The Wolf Path

by Judith Van GIeson

  “This is Texas water,” I said.

  “Help yourself,” said Juan. “So if you guys win what happens to the lobo? It gets reintroduced to White Sands as part of some experimental population, right? Then the FWS can radio-collar ’em, study ’em, drop ’em with tranquilizers and the ADC will shoot ’em whenever they wander off the range.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Charlie. “But it’s a start and we’re hoping the younger ones won’t get on the radio.”

  “If they come back on their own like they’re doing in Montana then they get classified as an endangered species, not an experimental population. Neil and I got a friend up there who told me that. That means nobody can legally shoot ’em without getting a permit and going to a hell of a lot of trouble, not even if they kill cattle. Why do you think you’re seeing all these politicians coming out on behalf of wolf recovery in Yellowstone? Because if the FWS reintroduces them they can manipulate ’em, but if the wolves come back on their own, they can’t. The Magic Pack came over from Canada into Glacier and now they’re working their way down the Rockies. They’ll be in Yellowstone before the ranchers know it. I hear there are lobos left in the Sierra Madres, too.”

  “Where the wolves and the drug dealers roam,” I said.

  “They say it’s the drug dealers that are keeping them alive. Everybody else is afraid to go in there to kill, trap or even study ’em. There have been sightings in Arizona. Could be some illegal aliens have sneaked over the border into New Mexico. It’s not so far away.”

  “Well, you’re never going to get anybody to admit that around here,” said Charlie. “The FWS will keep it quiet because they want wolves under their control and anybody else who sees one will shoot, shovel and shut up.”

  “Soledad ain’t my favorite place. As soon as I get Siri back I’m outta here.”

  Unless, of course, he was indicted and held on charges of murder.

  The shadows of the adobe wall crept towards the portal. We were moving from midafternoon to late. It was time for Charlie and me to be out of there. “We’re on our way to the falls,” I said to Juan. “Want to come?”

  “Naah, I want to finish this job up for Jaynie and I’ve already been there once. That was enough for me. The part of California I’m from water’s no big deal.”

  “Where’s the path?” I asked, squinting toward the Soledad Peaks.

  “Thataway,” replied Juan, pointing at the far side of the parking area.

  Juan passed around his bottle of Texas spring water. I thought about asking to take it along, but neither Charlie nor I had a backpack. I didn’t feel like carrying it. We each took a hit from the bottle and took off up the path that led to the falls. I never wear a watch myself, but Charlie, like most people, did. “What time is it?” I asked him.

  “Five,” he said.

  The path started out steep and soon got steeper. Started out hot and then got hotter. It was the kind of day when the air feels like an impenetrable thicket and the sun, nourisher of plants, bringer of warmth to other places, is an enemy, a preview of what it will be like everywhere when the next layer of ozone is gone, exposing a raw, angry, scorching sun. Even the birds maintained a stunned silence. What kept me going was curiosity and the belief that sooner or later we’d reach water and could start down.

  The back country was about as I’d imagined it—high Sonoran desert, the kind of place you expect a man in huaraches to pop up and tell you that everything matters and nothing, the kind of place rattlesnakes hang out. In all my years in New Mexico I’d always wanted to see a rattlesnake—at a distance—but it hadn’t happened yet. I keep my eyes open to the possibility, however. Rattlesnakes like hot, dry places. They have tough skin, too. When the unforgiving sun has turned the rest of us to malignancies, they’ll still be here slithering around with the rodents and the roaches.

  Although this was desert, it wasn’t exactly barren. There was a variety of vegetation which Charlie was happy to tell me all about.

  “We got Chihuahua and ponderosa pines, juniper, oak and mountain mahogany; sage, rabbitbrush, chamisa and mesquite; and for cactus cholla, button cacti, yucca and Spanish daggers,” he said.

  “Botany major?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I’m working on my doctorate.”

  “And then what? The federal government?”

  “No way.”

  After a hard hot mile we came to a tree that was bent over and humped like an old lady who hadn’t taken her calcium. It was wider than it was tall, having been twisted and gnarled from the wind and the weather. Its bark was thick, notched, crocodilian. “That alligator juniper is a thousand years old,” Charlie said. There was a gouge where someone had taken his little hatchet and had tried to hack it down, a heart that said JH LOVES BJ, slashes where lightning had struck. The tree had survived it all. “A thousand years old,” Charlie repeated. “That tree was already ancient at the time of the conquest. It’s seen one hell of a lot.” He put his arm around the juniper and stared at it.

  “I know that people talk to trees, but you’re the first person I’ve seen make eye contact,” I said.

  “It’s a female.” Charlie hugged the tree. “In the winter it gets berries, and animals and birds have been eating them for a thousand years. Pretty incredible, huh?”

  “Arbol de la esperanza, mantente firme,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  We continued up the path, one shadow after another, one foot after the other. The sun was on my back, my mouth was dry as dust, my eyes were focused on the path which had been softened by horse plops and chopped up by horseshoe prints, lots of them, some of them recent and sharp, others older and muted. There was also a pair of shoe prints going up and coming down, running shoes a lot bigger than mine, about Juan Sololobo’s size. “There’s one way Jayne can tell who’s been on her property,” I thought out loud. “It would be hard to cross here without leaving tracks.”

  “Did you know a wolf puts its back paws exactly on the spot where the front paws have been?” Charlie said. “It makes it hard to tell how many of them there are. It’s hard to tell their number by their howls, too. The sound echoes around and you can’t tell if you’re hearing one or the whole pack.”

  “They protect their feet and always pick the best path, too,” I said, echoing the Kid.

  Charlie had gotten several feet ahead of me and he stopped and waited for me to catch up. He was looking down from a higher place and the sunlight glinted on his glasses. “You really think Bartel caught Buddy tracking a mountain lion?” he asked.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.” I stopped when I reached him and wiped the sweat off my face, hoping he’d take the hint and take a long pause.

  “Won’t be the last either. The ADC and the state Game Commission, which sets the hunting rules, are like that.” Charlie squeezed two of his fingers together. “The state approved a regulation that allows Buddy to kill just about anything he wants to. All he needs is a complaining rancher, no evidence required.”

  “An execution with no investigation, no evidence, no trial, no jury,” I said. “Whatever happened to due process?” My mouth was so dry the words stuck to my tongue.

  “And ranchers are always complaining that animals have all the rights. There was one rancher in Arizona who had 37 cougars killed to protect 135 head of cattle. And it gets worse. There are people out there, rich Texans for starters, who will pay big bucks to hunt cougars and hang their heads on the wall. The rancher loses a calf or a sheep. Maybe it’s killed by a dog, maybe it’s killed by a coyote, maybe it dies of natural causes, who knows? Anyways the rancher says he saw cougar prints, calls in Buddy, Buddy finds a cougar miles away probably, tracks it with his dogs until it’s terrified and exhausted and climbs a tree. Then he calls in the big bucks hunter on his radio and that guy flies in by helicopter and shoots the cougar out of the tree. They call that sports hunting. The rancher and Buddy split the money and nobody has to worry about hunting seasons or limi
ts or any of that stuff. And if the lion is already collared and Buddy has the frequency, hell, he doesn’t even need dogs.”

  “What do you know about radio-collaring?” I asked.

  “The person to talk to about that is Norm Alexander. He was a pioneer. He knows more about wolves than just about anybody else, too, but it’s hard to get it out of him. He stays over there in Singing Arrow and keeps to himself.”

  We started up again, but this time I kept my mouth shut, my eyes focused on the near distance - the path - my thoughts on water, cool water, clear water, wishing I had a backpack with some ice and a water bottle between me and the sun, imagining I was running a race and around the next bend waited a hand holding water, water to drink and pour over your head, water to run down your face and your neck, a shower with an unlimited supply of water, riding a turtle in the sea off Cancun, slapped by the rapids in the Rio Grande Gorge. I thought of Evian, Perrier, Ozarka from the Forth Worth water supply; glasses, bottles, canteens, hands; snow, sleept, hail, ice cubes; springs, wells, puddles, cenotes; fountainheads, watersheds, faucets, hoses. I thought of gentle water, cleansing water, angry water, muddy water, trickles, floods, torrents, drips, flumes, Chinese water tortures, tidal basins, tidal waves, swimming holes, hot springs, water that carved Canyon de Chelly, inundated Glen Canyon, oceans that lap at the foundations of Venice. Water that flows around, under, over, through. Water that follows the path of least resistance. Water that gets where it wants to go no matter what.

  When we finally reached them a thirsty mile later, Roaring Falls were a disappointment of hallucinatory proportions, a stream about six inches wide that trickled over the edge of a rock face, fell down about fifty feet and disappeared underground. They whispered but they didn’t roar. It was a waterfall only a desert rat would love—or notice. “That’s it?” I asked.

  “You were expecting Niagara?” Charlie said.

  "Well, no, but I've been hearing about these falls ever since I got to Soledad. I was expecting more than this."

  “Maybe it’s no big deal if you’re from California … or the Duke City. You guys got wave machines and water slides.”

  “Ha, ha,” I replied.

  “This is all we’ve got and they get cranked up pretty good when it rains.”

  It wasn’t wide but it was tall and it was water, the essence of life and cool, besides. I splashed some over my face, arms and neck, cupped my hands and filled them up.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Charlie said as I put my lips to the cup. “Giardia.”

  I’d lived in Mexico and knew all about giardia and amoebas too. Was one desperately needed sip worth weeks of pills and pain? I looked into my handful of tantalizing, revitalizing, parasite-filled water, opened my hands and let it all spill out.

  “You can climb up the rocks to the top of the falls and there’s a pool and a rock slide up there. That’s where the kids used to go. Come here, I’ll show you something.” He led me over to the ruins of a building with some scraggly blackberry bushes nearby that had obviously been transplanted from some more congenial place and were struggling to survive. They had berries on them, though, tiny ones. I picked them for the juice. Below the ruins Charlie showed me a ditch lined with stones neatly piled on top of one another and fit together like Lego blocks. “That was a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients in the days people came to the Southwest to get healed and that…” We looked into the ditch. “… is a diversion channel.”

  It had a lot more charm than the Duke City’s concrete channels, I’ll say that for it.

  “When we get a good rainstorm,” Charlie continued, “it’ll fill up and the water will rush through here like the Rio Grande in snowmelt. Water doesn’t last very long in the desert, but it’s pretty impressive when it’s around.”

  “Where does the trail go?” I asked.

  “Thataway.” He pointed toward the hoof tracks that circled around the spa ruins and continued on. The running shoe prints, however, headed back toward the way we’d come.

  “And then?”

  “Up to El Puerto and the top of the Soledads, but I don’t go up there anymore. People have been shot at in the peaks.”

  “By who?”

  “Smugglers probably: marijuanistas, contrabandistas, narcotraficantes. If I’m going to be plugged, I’d like it to happen in a meaningful action. There’s nothing like the adrenaline rush of a well-planned action, but one thing I’ve never been crazy enough to do is confront a hunter with a loaded weapon, or a Mexican smuggler either. There’s a path up there that leads right to the border and they smuggle in parrots, bull semen, drugs, you name it. Mexico’s twenty miles away, but that’s nothing to a Mexican. They used to fly all that stuff in, but now that the DEA has put a surveillance balloon up in Deming they’ve been catching all the planes and smugglers are back to using their feet and their burros again. That’s another reason nobody around here wants the lobo to come back. Ranchers have made their peace with the smugglers and they don’t want the government coming around, conducting investigations and screwing things up.”

  “The horse tracks go that way.”

  “Anyone who goes on horseback has a four-legged advantage and riders usually go armed anyway. They say they want to be able to shoot their horse if it trips and breaks a leg.”

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Six thirty.”

  An hour and a half up, an hour, maybe, back down. The timing was right, the tracks were right, maybe Juan had come here alone the afternoon Bob Bartel was killed. Maybe he and Jayne had made love at 1 A.M. too. His story was holding up so far.

  “We ought to start back if we’re going to make it by dark.” Charlie said.

  That was all right with me. If I was going to meet a rattlesnake I’d rather meet one in daylight when I could see it coming. We began walking the three miles back to the ranch. It was a lot easier and faster going down than it had been coming up. The sun matured, mellowed, sank, lost its power to dehydrate and burn. It was a golden orange ball, spreading its radiance across the peach and apricot sky and the solitary plains, throwing some afterglow at the peaks as it went down.

  Jayne was standing outside with her arms crossed watching the sunset when we got back to the house. “Nice bike,” she said to Charlie.

  “I like it, but I don’t ride it much anymore. Anybody who cares about wolves and rides a motorcycle these days is suspect.”

  “Why’s that? “ Jayne said.

  “Because when the lobo pups were stolen, they were stolen by someone wearing motorcycle gear. Any bike-riding environmentalist was a suspect.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jayne said, looking at the motorcycle and seeing no helmet there. “Well, I see that you don’t wear the gear.”

  “Not any more,” Charlie replied. “You’ve got to be careful when you’re radical. They can take you down any time they want.”

  “How they gonna do that?” Jayne smiled.

  “Through the media, by assassination.”

  Jayne laughed. “You have to be careful not to get too paranoid. You’re a wolf activist, not the president, Charlie. Someday you’re going to have to settle down and make a living in the world, too. You don’t want to be suspecting your neighbors and everybody else you come into contact with.”

  “I’ll never stop being radical,” Charlie said.

  “Everybody says that when they’re your age,” Jayne replied.

  14

  ON THE PRETEXT of going out for cigarettes that evening I drove to the 7-11 in Soledad and made some calls from their outdoor phone. One of the advantages of being a smoker is that you have an excuse to get out of the house when you want to. In most houses they’re glad to see you go. First I called March.

  “Neil,” he said in an uneasy voice, not being accustomed to hearing from me in the evening. “Where the hell are you?”

  “In Soledad.” There was a pause. He knew what that meant—trouble. “You wanted to know what happened,” I said.

&
nbsp; “You’re right. Shoot.”

  “Remember Bob Bartel, the biologist Juan shook up the last time I was here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was murdered and Juan is a prime suspect.”

  “Oh, God. How did it happen?”

  I told him.

  “Does he have an alibi?”

  “Making love to Jayne is his alibi for the time the body was disposed of. He says he was out hiking alone at the time Bartel was killed. I wouldn’t exactly say either one of those was airtight.”

  "But on the other hand, if he were making them up, wouldn't he come up with something better?"

  "Maybe."

  “Juan gets a little crazy but he wouldn’t murder anyone. You’ll find out he didn’t do it, I know you will.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said.

  My next call was to Norm Alexander, who was listed in the Soledad phone book although he lived in Singing Arrow. Phone books in this part of the world cover several hundred square miles. I told him I wanted to get together with him.

  “Why?” he asked in a suspicious voice. Biologists here seemed to be as wary as everyone else.

  “I want to talk to you about radio collars,” I replied. That didn’t make him any less wary, but he said he had to be in Soledad in the morning and would meet me at Hardee’s.

  By the time I got back to the ranch, Juan and Jayne had gone to bed and, as far as I could tell, to sleep. I spent another restless night in the spare bedroom with no tequila to help either. This time it wasn’t the sound of screwing or howling that ruined my sleep, it was the thump of an explosion. “Incoming,” I thought when the medium-sized bang woke me up. “Why did you think that?” my lawyer’s mind asked once I was fully awake. “Were we at war when you went to bed? With who? Chihuahua?”