The Wolfer Page 5

"Seen Black Jack lately?" asked the foreman.

  "Don't see him hanging there, do you?" Esau put down the sack, sank to his knees and picked up the bloody matter once again. It squished over the skin's tawny surface.

  "Black bastard," ground out Crippen, after they had passed beyond earshot of the cabin. "I would of sent him packing ten years ago if Old Man Meredith and him wasn't such good buddies. He does kill wolves, though. I bet he has a couple of hunnert dollars' worth of skins in that there shack. And that's one more thing that bothers me about him."

  "I don't see why it should," said Fulwider. "Isn't that what you want him to do? Kill wolves?"

  "Trouble is he brings in just as many hides whether the picking is high or low. He ain't that good and no one is that lucky. I suspect he raises the critters for the bounty. If I could find out where he does it I would skin him myself."

  "That's barbaric!"

  "Hell no, it's common. There's different ways of doing it. Most wolfers don't kill bitches on account of they are the ones have the litters. That would be like shooting the paymaster. Some take it a step farther and raise them theirselves, just like cattle or horses. When the litters get big enough they poison their feed. It's steady income and the Idaho Stockmen's Association don't ask questions so long as the hides and scalps keep coming in."

  "Astonishing. But doesn't that defeat the purpose of the bounty?"

  "Wolfers don't treat with purposes. They're in it for the money. You see now why no self-respecting cattleman will sit down and have a drink with one?"

  As he spoke, his eyes were on Asa North. But the latter appeared too intent upon studying the snowy ground at his roan's feet to have heard.

  The trail leveled off a mile south of the trapper's cabin, at which point signs of their quarry began to appear in the form of more tracks and an occasional swirl of bloody slush where a mole or fieldmouse had ventured improvidently from its snug burrow and been snapped up for its audacity. The first time they came upon evidence of such a Liliputian drama, Fulwider was surprised and asked if these could be the same predators that had been slaughtering Meredith's cattle.

  "They ain't particular," replied Crippen. "You got to remember that wolves spend ninety percent of their time looking for food. You go without eating six days at a stretch and see if you don't develop a taste for mouse."

  The journalist had much to be grateful for in Crippen. Given North's taciturn nature, if not for the foreman Fulwider would remain as ignorant of the animal they sought as he had been at the journey's outset. It was he who explained, when the wolfer would not, that the reason they scanned the sky while tracking was to note the direction in which the ravens were flying. Carrion-eaters were known to follow wolves in anticipation of a feast, much as gulls flocked around whales to feed on the parasites that infested their hides.

  But enthralled though the easterner was with these gratuitous insights, Asa North fascinated him even more. He rode with his rifle across the throat of his saddle, carried no other weapon save the skinning knife and for all the years he must have spent on horseback he did not ride particularly well. Whenever the opportunity arose he would abandon the creature and strike off on foot to read a sign or determine the wind's direction. The horse sensed this and seldom missed a chance to cause its rider discomfort. Yet they looked after each other during harrowing moments with the faithfulness of the mutually dependent. The relationship between North and Crippen was drawn along similar lines.

  Fulwider was contemplating his unenviable role as buffer between two volatile personalities when the trio topped a rise overlooking four rust-colored hulks lying a hundred yards apart in a field of trampled snow.

  The cattle might have been asleep but for the blood that smeared the scene in crimson streaks and whorls of pale pink and darkened the creatures' hides where it no longer flowed. A funereal silence settled over the riders as they stopped to take it in.

  "Goddamn," said Crippen. "Goddamn." He dug in his spurs and the sorrel shot forward, jerking his gray in its wake. North and the journalist followed.

  As they drew near, a gray head came up on the other side of the near carcass, lingered long enough for Fulwider to observe its scarlet muzzle, then dropped from sight and a fleet from dashed toward a nearby stand of firs.

  Crippen's horse, out in front, came to a skidding stop as the foreman leaned back on the reins and clawed the Henry out of its scabbard. But North's roan was slower to react to its master's hand and drew abreast, inadvertantly blocking Crippen's line of fire just as he was shouldering the weapon. Meanwhile Fulwider, still gathering momentum when the wolf had appeared, slowed to a halt and drew the Remington from his bedroll, taking aim even as North sighted in his Ballard. The weapons double-crashed in the crisp mountain air.

  The wolf yelped, a terrible bellow of rage and pain, executed a hurtling triple somersault and came to a rest in the shade of the trees whose shelter it had sought.

  The rifle's recoil had left Fulwider's shoulder numb. When he had satisfied himself that nothing was broken, he threw the gun across his pommel and rode over to join the others at the firs. The animal was still alive and struggling to rise despite the blood that covered its haunches. To the journalist's report-deadened ears its whimpers and whines were scarcely audible.

  "He's yours, Mr. Newspaper Writer," North said. "Finish him."

  "I think it was your bullet that hit him."

  Crippen shook his head. "He missed. His horse was still moving when he shot. No thirty-eight punched that hole in its spine. You best get to it while we still got horses."

  The smells of blood and wolf were making the mounts dance and shy. Fulwider stepped down and reloaded. The predator had ceased its struggles and lay panting on its side, one brown eye following the movements of its assailant. Leaning down, the easterner placed the muzzle behind the beast's ear and squeezed the trigger. The report seemed twice as loud as that which had preceded it. The wolf threw up its smashed head and sprawled back down in the dark red snow.

  Lifeless, it appeared much smaller than when first encountered. Crippen stooped to pull back a rubbery lip with his thumb, exposing an incarnadined tongue clamped between curving yellow fangs. Some teeth were missing, and most that remained had been worn down to pyramidal nubs. The gums were stained vermilion. He straightened.

  "Old. At least ten years. Loner, likely, following the pack." He handed Fulwider his knife. "Just the scalp. Furriers will give you another five for the hide, but we got bigger game to chase."

  "I'd rather not." Fulwider extended the knife for him to take back.

  The foreman's expression hardened. "You kill, you cut. Don't never ask no one to do your job."

  "It's all right. I'll forfeit the bounty."

  Crippen made no move to accept the blade. The wind freshened, drawing his collar across the lower part of his face so that only his eyes were exposed, fixed and humorless. North broke the spell.

  "Don't," he told the journalist, "yelp."

  He spaced out the words like separate sentences. Under his flat scrutiny, Fulwider withdrew the knife and crouched over the slain wolf.

  Its coat felt warm to the touch. Lying on its side that way, it reminded him so much of a sleeping dog in spite of the pulpy mess he had made of its head that he was reluctant to make the first cut for fear it would cry out. Crippen mistook his hesitation for ignorance of how to begin and guided the hand grasping the knife with his own, describing a phantom incision clear around the animal's head under the ears. He let go and stood back to supervise.

  North, who had spent much of this time pacing back and forth, lost patience suddenly and shouldered the journalist aside just as he had begun sawing at the tough membrane. In less time than it takes to describe it, the wolfer scored his blade around the mutilated skull and peeled the scalp from the bone with a nasty sucking noise. Straightening, he thrust the bloody relic at Fulwider, who ignored it.

  "I suppose we split the bounty," declared the other stiffly.

  "What'
s yours stays yours." North cast the scalp at Fulwider's feet, plunged his knife into the snow and scraped the blade clean on a patch of exposed dead grass. "You was just taking too much time about it."

  "Take it," Crippen advised. "If you don't, someone else will. Maybe Fire Eye and Lightfoot."

  He obeyed moodily, folding the gory surface inside and tucking it into his saddle pouch.

  The cattle slaughtered by the predators lay on their sides and stomachs, heads twisted so that the five-foot horns for which the breed was named stuck up in the air like crooked flagstaffs. They included two elderly cows and a half-grown calf run to ground after a chase, according to the tracks, of less than a thousand feet, and a large bull whose many grisly wounds bespoke a costly victory on the part of its tormentors. For two hundred yards around its massive remains there wasn't a square inch of earth that hadn't been torn by its slashing hoofs. All of the victims had been pulled down by the shoulders and their intestines devoured.

  Further investigation uncovered the mangled remains of what North identified as a male yearling wolf in a blackberry bramble more than a hundred yards from the point where the hunters had caught up with the bull. No tracks led up to it, and it was determined that the beast had been hurled there on the horns of the besieged herd leader. Crippen claimed the scalp as the man who had made the discovery.

  "Dawn, maybe a little later." The foreman swung into saddle. "They know someone's after them or they wouldn't of left so much meat behind."

  Mounting, North nodded. "They'll be taking to the high ground here on out." He urged the roan forward.

  Crippen turned a grim face on the journalist. "Going to write about this here?"

  "If I can find the words," he confirmed. "It's one thing to quote statistics about how much livestock is destroyed annually, but the impact of first-hand evidence is so much greater."

  "It's like coming home and finding your daughter raped," said the foreman, and moved out into the wolfer's path.

  Chapter Seven

  For two days the trail they were following wound steadily upward, where nature knew no rounded edges and breathing the air was like inhaling needles. They had passed the thaw belt the first day and were moving deeper into the region where spring never visited. There were places where the riders had to dismount and literally drag their horses, digging in their hoofs and whinnying, one by one up steep inclines while the reins slashed their gloves to ribbons and rubbed the flesh from their palms. The jagged scenery resembled nothing in Fulwider's experience, and even when, after acres of dead white, they moved into tall stands of evergreens spaced like whiskers on a Chinaman's chin, he felt as out of place as a visitor to Monsieur Verne's moon.

  Many wolf tracks spotted their path. Once, when they came upon evidence of an unsuccessful chase involving the pack and a number of mountain sheep that ended when the intended prey took to the peaks, Fulwider commented that the pack must be growing desperate after two days without feeding. Crippen dismissed this, explaining that the stomach of a full-grown wolf could hold as much as sixty pounds, enough to see it through five days of fasting. When the journalist expressed disbelief, North astonished them both by declaring that it was more like two hundred pounds, and that they could go without food for nearly two weeks. Pressed for further information, however, he fell back on his usual grunting responses.

  The New Yorker was losing patience with the man he had come along to write about. Time and again he had attempted to smash through North's hostile barrier and had met only rebuff. The situation was especially intolerable in view of his certainty that the wolfer had much to offer that Crippen could not. More and more, Fulwider found his thoughts returning to his friend's assertion that North's success in wolfing was related to his having become one himself.

  Late in the morning of the third day after encountering the slain cattle, they picked their way up a craggy precipice and found themselves on the edge of a level expanse that stretched for a snowswept quarter of a mile before climbing to the highest peaks in the range. There they paused. For a moment the journalist was at a loss to understand why, or what it was that had drawn his partners' attention. Then he spotted a line of shapes towing a cloud of snow across the base of the soaring rocks. These he took to be a herd of elk moving swiftly, but not nearly as swiftly as a column of much smaller forms circling around to head them off from the south. The creature at the head of the column was a smear of black and gray, and in the gray phalanx behind followed another that was almost pure white.

  Chapter Eight

  The scene was live hundred yards off, beyond effective range of even the Remington. The three watched helplessly as it unfolded, North in silence, Crippen chewing agitatedly, Fulwider in dumb, morbid fascination as the predators swung inexorably around in a semicircle from the rear to close in on the stragglers falling behind the fleeing herd. It was a wonderfully precise maneuver that put the journalist in mind of diagrams he had seen of famous European battles. Napoleon's army had marched with no greater purpose to divide the massed forces of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz.

  But the victim was much the stronger of the two. It was on its feet again after a brief struggle and plunging to narrow the gap between itself and the protection of the herd. The wolf hung on, however, letting its limbs drag and using them only to avoid injury when the antelope-like creature slashed at it with its near hind hoof. Meanwhile the dangerous gap widened, and the other wolves leaped and tore at their prey's flanks. Blood spattered the snow. The elk stumbled, rose and stumbled again, and before it could thrash upright a third time it was aswarm with heaving gray bodies. Abruptly its struggles ended.

  The remainder of the herd had not slackened its pace in the meantime, and though four or five wolves made feints at the retreating host it was plain that they were only engaging in sport, and as they fell back to join the feast the elk stampeded over a ridge and out of sight.

  Crippen gave his reins a snap, but North lunged and grasped the sorrel's bit chain before it could break into gallop. It snorted in confusion.

  "Where I growed up it's considered mighty unfriendly to take control of another man's horse," snarled the foreman, over his drawn Colt.

  North said, "Let them feed. When they get their bellies full they won't be in any shape to run."

  Their gazes locked. At length the wolfer released Crippen's mount and the gun was returned to its holster. "Next time say something first."

  They dismounted to rest the horses. For two hours they watched as the hunting creatures gorged themselves on warm meat and lapped at the bloodstained snow. Some finished early and wandered away, nipping at each other playfully like children at a picnic, while others stretched out in pillowy drifts to sleep and digest. Fights broke out occasionally among those feeding, but these invariably ended with one of the combatants rolling onto its back in a signal of surrender rather than continuing to the death, as the journalist had anticipated. He saw nothing of the dark-mantled male after the kill but assumed he was among those on the other side of the carcass. From time to time he spotted the white female walking around among the others as if to ensure that none claimed more than its share. It was a pastoral scene, all the more so because of the violent one that had preceded it.

  North swung a leg over the roan. "We'll circle in from the north, upwind."

  They approached at a walk. With the wind in their faces they escaped the animals' notice until the distance had closed by two thirds, where they stepped down and sank into a crouch. From here they could see the dead elk's great rib cage, hung with strips of hide and sinew. Wolves lay and sat around it licking their chops and gazing around with sleepy, sated looks on their incredibly doglike faces. There was still no sign of the leader.

  Crippen tugged at Fulwider's sleeve.

  "See to your horses," he whispered. "Hang on hard to their noses and mind they don't snort nor whinny. They ain't trained wolfers and if they get a whiff of them black-hearted bastards we won't get so much as a hair."

  "But
how will I fire my rifle?"

  "You won't. You're here for a story, remember? Not bounty. That lofer you shot was a lucky bonus."

  At that moment the wolfer's Ballard spoke. Two hundred yards away a rangy male with a white ruff encircling its neck half reared and fell where it had been sitting atop a snowy bank. In a flash North reloaded and fired again, and yet again. Two more wolves dropped. One, though dark at the shoulder, wasn't big enough to fit Black Jack's official description. The second was even smaller and evidently female.

  Dale Crippen, caught by surprise, unlimbered his repeater and hammered three times rapidly at the predators. But by this time the pack had scattered, and through the confusion and scudding black-powder smoke Fulwider was unable to see the result. He glimpsed a large gray shape darting from behind the slain elk and over the far ridge. A similar shape, pure white, followed hard on its heels.

  The reports echoed sizzling in the distance. In the stillness afterward, five gray carcasses lay about the torn hulk. "You missed some," commented North, reloading.

  "I didn't have your head start." The foreman punched shells into his magazine with a savage thumb.

  "That white-ruffed male was looking right at me. You two appeared to be busy, so I started without you. I thought maybe Jack would be first from behind the elk when the shooting started. He wasn't."

  He got to his feet with a quick, animal-like pounce and, grasping the roan's bridle, started on foot toward the death scene. The black tethered behind followed docilely.

  "I believe all that," Crippen rejoined, leading his own pair. "Yes, sir, Mr. Living Legend. I believe all that."

  Although flat in appearance, the landscape was really a series of moraines rounded by erosion and snow, and as the hunters descended into a horizontal trough more than a mile long, the ridge in front of them obscured the killing ground. By the time they surmounted it they found they were no longer alone.

  The slight figure in the battered round hat and buffalo coat had his back to them as he bent over the wolf with the white ruff. Crippen clanked the Henry's lever, causing him to turn. He had a scarlet-stained skinning knife in his left hand with which he had slit the dead wolf's pelt from throat to belly.