The Loop Read online

  As the mountains loomed larger, the land before them crumpled into a badland sprawl of rocky bluffs, sliced randomly by sudden scrub-filled creeks. Cresting a hill, she saw a line of cottonwoods converging from the south and through their foliage the glint of water.

  ‘That’s the Hope River,’ Dan said.

  The blare of a car horn made them both jump. Looking at the river, Helen had let the pickup wander and in the mirror now she saw a black truck right behind them. She yanked the steering wheel so hard to the right that they lurched and shuddered briefly onto the verge. She quickly got control again. She narrowed her eyes and didn’t look at Dan.

  ‘One crack about women drivers and you’re dead.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a woman drive better.’

  ‘You’re dead.’

  The black truck pulled out to pass. As it drew alongside, Helen turned and beamed her sweetest apology at the two inscrutable cowboy faces that surveyed her. They were maybe in their early twenties but with an attitude that made them look older. Dan gave a friendly wave. The one in the passenger seat touched the brim of his hat and almost smiled, while the driver just shook his head and drove on by, his disdain shared by a dog who rode windblown in the back. Once they were ahead, the passenger turned briefly to look at them through the gun rack in the cab’s rear window.

  ‘You know them?’

  Dan nodded. ‘They’re Abe Harding’s boys. They ranch a little spread up near the Calder place. You’ll be neighbors.’ Helen looked at him and saw he was grinning.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘ ’Fraid so.’

  ‘Well, there’s me off to a great start.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s not your driving they’ll hate you for. See the bumper sticker?’

  She had to lean forward and squint because the truck was accelerating ahead, but she could still make out a wolf’s head crossed out in red and, beside it, the words No Wolves, No Way, No Where.

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll soon have them eating out of your hand.’

  The road followed the bends of the river for another four miles until Helen saw a white church on a low hill, then other buildings rear above the trees. There was a narrow, railed bridge that crossed the river and a sign saying HOPE (POPULATION 519) after which some cryptic soul had added three clean bullet holes of perfect punctuation, consigning both town and people to a state of perpetual suspense.

  ‘I always get this childish urge to spray “abandon” on it.

  ‘Dan, you’re doing a really great job selling this place to me.’

  ‘Like I told you, it has a history.’

  ‘So when do I get to hear it?’

  They were coming over the bridge and he pointed ahead.

  ‘Take that turn there.’

  She pulled off the road and down into a small gravel parking lot beside the river. There were a couple of other cars there and Helen stopped beside them and turned off the engine.

  ‘Come on,’ Dan said. ‘I’ll show you something.’

  They left Buzz in the pickup and walked into a small park that stretched beside the river. It was a pretty place, its grassy slopes kept lush by sprinklers. Their spray made rainbows in the sun that was shafting the shade of several tall willows. There were swings and a climbing frame for children, but those there now were playing chasing games through the sprinklers. Their mothers sat chiding them halfheartedly from one of half a dozen wooden picnic tables.

  Below, at the water’s edge, silhouetted against a molten reflection of sky between two cottonwoods, an old man in red suspenders and a dusty blue feed cap tossed crusts to a family of swans. Helen could see their feet churning to hold steady in the current.

  Dan led the way along the raised path that snaked from the parking lot to the white clapboard church on the hill at the far end of the park. He seemed to be scanning the ground. Then he stopped and pointed down.

  ‘Look.’

  Helen stopped beside him. She couldn’t see what he was pointing at.

  ‘What?’

  He bent and picked up something small and white from the path. He handed it to her and she examined it.

  ‘It’s like a piece of shell or something.’

  He shook his head and pointed again to the ground.

  ‘See? There’s some more.’

  There were flecks of it along the edge of the path, like a snowy residue, scuffed there and scrunched to ever finer fragments by the constant passage of sneakers and bicycle wheels.

  ‘Sometimes you can find bigger pieces,’ he said. ‘Deep down the soil must be full of it. I guess that’s why the grass grows so well.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘It was from an old road that was here once.’

  Helen frowned.

  ‘It’s wolf bone. The road was paved with wolf skulls.’

  She looked at him, thinking he must be kidding.

  ‘It’s true. Thousands of them.’

  And while, across the park, the children played on among the sprinklers, their laughter floating on the balm of the evening air, as if the world had ever been thus, Dan sat her down at one of the tables beneath the willows and told her how there came to be a road of skulls.

  8

  It was a hundred and fifty years since white hunters and trappers first arrived in any number in this valley. The first of them came in search of beaver when the land farther east was trapped out, making their watchful way along the Missouri in mackinaw boats piled perilously with store enough, they hoped, to see them through a winter. Paddling west then south, they found a narrow tributary, nameless to all but ‘savages’, that led toward the mountains and they followed it and made their camp.

  Along the slopes of the hill where the church now stood, they dug cave-like shelters, roofing them with timber, brush and sod so that all that showed were stumplike chimneys of stacked stone. The following spring, when they sailed back to Fort Benton with their pelts, word began to spread of the great killing to be had. And over the next few years others followed, bringing horses and wagons, until soon there was a small village of hunters and trappers, a veritable colony of carnage to which someone, not in aspiration but rather in memory of a drowned child, gave the name Hope.

  In a few seasons the beaver were all gone, their pelts sold for proceeds soon squandered on Indian whiskey and women and shipped east to warm the fashionable heads and necks of city folk. It was only when the beaver ponds stood stagnant that Hope’s earliest inhabitants switched their attention to the wolf.

  The valley had been a special place for wolves since ancient times. Honored as a great hunter by the Blackfeet who had long lived here too, the wolf knew it as a winter shelter for deer and elk and as a passage from the mountains to the plains where, in great packs, he trailed herds much greater still of buffalo. By 1850 the white man had begun his grand massacre of these herds. Over the next thirty years he would kill seventy million head of buffalo.

  Ironically, at first, this made life easier for the wolf, for all the hunters wanted was the hide and maybe the tongue and a little prime meat. Wolves could dine in style on what was left. Then, from across the eastern ocean, came a great demand for wolfskin coats. It didn’t take a genius to find a way of meeting it. Like thousands of others all across the West, the good, the bad and the downright demented, the trappers of Hope turned to wolfing.

  It was easier than killing beaver, provided you had the two hundred dollars to set yourself up. A bottle of strychnine crystals cost seventy-five cents and it took two to lace a buffalo carcass. But set the carcass in the right spot and it could kill fifty wolves in a single night and still be fit to use the next. With good wolfskins now fetching two dollars apiece, a winter’s poisoning might net you two thousand dollars. That kind of money made the risks seem worth taking. A man could freeze to death with no trouble at all and lose his scalp too, for of all the white invaders, the wolfer was the most reviled and the Blackfeet killed him when they could.

&nbs
p; Each day the wolfers of Hope rode out in search of bait. As buffalo grew rare, they improvised with any creature they could find, even the smallest songbirds, whose breasts they delicately slit and stuffed with poisoned paste. The line of bait might stretch for many miles and was laid in a circle. When they rode its circumference the next morning, the wolfers would find it littered with the dead and dying of any bird or beast that had happened across it. As well as wolves, there would be fox and coyote, bear and bobcat, some still retching and convulsing. Their vomit and drool would poison the grass for years, killing any animal that grazed it.

  A wolf might take an hour to die and the wariest among them, those who only sniffed and lightly licked while their brothers and sisters gorged, might take much longer. The strychnine went to work slowly in their gut until their fur fell out and left them wandering the plains, like naked ghosts, to howl and perish in the cold.

  When winter tightened its grip and the daily harvest froze too hard for skinning, the wolfers stacked the bodies in the snow like firewood. It made the evenings easier but meant all could be spoiled by a sudden thaw. And it was one such thaw that gave birth to the road of skulls.

  The winter of 1877 saw one of the longest freezes Hope had ever known. By March, more than two thousand unskinned wolves were piled in towers above the wolfers’ caves and around the sprawl of cabins where most now lived.

  Then, one morning, there came a whisper of warmth in the air. The trees began to drip and the ice at the river’s edge to crack and soon a full chinook was blowing hot from the mountains. The cry went up and the wolfers, frantic with the fear of a whole season’s loss, set to work with their snicker-snack knives, like demons on the day of reckoning.

  By sunset every stockpiled wolf in the village was skinned and not a pelt lost and the wolfers of Hope, giddy with triumph, danced up to their knees in a mire of melted snow and blood.

  For years they had dumped their skinned carcasses on the lower ground beside the river to be picked clean by ravens and buzzards, many of which promptly died from the strychnine ingested by the wolves. Now, as a monument to their brave day’s doing, the wolfers raked all the bones together and, along with the headless remains of those just skinned, laid the footings of a road. Then they took the heads and boiled them and later, with great artistry, cobbled it with clean white skulls. And from that day forth the skull of every wolf they killed was added.

  On a clear night when the snow was gone from the ground you could see the road from the mountains, many miles away, gleaming pale in the moonlight.

  Eventually the skulls wound their way more than half a mile to where - perhaps to find more fragrant air, perhaps more fragrant company - those who had followed on the wolfers’ heels preferred to live.

  By now the valley was filling with the moan of cattle and the town grew proportionate with every herd that came, servicing the rancher’s every need. Blacksmith, barber, hotelier and whore, all thrived in their several ways.

  So too, at the other end of the road of skulls, did Hope’s wolfers, their daily deeds now overlooked, from its own Golgotha, by a fine white church (overlooked in senses both literal and metaphoric, for wolves, like all animals, of course, were not deemed to possess souls).

  Even before the church was built, the wolfers had not gone in want of spiritual guidance, thanks in large part to a self-styled preacher, wolfer and former Indian fighter by the name of Josiah King, better known to his flock as the Reverend Lobo.

  On Sunday mornings, depending on the weather and the amount of whiskey consumed the night before, Josiah would tell those assembled that the wolf was no mere varmint but the walking apotheosis of all evil. And he preached its annihilation with such infectious zeal that the wolfers of Hope came to see themselves as latter-day crusaders, reclaiming the frontier from this infidel beast and wreaking holy vengeance.

  The work of the Lord brings just reward. Wolfing was better paid than ever. There was a state bounty of a dollar for every wolf killed, topped up by cattlemen whose hatred of the species needed no priestly prompting. For now that the buffalo was gone and the deer and elk grown scarce, wolves had acquired a taste for beef. Cows, moreover, were slower and dumber and easier to kill.

  In truth, the elements were always better and more brazen in their killing than the wolf had ever been. The arctic winter of 1886 killed almost every herd in the valley. Only Hope’s hardiest ranchers survived, but with grievance etched in ice on their hearts.

  Yet whom could a man blame for the cold? Or for sickness and drought or the pitiful price of beef? And why curse government, weather or God, when the devil himself was at hand? You could hear him each night out stalking the range and howling the stars from the sky.

  So the wolf became Hope’s scapegoat.

  And sometimes, for his crimes, they would catch him alive and parade him in shame through the town. Children would throw stones and the braver among them poke him with sticks. Then folk of all ages would gather by the river and watch while the Reverend Lobo’s most ardent inquisitors torched him like a witch.

  Most of the wolfers drifted away with the century. There was no longer a living to be made. Some turned to different trades, others traveled farther north and west where easier killing persisted awhile. The livestock industry had gained huge political clout and, spurred by a rancher-president, who declared the wolf to be ‘a beast of waste and desolation’, the federal government took over the crusade.

  Rangers in every national forest were ordered to kill every wolf they could find and in 1915 the US Biological Survey, the agency entrusted with nurturing the nation’s wildlife, methodically went to work on a well-funded policy of ‘absolute extermination’.

  Just as they had followed the buffalo across the plains, wolves now followed it, in a few short years, to the brink of extinction.

  In Hope, with its great hinterland of wilderness, some lingered on. They hid high in the forests, too wise and wary to be caught by a crassly poisoned carcass. They could smell a poorly set trap from half a mile and would sometimes dig it up and spring it to register their contempt. To catch these animals, a man had to be more than cunning; he had to think like a wolf, had to know every shade and scent and tremor of the wild.

  And there was only one now in Hope who could.

  Joshua Lovelace had first come to the valley from Oregon in 1911, attracted to Montana by a new state law that increased the bounty on wolves to fifteen dollars. He was so much more skilled than any of his rivals that soon the local cattlemen’s association hired him full-time. He built himself a home, five miles out of town, on the north bank of the Hope River.

  He was a taciturn man who preferred his own company and guarded closely the subtle secrets of his profession. He was known, however, for two special trademarks. The first (for which many thought him either eccentric or excessively principled) was that he never used poison of any kind. When asked, he would proclaim his loathing of it, saying it was only for imbeciles who didn’t care what they killed. Wolfing, to him, was an art of the utmost precision.

  His second trademark was a working illustration of this, a device he had invented himself and for which he had applied, unsuccessfully, for a patent. He claimed to have gotten the idea as a boy, in Oregon, watching salmon fishermen lay nightlines in the mouth of a river.

  He called it the ‘Lovelace Loop’.

  It was used only in the spring when wolves were denning and consisted of a circle of thin steel wire, some fifty feet in length, to which were attached, on traces of thinner wire, a dozen spring-loaded hooks. Each hook was baited with a bite-sized piece of meat (almost any kind would do, though Joshua’s personal preference was chicken). The loop would then carefully be laid around the outside of the den and anchored with an iron stake.

  Timing was critical. For optimum results the loop needed to be laid between three to four weeks after the mother had given birth, and knowing this, through discreet observation, was part of the skill. An adult wolf would rarely be fool enough to t
ake the bait. But it wasn’t to catch adults that the loop was designed.

  At the age of two weeks a wolf pup’s eyes opened and a week later his milk teeth broke through and he could hear. This is when he would first venture out into the world and be ready to eat small morsels of meat, brought home and regurgitated by the adult wolves. Joshua used to pride himself on knowing the exact moment that the loop should be laid. He wanted his chicken to be the pups’ first taste of meat. And their last.

  He would lay it as the sun was starting to go down and then retire to some high place and, for as long as there was light, keep watch with the brass army telescope he had once traded from an old Indian who claimed to have plucked it himself from General Custer’s body at Little Bighorn.

  Sometimes, if Lovelace got lucky, he might see one or two pups emerge that same evening, lured from the den by the smell of the chicken. Once, in Wyoming, he caught a whole litter of six before nightfall. Normally, however, they came out of the den when it was too dark to see and you only knew you’d got one from the squeal they made when the triple-hook snapped open in their throats.

  At dawn you would find five or six pups, hooked like fish around the den and still alive, though too tired by now to make more than a whimper. More often than not, their mother would be there, nuzzling and licking them, all her wariness lost in distress.

  And therein lay the beauty of the loop. For if you were smart, if you had found yourself a good spot and didn’t go blundering in at first light, you could catch the whole pack, shoot the other adults one by one, as they came home from their night’s hunting. Only when you were sure you had them all, did you go in and finish the pups off with an ax or the butt of your gun.

  Lovelace eventually married a woman much younger than himself and she died a year later, giving birth to their only child. The boy was christened Joseph Joshua but was known by his father from an early age simply by his initials.