The Wolf Path

by Judith Van GIeson

  “Sure,” he said. “I like to watch the lobos.” Apparently he didn’t mind revisiting childhood, but maybe he hadn’t had one.

  A sign beside the pen told the sad history of the lobo, a widespread and efficient predator in the Southwest for 20,000 years, wiped out in only decades by our federal government. Once New Mexico became a ranching state that was the end of the lobo. By the 1950s they’d been shot, dynamited, poisoned into oblivion. The last known New Mexican survivor was trapped and killed in 1965. The Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, requiring the government to undo the harm it had done. The lobo was listed in 1976 and in 1982 a recovery plan was approved, but by then the only lobos left were in old Mexico. A few were trapped and brought back here to start a captive breeding program, and now there were a total of thirty known lobos in existence, making them one of the rarest mammals in the world. It would be foolhardy to keep such a limited population in one place, so when pups were old enough to take from their mother, they were transported to other zoos.

  I recalled something the sign didn’t say. A few years ago a shipment of pups had been stolen en route from the Rio Grande Zoo to Texas. Now when lobo pups traveled they were escorted by armed guards.

  “Do you remember when the pups were stolen?” I asked the Kid.

  “I remember.” he said.

  “Did they ever find out who did it?”

  "No. It was someboday in a truck wearing a motorcycle jacket with a black vizor over the face like - how do you say it, Darth Vader? - and a gun."

  "It was a hunting rifle."

  “They were not the only ones stolen. More pups were taken in Arizona. Did you know that?”

  “No. Who do you think did it?”

  “Who knows, Chiquita?” the Kid shrugged. “People in this country are crazy.”

  “They’re not in Mexico?”

  “They’re crazy there, too, but people have more here and they can make more trouble.”

  “Maybe it was a hunter. The kind of guy who would raise pups to adulthood, set them free and charge his friends $5,000 to come over and shoot them.”

  “It could be a rancher,” the Kid said. “They kill lobos.”

  “Or someone, maybe, into breeding exotic pets.”

  “Or one of your environmental people who wanted to free them. If that happened, it’s better they take them to Mexico. Lobos are safer there.”

  “Why?” I asked. “They kill animals in Mexico, too, don’t they?”

  “Not where the lobos live. That’s where the Norteños are and everybody else is afraid to go.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Narcotraficantes.”

  “Drug dealers don’t kill wolves?”

  The Kid shook his head. “No. The Norteños are simpatico with lobos; they are outlaws, too.”

  A little boy about eight years old wearing mirrored sunglasses, holding a cone of cotton candy and looking more like somebody’s plump and pampered darling than an outlaw, walked up to the adjacent window, poked a sticky finger through and pointed it at the wolves. “Bang, bang,” he said, “you’re dead.”

  2

  I SAW A TV commercial recently in which an automaker invited me to have a long and meaningful relationship with a car. I’d had a long relationship with an orange Rabbit and what it meant to me was clogged fuel filters, dead carburetors, breakdowns on lonely roads, breakdowns in traffic. As the Kid says, when they get old it’s one thing after another. After my friend Lonnie Darmer died, her parents gave me a chance to buy her yellow Nissan and I took it. So far it had been reliable, although a bit heavy with bumper stickers for my taste. I’m not sure it’s wise for an attorney to be making so many statements at once: STOP THE UGLY BUILDING, DON’T BUY EXXON, WHIP WIPP, BETTER ACTIVE TODAY THAN RADIOACTIVE TOMORROW, NEW MEXICO NATIVE—that one wasn’t even true; I had grown up in Ithaca, New York. I ended up in this state when I went to UNM law school. One day I planned to scrape all the messages off. I also planned to check the tire pressure, wash the car every week and get the oil changed regularly, too.

  To get to Soledad I headed south on I-25, the lonesome highway, where you have to drive fifty miles to find gas or food and the billboards show their bare backsides because there’s nothing beyond here to advertise. The Rio Grande Valley was a green snake, the land above it was desert; animals inhabited the higher elevations. Clouds made falcon shadows on the mesas, gray mountains loped wolflike to Mexico. There’s a 328,000-acre land grant courtesy of a king of Spain here that doesn’t appear to have any life on it. It’s the kind of land that takes a hundred acres to feed one cow, bare as the moon, but did it get that way before the cattle started grazing on it or after? Some people say that this was once fertile grassland and modern management reduced it to dust, but those are fighting words in ranch country.

  I hadn’t put the Nissan through its paces yet and it didn’t seem to be worth a cop’s time to patrol such a deserted stretch of highway, so I took a quick look around and when I didn’t see anybody watching I put the pedal to the metal and the rubber to the road: 80, 85, 90. At 95 I lost my nerve. The engine was willing, but the fragile metal body shimmied and bucked.

  I slowed down to a conservative 75 and tuned in to Christy Hubbard, the DJ from Socorro. “Now you have a nice day,” she said, emphasizing the “you” like they do around here. Christy stayed with me from Belen to Soledad, two hundred hot miles, three long hours. Linda Ronstadt was not in the market for a boy who wanted to love only her and James Taylor was sweet baby James again. They stuck with what they liked down here and why not? Nothing else changed; why should the music?

  I passed by Socorro, Truth or Consequences and not much else until I came to an eighty-mile string of man-made lakes that seemed unnaturally blue, maybe because there wasn’t any green around them, just moon-colored stone. I’ve heard that people come here on Sundays from miles around to watch the water flow. I got off the interstate at 218 and headed south to Soledad. This was ranching country, the land of 50,000-acre spreads. The few visible houses were surrounded by the bones of yard cars and all the mechanical appliances their owners had ever known. Every ten miles or so I came to a sign that said HARPER’S HEREFORDS or CHAROLAIS, THE FRITZ AND HELEN EWALD RANCH, and a dusty road pointed toward infinity, not a place you’d want to live alone. I passed some of Fritz and Helen’s Charolais, big spooky white cattle, precious as Brahmans in India. In New Mexico cattle have rights, too, including the right to roam unfettered. If you want to keep your neighbor’s cattle off your property legally, you have to put up a fence. After thirty miles of empty highway a couple of long-distance motorcyclists passed me from the opposite direction. They had stuffed animals tied onto their handlebars and wore black helmets and visors pulled down over their faces, Darth Vader visors, like the Kid said, CAUTION WATCH FOR WATER, a roadside sign read, but the dip it guarded looked like it hadn’t been wet in a century, COURTESY PAYS, said another, only there was no one to be courteous to.

  The road began to climb so subtly that I didn’t notice until my ears popped. The soil got redder, the yucca taller, the black volcanic rock of the malpais began to appear. It was August and the tarantulas, known to some as wolf spiders, were on the march. Big fuzzy black and brown creatures, crawling all over the hot highway, they reared up as I approached and took a swing. In the purple distance I began to see the Soledad Mountains that connect with the Sierra Madres at the border. When I reached I-10 I turned west. The Soledads took on definition as I got closer, an exposed spine: rocky, barren, jagged as broken bone. The view was so spectacular that I was glad I had eyes to see it, and so empty that I began to wish for something to fill it up.

  When Soledad appeared I was ready. First came the front sides of the billboards. Jesus was Lord over Soledad, Tom and Patricia Cook had been married for fifteen happy years, 25,000 friendly people welcomed me, motel rooms were only $14.95 a night and American owned, every one. The city was on the west side of Soledad Pass, and, as I crossed over, I saw it spreading
its tentacles of McDonald’s and Burger King. I’d worked up a big thirst on the highway so I got off at the first exit I saw, got on a secondary road and stopped at the Galaxy Deli. Soledad is only twenty miles from White Sands Missile Range and under the influence.

  In spite of its zingy name, the Galaxy Deli was dimly lit and quiet. I poked around in the cooler, picked out a Papaya Punch and took it to the counter behind which a Hispanic man with a long and deeply lined face sat. He wore dark glasses and a long-sleeved khaki shirt. His elbows were on the counter and his chin rested in his hand. He was so still that at first I thought he was sleeping. As I approached, though, he cocked his head and seemed to be sizing me up with antennae that I couldn’t see, hearing things about me, maybe, that even I didn’t know. He had the preternatural acuteness of the long-term blind, but I wasn’t sure he’d want me to notice.

  “Buenas tardes,” I said.

  “Buenas tardes.”

  “Your Papaya Punches are cheaper here, only fifty cents.” I laid the juice down on the counter, handed him a dollar bill. He put it in the cash register and counted out two quarters.

  “Where are you from?” he asked. He had a slow, careful voice and a trusting manner. He’d have to be trusting in his position—a blind man handling money. It probably brought out the best in some people, the worst in others. I hoped that if anyone screwed him he just averaged it into the cost of doing business or staying alive, because there’s that certain percentage of people who will put it to you no matter how you behave or what you do, whether you trust them, whether you don’t.

  “I’m from Albuquerque,” I said.

  “That’s a long way away. What brings you to Soledad?”

  “I’m a lawyer and a client of mine is giving a program about wolves at the high school.”

  “They’re talking about bringing the wolves back, aren’t they?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He tilted his head as if he were looking far, far away and motioned me closer. “They’ve already come back,” he whispered. “I can hear things that other people don’t and I hear the wolves at night at El Puerto. It’s a lonely, lonely sound.”

  Juan Sololobo had already sent me a copy of the permit in question. I’d looked it over and it seemed in order to me, but you couldn’t blame a person with his history for being uneasy. Instead of marching to the Vietnam War he’d gone AWOL, he had told me when I called to say I’d represent him. He got into robbing banks to support his antiwar activities and did time for it. He probably had that extra chromosome buzz common to cons and ex-cons that immediately raises the hair on the back of law enforcement officials’ necks, the way a wolf raises the hackles on certain other people’s. The way he told it, two outlaws (he and the wolf) had banded together and were trying to find a peaceful and law-abiding way to promote their cause. They hadn’t always been successful, he admitted. Wolves brought out the beast in men. Other wolves of his had been set loose, confiscated, poisoned, shot and tranquilized to death.

  “How did you get involved with wolves, anyway?” I asked him.

  “It started years ago in California,” he said, “when my first wife, Jayne, brought a wolf pup home. She was trying to make a pet out of it, but I could see that wasn’t going to work so I began educating myself about wolves and then I started breeding them—that’s legal as long as you keep them penned up. When I got penned up myself Jayne went on breeding ’em, but she split soon after I got out of jail. I kept the wolves and eventually I started giving the program. Siri is a descendent of Lupe, that original pup. Jayne lives in Soledad now. You’ll meet her; Siri and I are going to be staying at her place. You ever been married?”

  “Once.”

  “It’s a bitch, ain’t it? I get along fine with ’em before I’m married to ’em and after it’s over, but when you got that legal arrangement, it gets tough.”

  It was one way I made a living, severing those legal arrangements—it was tough. “How many times have you been married?” I asked him.

  “Four.” Four marriages were bad enough, but four divorces? Who would want to put oneself or anybody else through that? “I’ll always have a soft spot for the first,” he said, “someday you may, too.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Jayne was only seventeen when I married her. God, she was beautiful, always knew her own mind, too, even then. I’m kind of sorry we never had a kid. Maybe things would have turned out different if we had.”

  “What keeps you going?” Was I talking about marriage, wolves or life when I asked that question? I wasn’t sure, but he was, because wolves were his real marriage and his life.

  “You have to believe in something,” he said, “and the wolf is bigger than me … or them. He’s a magnificent animal who deserves better than man has been giving him. Wait till you see the response I get from those kids down there, you’ll understand.”

  ******

  Juan Sololobo’s program was held in the Soledad High School Auditorium for a group of Upward Bound students who had been sentenced to summer school. I arrived just as the program was about to begin. The auditorium was full of restless teenagers who were there because they were disadvantaged in some way (it was a requirement for getting into the program)—by poverty, maybe, diet, heredity or parental neglect, but not by energy. They’d been blessed when it came to that. They wore jeans and T-shirts and had a lot of hair—they weren’t impoverished when it came to hair either. They laughed, they joked, they chewed gum and they weren’t for one instant still. Juan was ten minutes late, which gave them a lot of time to get restless.

  Finally he entered the auditorium holding a leash that Sirius was pulling. This was my first glimpse of Juan Sololobo and he looked moderately tough, which was about as I had expected. He was medium height for a man, around 5´10˝. His arms, totally visible because he wore a Levi’s jacket with the sleeves ripped off, were well muscled. “He’s got cords,” one girl behind me giggled to another. “Cordy,” her friend replied. Juan’s hair was moderately long and moderately gray and it curled around the edges. His stomach probably wasn’t as flat as it used to be, but he still looked okay in jeans. His eyes were pale blue and alert but they had a baffled expression, as if he weren’t sure how he’d ended up being pulled around an auditorium by a wolf.

  “Be cool,” Juan said to the room. “Like all wolves, Sirius is very intelligent and psychic. He can feel your energy, so stay cool and calm. If one person in here doesn’t like him, or scares him, he will sense it and want to leave. He may come up to you and say hello. If he does, keep your hands calm and gentle, put them out and let him sniff.”

  He began walking around the room with Sirius, who was as wired as the teenagers. Sirius was only two years old, Juan said, and he liked to play. He was big, a lot bigger than the zoo lobos, and had thick gray fur. His eyes were yellow, slightly slanted and intense. Sirius pulled Juan around the auditorium, walking right up to the kids, sniffing them and climbing across the writing arms of their chairs if he felt like it.

  The kids tried to be blasé, but when a full-fledged wolf sniffs your hand and looks you in the eye, it makes an impression. This, after all, was the premier predator, an animal that could run for twenty miles without a break, cover a hundred miles in a day, take out a moose. As Sirius cased the room with every sense alert, he gave the impression that he was operating in a higher physical and sensory gear, that his kind of energy and awareness was knowledge and there were things he knew that we never would or could. After he’d checked us and the room out, Juan led him up to the stage where first wife Jayne, a California blond, was standing. She was about as tall as Juan and wore jeans too. She had long legs, a slender body and breasts that were firm as unripe mangos, the kind of body that after twenty-five takes workouts, silicone and liposuction to maintain. Her eyes were blue, her features even, her teeth perfect, and her long blond hair tumbled over her shoulders. It was smooth, silky, well-taken-care-of hair, but the style should have been abandoned by now. T
here’s a time when Alice in Wonderland hair makes a woman look younger, and then there’s a time when it makes her look like she’s trying to look younger, and then there’s a time when it makes her look old. Jayne was still striking, but too chiseled to be pretty. When her smiles faded, hard lines lingered. Her kind of looks must have been a meal ticket once had she chosen to cash it in, and why wouldn’t she? Good looks are like a trust fund established at birth with one catch: if you spent the interest, you’d have to start living on the principal, and if you spent the principal, you’d have to start living—like the rest of us—on your wits.

  The wolf bounded across the stage and climbed on Jayne like an old friend. He was big enough to put his paws on her shoulders and wrap a large mouth around her head. Jayne smiled and gave him a hug, which, given his furriness, must have been an irresistible impulse.

  “Don’t worry, folks,” Juan said. “That’s just his way of saying hello.”

  When Sirius climbed off Jayne, she knelt down, picked him up and draped him over her shoulders like a large fur piece. The wolf went limp enough to let her do it. “Now this,” said Jayne, “is the only way to wear fur.”

  “A wolf is a friend,” Juan lectured, “not a pet. Unlike a dog, he doesn’t care about pleasing you, me or anybody else. You leave them alone in the house and they will pull down everything that moves and pile it up in the middle of the floor. Jayne knows that because she’s tried. You can’t house-break a wolf either.”

  Jayne put Sirius down on the stage. As if on cue, he peed and a pungent smell circled the room. The kids giggled as the scent went by.

  Juan and Jayne worked well together on this level anyway, and they presented a program that corrected a lot of misinformation about the wolf. One sign of its effectiveness was that the Upward Bound teens remained still. When the talking was over Juan showed a film with beautiful scenes of wolves in the wild punctuated by heartbreaking scenes of the harm man had done.