakes have all been poisoned and you get a plague of sidewinders . . . You think it can’t happen? You broadcast poison, kill all the meat-eaters, you’ll see . . .”
“All the same,” Fellows began, “if it could get that wolf ...”
Cutler laughed harshly. “That’s the whole point. It wouldn’t.” He turned on Fellows. “That wolf kills every night, don’t he? And always more than he can eat. One of the things that means is he’s wise to poisoned baits already. He won’t touch dead meat lyin’ on the ground. He’d laugh every time he saw a chunk of poisoned carrion and go take himself another calf. And it just might happen that all of a sudden he’d have some company ...”
“Meaning . . .?” Fellows asked.
“Meanin’ that wolves and coyotes ain’t stupid. The poison would wipe out most of ‘em. But some would get the idea when they saw the others die. Then they’d shun dead meat altogether, eat nothin’ but what they killed themselves, fresh every night. You got one educated cattle killer now. Poison the range, you may make another half a dozen.” He paused. “And, of course, you’ll lose your dogs. Either that, or you’ll have to shut ‘em up, and it may be months before they can run free again without the danger of swallowin’ a capsule of cyanide Gilbert’s gone off and left . . . But if you want to take a chance, go ahead.” He shrugged. “Me, I’ve always got more calls than I can answe
r.”
For a moment, the sweltering room was silent. Then Fair Randall’s voice rang out. “All right, Mr. Cutler. We’ve heard your views on poison. But suppose you tell us how you’d get the Victorio Wolf?”
Cutler opened his mouth to answer. But before words came out, Gilbert’s harsh laugh sounded. “About like he got that stump-legged grizzly that killed his wife! Ask the great John Cutler about that! About how long he’s been chasin’ that man-killin’ bear he’s followed all over the West for five years and never has caught up with!”
Chapter Two
John Cutler stood there rigid as Gilbert’s voice died. Within him rage and grief flamed instantaneously and white-hot, as always when something forced that memory back into his consciousness. What he had to master then was an insanity that gripped him, that made him want to whirl on Gilbert and smash the man’s mocking face, wring his neck, feel Gilbert die under his hands. It took every ounce of willpower that he owned to control himself, and he found no words to answer, and Gilbert went on, voice full of mockery.
“He’s a great one for catchin’ rogues, all right. Oh, he caught two-legged ones up in the Injun Territories when he was a Federal Lawman, we all know that. Made his reputation as a tracker and a gunman choppin’ down train robbers and bad men. And he thinks he’s as good when it comes to animals . . .”
Cutler turned, slowly, hands clenched, the cords in his neck bulging. “Gilbert . . .” he whispered.
“Go ahead, John, tell ‘em . . .” Gilbert’s grin split his ginger beard. But Cutler did not miss the fact that his right hand was near his gun butt. Gilbert knew just how hard he was pushing and if Cutler moved, he would draw, and there was a woman and a child up here, vulnerable to stray bullets; and that, Cutler knew, was what Gilbert counted on to hold him back.
Cutler swallowed. And he knew that he was not going to let Gilbert have the wolf or poison the range. His hands unclenched; he let out a shuddering breath. Then, slowly, he turned to face the ranchers.
“All right,” he said, still holding himself under iron control. “I’ll tell you about the grizzly.” Even to himself, his voice sounded dead and toneless. “A lot of people know, you might as well.”
Fair Randall was staring at him, wide-eyed. He focused his gaze on her as he went on.
“I got tired of hunting men and killing ‘em,” he said bitterly. “Tired of using my gun on other people. I went to Arizona, as far from Oklahoma as I could get, bought me a ranch there and ... I got married.”
He paused, ordering his words in the dead silence. “It was all right. I was building up a herd near the White Mountain Reservation. Then a grizzly drifted in and started killing stock. Not an ordinary silver-tip—I’ve killed a lot of those—but one gone rogue, crazy. Like your wolf. It happens to animals sometimes. And when it does, they don’t follow the rules any longer. There’s no telling what they’ll do . . .”
He licked his lips. “I put out traps, figured it would be easy to catch this bear. It didn’t have much fear of humans. And I’d seen it lots of times, no mistaking it, skinny, snake-headed, a blaze of white along its back, maybe from the old wound that drove it mad . . . And I caught it.”
Beside Fair Randall, the little boy had settled down, mouth open.
“It gnawed off its foot above the trap,” Cutler said, his voice dead still. “And then it really went crazy. From then on, it wouldn’t come near a trap. And it began to kill even more . . . and . . .” He had never done anything harder than to continue, but he forced himself to. He owed it to her. The wider the story spread, the more likely he was to get word of the bear’s whereabouts, if it were still alive. Besides, he could not stop now.
“What I didn’t count on,” he said, “was it coming right to my home ranch. I was out hunting it in the mountains . . . And all the time, it was there. It must even have watched me ride out—knew the coast was clear. Because, when my wife went outside to hang out clothes . . .”
He broke off.
“She was still alive when I came back,” he said, his voice a whisper. He did not even see his audience now; he was seeing what had once been Doreen, lying there in her own blood, horribly mangled, not ten yards from the house. “But she didn’t live long. Just long enough to tell me what had happened. Then . . . then she died in my arms.”
He stopped, grateful for the quart of whiskey inside him, without which he could not have borne to talk of this at all. Even Gilbert was silent, sober now, as he went on.
“I went after the bear,” he said. “Most grizzlies, they stake out a territory, stick to it. Not this one. It was crazy all right. Like it knew I would hunt it down, it cut out ahead of me. When I was sure it was gone, I sold the ranch and followed it. But it always stayed one jump ahead of me. As if—as if it could scent me on the wind from a hundred miles away. And the critter’s still traveling . . . It’s cropped up in New Mexico, on the Tonto Rim, in Utah, again in Idaho . . . Never resting, always traveling, killing as it goes, anything that crosses its path . . . For five years I’ve tried to catch up with it. During that time, I’ve made a study of rogue animals. I’ve earned my living catchin’ ‘em. I’ve never failed to get any that I went after, except that bear.” Again his eyes swept the crowd. “If any of you ever see it, hear of it, a big, snake-headed boar silvertip with a white blaze on the shoulder and a stump where its left hind foot ought to be, for God’s sake, let me know.”
Then, slowly, he turned to Gilbert. His eyes drilled into those of the other wolfer. “Satisfied?” he asked.
Gilbert’s eyes shuttled away. Cutler turned to the ranchers again. “I’ve made myself into a pretty good trapper. I use steel traps because with them I don’t take anything but the kind of animal I’m trying to catch. I’ve got a good dog, too, and he’s a help. What I’ll do is this: move in, learn everything I can about the wolf and his habits. When I know how he thinks and where he ranges, I’ll get him. If there’s too many other wolves, too many coyotes, I’ll cut down their numbers too. Win or lose, when I move out, I won’t leave your range saturated with poison and the balance that holds everything together won’t be upset. I’ll make my headquarters on the ranch he’s hit the hardest and operate from there. While I’m working, you keep your dogs penned up and nobody sets a trap but me. Every time he kills, you’re to let me know right away. If I don’t have him within a month, I won’t get him. But it’s like Gilbert says: only one wolfer can work a territory at a time. If I fail, Gilbert can try his poison. The decision’s up to you.”
Then he sat down, between Fair Randall and the boy.
Fellows looked at him and then at Gilbert. “Well . . .” he began.
The woman jumped to her feet. “Tom, before this goes any further, we might as well tell both of them the rest of it. About Gustav Holz. They might as well know what they’re getting into.”
Fellows frowned. “Fair, I hadn’t planned . . .”
“Let’s put the cards on the table, all of them. Then we’ll take a vote, Mr. Cutler or Mr. Gilbert. Maybe when they hear the whole story they both might want to pull out.”
She moved up front, to stand by Fellows. “You might as well know about Holz,” she said. “As soon as the Apaches were cleared out, Gustav Holz came down here from the Pedernales country with his herds and cowboys. He laid claim to most of the Davis Mountains the way they used to do, ten, fifteen years ago. The rest of us came in later. We challenged Holz’s claim, homesteaded some land, bought some more. Cut his empire in half. It’s still enormous, but half’s not enough for him. He’s been doing everything he can to squeeze us out, including buying up our mortgages. That’s why we had to form this association. The only way we could stand against him was to unite.”
She looked at Gilbert, then at Cutler. “Catching the wolf might not be as easy as either one of you thinks. The trick is that you won’t be allowed to go after him on Holz’s range. Holz is so big and rich that what the wolf kills on his Circle H is just a fleabite. But with us it makes the difference be
tween survival and going under, and that’s why Holz won’t let any trapper go across his line. The fact of the matter—” her voice rose “—is that the wolf must den on Holz’s land and comes on our range just to kill. When he’s pursued, he just heads right back for the Circle H. And nobody can follow him there. Not with Holz’s gunmen riding deadline to keep off trespassers. And they mean business. Nobody knows that better than I do.”
“Now, Fair,” Fellows began. “You can’t be sure . . .”
“I know this,” she said. “When the wolf first started killing, my husband followed him onto Holz’s land. And that was where they found him dead. The coroner said his horse must have thrown and dragged him. The sheriff accepted that, even though . . .” She faltered. “Even though I showed him the rope marks on Bill’s neck. So,” she went on, more steadily, “it’s not only the wolf you have to worry about. It’s Gustav Holz, too.” Cutler saw how her small hands clenched. “Gustav Holz,” she finished huskily, “is as much a killer as that wolf.”
“Fair,” Fellows said awkwardly, “you’d better sit down.”
She turned on him, keeping herself checked with effort. “Oh, I will, Tom, sure. But not before I make a motion. I move that right now this association vote on whether Mr. Cutler or Mr. Gilbert is given the right to go after the Victorio Wolf.” Then she whirled, took her seat by Cutler, staring straight ahead.
Fellows took out a handkerchief, mopped sweat from his face. “Well, we’ve heard ‘em both. Me, I say Gilbert seems to have the right idea. Get the wolf and all the other varmints at the same time. Right now, every calf is precious. We’ll worry about the jackrabbits and the locusts later . . . But let’s have the vote. I vote for Gilbert. Now, the rest of you . . . Bud Wheeler?”
