Eye of the Wolf

by Margaret Coel

  “We’ll have to discuss this later,” Father John had said, starting around the desk.

  “Six new parents at last week’s meeting.” His assistant had followed him into the corridor. “No way do the numbers justify the expense.”

  Father John had yanked open the front door and glanced around at the man planted a few feet behind him. “I’ll be back for the meeting,” he’d said.

  “For Godsakes, John. We have to talk about this before the meeting.”

  “Okay, then. I don’t intend to cut any programs.”

  “Be reasonable, John. How can we pay for everything?” Ian had rolled his eyes skyward, and Father John had read the other priest’s assessment of him: stubborn, refuses to see the facts smacking him in the face. He’d stepped outside, pulling the door shut behind him, and hurried to the pickup.

  Now he realized that the narrow road had started winding downward. He was dropping off the top of a bluff, and the landscape was beginning to change. A thin line of trees—a black smudge in the whiteness—marked the banks of Bates Creek below. Tire tracks were still running ahead, which struck him as strange. Ranches out here were scattered over the bluffs. There was nothing in the valley, except the battlefield.

  He was getting close, and yet, nothing was as close as it seemed in the empty spaces. He’d once decided to take a walk across the plains to the home of a parishioner—the direct route, the way the eagle flies. He figured it would take thirty minutes. It had taken more than two hours.

  The road flattened out through the valley, the tracks heading west toward a canyon burrowing through slopes that rose like granite skyscrapers. The snow was deeper, and the sky darker, so that he had a sense that he was plunging toward an abyss. It occurred to him that if another spring blizzard set in, he could be stuck out here for days. He’d meant to get new tires for the pickup during the winter; there’d never been enough money in the budget. He concentrated on working the accelerator—easing up when the road smoothed out, pressing down for the climb over the ridges, always aiming for the tracks that chased ahead.

  He could feel the pickup balking in the snow, the back wheels slipping and churning. He jammed the accelerator into the floor and willed the old vehicle to keep going. A couple of hundred yards, it looked like—he couldn’t be sure—to the mouth of the canyon. The pickup nosed into a ditch hidden under the snow and started crawling up the other side. Then it stopped, the wheels grinding in place. He shifted into reverse and tried to back up. The tires whined; the rear end shimmied sideways. It was no use. He was stuck.

  He turned off the engine, hit the stop button on the tape player, and got out. He fished his gloves out of his jacket pocket and pulled them on. His hands felt stiff. The air was colder in the valley, the earth striped with blue shadows. Reaching back inside the pickup, he grabbed the cell phone and a pair of old binoculars that he kept in the glove compartment. He slammed the door shut—a loud crack through the sound of the wind rippling over the snow—and started out, stuffing the cell in his pocket, taking off his hat, looping the cord of the binoculars around his neck, and setting his hat back on. He walked in the packed snow of one of the tire tracks running ahead. Chances were that he could hitch a ride later with whoever was here, if he had to.

  It looked as if the canyon had been swallowed by the black shadows falling down the rock-strewn slopes. He could see the scraggly line of trees veering right around the base of the mountain. And the tire tracks also veered right, he realized. They crossed the road and plunged toward the trees. Father John stopped. He stared after the tracks a moment, wondering where the driver was headed. Animal tracks danced around the tire tracks. Antelope. Deer. Maybe elk. And wolves, he knew, had also been seen in the badlands.

  He dipped his chin into the folds of his jacket collar and set off at a half-run down the road, making his own tracks now, the snow swirling around his boots. He’d look for the other vehicle later.

  It was like running into the night, he thought, as he headed into the narrow canyon, moving in and out of the shadows down a corridor of frozen air. The slopes closed in around him, clumps of rocks and boulders rising up to the flat faces of granite that towered overhead. Scattered among the rocks were a few junipers and limber pines that cast their own long shadows, like the shadows of dead men. Above, the sky was a milky strip of light. The snow-covered floor of the canyon was pockmarked with sagebrush and clumps of dead grass. There were a few trees along the edges of the canyon floor. Gusts of wind zigzagged over the snow, lifting white puffs into the air and dropping them back to the ground.

  Father John stopped running. He was breathing hard, the air jabbing his lungs like icicles. This was a wild-goose chase, he told himself. A crank call, just as Father Nathan had suspected. Nothing here but the emptiness and the pervasive quiet of remote places.

  He lifted the binoculars and worked at adjusting the focus knob. His fingers felt as stiff as wood. Through the lens, the canyon dissolved into the sameness of snow wrapped in shadows, broken by a tree here and there and the gray hulks of sagebrush. The wind had picked up, howling across the slopes. No wonder that the elders said you could still hear the cries of the women and children at Bates and the howling of wolves.

  He was about to turn around when the binoculars brought up something different—a long, horizontal shape, like a log partially covered with snow. Two round, dark smudges jutted from one end. He crept forward, keeping the shape in the lens. He’d gone about twenty feet when the smudges came into focus. He could see clearly—the black hair, the hump of a shoulder in a dark jacket, the long shape of a body.

  He dropped the binoculars and started running, gulping in the icy air that ripped through his chest, the binoculars thudding against the front of his jacket. His heart pounded in his ears. A few feet from the body, he stopped. It was the body of a man, reclining on his side, right arm stretched over his head as if to ward off a blow. Little mounds of snow covered the gray jacket, the plaid shirt poking above the collar, the blue jeans, the tops of brown boots. There was no hat, no gloves, no footprints, which meant that the body had been here before last night’s snowstorm, possibly since Saturday, when the temperature was in the sixties—hatless, gloveless weather.

  Father John moved closer and went down on one knee in the snow. His breath stopped in his throat. The scavengers had already found the body—magpies, ravens maybe. They had picked at the eyes, so that the dead man seemed to be staring out through jagged, dark holes. Pieces of skin had been peeled away from the face and hands. Father John wondered how long it would be before the wolves came. They came with the ravens, he knew. They worked together.

  He didn’t take his eyes from the body. The man looked Indian, with prominent cheekbones, black hair falling over his forehead, wide nostrils. A sheen of frost lay over what was left of the face, which looked leathery and gray, almost colorless. Even the right hand—half lost in the snow—had a gray pallor of frozen flesh. There was a hardened puddle of blood on the front of the jacket, another puddle on one shoulder. And there was something else—something familiar about the way the body lay, right arm pulled up above the head, left arm folded helplessly across the abdomen.

  He’d seen dead bodies like this in old photographs of fallen warriors—soldiers moving across a battlefield in the stillness following an attack, snapping pictures of dead bodies lying on their side, right arms stretched overhead from the way they’d run forward, waving white pieces of cloth and American flags. But there was no surrender cloth here, no flag. Only the outstretched arm.

  He understood then: The killer had posed the body.

  “My God,” he said out loud. The sound of his voice was almost lost in the quiet of the canyon.

  He dropped his head and thumped a gloved fist against his forehead. In his mind, as clearly as if the tape had started to play, was the mechanical voice: Frozen enemy of old. Dead in the gorge. The voice of a madman who had re-created the battle scene from the past.

  It was a moment befor
e Father John could push past the horror. “May the good Lord have mercy on you,” he said out loud. “May He forgive you your sins, whatever they may be, and may you live forever in His peace.”

  Finally he struggled to his feet and peered through the dim light along the canyon floor. Bodies in the snow, the voice had said, and he knew with a certainty that there were more bodies. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes and studied the floor again. Left. Right. The temperature must have dropped ten degrees, and the shadows were deepening, beginning the slow meld into dusk. It was going to be hard to spot any other bodies, he realized, sweeping the binoculars back to the left.

  There it was—another horizontal shape interrupting the expanse of snow. The same dark, rounded smudges of a head and shoulders at one end.

  Father John started walking, not taking the binoculars down, afraid of losing sight of the body. As he stumbled over something hard—a rock, a frozen stalk of sagebrush—the crack of his boots against the object lingered in the silence. He kept going until the body loomed up in front of him.

  He went down on one knee again. Another man, judging by the wide shoulders beneath the dark jacket, the wide brown belt at the waist of the blue jeans, the heavy boot visible in the snow that had drifted over the legs. Hatless. Gloveless. There was the crusted blood, the torn black hole the size of a baseball in the back of the jacket. The body lay face down in the snow, both arms pulled high above the head so that the back of the jacket stretched into frozen wrinkles. Another pose, but this one was the pose of a chief running toward the enemy, both arms outstretched, palms up in the sign of peace—We are friendly Indians— before the bullet had slammed into his chest.

  Father John said the same prayer out loud. His voice was tight with horror and dread. How many more bodies?

  Another one, he realized, glancing over toward a clump of trees at the base of the slope on the left. How had he missed it? He pushed himself to his feet and walked over. Also a man, he could see, with the features of an Indian, dressed in blue jeans and a navy jacket opened over a light-colored shirt. In the center of the shirt, he saw the frozen puddle of blood. The scavengers had been here, too, pecking at the eyes and parts of the face. The body was propped upright against a tree stump, as if the man had sought a place to rest and had sat down, one hand relaxed in the snow. But the right hand was stuffed into the jacket pocket. A deliberate pose, Father John knew. He’d seen photographs of dead warriors, slumped against tree stumps and wagon wheels, one hand in a pocket.

  Pulling aside one of the branches, he went down on both knees. “Lord, have mercy on us,” he began.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something on the opposite slope—the faintest movement, like that of a wolf prowling an outcropping of rocks. He raised the binoculars and scoured the slope until he’d focused in on the spot. Hunched down among the rocks was the shape of someone in a dark jacket, a black hat pulled low over the forehead. It wasn’t until the figure slid sideways behind a rock that he saw the rifle moving upward.

  He threw himself down into the snow as the rifle shot cracked the air, the sound bouncing back and forth across the canyon. A nearby stump was hit, and little pieces of wood rained over his glove. He felt a sharp pain in his face, then something warm and moist trickling down his cheek. He ran his glove over the moisture; fingers and palm were smeared with dark red blood. The body had started to slump sideways, a slow falling into the snow. Father John inched himself around the body until he was behind a boulder where he pulled in his arms and legs and waited.

  5

  ANOTHER BURST OF gunshots reverberated across the canyon, explosions of noise. Father John could see the bullet lines catapulting through the snow. A nearby sagebrush shuddered, as a bullet thudded into the tree next to him. Pain stabbed at his face. He could feel the hot, wet blood trickling along his jaw. He held himself very still. Four seconds, five seconds passed—God, a lifetime—before the firing stopped and the silence closed in.

  He stayed still. The slightest motion, he knew, and the shooter would pick him out in the shadows. Hunched over, curled around himself behind the boulder, the collar of his jacket damp with blood and his heart thumping in his ears, he waited for the next eruption of gunshots, counting off the seconds that turned into minutes, conscious of a scraggly line of trees running along the base of the mountain slope a few yards away. If he could crawl over to the trees, he might be able to work his way out of the canyon and make a dash for the pickup. Dear God. The pickup was stuck. It would be impossible to dig it out with a madman shooting at him. He was ten, fifteen miles from the nearest ranch, the temperature dropping. Unless he could dig out the pickup, or get the cell phone to kick in, he was a dead man.

  The sound of the wind skimming the snow melted into the quiet. Another thought now, the shooter could have surmised that he’d been hit and was coming for him, coming for him with a rifle, intending to fire another shot—to execute him—then pose his body like the others. Father John skimmed the landscape with his eyes and tried to tighten his fists, a reflex motion. His fingers had gone numb with cold; his gloves felt as stiff as cement. A sharp cramp had settled into one leg and the pain in his cheek had turned into a persistent throb. There was no sign of any movement anywhere, yet he could feel the shooter waiting and watching, like a wolf waiting and watching for its prey.

  He considered darting across the open area for the trees, then dismissed the idea. A dark shape moving across the snow! He’d be the target in a shooting gallery. He remained still, trying to count off the minutes until probably three or four had passed. God, it seemed like three or four hours! The odor of his own blood was sharp in his nostrils. From somewhere far off came a high-pitched howling noise that drifted overhead, then dissolved into the quiet. The wind howling down the slopes, he told himself. And yet there were wolves in the area.

  This is the way it had been at the massacre, he realized. Arapahos pinned inside the tipis and hunkering down in the grass and brush, with the troops and the Shoshones firing into the village, and wolves howling in the distance. Then, a few warriors had broken out and clambered up the slopes, dodging among the boulders. The advantage shifted. Arapahos had begun firing down on the enemy, eventually driving them from the village.

  He tried to push away the images. Dear God! He had to keep his imagination in check and stay focused. He let a few more minutes pass, then began inching himself upward along the boulder, pulling his feet under him until they were firmly planted in the snow. Gripping his cowboy hat between two fingers, he moved his head away from the hat. To his right was a corridor of open space, no more than a few yards wide, he guessed, before the trees and the shadows began. With a flick of his wrist, he flung the brown cowboy hat like a Frisbee to the left. Gunshots cracked the air as he propelled himself across the open slot and into the trees. He crouched behind a small limber pine, more like a bush than a tree—a flimsy shelter—and held perfectly still, bullets streaking the air around him, smashing into the trees, furrowing the snow. There was some comfort in the realization that the shooter had to be shooting blind now, shooting into the shadows.

  The afternoon light was fading fast, only a flush of light left in the sky and layers of black shadows dropping over the slopes and sweeping through the canyon. He waited another few minutes, conscious of the blood crusting on his face and neck, and then began moving along the trees, expecting the gunshots to explode again, but there was only silence and the muffled crunching of his boots in the snow. He kept going, sinking into a snowdrift at times and grabbing onto the branches to steady himself.

  He was close to the mouth of the canyon when he heard the faint growl of an engine turning over. He stopped and bent his head in the direction of the noise. It seemed to come from far away, across a vast emptiness. And then it was a steady thrum that got louder for a moment before it began to fade, and he realized that the shooter was driving away.

  Stiff fingered, he removed his right glove and fumbled in his pocket for the cell phone,
nearly dropping it into the snow before he managed to grip the cold plastic. He jabbed at the on button and punched in 911, his eyes on the readout. Roaming. Roaming. Finally, the message, no service. He had to get out of the canyon.

  He made a sharp left into a clearing and walked straight ahead toward the open expanse of snow and sagebrush, his muscles tense, waiting for the rifle shot—God, let the shooter be gone. There was no sound except for the swoosh of the wind. He tried the cell again and again. Still no service. He emerged from the canyon and started running. His legs felt like lead pipes pumping through the snow; his breath floated ahead in gray puffs. Down the road, the pickup looked as if it were part of the frozen landscape.

  It took a good thirty minutes, he estimated. Extricating the collapsible shovel from the other tools in the lockbox in the pickup bed, shoveling snow out from the rear tires, spreading the bag of sand—half full, crammed in the corner of the box—behind the tires. Then jiggling the key in the ignition until the engine finally turned over and rocking the pickup backward and forward, the tires kicking out the sand and snow, until he was free. Craning his head around to stare out the rear window, driving in reverse along the tracks—his and the shooter’s—until he came to a spot where he was able to manage a U-turn. And every few minutes, he pulled out the cell, jabbing in 911.

  He was starting the climb out of the valley, the bluffs looming above, the phone pressed against his ear, when the cell came alive: “Fremont County Sheriff’s Office.” A woman’s voice across a great distance.

  “This is Father O’Malley,” he said, and he told her that he’d found the bodies of three men at the site of the Bates Battle, near Bates Creek north of Lysite.

  “Bates Battle,” she repeated. “Deputies will be there as soon as possible, Father. It could take awhile.”

  He eased on the brake, looking for another place in which to make a U-turn, and told the operator that he would be waiting near the battlefield.