The Loop Read online

  The letters she had written lately had been determinedly cheerful. She described the place to him, told him the detail of her routine, joked about her failure yet to catch a wolf. But sometimes she wondered if a whiff of her true feelings, of her loneliness, of the aching hollow he had left in her, had somehow infected her words without her knowing.

  Buzz watched dolefully from the pickup while she opened the lid of her mailbox. It was empty.

  14

  He had watched her ever since she arrived. Even on those first couple of days when Dan Prior was helping her unpack her things and get the cabin into shape. And that next night when she’d come back late and smoked her cigarette down by the water and did that amazing howl. He had stood in the cover of the trees across the lake, where he was standing now, and had prayed no wolf would answer.

  He didn’t come here every night and he never stayed long. Sometimes all he would see of her was her shadow looming like a giant’s inside the lamplit cabin. If he walked farther north along the fringe of the forest and nearer than it was safe to go, he might get a glimpse of her through the open doorway, sitting at the table with all her charts and her computer or talking on the phone.

  Once while doing this, he had stood on a dead branch and the snap set her dog off hollering. She came to the door and he froze with his heart in his throat, but she didn’t see him and went inside again. Since then he had been more careful and if the wind was behind him, he didn’t come at all in case the dog got a whiff of him.

  Luke tried to persuade himself that he wasn’t spying. It wasn’t like he was being a Peeping Tom or anything. All he was doing was trying to stop her getting the wolves. Just like in war you needed to know what the enemy was doing. But as time went by, he was finding it harder and harder to think of her that way.

  She seemed so sad. The way she came down and sat by the lake, crying and smoking all those cigarettes, like she was trying to kill herself. He’d wanted to go down there and put his arms around her and tell her to stop and that everything was okay.

  Then that time she had suddenly slipped out of her clothes and gone into the water and he was sure she was going to drown herself and had nearly called out. And thank God he hadn’t because it turned out she was just going for a swim and the dog went in too and they messed around and he actually heard her laugh for the first time. In the dark, Luke had only gotten the faintest impression of her body, but it was enough to make him feel like a freak and a pervert and he immediately left, vowing he was going to stop.

  But he hadn’t.

  The night before last he had dreamed about her. He dreamed he was lying on the ridge above the meadow where the wolves had denned in the spring. The place was somehow different but the wolves were there, all the adults and the pups, and they were sitting in a circle, like the picture he used to love in that old copy of The Jungle Book he’d had as a kid. Then he saw that the woman was sitting in the circle too, like she belonged. And she looked up at him and called out his name and asked him why he was spying on them. Not angrily, just wanting to know. And he stood up and tried to say he didn’t mean them any harm and that he too wanted to belong, but he blocked. The words just wouldn’t come. And the woman and the wolves all just stared at him. And then he’d woken up.

  Somewhere behind him now, in the forest, he heard the deep hoo-hoo-hoo of a horned owl. He turned and it took him awhile for his eyes to adjust after staring at the lit windows of the cabin. The owl was only a few yards away, sitting in the dead lower branches of a fir tree, fixing him with its wide golden eyes, so close that even in the dark you could see the tiger stripes on its chest. It was only fair, he thought; the watcher being watched.

  He looked back across the lake. There was still no sign of life from inside the cabin. Unusually, she had closed the curtains and the door too. But the lights were on and he knew she was there because her truck was parked outside and he’d heard her dog barking. She was probably reading or something. He was always disappointed not to get a glimpse of her. But she was home and that was all he needed to know. It meant he could safely go about his night’s work.

  He turned and slipped quietly back into the forest. The owl didn’t move, just watched him walk by.

  As he threaded his way among the trees and circled down toward the creek, he thought again about meeting her at the fair. He’d expected her to be all morose, like she was up here on her own. But she hadn’t been like that at all. And he’d been relieved because he’d been worrying that maybe he was the cause of her sadness, because of what he was doing to her traps.

  ‘Why m-m-my wolf? I never saw him!’

  God, what a dork he’d been, saying that. He’d been cursing himself ever since. She was real nice, which was part of the problem, like it was with Cheryl or any girl he wanted to impress. He always made such a damn fool of himself. Except, of course, Helen Ross wasn’t, like, a girl. Whatever, he’d done the same thing, gotten himself all worked up so the stutter clicked in and he wasn’t able to say what he wanted to and ended up being precisely the dork that creeps like Jerry Kruger considered him.

  It was hopeless. He often wondered how any girl was ever going to find out he wasn’t that bad. Or maybe he was. Maybe he was going to end up sad and old and lonely, living on his own and jabbering to the birds like a lunatic.

  He’d been surprised by how pretty she was up close. That smile of hers and the way she looked so directly at you with those brown eyes. And, God, she’d looked so good in her baggy khaki shorts and her T-shirt sleeves rolled up so you could see her arms all tanned and golden.

  Below him now, through the trees, he saw Moon Eye grazing where he had left him, beside the shallows of the creek that cascaded through a narrow, high-sided passage of rock from the southern end of the lake. Any noise the horse made down here was smothered by the roar of the water. Moon Eye heard him though and looked up. Luke put his face against the white crescent on the horse’s face, for which he had named him, then spent a full minute rubbing the animal’s neck and murmuring his love. Then he swung himself into the saddle that was laden heavy with all he needed for his night’s work and coaxed Moon Eye into the creek.

  The water ran fast and broke white around the horse’s hocks but his hooves found firm places among the slip of the rocks and they were soon on the other bank and heading down through the forest toward the first of the traplines.

  It wasn’t that he thought she meant to harm the wolves. Far from it. But once she got collars on them, they wouldn’t be free. They could be found and gotten rid of whenever anyone chose. It was weird these biologist people didn’t get it. But then maybe in the end they were just like everyone else, unable to stand other creatures being truly wild and forever trying to tame and shackle them.

  At the start, Luke had treated the trap thing almost like a game. He had enjoyed shadowing her and the predator-control guy, Rimmer, through the mountains and forest, seeing where they chose to set the traps. He was amazed they hadn’t seen him, but they hadn’t. He’d bumped into her that once, about a week later, but luckily it was when he’d finished with the traps and was riding back to his father’s allotment, so she wouldn’t have thought it suspicious.

  He hadn’t been able to see where they’d put every single one of the traps and it had taken him a few days to find them all. And then she’d started moving them around which was real tricky, but he usually managed to find them by trailing her when she went to check them. It had been fun seeing her get more and more puzzled at why she wasn’t having any luck. And even more fun seeing her dog’s reaction.

  It had taken Luke awhile to find the right formula.

  First off, he’d bought some little green crystals from a pet store in Helena. They were supposed to stop cats and dogs pooping on your lawn. When Luke said he needed a dozen bottles, the storekeeper said he must have one hell of a problem but Luke told him it was just a very big lawn.

  He tried it out on the ranch dogs and decided it might not be powerful enough to keep wolv
es off your lawn, so he went back to town and bought supplies of bug repellent, ammonia and various types of pepper and mixed them into a gooey liquid with the crystals, half expecting to blow himself up.

  The result, when he sniffed it, nearly made him pass out and it worked like a dream on the dogs. He could put a piece of steak down, spray a circle of the stuff around it and the poor things wouldn’t dare cross the line to get it; they just lay there, whining and slobbering. He even gave his new product a name: Wolf-Stop.

  He’d read somewhere that wolves hated the smell of two other things: diesel oil and human urine. The diesel was easy. There was a tank of it down by the barns and he always took a can of it along with him and sprayed it around the traps with the Wolf-Stop. The urine was trickier. For twenty traps he’d need a lot. He wondered, briefly, about whether there was a way to augment his own supply from the restroom at The Last Resort, but he couldn’t come up with one. In the end, all he could do was drink a lot and distribute it sparingly, using the delivery method God intended. He’d never drunk so much water nor peed so much in his whole life.

  The two traplines she’d laid down toward the allotments were a breeze. Once he’d done them, he barely needed to check them. Both places were like corridors and he had effectively blocked them off by spraying a three-line barrier of Wolf-Stop, diesel and urine at each end. He had sprayed it too around every trap he could find - though not too near in case she noticed.

  Then, for good measure, he’d sprayed the traps and the wolf scat she had carefully placed near them with some scent-killer he’d bought from a hunting supply store. The real tedious part was clearing up his footprints afterward.

  Hiding behind some rocks one morning, he’d seen the woman’s dog come hurtling down the slope just above where he’d laid the barrier. It was like a cartoon, the poor mutt suddenly seemed to hit an invisible brick wall. A sniff and a whimper and he slunk off the way he came. The woman didn’t even notice. Luke was laughing so much he had to beat a quick retreat too.

  The traps in the high canyon were a different matter. The way the land was up there, you couldn’t just block it off. The wolves seemed to move through it almost at random. All he could do was spray around each trap and if she moved one, like she’d been doing lately, without him seeing her do it, he could lose hours trying to find it.

  Even worse, a couple of nights ago, he’d dropped his bag with all the Wolf-Stop in it on the way up there and even though he went back and looked, it was too dark to find it. He ended up having to spring some of the traps instead, which he’d only ever done when he ran out of the stuff. It was bound to make her suspicious and it was scary too, because you had to do it without activating the radio collars she’d fixed to them.

  Sometimes Luke managed to do the traps in daylight, just after she’d checked them. It sure made life easier, but there was always the risk that she would see him. So normally he did it at night, always going first to check she was back at her cabin.

  His excuse for being away from home all night was simple. He suggested to his father that he should camp up on the allotment so he could ride the herd through the night. His mother had said it was ridiculous but his father had been real impressed and backed the idea.

  Sometimes it took him so long to see to the canyon traps that instead of going back to the tent, he just found a sheltered spot and curled up in the sleeping bag he always kept strapped to his saddle.

  The only night he regularly went home was Tuesday, so he could get a shower and a shave and some decent sleep before his speech therapy the next morning. His mother went on and on about how pale and tired and terrible he looked. She said he looked like a drug addict, though when she’d seen one of them, Luke had no idea.

  ‘It’s not right you sleeping out in the open up there.’

  ‘Mom, I’m fine. I like it.’

  ‘It’s dangerous. You’ll get eaten by a bear.’

  ‘I don’t t-t-taste good.’

  ‘I’m serious, Luke.’

  ‘Mom, really, I’m not a k-k-kid anymore. I’m fine.’

  But, in truth, it was starting to wear him down. He’d looked in the mirror and thought his mother wasn’t wide of the mark. He didn’t know how long he could keep it up.

  Tonight it took him no time at all to see to the two forest traplines. The sky was starting to cloud over but there was a moon and he hardly needed to use his flashlight to locate the traps and refresh the barriers with a good dousing of Wolf-Stop, diesel and his own pee. Within an hour he had brushed away his tracks and was urging Moon Eye up the long, steep route to the canyon.

  Exactly where the wolves were at the moment, he didn’t know. Twice in the last week he had gone to the meadow where they had spent most of the summer and neither time had he seen any sign of them. He knew from his wolf books that around this time of year, when the pups were big, they left these so-called rendezvous sites and started to hunt as a pack.

  A few nights ago he had heard them howl and though it was hard to tell where it came from, for the mountains played tricks with any sound, he figured it was somewhere up above Wrong Creek, a mile or so to the north. With luck, they might have gotten sick of sniffing all the stuff he’d sprayed around the place.

  At last he reached the foot of the canyon and tied Moon Eye to a willow bush beside the creek. The slope above grew thick with sage and he broke himself off a good bushy stem to use as a brush for his tracks. Then he had another drink and, taking the bag in which he carried all his various bottles of Wolf-Stop, diesel and scent-killer, set off along the rocky bank of the creek.

  He chose his route with care, making sure to step on rock and scrub and trying to avoid any patch of dust that might show a footprint.

  She had set three of her traps along the upper side of a narrow deer trail that skirted a dense thicket of juniper. Below it, the ground fell away in a steep slope covered with buffaloberry, among which Luke now stopped. He was a few yards short of where he thought the first trap was.

  He peered both ways along the trail to get his bearings. He was looking for the telltale tuft of grass or scrub in front of which she had dug the hole for her foul-smelling bait. But he couldn’t see it.

  The moon was permanently masked by cloud now. From somewhere behind the mountains came a long, low rumble of thunder.

  Luke took out his flashlight and walked slowly through the buffaloberry bushes along the lower side of the trail, scanning the other side with the beam. Up ahead he could see something dark on the pale dust and as he got nearer he saw it was wolf scat and knew he’d found the right spot. There, behind it, was the tuft of grass and buried between the two, sprinkled carefully with dirt and debris to disguise it, would be the trap.

  He reached into his bag for his scent-killer and, taking care not to step on the trail, crouched down and started to spray it on the scat. The thunder rumbled again, nearer now.

  ‘Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  It was as if someone had jabbed him with a cattle prod. The voice came from the trees and gave him such a jump that he lost his footing and found himself sprawled on his back among the berry bushes. He’d dropped both the spray and the flashlight and couldn’t see a thing. Then he realized his hat was over his face. He could hear someone charging out of the trees toward him. Quickly, he rolled over, scrambled to his feet and launched himself down the slope.

  ‘Oh no you don’t, you son of a bitch!’

  With one leap Helen cleared the trail. Whoever it was had about a ten-yard start on her and was already gaining. He was halfway down the slope, crashing through the bushes in giant strides. Suddenly there was a flash of lightning and she could see him below her, his arms spread wide for balance. He had his hat in one hand and a bag or something swinging wildly from his shoulders. Things were falling out of it.

  ‘You’re in big trouble, buddy. Big trouble!’

  Thunder boomed as if to make her point. The bushes thwacked against her legs as she ran and once she went over
on one ankle but her mind was too full of outrage and vengeance to pay heed to it.

  He was almost at the foot of the slope now where the land shelved down to the creek through a thick band of alder and willow scrub. Once he was in there she could easily lose him.

  ‘Interfering with federal trapping is a serious offense!’ Helen had no idea whether it was or not, but it sounded good.

  Then, just as he reached the trees, she heard his boot crack against a rock and he tripped and disappeared headfirst into the undergrowth.

  Helen gave an exultant, ‘Yes!’

  She was there within seconds but it wasn’t quick enough, for he was already scrabbling off on his hands and knees through the scrub, trying to get to his feet and, without thinking, Helen just dived like a football tackler and landed full-square on his back. He flattened beneath her and she could hear the breath leave his lungs in a great oomphing grunt.

  She rolled off him and got to her knees, too out of breath herself, for the moment, to speak. Then the thought occurred to her: now what? She had just attacked a total stranger, a man bigger than her and no doubt stronger and, God, for all she knew, perhaps even armed! And here they were, out in the middle of nowhere. She must be out of her mind.

  She got to her feet. He was still spread-eagled beside her, facedown, but suddenly he made a peculiar sound and moved an arm and she thought, that’s it, he’s going for his knife or his gun and so she gave him a kick.

  ‘Don’t you try anything, buddy. I’m a federal agent. In fact, you’re under arrest.’

  As she said it, she realized he was in no state to try anything. He was on his side, with his knees doubled up and gasping for breath and in another flash of lightning she saw his face, all contorted and covered in dust.