Not wanting to take her headlamp off in that part of the forest, as if the beam alone could keep the thing at bay, Alex continued to walk backward. She stumbled over a bush but managed to right herself by grabbing onto a tree. The light went wild as she regained her balance, and she heard the thing move toward her furtively.
Realizing her light was giving away her position, she switched it off and hurried as quietly as she could in the other direction, moving quickly. Whatever it was suddenly crashed away from her through the brush. She spun and turned the light back on in time to see something large disappearing into the shadows. She hadn’t had time to see it clearly, only that it was big. It could have been a human, or maybe a deer or a bear.
Panic reared up within her and she turned and moved quickly away, facing forward, loath to turn her back on it, but feeling like she had to get out of there now.
Sasquatch, her mind said, thinking back to Jolene.
Feeling spooked even after the thing had moved away, she made her way quickly back down the mountain. She hurried through the lodgepole pines, then across the meadow to the lodge. Only when she entered the old building and locked the door behind her did the fear subside.
She took a deep breath and slung off her pack, placing it on a table. Now that she was safe indoors, she started to feel a little silly about her scared reaction. Taking off her headlamp, she decided to make a cup of tea and went through to the kitchen. After digging out some black tea from the cupboard, she boiled water and made a cup. Returning to the reception desk, she pulled up a tall stool in front of the phone. She still hadn’t told Zoe she’d taken this assignment.
With no cell service, she had to use the landline and knew Zoe wouldn’t pick up if she saw a strange number. Zoe had had some bad experiences in the past with scary fans, so even the name on her voicemail was fake, in case someone got hold of her private number.
As Alex had suspected, her friend didn’t pick up and it went through to her messages. “This is Beatrice McStumplepott. Please leave a message.” The name made Alex laugh out loud. Zoe always picked names that sounded like they belonged to a stuffy busybody who made her neighbors miserable by constantly complaining about their gardens or dogs or choice of hats.
“Hey, Zoe, it’s Alex. I’m not a crazy stalker. I’m in a place with no cell signal, so this is the number where you can reach me. Hope all’s going well on set. Bye.”
Moments later, the phone rang, and Alex picked up.
“I didn’t even know there were places where there wasn’t cell reception,” Zoe said, without even saying hello.
“There are. Thing is, you have to go really far away from a city to experience this strange phenomenon.”
“And are you? Really far away from a city?”
“I am. In rural Montana.”
“What? Like, for fun?” Zoe sounded incredulous.
“Like, for work.”
“Okay, what’s going on? Did you and Brad have another fight?”
Alex shifted on the stool. “This has nothing to do with Brad. Well, other than the fact that we’re not together anymore and I was just wasting my time in Boston. After I hung up with you, I had a conversation with Professor Brightwell. He got me a gig in Montana studying wolverines.”
“And you’re already there?”
“That was part of the deal.”
“Did you at least tell Brad? Are you two really broken up? I thought you were just taking a break.”
Alex frowned. “The break’s starting to turn into a breakup, I think. I called him a few times, but no answer.”
“I’m sorry, honey.”
Alex wasn’t sure if she was too sorry about it herself. His silence bothered her, but the fights bothered her more.
“How are you doing after the shooting?”
“Still a little freaked out. But that reporter is going to pull through.”
“That’s good at least. Did they catch the second gunman?”
“No. They have no idea who he is, if he knew the first guy or what.” Alex exhaled. It still made her shaky to think about. And to just jump on a plane, not knowing what had happened, felt weird. “Will you let me know if you hear anything? I don’t have internet access out here.”
“Of course. I am in the land of the modern conveniences.” She paused. “You okay, kid?”
Alex took a deep breath. “I guess I’ll have to be.”
Zoe changed the subject. “So tell me about your new digs.”
Alex glanced around the old place. “They’re pretty unusual. I’m staying at an abandoned ski resort pretty far up on a mountain. It’s called the Snowline Resort.”
“What the hell?”
“Yep.”
“And I bet you love it.”
“Except for the abandoned part. Gets a little spooky at night.”
“Seen any little ghost girls standing at the end of the hall, asking you to come play with them, forever and ever?”
“No, but thanks for the image.”
“I aim to please,” her friend said. “How long you going to be out there?”
“A few months at least, probably until the spring.”
Zoe coughed. “Until the spring! You made me choke on my wine! You’re going to be out in the middle of nowhere for that long? Tell me there are other people there. Cute people. Interesting people.”
“The nearest town has some interesting people that I would certainly classify as colorful, even if they’re not that friendly. Up here it’s just me. Though a cute regional coordinator did pop by to get me settled in. But he’s gone now.”
“How cute?”
“Pretty darn cute.”
“Well, cute guy settling me in or not, I couldn’t do it. No way.”
Alex smiled. “Well, you may remember I like this sort of thing.”
“Yes, you’re weird like that.”
“So what’s new with you?” Alex asked.
Zoe giggled. “I met someone new.”
“What happened to John? Or was it Phil? Or Steve?”
“Steve. He’s old news. Rob is the new one. He’s so full of energy. This weekend we’re bicycling along the coast.”
“You hate bicycling,” Alex pointed out.
“Yes, but he doesn’t know that. He’s all about fitness and eating quinoa and kale and stuff like that.”
“You don’t like quinoa or kale, either.”
“Mere details. I can reveal that stuff later. Right now I want to make a good impression.”
Alex laughed. “You mean a false impression.”
“Exactly.”
Zoe changed the guy she was dating as often as she updated her wardrobe, which was about once every two months, sometimes even more frequently.
“Do you think he’s the one?” Alex joked, knowing that Zoe didn’t believe in soul mates, “the one,” or even marriage.
“Of course!”
“I thought so. You’re lucky enough to happen across ‘the one’ at least six times a year.”
Zoe tittered. “Yes, I am lucky.” Alex heard Zoe’s doorbell ring. “Oh, there he is now!” she said excitedly. “We’re off to some kind of lecture on superberries. Or was it supergrains? Now I don’t remember.”
“Sounds thrilling. Have a good time.”
“I’m sure I will. And I want to hear more about your wolves tomorrow.”
“Wolverines.”
“Gotcha. They’re like little wolves, right?”
Alex smiled. “More like really big weasels.”
“Weird,” Zoe commented.
“Talk to you later.”
“Bye.”
Alex hung up and stretched. She still hadn’t read more in the paperback novel from the airport, and with no data to crunch through yet, she thought she’d just sprawl out on the couch and do some much-anticipated reading.
But the place around her felt cavernous and silent. Water dripped somewhere and a weird whistling noise was coming from the second floor, something she hoped wa
s just wind coming through a shutter and not the tortured wailing of lost souls.
Alex started awake, finding herself still on the couch in the lobby, her novel fallen on the floor. Sunlight streamed through the windows. Groggily she sat up, rubbing a kink in her neck. She looked at her watch: 8:30 a.m.
She’d slept solidly through the night, something she hadn’t done in years. Usually she woke up about four hours in, sometimes too awake to go back to sleep. Then she had to read for an hour before her eyes grew heavy again.
She stood up and stretched, then walked into the kitchen to make tea. Today she’d hike out to another location and put up a second camera and hair trap. After she’d showered and eaten a breakfast of scrambled eggs and an English muffin, she loaded up her pack again and set off for the second location.
For the next week and a half, she kept up this routine, ferrying supplies to different parts of the preserve and building camera traps. The last two traps were so far out that she slept in the backcountry.
On her seventh and final trip out, she built the last trap and then hiked a couple of miles back toward the lodge before setting up camp. She chose a gorgeous high alpine meadow a couple of hundred yards from a burbling glacial meltwater stream, the perfect place to get water. Her backcountry tent was quick to put up, and she slid in her three-quarters-length Therm-a-Rest mattress and lightweight mummy bag. Taking her water filter and bottle to the stream, she breathed in the sweet smell of subalpine fir. The light faded in the west, creating a dazzling sunset of gold, pink, and red. Nearby she heard the buzzy kraaak of a pair of Clark’s nutcrackers, discussing their day with each other.
She knelt at the water’s edge, dipping the filter’s hose into the stream. Then she pumped the handle, filling up her water bottle.
“This is the life,” she said aloud. Being here in the high country—the smell of pine, the air so crisp, the sounds of birds in the forest and wind in the trees—set her soul at ease. It was a new moon tonight, and she knew the stars would be amazing, revealing the delicate expanse of the Milky Way overhead.
Her water bottle full, she took a long drink, then topped it off again. She still hadn’t heard from Brad. She’d been here in Montana for more than a week now, and hadn’t gotten even a single text. Granted, she hadn’t had many opportunities to check her cell, but she’d been in town only yesterday to resupply, and there was no message waiting for her when she turned on her phone. But out here, living in nature like this, the pain of the breakup and the slow realization that they weren’t going to work things out didn’t hurt as much.
In fact, nothing hurt as much out here. Breakups aside, normally she walked around with a vague sense of pain inside her, a constant dull ache that she’d had for as long as she could remember, a feeling that something was wrong or missing, or that something had been torn from her life but she didn’t know what it was. It was years before she learned that it was nature that she’d been missing. She’d grown up in a number of big cities, but somewhere deep in her bones was the call to nature. She just didn’t know it back then.
When she was seven, her parents took her camping in the Rocky Mountains. She sat high on a mountain pass on a lichen-covered boulder, gazing out at magnificent peaks and watching the clouds curl around her. She saw marmots and pikas and a grizzly bear, and, laughing, felt more alive than she ever had before. The mysterious ache she’d felt throughout her childhood was gone. Just vanished. Her heart felt whole.
When they returned home at the end of that summer, the ache returned, but this time it was worse. Cement, cars, exhaust, horns blaring, people yelling, steel buildings, and almost no trees. The more she was around the city, the more her soul ached.
When she was a kid, because of this ache, she was prone to act out. Her mother always called her willful. But the nameless pain drove Alex to frustration. She never took it out on her parents, but woe to any bully in the schoolyard who chose to pick on some unfortunate kid. By the time she was in third grade, she had gotten into so many fights with bullies that there was talk of pulling her out of school. Her mother decided she wasn’t too young to start learning a martial art, and suggested karate, hoping that it might give Alex more control over her anger.
It had worked. She’d loved karate, then switched to tae kwon do, and when she was eleven, she’d discovered Jeet Kune Do and never went back. Jeet Kune Do had been created by Bruce Lee and prepared the student to defend against many different styles of attack. It was an informal martial art and didn’t offer belts, but by the time Alex was a freshman in college, she had spent so much time studying it, she was adept.
She still couldn’t tolerate bullies, but over the years her focus had shifted. She’d realized that as bad as it was for humans who were picked on, it was even worse for wildlife, because wildlife didn’t have a voice. Alex swore she would become that voice.
Over the years she’d returned to the Rockies every chance she got, spending weeks or months at a time there. The Rockies boasted an almost intact ecosystem. It still had wolves and grizzlies, wolverines and pikas, and it made her feel whole.
Being out here now, breathing in the air, knowing that the forest around her was filled with creatures and she was simply one of them, heartened her.
She was in heaven.
For a long time she lay out under the stars on a soft bed of pine needles, her head resting on a log, the sky so dark that she could see the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye. Finally it got too cold to lie there, and she crawled into the tent, zipping herself up in the mummy bag. Instantly she was warm. She had intended to read, had almost finished her novel, but the thought of sticking her arms outside the sleeping bag to hold the book in the cold was too much.
So instead she closed her eyes and drifted off to the sound of the rushing stream and a great horned owl calling out from the trees.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep when something startled her awake. She listened, wondering if it had just been a bad dream. Then she heard it again, a shuffling sound outside the tent. Something big was moving around out there. Her food was stashed in a bear-proof canister away from the campsite, so she wasn’t worried about a bear getting into it.
She thought of shining her headlamp out to see what was there, but decided against it. Whatever it was moved in a full circle around her. Images of the Highway Murderer flashed in her mind, then a roving madman with an ax, loping along in the starlight looking for victims.
Reaching over quietly, she grabbed her field knife and opened the blade. Eyes wide, she stared up at the tent ceiling, listening. Then slowly whatever it was shuffled off. It sounded like it was dragging its feet, and it was big and heavy—certainly no agile deer or limber wolf.
As the sounds faded into the trees, Alex stayed awake, her body on alert, wondering what had been next to her in the darkness.
Eight
The next day, on her way back to the lodge, Alex revisited the site of her first trap. She was excited to see that seven of the hair snares had been triggered, grasping clumps of dark hair.
She tweezed the hair from each triggered clip and placed the samples into separate specimen envelopes, labeling each one with a Sharpie to correspond with her numbering system for the clips. She swapped out the batteries and memory card in the camera, putting in fresh ones, then returned to the lodge to see what she had.
Once there, she fired up her laptop, elated to have data to crunch through now. She’d set the camera to go off each time something moved in front of it.
The camera had a one-hundred-foot range, so she found it was triggering things behind the target area as well. As she examined the photos, she saw deer, numerous red squirrels, then a black bear who had come to check out the trap. Instead of using the run pole, the bear had simply shinnied up the tree, but the food was hanging so far out that after a few bats at the bait, it had given up for easier fare. Black bears were mostly vegetarian, so she didn’t think it was too disappointed.
Hundreds of images
later, she still hadn’t seen what had triggered the hair clips. In these photos so far, all the clips were still open and ready to snag hair. She rubbed her eyes, then went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Returning, she sat down, stretched, and started through the rest.
A windstorm had kicked up on one of the days, and the waving branches of the tree had triggered the camera about forty times, eating up precious memory. She was starting to think that the camera’s memory card might have been full before whatever dark-furred animal had arrived.
But then a fisher appeared on the pole. The fisher was a different member of the weasel family, and one that had seen significant population decline due to logging and overtrapping.
She watched as it triggered three of the clips, then stood up to get at the bait, completely exposing its underbelly. She smiled. Not only was it a fisher, which she was delighted to see, but it also proved that if a wolverine showed up, the trap would definitely work, taking a photo of that much-needed ventral area for individual identification. She labeled the corresponding envelope with Pekania pennanti, the scientific name for fisher.
She continued through the pictures, excited to see what had triggered the other four hair snares. Photos taken the following day revealed a slender pine marten who had crawled out on the run pole, doing its best to reach the bait. The trap was definitely popular among weasels. She saw the marten’s signature orange chest. Though it was certainly slender enough to pass through the hair snares without triggering them, on its way out, it set off two on the right side. She jotted this down in her notes, then took the Sharpie and wrote Martes americana on the corresponding envelope.
Now she neared the end of the images. More squirrels, more wind, and the black bear walking by again. Then she saw a flash of white in one of the images and paused on it, surprised.
It was a person wearing a white T-shirt. The figure was in motion and blurry, but it looked like a man running past the tree. She clicked on the next image. Now he stood on the far side of the tree, looking back over his shoulder. It looked like his pants were torn and that he had a dark stain at the tear, maybe blood. He had no pack, no gear, just a T-shirt and his ripped jeans. Weirdly, it didn’t look like he was wearing any shoes. She thought she could see his bare feet among the grasses.
A Solitude of Wolverines Page 8
