The Wolfer Page 7

  Grierson, the butcher, was a chunky fellow of indeterminate age with a brilliant bald head and an expression fixed in a perennial smile of good will, counterbalanced by an enormous right arm developed through years of slinging around hogs and sides of beef three times his weight. He had a huge balance scale suspended by a chain from the ceiling and operated by means of sandbags in various denominations. This he agreed to use in settling the dispute, after first sizing up the evidence and cutting himself in on the wolfer's side.

  A general hubbub greeted the rancher's arrival. He looked tired under his broad-brimmed gray hat, and swung his gold-headed walking stick impatiently when the crowd was slow in clearing a path for him. Angry mutters followed him. Meredith was far from popular in a town whose citizenry was constructed largely of people whose nationalities had known little but suffering at the hands of the British. Two lanky cowhands packing side arms came in behind him and slouched against the wall on either side of the door with thumbs hooked inside brass belt buckles.

  "I want it understood that if it weighs less than eighty pounds you will eat it yourself," the Englishman declared.

  Aaron Stemmer smirked. "Understood. Look at that frame. She's ninety if she's a pound."

  "If she's even seventy I'll help you eat her. Go ahead." He nodded at Grierson.

  The butcher started with five twenty-pound sacks on one side of the scale. The man with the yellow moustache, whom Fulwider remembered as Jim, helped him hoist the gray carcass into the other pan and stepped back. Immediately the pan with the sacks sank two feet. Grierson removed one of the sacks. The sides seesawed for an anxious moment, then settled with the sacks still hanging below the slain wolf.

  "It ain't eighty," he announced, in a surprised tone.

  A murmur rippled through the spectators. Meredith said, "Keep going. We haven't determined yet whether I'll be dining with Stemmer."

  For five minutes the butcher worked up a sweat removing and replacing sacks of different weights, grunting when one side or the other dipped below its mate. His smile was an early casualty. Finally he discarded a ten-pound sack and put two smaller bags of different sizes in its place. The pans shifted up and down and swayed to a perfect balance. "Sixty-seven and a half."

  A heavy wagon rumbled past outside, louder than anything in the shop. It was Aaron Stemmer who broke the spell.

  "Damn it, Grierson, your scale is busted."

  "Like hell it is!" snarled the butcher. "And even if it was, I sure as hell wouldn't leave it reading low."

  "They're never as heavy as they look." Meredith's smile was blade-thin. "You know the wager, Stemmer. Chris, cut him off a good-size piece to start."

  One of the cowhands produced a knife and stepped up to the carcass. Gripping it by a foreleg, he started sawing at the tender flesh beneath the appendage.

  "I won't do it." Aaron backed away, a hunted look on his blunt features. "Wolf meat is tainted."

  "You will do it."

  The declaration came from behind Fulwider, where Oscar Adamson had stood unnoticed until that moment, holding his shotgun in both hands. His scarlet face was grim.

  "I have scraped up too many welshers from too many barroom floors to let it happen here. You made a bet and, goddamn it, I am going to see you pay it off if it means loading this here scattergun with wolf meat and blowing it down your gullet. Eat!"

  "I scraped the hair off it for you." The cowboy named Chris thrust a bloody portion skewered on the end of his knife under Aaron's shapeless nose.

  For a long time he stared at it. Then his eyes scoured the room restlessly, lighting on Meredith, the sheriff, Jim standing helpless on the other side of the second cowhand and finally the impassive, leathern features of Chris. Gingerly he took the raw chunk between thumb and forefinger and, closing his eyes, popped it into his mouth. He wobbled it around and swallowed it whole.

  Tears came to his eyes. He clapped a hand to his mouth, gagging.

  "Next time go after something worthwhile, like Black Jack." Meredith caught Chris's eye. "See that he eats every last ounce of the sixty-seven and a half pounds."

  "That could take a while," said the employee.

  "I won't need you before tomorrow morning." He walked out past Fulwider, trailed by the other cowhand. On the boardwalk he stopped and turned around to stare at the journalist.

  "Fulwider, is that you? My God, I didn't recognize you! What happened? No, never mind, that's a ridiculous question. Of course I know what happened. How are you?"

  The New Yorker replied that he was holding his own, after a fashion.

  "You're just the man I want to see. Do you have a moment?"

  "It appears that I have nothing but," came the reply, "at least until I hear again from my newspaper."

  The Englishman smiled, his face breaking into a mass of creases Fulwider had not noticed on their last meeting. "Would you object to having a drink with a carpetbagger?"

  "Mr. Meredith, I'd drink with the devil himself if he were buying," said the other, answering the smile with one he didn't feel.

  "You must learn to call me Nelson." He waved away the bodyguard.

  Chapter Eleven

  "You cannot imagine what it means to me to speak with someone whose conversation isn't sprinkled with 'I reckons' and 'much obligeds.'

  Fulwider smiled politely but said nothing. The bartender, a small man with meaty forearms and a pitted nose like J. P. Morgan's, refilled their glasses with cognac and withdrew. The sun was still climbing. The journalist thought that if he wasn't careful the rest of the day would be lost in an alcoholic haze.

  "You're probably curious about what happened in Grierson's," said the rancher.

  "It's hardly my business."

  A smile fluttered and was gone. "Discretion is something else that dies a quick death out here. Aaron Stemmer and his brother Jim are two of the reasons why I find life on the frontier so hard to bear. They've been asking for today's comeuppance for some time."

  "I doubt they'll learn anything from it," said the other, and told of the their role in the Bismarck incident. Meredith listened with eyebrows raised.

  "Remarkable." He touched his lips to the edge of his glass. "And yet it's not such a coincidence that you should run into them again so soon. Fewer people live this side of the Missouri than in New York City, and they're moving constantly. The Stemmers will do anything for a dollar and frequently visit Rebellion during the wolfing season. Perhaps my standing with the natives will improve after today."

  "They will probably resent you even more."

  The rancher sighed. "I don't remember much about my father. He was knighted for bravery during the Crimean War, after which he deserted my mother and me to dig for gold in Australia. We heard he struck it rich and bought land in America. There was no more news until his solicitors wrote to inform me that I had inherited seventy thousand acres in someplace called Idaho Territory. When I got here I learned that I owed more than the ranch was worth. I could have walked away. Instead I wrote Sheffield, where my father still had friends, and offered them controlling interest in return for payment of debts and the post of manager. They accepted, and since then I've done nothing but regret my action."

  While he was speaking, Jim Stemmer came through the batwing doors and demanded whiskey at the bar, ignoring the chorus of jeers that greeted him. It struck Fulwider that he smelled much worse than North had the day he and his brother forced his hand. He drank up, paid and left, raking a murderous glance over both Meredith and the journalist that made Fulwider wonder if he remembered him from Bismarck. The doors flapped to behind him.

  The Englishman was saying something about Dale Crippen. He concentrated on the words.

  ". . . not for him I would never have survived those first few weeks. He knew far more about cattle and horses than any four men I've met out here. He is sorely missed."

  Fulwider sorted through his journalist's vocabulary for adequate phrases of consolation. He could find none. He sipped his cognac and found t
hat it tasted as much like stewed barbed wire as always.

  "You've changed," Meredith observed. He'd placed his hat on the table, revealing again the lines of age under his ice-blue eyes and at the corners of his aristocratic nostrils.

  "The doctor assures me I'll start putting on weight soon," said the other, drawing patterns with his forefinger among the beads of moisture on the outside of his glass.

  "That's not what I meant. I mean that you have grown hard. You're not the gullible easterner I met two months ago."

  "I'd like to believe that, but a week in the wilderness doesn't make a Kit Carson out of a Horace Greeley."

  "Perhaps not, ordinarily. But your experiences during that week were hardly ordinary. A lesser man would have succumbed."

  "A wiser one would not have gone in the first place. But you didn't ask me in here to discuss either my wisdom or my fortitude."

  He laughed quietly and dampened his lips once again. It had taken him almost twenty minutes to drain the glass the first time. "Would you call Asa North your friend?"

  "No man calls him that."

  "You saved his life. You must have developed some sort of rapport."

  "Why?"

  Meredith leaned forward onto his forearms. "I want you to get in touch with him. He's the only man capable of running Black Jack to ground before my investment in this territory is literally eaten up."

  Fulwider drank. "Wolves don't plague cattle in the springtime. There is too much risk in it when other prey is available."

  "I wish you'd explain that to my fellow investors."

  "Do they trouble you?"

  "Like Penelope's suitors." He smiled at his own witticism. "Hardly a month passes without a letter from one or another, asking where are all the profits von Richthofen promised in his book about ranching on the plains. Those I can handle, though I suspect at least one of them is entertaining dangerous notions about my integrity. But Black Jack is another matter."

  "They know about him?"

  "You aren't the first writer to sense a story here. A year ago, a fellow in Boston somehow acquired a number of clippings about the animal from the Boise newspaper and put together a lurid account that sold for a dime on the east coast. Someone sent a copy to someone else in England. Rumors began circulating—outlandish tales, the kind one might expect from a country where wolves have been extinct for four hundred years. Now my associates are demanding that I do something about the problem or sacrifice my position."

  "Wouldn't that solve your problem?" Fulwider posed.

  "I won't leave here in disgrace!" The rancher slammed his fist to the table, spilling their drinks and stopping all conversation in the room. Embarrassed, he sat back and lowered his voice. "I won't give my friends here that satisfaction. When I leave, it will be by my decision. That's why I need North."

  "There are other wolfers."

  He shook his head. "When you are dealing with a myth you must use mythical means to combat it. The only way I can reassure those people is to employ a legend to pursue a legend. We are speaking of intangibles here, not just of a man and a wolf."

  "I haven't the slightest idea where to begin looking for him. And even if I found him I can't say I could persuade him to return. He is a deeply troubled man."

  "He isn't the only one who has lost something out here," came the bitter reply.

  "If you mean Dale Crippen, they were far from friends."

  "Not that. The other thing."

  Something in the journalist's expression must have betrayed his bewilderment, for the rancher stared at him in disbelief. "You didn't know?"

  "Know what?"

  "It's part of the legend." He drew himself upright and stared into the amber liquid in his glass as if the details of his narrative were to be found there. The story he told had the symmetry of something shaped by repetition around countless campfires.

  Asa North had taken a Cheyenne woman in marriage and gone to live with her in Montana's Bighorn Mountains.

  Because her name was unpronounceable in her native tongue he called her Leah, though no one was clear why he chose that name in particular. There was a child, a dark-eyed girl in whom the combination of her father's tawny hair and her mother's dusky features was as attractive as it was striking, and whose childish curiosity and determination to satisfy it no matter what the consequences won her the nickname of Cat.

  Cat was two years old the winter her father returned from trading with the Arapaho to find his cabin dark and the chimney cold. The snow was deep, and though he had started back in the forenoon it was dusk by the time he made the discovery. He nearly killed his horse plunging through the drifts that stood between him and the door.

  Inside, the cabin was black and silent. He fumbled for a lantern and matches and waited impatiently as the wick's reddish glow spread outward, fading and yellowing. Monstrous shadows slithered up the walls as he turned the tiny key.

  He saw the girl first, and gagged on his own vomit.

  She was lying in the cradle he had made for her—placed there, probably, by her mother after the convulsions had begun. Her own seizures would then have driven Leah to their pallet, where he found her wrapped in the colorful blanket presented them by her uncle, a powerful sub-chief, on the occasion of their wedding. In earthen dishes on the table he discovered fresh venison remains, and from them he learned what had happened.

  Not understanding poison, she would have diagnosed the cramps that seized her and her child as another of the strange diseases the white man brought from the East, and would have been powerless to deal with them. When she had found the deer lying near the cabin it wouldn't have occurred to her to question the boon, or suspect that it had lapped at the snow where a wolf had vomited the strychnine that was killing it or where a careless wolfer had dropped a crystal while tainting a carcass. Deer, like children, are curious, and like children they are apt to put anything in their mouths that interests them. Being unaware of the campaign of extinction going on among the Montana wolf population, she would have no reason to avoid the meat. She had watched her child die and then had succumbed herself without ever knowing why.

  In the end it was not their deaths that haunted him so much as the image of their faces and what the poison had done to them in the final throes, so that the memories he kept of the good times were obscured forever behind those hideous, scarcely human grins. They returned to him in nightmares even now, and he woke up screaming Leah's name.

  Fulwider didn't say anything for a long time after Meredith had finished. At the bar, glasses clinked and liquor gurgled hollowly from vessel to vessel. He swallowed the last of his brandy and stood up.

  "I can't help you," he said. "I have no way of reaching North. Perhaps the Stemmers can find Black Jack, assuming Aaron still has a taste for wolf."

  The rancher looked sour. "Aaron doesn't know a wolf from a jackass. Turning his brother and him loose on Newcastle would be like giving them a license to rustle."

  There was nothing Fulwider could say to comfort him. He thanked him for the drinks and left. On his way out he heard Meredith ordering another refill.

  In the lobby of the Assiniboin he was approached by a boy in overalls carrying an envelope, who asked him if he was R. G. Fulwider. The journalist tipped him and opened a telegram signed by the editor, informing him that his firsthand account of the wolfing trip in the Caribous would run the last week of April and congratulating him upon a fine job. He crumpled it and tossed it into the wastebasket behind the clerk's desk.

  He paused before the door of his room, dreading the same four walls he had been staring at for weeks. After a full minute he turned and descended the steps back to the ground floor. Thanatopsis blinked as he passed the desk but made no comment.

  The unmarked building across from the hotel sported a fresh coat of paint and a bell pull. Fulwider's jangle was answered by a short, buxom woman with copper-dyed hair and eyes that protruded under lids tinted a disconcerting shade of green. Before he could stammer out his bus
iness, she ushered him inside with a sweeping gesture of her thick and not entirely feminine right arm.

  "I have been expecting you since first you came to town," said she, in a surprisingly deep voice coarsened by a heavy German accent. "I am Aurora. Ladies, there is a gentleman here I would like you to meet."

  The large front parlor was elegant if over decorated, with narrow aisles winding among pedestal tables and skirt-legged chairs and sofas piled with lacy cushions and a gramophone on a low stand, playing a scratchy, nasal rendition of "Whispering Hope." Heavy curtains drawn over the windows made necessary a number of burning lamps, whose oily smell mingled with the scent of too many varieties of toilet water in a closed space to sour the liquor in his stomach. The various seats were occupied by women in flowered kimonos who studied him with lidded eyes.

  He selected the youngest of the group, a blonde of about thirty, paid in advance and escorted her up the stairs to the second story. When he came down Asa North was waiting for him inside the front door.

  Chapter Twelve

  He looked tired. His tall moccasins were mud-heavy and his clothes, including the matted and tangled wolfskin, were coated with a fine yellow dust that sifted from him when he moved. Even his face was caked, lending him a jaundiced appearance. In his presence, Fulwider forgot the evil mixture of scent and coal oil that had assailed him upon entering the overdone parlor, and smelled again those odors of wolf and leather and sweat of horse and man with which he had come to associate North alone. The yellow-brown eyes fixed on him when he came to the landing and didn't waver as the journalist hastened down to greet him with hand outstretched.

  "Hope I didn't interrupt nothing." His palm was like an asbestos glove.

  "How long have you been in town?" Fulwider spoke quickly to cover his embarrassment. His blonde companion had somehow melted away at the head of the stairs. Indeed, the parlor itself was deserted but for them. The wolfer had that effect on people, like some fearsome wild thing that wandered occasionally from its natural habitat, to be let alone until it left.