The Wolf Path

by Judith Van GIeson

  “No.”

  “Maybe when you left the room…”

  “I went to the bathroom,” she said. “I didn’t see or hear a thing. I got my period and Don and I were pretty disappointed. We want to have a big family; next we’re hoping for a girl.”

  “Bob Bartel says you’re sure the animal you saw near the calf was a wolf. How did you know?”

  “Granddaddy Phillips saw plenty of wolves in his day and he told me that only a wolf will turn its head and look back like that critter did.”

  Esperanza picked the other child up and headed inside. She had one towhead in each arm now, which made her appear even darker and tinier. Toddlers’ big heads always make them seem larger than they are.

  Perla was watching something over my shoulder and I began hearing it, the thundering sound of hooves pounding the ground, a sound anyone who spent her childhood watching Western movies would instantly recognize. I turned and saw a cloud of dust approaching fast. The cloud reined to a stop when it reached the portal and the dust settled to reveal Buddy Ohles in camouflage hunting gear sitting on top of a sweating horse. He had a rifle sticking out of his saddle scabbard. “Where’s Don?” he called in a highly excited voice while the horse did a nervous reined-in-place dance.

  “Halfway to the border looking at another calf kill.” Perla remained calm. She didn’t seem to get excited about much. “Why?”

  “I trapped the wolf,” Buddy crowed. “He came back to feed on the calf and I caught him not twenty feet from the carcass. He’s a big, gray bastard. I want to get Don up there.” My presence had made barely a blip on his mental antennae; he had more important things on his mind.

  “Bob Bartel is with him,” Perla said, verbally underlining Bartel and glancing pointedly in my direction. “I’ll get them on the radio.”

  “Okay,” Buddy answered, but some of the excitement had gone out of his voice. Bob Bartel’s introduction had put the damper on.

  Buddy’s dust devil turned and galloped off and Perla went inside, leaving me all alone with Chili. I took a good look at him, big brown thing. He looked back with placid eyes that said he didn’t get excited about much either. Buddy Ohles was going after an entrapped wolf—Sirius—with a loaded gun, hoping, no doubt, to get there before Bob Bartel did. Was I the kind of person who could sit on Perla’s porch and let that happen? The best way to follow was the way he’d gone, on horseback.

  It wouldn’t be my first time on a horse. I’d been a red-blooded girl growing up in America. I’d never had blue or even white ribbons hanging all over my bedroom, but I had briefly had a horse infatuation. I fell off, fell out of love and moved on to boys while my peers were still learning to post and trot. I should have known then and there that my infatuations weren’t going to resemble anyone else’s.

  “How ’bout it, Chili?” I said. “You want to take me for a ride?”

  Chili swung his tail, swatted a fly. I remembered how to mount a horse: grab onto the saddle, stick the left foot in the stirrup, swing the right leg over the back, but my right leg didn’t want to swing—it got halfway up and stuck on the saddle. I yanked it over, pushed my foot into the stirrup. I remembered a riding instructor from back then saying, “Heels down, ball of foot on stirrup.” Was that English or Western? These stirrups had been set for Perla, who was 5´2˝, and I had to crook my knees way up to squeeze into them. My heels fell where they fell. I also remembered the riding instructor saying, “Straighten your back, stick out your chest.” “The horse can’t see my chest,” said I. “I can,” the instructor replied. Another reason I gave up riding.

  I remembered what came next: pull on the reins, but not hard enough to hurt the horse’s sensitive mouth; give him a kick, just hard enough to let him know you mean it; click your tongue. “Click, click.” I poked Chili with the heel of my running shoe. Chili shook his head, swung his tail at a fly, gave some thought to dinner. Running shoes didn’t impress him; he was used to heels, spurs, leather. “Vamos, caballo,” I said, but Chili no comprende Español either. “Move it.” I kicked again harder and he loped off in one of those moves somewhere between a walk and a run that I’d never been able to get the rhythm of. Chili’s hooves left the ground, my thighs slapped the saddle. Chili came down, I bounced up. My knees were too high up and near his neck to get any kind of a grip. Posting hadn’t been my forte; I couldn’t follow the leader in ballroom dancing either. My butt ached with every step, my thighs would get rubbed raw if we continued like this. Buddy Ohles was disappearing in the dust. “Get your ass in gear, Chili.” I kicked harder and, I’ll admit it, yanked on the bit. He got the message this time and began to run. I hunkered down, bent over his neck, and hoped like hell he wouldn’t get a cactus spine in his leg or step in a hole. Now I recalled what it felt like to have a thousand pounds of galloping horseflesh between my legs with no control over it, something like the feeling I used to have on a rental horse rushing back to the stable. Only the ante had been raised; I was bigger and stronger now, but so was the horse. This was how I’d hit the dust before, thrown by a pissed-off and hungry horse. But you wouldn’t expect a rancher to put up with a totally obstinate beast, and once Chili got into the spirit, he didn’t seem to mind having someone on his back. He seemed to enjoy running after Buddy’s horse. I’d gotten an adrenaline rush and we were going too fast to feel fear anyway. I just held on, watched the ground and let Chili have his way. We caught up to Buddy just as he had dismounted and was tying his horse to a bush.

  I swung my leg over the saddle, dropped to the ground and tied Chili up, too. He’d barely broken a sweat, unlike Buddy’s tired and panting horse. Perla kept him in shape. “What are you doing here?” Buddy asked with the cutting edge of suspicion in his voice.

  “What are you doing here?” I answered. “Aren’t wolves Bob Bartel’s job?”

  “Anything that kills livestock is my job.” He pulled the rifle out of its scabbard and began walking toward a boulder with a large shadow, not long yet but deep and dark, the kind of shadow that appears flat on the surface but if you looked into it hard enough you’d see life flapping and crawling. A squawking raven flew overhead.

  A shiver rippled through Chili’s muscles, and he whinnied and danced in place. I patted his shoulder. “Hang on, boy,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  There was a cactus beside the boulder, the kind with spines that leap out and stab as you walk by. Keeping my distance, I circled around it and followed Buddy to the far side of the boulder where the calf carcass lay baking in the decomposing sun, ribs sticking up and exposed, body eaten hollow, head swollen. Like Perla Phillips had said, it was not a pretty sight. Near it lay Sirius, his foot caught in the steel jaws of a leg-hold trap, his eyes wide, yellow and frightened. He remained strangely quiet and watched us with wary intelligence. He was part pet and, although being trapped probably terrified him, he’d be expecting us to help.

  “You know, even if the wolf was eating on the carcass, that doesn’t prove he killed it,” I said.

  “Does to me.” For a minute it seemed like Buddy was macho posturing to impress me and the wolf. But when he aimed his rifle both Siri and I knew he meant to kill. Siri pulled his ears back. The gray fur stood up around his neck.

  He bared his canines and growled low in his throat. It was a fierce and intimidating display. Any other animal would have put its tail between its legs and fled, but Buddy was the one animal that had nothing to fear, the animal whose weapons were its thumb and its brain. With his brain he had created hard, stiff, projectile weapons of destruction—guns. The leverage of his thumb made it possible to build and fire them. Those two weapons had made man all but invincible in the wild.

  “Bob Bartel’s gonna be here any minute and he’ll be wanting to stop me, but I ain’t gonna let him do it,” Buddy said. “Gonna be puttin’ you out of your misery, old boy.” He peered through the sight seeking his target: the heart, the head, the brain, the liver. Siri cried and struggled against the trap.

  I cou
ldn’t say I thought about what I did. Images fly, thoughts crawl. I saw the wolf’s frightened eyes, his paw trapped in a metal grip, blood, a bullet blasting gray fur to bits. But I didn’t see Buddy shooting a woman—me. I got there without knowing I was doing it and found myself standing between Buddy and Siri staring down the dark end of a long rifle with Buddy focusing on me through the sight. “Get out of my way,” he said, but I didn’t move. “Goddamn, wolf lover, I got a job to do. Get out of my way.”

  I had that sense of crystalline clarity, unnatural calmness and purpose that hits people at the moments when they ought to be scared to death. It’s a feeling some have been known to get high on. “No,” I said.

  Buddy circled to his right; I stepped in front of him. He circled left; I followed. He stopped and stared at me with narrow eyes, while his jaw worked a wad of tobacco in his cheek. I could see him considering—not the pain a bullet, or the butt of a rifle would cause me, but the inconvenience it would cause him. Bartel and Don Phillips would be arriving soon and there he’d be with the gun smoking in his hand. It would take some explaining, more than Buddy was capable of. He thought it over, chewed, spat a stream of tobacco juice near his boot. “Goddamn wolf lovers,” he said, putting his rifle down and kicking the ground. “Goddamn.”

  7

  BUDDY PACED BACK and forth muttering to himself, and I stood between him and the wolf. Siri’s ruffled fur settled down and his ears moved back into place. He stopped growling, kept on watching. I wanted to approach him, but I didn’t dare. I didn’t want to get any closer to Buddy Ohles. His anger had boiled over and was oozing out of him in drops of sweat. Although Siri’s leg was caught in the trap’s grip, he wasn’t bleeding and didn’t seem to be in pain. Not that I could have done anything about it if he were.

  Bob Bartel and Don Phillips arrived eventually in Bartel’s government-green truck. Siri’s ears picked up when he heard them coming (long before I did). While the men got out of the truck and walked over as fast as Don’s cowboy boots would allow, I thought about what had made me step between a gun and a wolf. Bravery? Stupidity? Who knows what anybody will do when challenged or why they do it? Since reason had not been involved, I settled on instinct. It was instinct that sent the wolf in this direction once it was set free, instinct that led it to kill and/or eat the calf, instinct that made me want to protect it. Instinct maybe that made Buddy want to kill it, except that he was the only one who’d planned what he did.

  “What’s this, a New Mexican standoff?” said Bartel, looking from Buddy to me to the wolf.

  Buddy spat a brown tobacco goober at the ground. “That wolf killed the calf and came back to finish it up. My job is to kill it and then some goddamn wolf lover gets in my way.”

  “My job is to come up with a recovery plan for the lobo and if you kill that wolf, you’re gonna be getting in my way,” Bartel replied.

  Don Phillips stuck his thumbs in his jeans and spoke up. “And how many losses do I have to take because some damn fool doesn’t have better sense than to try to keep a wolf for a pet or because environmentalists get a notion to bring back a predator? Once a wolf starts working on your livestock it’s not gonna quit. That calf there could have been my next champion bull.”

  “No one’s proven to my satisfaction that this wolf killed this calf,” Bartel replied. “It came here to feed on it, sure, but wolves are carrion eaters. If that wolf didn’t kill this calf, shooting it isn’t going to do your livestock any good, now is it? We’ll have a dead wolf, a bunch of angry citizens on my back and an animal out there that will kill again.”

  Buddy danced in place like a tied-up horse. “You grew up here,” he bitched at Bartel. “You had country values before you became a wolf lover.”

  “I’m a wildlife biologist employed by the federal government, Buddy. With all due respect, that means I represent some ten-year-old kid in Illinois who wants to have a wilderness experience just as much as I do ranchers.”

  “You want watching wolves kill cattle or cougars kill sheep to be part of some kid’s wilderness experience?” Buddy asked.

  “You know how I feel about your killing that cougar.” Bartel spoke quietly, but his lips got tight and he seemed as close to anger as he was likely to get. His displays were subtle.

  Anger and displays came easily enough to Buddy. “That sucker wasn’t doing what it was put here to do—eat deer. It was killing sheep. I don’t know why everybody made such a goddamn fruckus about my killing a cougar anyway.”

  “It was an FWS lion, Buddy, we were the ones who radio-collared it, we were the ones who were studying it.”

  “That radio collar didn’t keep it from killing sheep, did it? So now your job is to keep me from doin’ my job? What are you gonna to do next, put a collar on me?”

  The thought of Buddy wearing one of those monitored bracelets that kept criminals close to home didn’t sound so bad to me. It would keep him from causing any more fruckuses, fracases or ruckuses either.

  Buddy kicked the dirt. “Damn waste of the taxpayers’ money if you ask me.”

  “Keeps us both employed, though, don’t it?” Bartel said. “I do it for the Interior Department, you undo it for Agriculture. Now why don’t you boys go on back to work and let me take care of this situation. Don’t you worry about this wolf none, Donald; I’ll see that he won’t be bothering your cattle anymore.”

  “You do that, Robert,” Phillips said.

  “That’s Perla’s horse out there, isn’t it?” Bartel asked.

  “Yup,” Phillips answered.

  “Can you ride it back home? I’ll take Neil in the truck with me.”

  “You betcha.”

  They left, Don with a rolling cowboy walk, Buddy scrambling to keep up, trailing long-legged shadows behind them.

  “Takes an unusual person to step between a gun and a wolf,” Bartel said to me when they were gone. “Lot of men wouldn’t have done that. Bet you didn’t think Buddy’d shoot a woman, though, did you?”

  “I didn’t think, period.”

  “Buddy gets riled easily, always has, but I wouldn’t be too hard on him. He’s got a job to perform, too, and he gets a bellyful of complaining from ranchers. Maybe you’ve heard the saying up there in Albuquerque that you should never judge a man till you’ve walked a mile in his boots?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well, down here we say you should never judge a man till you’ve held his weapon in your hands.”

  “His … weapon? You mean his six-shooter? His repeater?”

  Bartel smiled. “His gun? His hunting rifle?”

  “Still sounds like a euphemism to me.”

  Bartel had a nice, easy laugh; everything about him was nice and spare and lean and easy. “I mean that thing he puts bullets in and shoots animals with. It changes a person to be looking through the sights of a gun, and the more powerful the gun the more it changes the person. You never know how you’ll react until you’ve held one yourself. That’s one reason I don’t carry guns anymore. Well, let’s see what we can do for this guy.” He walked slowly up to the wolf with his hands out, his eyes averted, talking all the while. His body language showed respect, but not fear. His voice was soft and gentle. “Hey, fella,” he said. “You just take it easy now. I’m sure not gonna hurt you.”

  The wolf watched warily, but it let Bartel approach. He seemed to be one of those people who could tame birds and talk fear from the wild. His gentle manner, his voice, just his presence had an effect more soothing than drugs. “You’re wedged in there pretty good, aren’t you?” he said. “Well, just hang on. I’ll be right back, and we’ll get you fixed up in no time.”

  He went to his truck and came back around the boulder with his arm at his side. With a gesture so quick and fluid I hardly saw it, he lifted a gun and fired it at Siri. Before I could protest he said, “Don’t worry, it’s just a tranquilizer.” Sirius started, his eyes widened and he struggled groggily against the effects of the drug. So much for trusting humans. Not having a w
hole lot of trust myself, I couldn’t help wondering if this would turn out to be one of those “accidental” overdoses of tranquilizers that would kill the wolf. Should I have stepped in front of Bob Bartel, too? I’ll admit that I’m not always the best judge of men and killing Siri would be one way to keep Don Phillips happy.

  As if he had read my suspicious mind Bartel said, “Don’t worry; that’ll only put him out for a little while, till I can get him to the zoo and have the vet there take a look at his leg. Norm Alexander always claimed he didn’t need tranquilizers, that he could calm a wolf just by talking, and you know what happened to him?”

  “No.”

  “He got bit. He’ll never get back full use of that hand either. His fingers work pretty good but his thumb is useless and without a thumb you can’t do much. A wolf can cause a lot of damage if it wants to. They can kill a human easily, but even when they’ve been provoked, they don’t. They only fight hard enough to prove their point. But dogs—dogs kill people all the time, yet everybody who’s afraid of the wolf has a dog. You tell me.”

  He waited several minutes for the tranquilizer to take full effect and when he was sure Siri was knocked out he stepped on the trap, released it, bent down and examined the foot. “He’ll be okay,” he said. “Nothing’s broken here.” He picked Siri up by the loose fur on the back of his neck. “It’s called piloerection when that neck fur stands up in anger or in fear,” he told me. He draped Siri around his own neck like a fur piece. The wolf hung limp as a boa, but he was breathing softly and regularly. I could see that. Bartel carried Siri to the pickup and laid him gently in the back. The truck had a government seal on the door and two large antennas on the roof that he noticed me looking at.

  “Those are Yagi antennas.” Bartel said. “They’re what we use to track our radio collars.” He got behind the wheel and I climbed into the cab next to him, which was filled with equipment apparently used in radio tracking, including a compass, headphones and a receiver. “If you don’t mind I’d appreciate it if you’d keep an eye on the wolf. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.”