The Wolf Pack (Cutler #1)

by John Benteen

  Cutler grinned. “You can pat him now. Right between the ears, rub him there and say his name. Big Red.”

  “Big Red,” Jess whispered. “Gee, hello, Big Red.”

  The Airedale whined.

  Cutler laughed softly. “Now you’re friends. You and him can tussle all you want to, only don’t pull his ears or tail.”

  “You mean I can play with him?”

  “If you mind your manners. You forget and he’ll nip you to remind you. Don’t come cryin’ to me.”

  “Boy!” Starved for a pet and a playmate both, Cutler judged, Jess grabbed Big Red around the neck. By the time Cutler had out spanned the mules, they were rolling on the ground together. But when the team and Apache had drunk from the tank and Cutler had turned them into the corral, Jess was on his feet, Big Red capering around him like a puppy. “Hey, Mr. Cutler! Can I see what’s in your wagon?”

  “Why not?” Cutler picked him up, set him over the tailgate. “Take a look.”

  Jess stared. “Gee,” he breathed.

  Cutler had no home but his wagon, and he was meticulous about it. There was a place for everything, and everything was stowed where it belonged.

  The built-in rack for long guns was just behind the seat. It held a brand new Krag .30 caliber high-powered repeating rifle; a .30-30 Winchester saddle carbine, and a twelve gauge shotgun. Ammunition was stowed in long boxes beneath it.

  Cutler’s bedroll, on a woolen mattress, was spread out on the floor of the wagon box. Beside it was his leather suitcase. A special bin held provisions for himself, the dog, and another housed grain for the horses. An extra water barrel was clamped in a steel hoop. And then there were the traps.

  Mostly they were Newhouses, though there were a few Oneidas among them. A few small single-springs for mink and otter dangled from one end of the strips running perpendicular to the hooped supports that held up the wagon cover. The rest were double-springed: number twos for foxes; number fours for larger, stronger animals such as bobcats, coyotes, and wolves; number fives for cougars and black bear. And then, dominating all the rest, enormous and grim-jawed, were the huge bear traps. They were custom-made and the only ones with teeth—great sharp steel spikes, interlocking. Cutler had designed them himself and had supervised the construction of their special double jaws. No bear, especially the grizzly that haunted his dreams, would ever gnaw its way out of one of those.

  Below in another box, were the big jackscrews to clamp down the trap springs when setting them.

  “Man,” Jess Randall breathed. “What a mess of traps. Hey, Mr. Cutler. Would you teach me how to use them?”

  Cutler grinned. “Maybe. It depends . . .”

  “Depends on what?”

  “Whether you follow the rules.”

  “Rules? What rules?”

  Cutler’s face went grim. He took down a single-spring number one, compressed its spring, set its trigger, then stuck a finger under its jaw and sprang it. The trap snapped shut with an ugly, metallic sound. Jess Randall jumped.

  “Traps,” Cutler said, “opened up the West. The fur companies coming after beaver sent the old-time mountain men into Indian country. The fur trade built Santa Fe and Seattle, and brought the Hudson Bay Company into Canada. As a matter of fact, young man, it’s possible that without trappers nobody would have hung on in this country when it was first discovered. Furs are like gold.” He looked down at the trap in his hand. “Furs are one way that poor men could get rich in a hurry. They came here huntin’ gold, but the gold was scarce, so they took the furs instead and stayed.”

  He laid the trap aside. “There’s many a farmer and rancher and many a farmer and rancher’s son who depended on furs for cash money. A boy like you . . .” He surveyed the ranch layout again. “I expect this place could use some cash and you could earn it. Take skunks, some badgers, maybe even coyotes. But first you got to learn those rules. There ain’t any other way.”

  “Tell me what they are. I’ll learn ‘em.”

  Cutler set the trap and sprang it once more. “Traps hurt animals. No way around it. You trap, you learn how to hurt them the least. And the first and most important thing is, any trap you set, you look at it every day. Rain or shine, sick or well, you got traps out, you run your line.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Because you don’t leave an animal to starve to death slow, you put it out of its misery quick . . . The next thing is, you don’t trap except in cold weather when the fur’s prime, not unless it’s a case like the wolf, where something’s killing stock. Warm weather furs are wasted, and waste’s a crime. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Jess said, nodding.

  “Last thing, and this is important, too, maybe the most important.” He thought of Gilbert, and his mouth thinned. “Don’t get greedy. Don’t try to clean everything out. Always leave some for seed. That way, you keep things in balance and you’ll have a crop of fur every year. Do like the Injuns did. Take what you can use, what you reasonably need, don’t waste anything, and even when your grandchildren come along, there’ll be something left for them. Now, when I’ve caught the wolf ...”

  He broke off as he heard the sound of distant hoof-beats. “There’s Mama!” Jess cried, and he jumped down from the wagon. He and Cutler watched the rider coming toward them across the basin at a gallop.

  Mounted on a roan gelding, she rode straight up, like a man, but even at that distance, Cutler thought, there was no mistaking her for one. Not with that chestnut hair streaming behind her and the fullness under the man’s shirt, and those long, good legs in tight Levi’s clamping the horse’s barrel.

  Coming into the yard, she pulled up, swung down. “Hello. Mr. Cutler. I see you and Jess have already met.”

  “Oh, we’re old pardners,” Cutler grinned. Then the woman froze as Big Red loped up. “It’s all right,” Cutler said. “He’s made friends with Jess, and he’s gentle as a lamb around women.”

  She put out a hand, patted the Airedale’s head. He stood patiently, sniffing at her. Cutler liked her attitude. “You ain’t much afraid of dogs, are you?”

  Fair Randall smiled wryly. “Mr. Cutler, I’ve got so many things to really be afraid of, I can’t afford any useless fears. Come in the house. Jess, put up my horse, please.”

  Cutler followed her into a small living room; once its furniture had been good, but it was shabby now with use, even though everything was meticulously clean. She led him into an equally spotless kitchen. “Well,” she asked, looking at him curiously, “did you have your drunk?”

  Cutler met her eyes and nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Fair’s wry smile lingered. “I shouldn’t have sounded so holier than thou.” She was sober all at once. “I know what it is to . . . miss someone.” Then she turned to a cabinet. “I’ve been working hard all day. I, in fact, am going to have a drink myself. Will you join me?”

  “Thanks, but no. Like I said, I don’t drink on the job, and I’m working now. Some coffee would be nice, though.”

  “Coming up.” She poked up the banked fire, added fresh fuel, prepared a big, blue enamel pot of Arbuckle’s. She handled herself in a kitchen, Cutler thought, as well as she rode a horse or wrote a letter .. . While the coffee was perking, she took a half empty bottle from a cabinet, splashed whiskey in a glass, added water, took a long sip, and then sighed gratefully.

  Cutler said, “Before Jess comes in, there’s something I want to talk about. He told me the wolf came right in the ranch yard last week and killed his dog.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “In the middle of the night. We found the carcass the next morning, not fifty feet from the house. And the creature did it without making a sound.”

  “It’s not unusual for a big wolf to entice a dog away from a house, tease him into a chase, then kill him when he gets him out of gunshot.” Cutler’s face was serious. “But when he pulls something like that . . . I’ll tell you. I don’t think I’d leave Jess here by himself anymore.”

  She lowered
her eyes. “I wasn’t happy about doing it. But I’ve got no help. I have to ride all day and he’s not up to it. I always come back well before dark. Surely the wolf wouldn’t . . . not in broad daylight.”

  “I don’t know what he’ll do—yet,” Cutler said. “All I know is that whatever he does, it won’t be what any other wolf would do. I wouldn’t take any chances. For the first few days anyhow, I’ll leave Big Red here with Jess so you can get your work done. He’ll be perfectly safe that way. But when the time comes that I need Red, you’ll have to keep Jess with you.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Now, what can you tell me about the wolf?”

  She finished her drink, started preparations for supper as she talked. “Well, the wolves had pretty well been eliminated from the mountains before we came in. I guess there were still a few way back in the remote spots. But then the Victorio Wolf and his mate showed up and started killing cattle. Oh, not like he’s doing now . . . they might pull down a steer a week, here, there, somewhere else; nobody got hurt too bad. But then Tom Fellows tried to catch them. He managed to trap the she-wolf . . .”

  “What’d he do with her?” Cutler asked quickly.

  “Why . . .” Fair shrugged. “Killed and skinned her. Made a hat and a pair of gloves from her hide; he brags about it.”

  “And the carcass?”

  “Left it for the buzzards, I guess.”

  Cutler made a sound of disgust. “The fool. He could have used her to catch him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Wolves mate for life,” Cutler said. “And once they mate, they’re a lot truer to each other than most married humans. Gilbert could have used the she for bait. Then he could have caught the male without any trouble.”

  Fair stared at him. “You mean—he would have come to her body? To grieve?”

  Cutler nodded.

  Fair turned her face away. “That almost makes me pity him. And maybe it explains what happened afterwards. That was when he started killing the way he does now. He’ll just go right through a herd, pull down full-grown steers, even bulls, eight, ten, maybe fifteen head a night. And we can’t stand any more losses like that. I’m not even sure now that I can gather enough beef to make my mortgage payment to Holz and get through the winter ...”

  “Holz holds your mortgage?”

  “He holds most of the mortgages ... He bought them up from the bank. And if we don’t meet the payments on the dotted line, he won’t give us an inch of leeway.” Her voice turned bitter. “You can see why he’s only too happy to provide a sanctuary for the wolf. He’s got plenty of riders to watch his cattle, and what few he loses are just an investment in getting full control of the whole area. If he were paying the wolf so much a month to work for him, it couldn’t be doing a better job . . . Mr. Cutler, you’ve got to get it. And quickly.”

  “I’ll do my best, but it’s going to take a little time. I’ve got to learn how he thinks . . . He’s turned rogue with grief, and his mind’ll work totally different from any ordinary animal’s. On top of which, he’s been well educated by all the amateurs who’ve had a crack at him. But I’ll do it as fast as I can, Mrs. Randall.”

  She looked at him. “Call me Fair,” she said. “Everybody does.”

  Cutler ran his eyes over her, grinned. “Yes,” he said. “You’re Fair, all right. And suppose you call me John.”

  In the wagon, Cutler lay awake, staring at the darkness overhead. He felt restless, even apprehensive. For the first time since he could remember, the two-bottle spree in town hadn’t done its work. It was, he knew, the woman, Fair Randall. Just being around her stirred up too many memories. She was so much like Doreen; he kept comparing the two of them . . .

  Rolling over, he made a sound in his throat. Christ, would he ever be free of that memory? And the hatred that racked him, too, kept him always on the move, always in pursuit of that silver-blazed, three-footed grizzly . . . Again he saw what the animal had done to her, again he heard her ghastly moaning and last whispered words as the life ebbed from her while he had held her in his arms . . . And again, the hatred blazed, the determination that somehow, someday, he would find her killer, and the knowledge that, until he did, nothing else mattered, nothing else was permanent.

  Sometimes he wondered if he were mad, if the grizzly were a hallucination, a figment of his imagination insane with grief. He’d wasted no time, had buried Doreen, had struck its trail. At first it had been easy to follow, especially for a man who’d learned tracking from the Indians up in the Territory . . .

  Heading due north, the bear had traveled swiftly, in a straight line, deep into the mountains, not stopping either to rest or to eat. He was hoping it would do as wounded maddened animals often did when pursued and turn on him, become the hunter instead of the hunted, but it didn’t. It only ran. And then the blizzard came, a roaring, blinding hell of snow whipping prematurely through the high country. That wiped out the trail. It blasted through the mountains for a week, making travel impossible for two weeks afterwards. Maybe the bear had denned for the winter or maybe it had kept on going and was miles away. Anyhow, it had vanished like a wraith.

  And so, for the time being, he’d had to give up. But he could not live on his ranch without Doreen and with all those memories. Besides, he was not finished with the bear yet. If it lived, he’d find it somewhere. He sold the place, outfitted himself with traps and gear. Then he’d set out on his long hunt, supporting himself as he made his search by seeking out other rogues like the grizzly and running them down. He was good at that: his grandfather had been a mountain man and taught him a great deal, the Indians had polished up his knowledge, and what he had learned about the art of man hunting as a Federal Marshal had helped too. There was, he knew, not a better trapper in the West by now than John Cutler—but unlike most he was not interested in making the usual small bounties paid for ordinary animals or the income from the fur he took. It was the killers he was after, the ones that slaughtered senselessly for the sheer sport of killing . . . And animals like that carried big prices on their scalps. He wandered everywhere, making war against them, always seeking one in particular—the silver-blazed, three-footed bear.

  It was still alive. And it had gone quite mad, roaming endlessly, staking no particular territory for itself. It killed anything that moved, that crossed its path. The bear turned up here, there, everywhere, and anywhere. And always when he got word of it, he dropped everything and went after it—and always by the time he got there it had vanished.

  Five years, now, he thought. Five years of obsession, of lonely days and lonelier nights and still he had not caught up with the grizzly. But maybe if Gilbert hadn’t been lying about Colorado—

  Then he heard the wolf.

  The howl came from far away, a good three miles, deep-throated, spine-chilling, eerie, carrying through the night. Like the ululating mourning of a lost soul in hell, it rose to a high, trembling crescendo, then died.

  John Cutler sat up, reaching for his boots. On the wagon seat Big Red came up, neck-hair bristling, a low growl rumbling in his chest. In the corral, Apache snorted.

  Once more the howl rang out. Cutler scrambled through the wagon, jerked the saddle gun from the rack, went over the seat and down. With Red beside him, he was already headed for the corral when a light came on in the Randall house and the door flew open.

  “John!” Fair stood in the doorway with her nightgown clutched about her. “Did you hear it?”

  “I heard it,” Cutler said. “Northwest, about three miles.”

  “Yes.” Her voice shook. “Buckhorn Canyon. I’ve got a bunch of cattle there—she-stuff and yearlings. Oh, my God, if he gets in among them . . .” Her hands clenched. “Wait, I’ll ride with you.”

  “No,” Cutler said, “you stay here. Listen at him! Jesus, that’s a big wolf!” He grabbed his saddle and blanket. “Maybe we’re in luck, maybe me and Red can run him down. How do I get up there?”

  “No trouble. Ride o
ut north ‘til you hit the creek, follow it up to the left branch, that’ll take you right to the canyon. But, John . . .”

  “Dammit, I said you stay with Jess.” He had the hackamore on Apache now; then he cinched the saddle. “Don’t worry if I’m not back for a day or two. If Red can strike his trail, we’ll stay after him as far as he can run . . .” He swung up. “Come on, Big Red!”

  The dog was already gone, running like a shot toward the howl that rose again on the midnight air. “John,” Fair Randall called, as Cutler spurred the bay. “Good luck—and be careful!”

  Cutler did not answer. With Apache stretched out and running hard, he was following Big Red toward the sound of howling. Soon the wolf would begin its hunt; he had to get to Buckhorn Canyon before it slaughtered Fair Randall’s yearlings. Whether he got a shot at the wolf or not, he had to spook it away from that herd.

  Even with a half moon overhead, shedding pale and tricky light, John Cutler made a wild and dangerous ride. But he had confidence in his gelding, and he never checked him. Apache, used to chases, gloried in the running and never slackened his pace. With Big Red not far in the lead now, the bay jumped whatever obstacles appeared as they reached the creek and raced along the low ground of its course. Ahead, now, the howling had ended, and that meant the wolf was getting down to business, about to start its nightly slaughter.

  Then, ahead, a dark line of brush veered left from the main course of the creek. Cutler pivoted Apache at full speed, called to Red. The big Airedale turned, caught up, raced out ahead again. Beyond stood the walls of Buckhorn Canyon. And from there not a half mile away, the bellowing of frightened cattle rose in an awful chorus. Cutler cursed; the God damned wolf was already in among them! He yanked the Winchester from its boot, worked the lever, fired four shots at random in the air, as Apache rocketed on, Big Red streaking out ahead. That would warn the wolf that he was coming, turn its attention from the cattle, even if it cost him a shot at the beast. If he waited longer, it could pull down a half dozen head . . .