by Molly Harper
Page 17
“The tracks just disappeared, like the wolf sprouted wings and flew away,” he told me one day at lunch.
“Um, they can’t actually do that, right?” I asked him.
“Not that I’m aware of,” he said, shaking his head, but the idea seemed to lighten his foul mood a bit. “I called an expert in wolf behavior at ASU. He said it’s not unusual for a wolf to attack a lone, defenseless person if they happen to be out at night. But he said an attack like this is usually preceded by signs that the wolves are circling closer to town, problems with livestock being killed, pets going missing. ”
“I haven’t heard anything like that,” I said.
Alan shrugged. “He said he’d send me a bunch of articles that should help me try to predict the wolf’s behavior patterns, unless, of course, it’s sick or wounded, in which case there’s no way to predict what it will do. I just want to find it before people go looking for it. This is the sort of thing that can get people crazy. ”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Have you seen Jaws? All those crazy fishermen going after a twenty-foot shark with a dinghy and a flare gun? It’s like that. People get all fired up about protecting their own. They’re far more likely to hurt themselves or each other than catch a monster. ”
I shuddered at the image of my neighbors forming a torch-toting mob and hunting Cooper.
“Hey,” Alan said, seeing my stricken expression and squeezing my hand. “It’s OK. Don’t worry. I’ll catch it before anybody else gets hurt. ”
I smiled, a little shaky. “I know you will. Is there anything I can do?”
He shook his head. “Just stay inside at night. Don’t leave the house after dark, even to take out your garbage. And carry that bear mace I gave you—at all times. ”
“That doesn’t really help you. ”
“Knowing you’re safe will help me considerably,” Alan told me. “I hear you’re keeping Oscar for a while?”
I nodded. “Gertie asked if I wouldn’t mind keeping him until further notice. And I don’t. He’s the best roommate I’ve ever had. He doesn’t eat my carefully labeled food or run up the phone bill. I don’t have to fight for TV or computer access. As long as we keep rent out of the equation, I think we’ll be fine. ”
Alan grinned at me. “I think you might have been getting a little lonely. Oscar will be good for you. ”
“You’re probably right. ”
I liked coming home to Oscar every night. I’d open the door, and he would be sitting there at the stoop expectantly, tail thumping against the floor.
Oscar liked to watch me cook. He’d sit politely at the kitchen doorway until I dropped something, then helpfully snarf it up before I could reach for it. At night, he slept over my feet, keeping them warm as I read. We made a habit of taking a short walk near my house before sunset. It tired Oscar out and kept my thoughts from constantly circling around Cooper.
My not-quite-friendly neighborhood werewolf had been spending a lot of time at the Glacier lately. I think he was trying to figure out whether I could keep my word or spill the beans about his furry little problem. We kept our conversations short and what could pass for amicable . . . in a Robert Altman movie. Every word had a double meaning. Every exchange left me wondering why Cooper bothered to keep coming in, day after day, when I’d made it clear I had no plans to “out” him. Part of me was just glad we could stop being blatantly hostile toward each other. It took too much energy to keep thinking up all those clever insults.
Even more astounding were Cooper’s efforts to have actual conversations with people besides Buzz and Evie—which, again, likely had more to do with keeping tabs on what I was telling people than with a desire to get to know his neighbors. While it made the regulars a little uncomfortable at first, they soon figured out that Cooper told some pretty great stories when he wasn’t snarling or growling at people. And good storytellers were always welcome at the Glacier.
For instance, that afternoon, I overheard Cooper telling Walt about taking a group of pharmaceutical reps from Alabama moose hunting and getting them to coat themselves in moose urine and mud to disguise their human scent. He sipped his coffee and guffawed over one of the hunters asking if the urine had been pasteurized.
I slid their orders in front of them and, before I could stop myself, commented, “I don’t get how someone who is so hostile to outsiders could make his living off taking them hunting. ”
Where Cooper would normally scowl or just stop talking, this morning he smirked. “Oh, it’s hardly hunting. I’m just trying to keep the tourists from devastating the ecosystem or shooting each other. I stall them until we find something worth their time, and then I put them in a position where it would be impossible for them to kill it. I give them the big talk about being spirit brothers with the animal they missed, so they’re responsible for protecting the species. They’ve got a good story to take home, I get paid, and everybody goes home happy. ”
“What happens if they manage to actually hit what they’re shooting at?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Hasn’t happened yet. Hey, I’m not a total fraud. If they go out with me a couple of times and prove that they’re not total assholes, I start taking them to better spots, putting them in better positions. If they’re decent shots, they have an honest chance of a decent kill. Until then, I see myself as a conservationist, protecting the local wildlife from idiots with firearms. ”
I rolled my eyes. “You just get a kick out of getting middle-aged men to rub mud on their faces, don’t you?”
“And the moose urine. Don’t forget that. ”
I refilled his coffee cup. “You are a sick man. ” I glanced down at his breakfast, a bloody steak, six links of sausage, six strips of bacon, a slab of ham, and a tiny piece of toast. The toast was for appearance’s sake, I guessed. “Can I get you anything else? Maybe something leafy and green? A pamphlet on the nation’s worsening heart-disease epidemic?”
“If God didn’t want us to eat the animals, he wouldn’t have made them so tasty, Mo. ”
“You know, I got grounded once for wearing a T-shirt that expressed that very sentiment to an animal-rights rally,” I said. Cooper flashed a wide, sincere grin at me. It knocked me back on my heels. He’d never smiled at me before, unless he was mocking me in some fashion.
It felt as if someone had dropped a Malatov cocktail at my feet. My whole body became flushed, hot, uncomfortably tight. I muttered some excuse about burning eggs and ducked back into the kitchen. Cheeks aflame, I made a beeline for the walk-in freezer, slammed the door behind me, and braced myself against a rack of frozen beef. Maybe I was coming down with the flu, I told myself. Please, Lord, I prayed, let it be the flu.
It was not healthy for one man’s smile to make my panties spontaneously combust.
I did not want Cooper to have that sort of power over me, especially when I was on such shaky ground with him. I just had to concentrate on other things, other people. Alan, for instance, who, as far as I could tell, had only one corporeal form.
I spent a good five minutes in the freezer, fanning cold air onto my face. I was careful to spend the rest of the afternoon in the kitchen. I cooked with my back to the dining area and worked like a dervish to keep the kitchen clean so I could leave the minute my shift ended, a rarity for me.
Oscar was waiting for me at my door, looking quite dandy in his little red argyle sweater. I gave him a scratch behind his ears before he streaked into the yard. We took a longer-than-usual route around the house that afternoon as I mulled the odd turn my life had taken. Why was Cooper being nice all of a sudden? And why was I responding to it? Hell, I was excited by it.
Maybe it was just an overabundance of hormones, a response to a sexual starvation diet. I’d been without for so long that my body was craving the worst possible thing for me. Cooper was carnal triple chocolate cheesecake, deep-fried on a stick.
Alan,
on the other hand, was angel food cake, sweet, wholesome, and nothing you’d regret. He was smart, honest, open, and thoughtful. So why did I keep thinking of him as “my friend Alan” when what I should have been thinking was “sex on legs with a side of fantastically compatible personality”?
I cursed my contrary id and looked up at the sky. It was getting darker much earlier these days. I wondered what it would be like in a few months, having just a few hours of sunlight each day. But I wasn’t uneasy now. The verdant jungle surrounding my hometown had always seemed so forbidding, with a constant, threatening undercurrent of man-eating mosquitoes and water moccasins, not to mention the occasional alligator. Here, I felt welcomed by the fragrant green, the cool, deep shadows. But as enchanted as I was, I knew that I didn’t need to be this far from my cabin after dark, bear mace or no bear mace.
“Time to go back to the house, Oscar. Come on, buddy,” I called. Oscar, who seemed to see leashing as some sort of personal insult, took two steps toward me, then suddenly turned as fast as his chubby little legs would carry him and took off into the trees.
“Oscar, no!” I cried as he began barking frantically.
I chased after him, slowed by thick branches and underbrush.
“Oscar!” I yelled after the echoing barks. I muttered to myself, “This is not a smart thing, Mo, following a tiny canine canapé into the woods when there’s a bloodthirsty wolf on the loose. Why not just rub yourself in meat tenderizer and put an apple in your mouth?”
I thought about turning around and letting Oscar find his way home. Clearly, he could get through the brush easier than I could. And he could smell a predator coming, couldn’t he? He’d be able to run. But the thought of him alone and defenseless, in his silly little doggie sweater, kept pushing me forward.
I could see a clearing ahead, the branches thinned in the dimming light. Oscar seemed to have stopped, because his growls and yaps were staying in one place. I jogged ahead, trying to remember if there were skunks this far north, because I was not prepared to destink a dachshund. I pushed through the last barrier of branches. “Dang it, Oscar—”
And that’s when I heard the roar.
I skidded to a stop and landed on my butt as my legs flew out from under me. The grizzly bear, already agitated by the yapping dog, reared up on its legs, standing a full eight feet tall. That thing was bigger than my first car! The sheer size of it was enough to make my primal brain scurry to a corner of my skull and whimper in the fetal position. In the rational part of my brain, I knew I had Alan’s bear mace in my pocket, but I couldn’t seem to make my hands reach toward my jacket. My reactions were limited to screaming or wetting my pants.
I went with screaming.
I scrambled back, scraping my hands against the rocks and branches. The forest that had seemed a welcoming fairyland just a few minutes ago was now a living nightmare. How ironic was it that my nature-loving parents were going to be mourning a child who was eaten by nature?
The bear lurched back onto all fours. Its breath was hot and rank, sweeping across my face in damp puffs. My mouth went dry and slack as the animal barreled closer. The bear’s massive front paw drew back as if prepared to take a swipe at me. My brain seemed frozen, fixating on the obscenely long claws fanning out from the paw and wondering if there was a good place to be hit with them. The answer was a definite no. I flinched, throwing my arms over my head, waiting for the blow, and a lot of things seemed to happen at once.
The blow didn’t come. I opened my eyes to see wolf-Cooper, standing between the bear and me, his stance wide, defensive. The hair on his back was as bristled as a wire brush.
I felt a rush of gratitude for the idiosyncrasies of the human brain and its effort to protect me from bear snack-time horrors. In a last-ditch effort to dull the shock of growling, clawed death, my mind had produced a fantasy image of my furry savior. I was sure this last heroic image would be a small comfort to me as I made my way though Not-So-Gentle Ben’s digestive tract.
