The Wolf Path

by Judith Van GIeson

  He’d played the accordion the night before and hadn’t been asleep for very long, but he woke up right away once he knew it was me. “Why you not call me last night, Chiquita?” he asked.

  “I was catching a murderer.” I told him all about it.

  “I want to go to El Puerto,” he said when I’d finished. “Can you take me there?”

  “I can find it.”

  “Bueno. I am coming down.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Why?”

  “I tell you when I get there.”

  I gave him directions to Roaring Falls Ranch and figured he’d arrive in about three and a half hours, around 11.

  Then I went into the kitchen where Juan Sololobo, who had gotten dressed and was cradling a mug of coffee in his L-O-V-E hand, was probably exactly what he was pretending to be—depressed. In spite of the name he had adopted, Juan was not a guy who liked to be alone, and he probably never was for long since there are plenty of women out there who don’t like to be alone either. He was in a bind this time, however, because Siri was still in the zoo and he wouldn’t want to leave Soledad until he got him back. Jayne had asked him to stay in the house and look after it until she was released on bail, but she might not be released on bail, she might never be released again.

  “Jaynie’s gonna be miserable in prison,” he said, feeling sorry for her. “What did she do that was so terrible? She was just breeding wolves.”

  “She killed at least two men, Juan, and the one that I knew deserved a lot better.”

  “I know. You’re right, but I’m gonna miss her,” Juan said, feeling sorry for himself. “You living with someone?” His pale eyes looked me over. Was I mating stock? Not likely.

  “No, but I have a friend and he’s on his way down here,” I said.

  “He’s a lucky guy,” Juan sighed, staring morosely into his coffee. On the other hand, maybe he wasn’t as depressed as he was pretending to be. His emotions and affections shifted as quickly as water, placid one minute, whitewater rapids the next. Being around all that emotion made me feel like a kitchen sponge that that sits on the sink pregnant with water. I couldn’t wait to get out in the desert to dry out and to see my solo lobo, the Kid. He knew what it was like to be alone; being around him made me feel sharp, not soggy. What the Kid held in check was more interesting than all the stuff Juan spilled out. Emotional men have never been my MO. Domestic men either.

  “Why don’t you call March?” I suggested. “He’ll want to know what happened.”

  “Good idea,” Juan said. The call kept him occupied for a little while. At the end of their conversation March asked to speak to me.

  “Thanks, Neil, for getting Juan off the hook.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “As always, you did a great job.”

  “Not that great,” said I.

  “It doesn’t surprise me much that Jayne was responsible. She’s trouble.”

  “And when are you getting married?” I asked.

  “Next month.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks. You’ll keep in touch, won’t you?”

  “You bet.”

  “Keep an eye out for Sirius at night. It’s in the southern sky. The first star to appear and the brightest.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for Venus in the daytime too.”

  He laughed. “Venus moves around a lot. It’s trickier.”

  “You’re telling me. Bye March.”

  “Bye Neil,” he said.

  It was time for Juan to start getting used to being alone. I left him that way, went into the nun’s cell, slept for a few hours and dreamed about nothing. When I woke up he was still sitting at the kitchen table, but he wasn’t alone any more. He was talking to the Kid and feeding him huevos rancheros. “Kid,” I said. “When did you get here?”

  “10:30.”

  It was now 11:00.

  “We’ve been talking about wolves,” Juan said, “and I’ve been telling your friend here all about Sirius and the lobos over the mountain.”

  The Kid shook his head. The things people did in America remained incomprehensible to him, but he and Juan both cared about wolves. They had that in common.

  “Want some eggs?” Juan asked me.

  I could see the Kid was getting restless already, but we had a hike ahead of us and I had to eat something. Juan made the best huevos rancheros in California, so I let him serve me breakfast. The Kid was anxious to be on his way, however. No time for coffee. He looked repeatedly at his watch, tapped his fork against the table and his foot against the floor.

  The minute I put down my fork he stood up and shook Juan’s hand. “Mucho gusto,” he said.

  “My pleasure,” said Juan.

  “Vamos al Puerto,” the Kid said to me.

  ******

  I’d never been hiking with him before. He has long, skinny legs that cover the ground a lot faster than mine do. The rain had washed away a lot of the tracks, but it was easy enough to tell where the path went; it had worn through the vegetation. I watched him moving on ahead of me with a quick, fluent motion. He seemed to be hearing everything, smelling everything, seeing everything. He held his head high. His thick curls had the alert springy quality of an antenna. Was he remembering anything? I wondered. What had it been like when he came through here before? Who he had been? He probably hadn’t had much more sleep than I’d had, but he’d spent yesterday repairing automobiles and playing the accordion. I’d been shot at and diverted down a ditch. I’d caught a murderer and I’d lost my fine edge. I ached, too, in all the places I’d hit the ditch.

  He climbed on ahead of me, but when he got to the falls he stopped and waited. The falls were six inches wide again and ended their performance by sinking into the ground. They whispered, they didn’t roar. Yesterday’s cloudburst had become today’s drip. They were falls that only a desert rat could love and the Kid did. He was splashing water all over his face and neck when I got there.

  “Be careful; that water could be full of giardia,” I said.

  He shrugged, filled his hands up and took a sip. Giardia didn’t scare him.

  “Have you ever been here before?” I asked.

  “Not here, no, up there.” He pointed toward the peaks.

  “I’ve only gone this far,” I said. “There’s an old road that comes through El Puerto and connects with this path somewhere.”

  The Kid nodded, looked at his watch, looked at the sun. “Andale, Chiquita, there’s not much time.”

  We followed the path on past the ruins and the stone diversion channel. The Kid stopped and looked in. It was dry as bone today.

  “You went down one of those?” he asked me.

  “Yup.”

  The Kid shook his head. “Que cojones,” he said.

  “Que loca,” said I.

  There were no footprints on this part of the path, only the partially washed-out prints Jayne’s horse had made as she rode back and forth across the mountain. The path twisted like a snake as it climbed around the boulders and eventually met the ghost of the old road, the widest place through the peaks, wide enough for a horse and carriage but not for a highway.

  The Kid had gotten ahead again and was waiting for me to catch up. He sat on a rock, but he wasn’t exactly resting. He was sniffing the air and for all I knew listening to the clouds as they passed in the sky. I sat down beside him.

  “You want to know why I came here, Chiquita?”

  “Digame,” I said, although it could only be one of two reasons, a lobo or a lobo.

  “When you tell me about the wolf biólogo coming here after the lobos got stolen, I call the Norteños. They tell me one of the lobos in the Sierra Madre is missing. Sometimes when they get big they have to leave the—how you say it?—the family, the friends?”

  “The pack.”

  “They have to leave the pack and look for a lobo to start a new one. It’s a problem for them because there are no more lobos. So they
go away and they live alone or someone kills them. Maybe he came here.”

  “That’s what Norm Alexander was hoping.”

  “If this solo lobo is here, he has to go back to Mexico,” the Kid said. “People in this country are crazy. You know, Chiquita, if you want to find a wolf, you don’t have to be a biólogo with a radio, you have to think like a wolf. You have to be a wolf.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “You remember the time when people lived with lobos, when they hear like a lobo and smell like a lobo. You know why people like lobos? Because they have families, because they are smart, because they are more like people than any other animal, because people and lobos were amigos and they hunted together.” He stood up. “Vamos.”

  I followed him up the road. As we got closer to El Puerto my adrenaline began kicking in and I felt a little less like a limp rag. I took giant steps and landed in his track so we were leaving only one path. I sniffed the air, listened to the wind slice through a yucca’s spines and make the joints of an alligator juniper hum. I heard the birds call out. It was hard to move with any grace at the Kid’s pace because every muscle rebelled and ached. When we got near El Puerto, the most accessible and crossable spot in the peaks, the watershed where the runoff flowed either east or west and you could see forever in both directions, where Jayne’s property met Norm Alexander’s, the Kid motioned me to stay low and quiet. He found a sheltered spot behind a gnarled alligator juniper. The prevailing winds, from the west, had bent the tree double. We crawled under it and looked up at El Puerto through the branches.

  “Wolves like to be high,” he said, “because they can smell more on the wind.”

  A footpath crossed the road and headed north from old Mexico to New, from starvation to employment, from the heart to the brain, from despair to hope, from citizen to alien. The route was high, narrow, circuitous, exposed. It was the wolf path.

  “La vereda del lobo,” said the Kid.

  “Would a wolf take a path that people use?”

  “Many times they won’t, but there are people everywhere in Mexico. The wolves in the Sierra Madre know the people smell and maybe this is the only path that went to what the lobo wanted.”

  “A mate?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How would a lobo know there was another one five hundred miles away?”

  “Maybe he didn’t, maybe he just went looking or maybe he did know. Wolves are very smart. They know things people don’t. Shh.”

  He motioned me to be quiet, but whatever he’d heard I hadn’t. I listened and listened but I heard only the low vibration of the wind. There weren’t any human noises up here: no boom boxes, no engines, no air conditioner hum. It felt like the last quiet place in America, a place free of the human need to manipulate, manage, make noise. It was the kind of quiet you could work up a thirst for. The Kid has the patience of the Third World. He could wait all day without moving a muscle, but I ached and twitched. Eventually at some signal that went right by me, the Kid threw his head back and began to howl. “Aaahoooo,” he howled and then again deeper and louder, “aaahoooo.” There was no answer. He waited and then he howled once more. “Aaahoooo.”

  This time there was an answering howl, a sound as wild and lonely as the wind. “Aaahoooo.” The howls sang back and forth, the Kid’s remaining in place, the other’s coming from the southeast and moving closer and closer.

  “Mira,” the Kid whispered. “Don lobo.”

  “Where?”

  “Allá.”

  He nodded toward the south, toward a dappled place where the path came around a curve and was shadowed by oaks. I looked into it, but all I saw was shade and dry earth bleached by the sun. Then a wolf began to take shape out of the shadows. Part of its fur blended into the path, part of it blended into the shade. Its ears were alert and pointed, its head was hunched forward. The white markings on its face accented its expression. It was the solo lobo that hadn’t gotten caught in Norm’s trap, the one maybe Ernesto had heard howling, not from El Puerto but from somewhere close to Norm’s. The lobo stepped forward a few feet on long, stiff legs looking for the source of the howl, staring with curious, intense, yellow eyes, eyes that burned like flames, much brighter than the ones I had seen at Norm’s or the zoo. The Kid and I looked back through the branches of the juniper.

  “El fuego en la noche,” I whispered.

  “Claro,” said the Kid.

  It was a fire that had burned with intelligence and sensory awareness for 20,000 years and was within a flicker, thirty-nine captive lobos and this one, of being extinguished by America forever.

  “They have a look that they call la conversación del muerte,” the Kid said.

  The conversation of death.

  “A lobo looks like that at a deer, the deer looks back. If the deer is ready to die, the lobo kills him. If it is not, the lobo goes away and looks for another.” The prevailing wind was blowing our words and smell due east across El Puerto, away from the lobo.

  He remained still, staring at something, but it didn’t appear to be us. Another long, lonely howl sang out from the east side of El Puerto. The lobo turned its head in that direction. The musical calm was shattered by the spine-tingling crack of a shot. The bullet hit the ground in front of the lobo and kicked up the dust. “Asesino,” cried the Kid. The lobo turned quickly and with a long loping motion began to run. There was another shot and a cry, a cry of human pain.

  It was happening too fast to comprehend and at the same time with all the clarity and brilliance of slow motion. A horse and rider galloped over El Puerto from the east and reined to a stop. The horse was dusty white. The skinny-as-a-cadaver rider wore a black shirt and black cowboy hat. He was a Mexican with the hungry face of a hawk and eyes that looked like they knew all about la conversación del muerte. He jumped off the horse and pulled a rifle from his saddle scabbard, which he aimed at some scrub oaks on the far side of El Puerto.

  “Kid…” I began, having no idea what the guy was shooting at.

  “Callate,” said the Kid.

  The Mexican fired and a hunter in a camouflage suit scrambled out of the oaks groaning and holding a bleeding arm. He was a ferret of a fellow with sharp features and bright, little eyes, and his jaw was working fast and hard on a tobacco wad. It was the last of the great white professional wolf hunters—Buddy Ohles. I’d know him anywhere. Since he probably wasn’t smart enough to figure out what Norm had been up to by himself, Sheriff Ohweiler must have told him.

  Buddy kicked his rifle across the path, whimpering and cowering in a submissive gesture, but the Mexican fired again, raising dust at his feet. “No gun,” Buddy yelled. “See?” The Mexican was not impressed. He was toying with Buddy and making him dance to his bullets. “No habla inglés?” said Buddy. “Goddamn Mexicans,” he mumbled. He hopped around in a bowlegged jig while the gunman watched with eyes as hard as obsidian. The horse reared up and whinnied, but it didn’t run. The gunman said not a word. Ping, and another shot hit the dust. Buddy chewed harder, danced faster, got red in the face and wet in the pants. He probably hated like hell to turn his back on a Mexican but finally he wised up, turned tail and scrambled down the east side of the mountain, stirring up dust as he went. The Mexican reloaded, fired over Buddy’s head a couple of times for good measure, picked the rifle off the ground and strapped it across his back.

  The Kid climbed out of the juniper and stood up. I followed. “Que tal, Flaco?” he said.

  The Mexican turned around with no trace of surprise in his flinty eyes at seeing the Kid or me. “Que tal, Greñas?” They spoke to each other in rapid Spanish. “Did you see that guy dance?”

  “I saw him pee in his pants, too,” the Kid said. They both laughed. “Why didn’t you kill him?”

  Flaco shrugged. “Then everyone would think he had the bad luck to meet a smuggler. Now he will know and they will know better than to shoot at lobos. When will you return to the Sierra Madre?” he asked the Kid. He looked at me and a motion th
at resembled a smile crossed his skinny lips.

  “Who knows?” answered the Kid.

  “Till then,” Flaco said. He stuck his rifle into the saddle scabbard, climbed on the horse, gave it a kick and headed south.

  “Ta luego,” said the Kid.

  We watched him ride off and disappear beyond the oak-shadowed bend.

  “Mira, Chiquita.” The Kid pointed toward a place further south where the path curved around the peaks and was exposed. It took a minute to find the lobo, whose fur blended into the dusty background. He was running with a motion that was quick and fluid as the ripples in a river. He turned his head, looked back once and kept on running. The lobo was a symbol, one of the last of his kind in the wild, but also an individual that wanted to eat, live, reproduce, run.

  “Ponte trucha.” said the Kid, which means be quick, wary, make like a trout.

  “Run, lobo,” said I, “run, lobo, run.”

  THE END

  Enjoy a free preview of A NEIL HAMEL MYSTERY, #5

  The Lies That Bind

  1

  I TOOK THE high road from Taos, speeding on the straightaways, hugging the curves, dropping down from Talpa to Nambe. The low road follows the Rio Grande. El Camino Alto, the high road, is the forest path; I was in the mood for trees and green. The cumulonimbus billowed in the big western sky; the sun reached deep into Carson National Forest and made every pine needle shimmer. A raven landed on the yellow line, flapped its wings and flew away. The tank was full of gas; the radials gripped the road. For the moment, me, my Japanese import and the highway were one. For the moment, I could almost believe that nature’s laws didn’t apply to me, that I’d never grow old, never get fat, never have to stop to buy gas or pee, never wake up in the night and turn on Love Connection, never drink Cuervo Gold, smoke Marlboros or mix up a batch of Jell-O shots ever again. I’d been in northern Rio Arriba County, the lawless county, to fight a custody battle, and I’d won. The tape that spins messages in the back of my brain spun. “You’ve got the power,” it said.