The Wolf Path

by Judith Van GIeson

  “Only a few more, I promise.”

  “Everything is dangerous. Life is dangerous.”

  “When you crossed the border did you ever come through Soledad on the old wolf trail?”

  “La vereda del lobo? Sometimes. Sometimes I went through Arizona, but never Texas. You have to be crazy to cross there.”

  “Did the Norteños ever make any deals with ranchers, pay them to look the other way?”

  The Kid gave me an are-you-kidding look. “The Norteños don’t have to pay anybody. Everybody is afraid of them. The Norteños have a—how you say—a reputation on the border. They go where they want.”

  “Tell me about the wolves in the Sierra Madre. Did you ever see them?”

  “There are not many left, Chiquita, maybe fifteen when I was there. You see the mierda or the footmarks and you hear them, but you don’t see them.”

  “How far away could you hear them?”

  “Eight kilometers maybe in the desert where it is quiet.” A little less than five miles.

  “That’s all? Just eight kilometers?

  “That’s a long way and you only hear them there because it is quiet. The lobos are very friendly with each other and afraid of people, but the Norteños don’t hurt them—they are outlaws, too. The Norteños won’t let the biólogos in. They won’t let them put their radios on the lobos and study them and everybody else is afraid to go there. There was one Norteño, Flaco, who understands lobos. He called them and they came. If you ever see one, you never forget it. The eyes—los ojos del lobo son el fuego en la noche. ”

  “The fire in the night.” The fire in his own eyes was flickering out.

  “Can I sleep now?”

  “Sí,” I said.

  The wind shifted during the night and the planes started using the north-facing runway at east-west-facing Albuquerque International. It happens sometimes but does it have to happen so early in the morning? The jets sounded and felt like they were twenty-five feet overhead. The glass on the nightstand rattled, the bed shook, the Kid slept on. I looked at his skinny body stretched out naked in my bed and thought about how familiar it was, how unknown and maybe unknowable he was. I thought about the alien population to the south that sneaks across our borders increasing the heterozygosity of our breeding population, expanding the gene pool, adding to our diversity. I woke him with a kiss.

  17

  I THOUGHT IT over for a few days, paced the shag carpeting down to pile and on Monday I went back to Soledad. There were some facts I wanted to check at the county clerk’s office where the records of real estate transactions are kept, to see if they were facts, that is, and not lies. Most attorneys think the county clerk’s office is Siberia where you send somebody else to do your title searches or file your deeds, but I’ve always found them one of the more interesting places a lawyer might go in the line of duty. A lot of questions can be answered there: who sold a property and when, who bought it, whether the buyer paid cash, who holds the mortgage. You can also find out who inherited the property, who has a life tenancy, how big the property is, who abuts who. If the property has been sold any time recently there should be a survey on file indicating how many acres there are, where the houses and barns are located, whether there are any established footpaths, roads, walls, fences, streams. Since people in Soledad got their identities from being property owners, it was time to find out who they really were by searching their titles and looking at their deeds.

  When you do a title search you look for any clouds on the title, like liens or encumbrances that would be transferable as debts or limitations on a future owner. You look for poor property descriptions that would make it difficult to establish the boundaries or the size of the property. As you go further and further back you find the descriptions written in spidery ink and then in Spanish and eventually you get to the 1600s when title was granted by the king of Spain. That’s where the search ends. You can’t search any further than that. The Indians didn’t rely on county clerks or deeds or private ownership. It made it easy to steal from them because they thought what they had couldn’t be owned. In the old days when land wasn’t worth much nobody worried about accuracy of description. A boundary could be described as an alligator juniper or the place where Rosita had her calf. In 1892 an act of Congress was passed to quiet noisy titles with poor descriptions, and at that point deeds were patented by the government if the property owner got around to doing it.

  Doing title searches is a little like reading the tombstones in a cemetery, it gives you a sense of the history of a place. I like seeing the old names, the old descriptions, the old deeds. Best of all I like maps, and county clerks’ offices are full of them.

  I didn’t tell Juan and Jayne that I was coming back to Soledad. My plan was to return to the Duke City the same day if I didn’t find anything, stay over at a motel if I did. I told the Kid.

  “Why you going back to Soledad?” he asked me.

  “I want to check the land records and see if anybody has been lying,” I said.

  “If you don’t come back at night, call me and tell me where you are staying,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Maybe I need to talk to you.”

  And I’d thought we’d successfully negotiated the transition from almost living together to not. What did he want anyway? He’d never asked me to call before. I didn’t think he ought to ask, but I didn’t have anything to hide, so I said okay. Brink and Anna didn’t seem to care when, or if, I’d be back. They had other things on their minds: Stevie on Anna’s, Brink on Brink’s.

  “I haven’t been with somebody in so long I’ve forgotten how,” Brink said in a morose moment. Who would want to be with him, anyway, when all he thought or talked about was himself?

  “Use your left hand and pretend it’s a stranger,” I said.

  ******

  What I found in the records at the Soledad County Court House on Monday was that March had been right (not that I would have doubted him). I looked up the book and page number of Jayne’s deed in the Direct Index, located the deed and found that her husband had granted her a life tenancy on Roaring Falls Ranch in 1986 when they got divorced. After she died the property went to the Conservation Committee in toto, which effectively kept her from selling it. Who would buy a property with a cloud on it like that? Next I looked in the Debtor Index and found there had never been a mortgage on the property; her ex-husband had paid cash. I looked in the Index to Plats. There was a survey map on file which I got out, laid on a table and pored over. An old road, marked as a double dotted line, crossed Roaring Falls Ranch, bisecting a single dotted line on the eastern boundary which indicated a footpath. In some places the footpath crossed Jayne’s property, in some places it went onto the adjoining property. The adjoining owners were listed as Emilio Sanchez and Javier Rodriguez to the east, Donald and Perla Phillips to the south.

  Next I looked up the Sanchezes in the Reverse Index, and found they had sold 5,000 acres in the sixties just as Don Phillips had said. Javier Rodriguez was the buyer. He transferred title to Norman Alexander in March of 1987, no mortgage on file. Norm had not inherited his property. Norm had paid cash. Norm had lied at least once. A survey map was on file. I got it out, unfolded it and laid it on the table, too. It showed where Norm’s property adjoined Roaring Falls Ranch, where it adjoined the Sanchezes, where it abutted the Phillipses. It showed where Norm’s house and barns were located, the curved line of a stream flowing from the Soledad Peaks to Norm’s eastern boundary, Route 30, the double dotted line of the old road that went from his property to Jayne’s, the single dotted line of the footpath.

  The Sanchezes had had a survey done of their remaining land at the time they sold the 5,000 acres to Javier Rodriguez. I laid that map out next to Norm Alexander’s. The two maps had been done by the same surveyor, Robert Birdsong, and fortunately they were drawn to the same scale, one-half inch equaled a mile. I’d brought a pocket ruler with me and I got it out and began to measure. It was 8 miles
in a straight line from the Sanchez house to El Puerto just as Ernesto had thought, but only 4 miles from the Sanchezes to Norm’s house. It was 10 miles from Norm’s house to Jayne’s by footpath and the old road, and 4.8 miles as the crow files (there was no marked path) from Norm’s house to the corner of the Phillips Ranch where Bob Bartel had left his truck—almost 2 miles further than a radio-collar signal would reach if Norm had been telling the truth, about the same distance a signal would reach if March had. I had no reason to doubt March, but Norm’s credibility had been strained. He hadn’t inherited his property, for one thing. He’d bought it and quite possibly with money he’d gotten from the taxpayers. He said he’d quit and retired from his biologist job. One or both of those statements was also a lie. So why had he bought here in the sole of America where the ranchers were king and the climate was so inhospitable to science?

  I folded up the maps, being careful to follow the existing creases, and put them back in their files. Then, just for the hell of it, I searched the Sanchezes’ title, wondering if it went back to the act of Congress of 1892 or the act of a king of Spain in the 1600s. The 1600 records are still on file, but they probably wouldn’t be kept here. The clerk got me the appropriate 1800s book and lugged it over to the counter. It was bound in faded leather with end papers in the tiny flowers of old wallpaper. The Sanchezes had a patent deed from 1892 that had been written in ink by a scrivener with an elegant style. The capital letters were works of art. The scrivener was obviously someone who enjoyed his work (no doubt it was a he back then) which consisted of writing things out day after day after day. The deed was sealed by the word seal wrapped in an ink cloud. “To all whom these present shall come, Greeting,” it began. “Given under my hand at the City of Washington, the eleventh day of November in the year of our Lord 1892 and of the independence of the United States the one hundred seventeenth,” it ended, signed by the president, Benjamin Harrison. In those days they knew how to pass a title. Deeds were valid, they used to say, as long as grass grows and water flows. This one had stayed in the family for almost a hundred years.

  An old Hispanic man with a white mustache, black eyes and a face as wrinkled as a walnut shell stood next to me looking up something himself. He peered over my shoulder. “Look at the beauty of that handwriting,” he said.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” said I.

  “It sure is. They don’t teach writing like that anymore.” He had a rather elegant style himself.

  “They sure don’t. Can you tell me how to get to the library?” That was my next stop. There are a lot of investigatory resources available to the nosy American citizen, if the citizen cares to take advantage of them.

  “Right down the street. Turn left when you get outside, you can’t miss it.”

  “Gracias,” I said.

  “Por nada, ” he replied.

  The library was another user-friendly stone building. The librarian was a little gray bird with glasses, the kind of woman people forget immediately unless she chirps loudly or finds some other way to make an impression.

  “I’d like to use the microfilm,” I said.

  “Of course.” She went back to looking through her card file. The Soledad Public Library hadn’t gotten computerized yet.

  “Where is it?”

  She looked up. “Around the corner to your right, my left, but if you turn around it will also be on your left.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  It had been a long time since I’d looked at a microfilm and I couldn’t remember how. The reels were in a file labeled by date. You had your choice of the Soledad Times or the Albuquerque Journal. I decided on the Journal and located the one I was looking for, the second six months of 1987. The hard part was loading the microfilm machine. I got the film on the reels, slid it under the glass and began cranking. It turned all right, but it screeched loudly as it did, loud enough for the librarian to screech back.

  “Stop it!” she yelled, hopping out from behind her desk. She could get your attention if she wanted to. “That is not the way to do it.”

  It was embarrassing to be told how to do something that every school kid knows. “You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked, taking the film off and loading it properly.

  “Albuquerque,” I said.

  She shook her firm little head. “I’ve never understood why anyone would live there.”

  She hopped back to her desk and I cranked the lever through July, and in August I found what I was looking for. On August 14 the wolf pups had been stolen en route from the Rio Grande Zoo. Wolf pups are born in April and by mid to late summer they’d be old enough to take from the mother. The month wasn’t too hard to figure, but it was the year I’d had to check—1987, four years ago, five months after Norman Alexander had bought his property in the sole of America.

  I rolled the microfilm up, put it in its file drawer and went out the back door. I could have passed this information on to Sheriff Ohweiler; he could also have gotten it himself if he were interested.

  I got in the Nissan, drove over the mountain to the east side of the peaks and checked into the Motel 6 in Singing Arrow. I didn’t want to run into anybody I knew or do any explaining. The woman who checked me in—Clarice McKean, her nameplate said—had a solid, reassuring presence, an I-can-take-care-of-it aura, but she didn’t have that much to take care of. There were about forty units in the Motel 6, but the only occupants so far were a couple of long-distance truckers whose rigs were parked off to the side and me. “Now you have a good night,” she said as she handed me my key.

  The emphasized you might have fooled some people, but I knew that no matter how friendly Clarice had been, I was checking into a lonely motel filled with people who’d spent the day alone in their cabs watching the highway and would be spending the night alone in their rooms watching TV. It was a sterile place where glasses came wrapped in wrappers, but sterility isn’t so bad if you are in the mood. In fact there can be something kind of anonymous, detached and appealing about highway motels, nobody to argue with, nobody to figure out, nobody to trust or distrust. I drove across the country by myself once on my first and last extended Xanax trip. I took one every night as soon as I got settled in bed. I could have been anywhere, I could have been anybody. Who cared? In about an hour I stopped replaying the highway, my legs stopped twitching and I was out. The next day I had a residual high—not enough to make me careless, but enough to keep me from thinking about anything except getting past the eighteen-wheeler ahead of me and what the next song on the boom box would be (my car radio had been stolen long ago). I was pushing at some kind of solitary-journey envelope. I wondered how long I could have gone on like that, driving the highway, drugged and detached, not happy, not unhappy, not talking to anybody, listening to Bob Marley singing about the shelter of his single bed (reggae makes the best road music). The only thing that broke the meditation was getting hungry and looking for something to eat. It’s tough to find edible food on the road in America and my standards aren’t very high. After a week of Burger King and McDonald’s, the blood was sluggish in my veins and I felt dull as a cow. One week is about all you get on interstate America anyway. By then you’ve reached one coast or the other and you’re faced with a decision north or south, Miami or Boston.

  My room at Motel 6 had that familiar, anonymous Sears Roebuck bedspread look and I half-wished I’d be getting up in the morning and getting back on the interstate conveyer belt, but, driven by my professional and personal big three—truth, justice, curiosity—I ripped the wrapper from a bathroom glass, poured in some Cuervo Gold, the hell with ice, picked up the telephone and went to work. My first call was to Norman Alexander.

  His throat was like a water pipe full of rust that had to be coughed out before he could say hello. It was the voice of someone who didn’t speak much.

  “This is Neil Hamel,” I said.

  He might have preferred a recorded message offering him a box of rattlesnakes. “Yes,” he replied.

&
nbsp; “I have some more questions about radio telemetry that I need to ask you.”

  “Is it really necessary for you to be pursuing this?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Albuquerque,” my first lie of the night. “How about Hardee’s for lunch? If I leave early I can make it by noon.” My second.

  “All right,” he sighed.

  The next call was to eco-warrior Charlie Clark, who liked the adrenaline rush of a well-planned action. This was a simple action that didn’t require much planning, although I could use some help. I wanted to get on Norman Alexander’s property and see what he’d been doing there, but I didn’t know what kind of fences and obstacles I’d run into on the way.

  “Hey,” said Charlie when I announced it was me.

  “Do you know how to get to Norman Alexander’s?” I asked. I could have figured that out myself from all the maps I’d seen, but who better to help me get onto the property than an environmental warrior?

  “I know where his place is, but I’ve never been up there. Norm keeps to himself,” Charlie replied.

  “How would you like to go over there with me tomorrow?”

  Charlie was easy. “Okay,” he said. “How did you ever get Norm to invite you? Norm never invites anybody to his place.”

  “I didn’t,” I admitted. “He doesn’t know I’m coming. How long do you figure it will take him to get from his place to Hardee’s? He thinks I’m meeting him there.”

  “About forty-five minutes, I guess.”

  “I’m staying at the Motel 6 in Singing Arrow. Why don’t you come here? I’d like to be as close to Norm’s at 11:15 as possible, but I don’t want him to see us and I don’t want him to pass you coming over the mountain either.”

  The intrigue of it appealed to Charlie’s sense of adventure, as I had suspected it would. “I’ll wear my helmet and visor,” he said, getting into the spirit. “I’ll look like anybody then. I can get one for you, too. I know a cottonwood grove where we can hide the motorcycle, wait and watch him go by.”