Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West (21 page)

T
he Bad Luck spring box needed to be checked every day, wolves or no. I sat beside it staring up at the foothills and the gray stone peaks behind them. With the volume high on my radio, I could listen to the others talking as they hunted. James and Jeremy
discussed the location of fresh sign. James had heard howling early in the morning.

My world had filled up to the brim with wolves. I watched for them all day while I worked, and when I had to piss I did it on the gateposts and trees they used to mark territory. In the evening I went home, ate a quick dinner, and drove out again to sleep among cows and listen for the far-off howling of the pack.

We checked cattle obsessively. Day after day I went out on horseback to ride through the steers and heifers. I borrowed one of Jeremy’s rifles, slung it across my back, and spent hours with the herds. At home when I took off my shirt and looked in the mirror, my lower back was bruised purple in the shape of breech and bolt.

James and Jeremy made their own rounds. Both were practiced hunters, having each brought down their share of deer, elk, and other game. They had camouflage coats, good binoculars, familiar guns, and scabbards to carry them in. They did not have to practice the movements of chambering a round or check endlessly to see whether the safety was off or on, as I did.

Someone once told me that wolves travel in circles. In a book on the species, a map showed the movement of three packs as lines with directional arrows and dated waypoints. The packs overlapped their routes like the Venn diagrams that demonstrate a gray area.

Each pack ran an enormous circuit over the course of a week or ten days. While they don’t end up in the same place each Wednesday or use a specific trail, wolves tend to visit and revisit the outer extremes of their territories. They follow the same general course through their landscape, diverging from it according to circumstance and season.

We couldn’t say how our pack was moving, but we kept missing them and they kept killing. Every day or two for a week we gathered around another dead heifer, looked for sign, and went off with our guns in hand. We dispersed to search along the edges and inside the wildest nooks of the ranch. We patrolled our territory.

Of the three of us, I was the least interested in shooting a wolf. For Jeremy, each new dead cow meant listening to another one of Orville Skogen’s tantrums. Every loss had to be reported over the phone and, though I never got to listen in, I doubted that the conversion of a cool thousand dollars into wolf shit did much to improve Orville’s thorny disposition. More and more it seemed like Jeremy’s reputation as a ranch foreman was on the line and each wolfless day tarnished it.

James was a born hunter—better at stalking and killing things by the end of his teens than most people get to be in a lifetime. Hunting wolves was a rare opportunity for him, something not to be missed, but that wasn’t the whole of it. James was a cattleman through and through. He loved his herds unstintingly, and wholeheartedly devoted himself to their protection and care. James liked wildlife, too—enjoyed seeing, living among, and hunting it—but his first loyalty was always to the stock.

I was less sure about the whole undertaking, stuck between a love of wild things and rage at the ruin of a summer’s work. I kept out of the hunt for a while, attending instead to the ranch’s day-to-day tasks. I carried a gun, sure, but doubted whether I could pull the trigger if a wolf walked through the sights. While James and Jeremy hunted, I hauled salt to the cattle, spliced wires, and cleaned stock tanks.

One night, as July ground through its final week, something inside me gave way. I bedded down beside the cattle, arranged my gun and other things, and then stared straight up into a vaulted dome of stars for hours. Though I was exhausted, I could not sleep. Perhaps it was the result of the endless workdays, the terror I glimpsed in the eyes of certain cows, or the vivid carnage that the wolves left in their wake. I stayed awake with muscles tense and fists clenched tight, watching the progress of a thin crescent moon. When morning finally came, I was seething with anger. The wolves had gone too far. They had stolen too much from us.

On the twenty-eighth, with a total of four heifers dead and the wolves still maddeningly elusive, Jeremy decided to make a big push through the timbered folds of Squaw Creek. I volunteered to come along. He just nodded and then, when James was out of earshot for a moment, asked:

“If you see a wolf, do I have your word that you’ll shoot it?”

I thought a moment, and then told him that I would. James returned and handed me a rifle, the old Winchester .30-.30 he’d bought at the age of twelve.

“It’s a brush gun,” he said. “Perfect for that thick timber in Squaw Creek.”

I looked over the gun carefully. It was a well-used lever action, bereft of ornamentation and engraving. The wooden stock was dinged in a few places, but freshly sealed with oil. I practiced throwing it to my shoulder and looking down the barrel, wondering when it had last been fired or sighted in. I loaded five shells into the tubular magazine. We rode out on four-wheelers before I could take a practice shot.

We walked for hours in the roughest sort of country. I climbed
through a hundred deadfall thickets and splashed across the North and Middle Forks of Squaw Creek. All the while I could not shake the feeling that the wolves were just ahead, hidden by thick timber and tricks of light and shadow. Though I carried no food and always seemed to pick difficult, steep, and circuitous routes, I did not tire. A strange force pulled me onward. It kept my eyes peeled and my feet moving fast. I drank from clean little springs, feeling always as though I was not alone.

I wish it had been otherwise. I wish I could say that I hunted the wolves reluctantly. That pursuing them through the maze of Squaw Creek was a hard but necessary duty. That might sound right, but it would be a lie. The truth is that, once I lost sight of James and Jeremy, chasing wolves afoot gave me a feeling I’ve never had before or since. It sharpened my sight and brushed cobwebs from every corner of my mind. It focused me so intensely on the task of pursuit that everything else faded away. I did not notice the passing of the afternoon, or that I teetered on the threshold of exhaustion, until I met up with James and Jeremy on a ridge above the thick swath of forest where the South Fork of Squaw Creek seeped into the world.

We stood there, ragged and empty-handed, and looked down at the timber. The copse wasn’t huge, measuring perhaps a half mile on its nearer side.

“Let’s hunt through there,” Jeremy said, “then call it a day.”

We split up again. James would circle around the top end of the trees. Jeremy would walk a lower route, then lie in ambush on the far side. My instructions were to wait fifteen minutes and then walk smack through the middle, hopefully flushing the pack into the open. On the far side of the trees we’d meet up on an old two-track, then walk back home together.

I waited and then slid down a steep embankment into a nightmare of mud, old bones, and dripping water. The first step sank me past the knee. After that I walked on rotting trunks, exposed roots, and thick hummocks of moss. The bog was claustrophobic enough to set my hair on end. I ran the .30-.30’s lever action, set the hammer at half cock, and tried to keep from falling. After a little while I found the slumping traces of an overgrown logging road and followed it into the heart of the bog. I remember green profusion, fallen trees, and shadow. Through this, deft and massive, came the wolf.

We saw each other simultaneously and then, though I can’t recall lifting the gun or thumbing back the hammer, I fired. The bullet knocked him over, and when he struggled up, I could see that his hind end was ruined. With his front paws, the wolf dragged toward the shelter of thick underbrush. I shot again and hit a tree. Again, and he tumbled out of view. I rushed downhill past bloodstains on a pine and came upon him breathing out his last in a clearing not ten feet across. He seemed to fill it.

I racked in another cartridge and hesitated, wondering whether to give him a few more moments or shoot again to kill quickly. But by the time my thought had passed, he was gone and I was alone in the clearing with nothing but the shot ringing in my ears. The others started calling on the radio and crashing toward me through the muck and downed timber. Sick to my stomach, I sat at the clearing’s edge and stared at the body.

The carcass had to be inspected by scientists from Fish, Wildlife & Parks. Doubting their ability to navigate through the depths of
the South Fork, we decided to carry the wolf out to a little two-track road. Jeremy tied the paws together with baling twine—hind and front. James found a stout branch, broke the limbs off, and threaded it between the wolf’s legs. They leaned against trees and tried to cheer me up.

“He’s a big one, a hundred pounds—maybe the alpha male,” said James. “People would pay money to hunt a wolf like that.”

“Probably got a belly full of steak,” Jeremy added.

He clapped me on the back. “You did good.”

I nodded dumbly, said nothing. James and Jeremy discussed the next move and wondered aloud if this would be enough to drive the pack into the mountains. They smiled and talked as if we were not sharing the clearing with a dead body and the echoes of atrocity.

They handed me their rifles, went to the wolf, and lifted the pole onto their shoulders. I walked ahead of them, searching in vain for an easy path out of the bog.

After a few minutes I switched places with Jeremy and brought up the rear of our procession. The pole was not much longer than the wolf, which meant I had to walk close to its voided asshole in a cloud of dog-shit stench. Once, when James stopped abruptly, I almost stepped face-first into it.

It felt like a shortcut through hell. James and I moved clumsily, tripping over branches and sinking in the mud. The wolf became an awful pendulum, lurching back and forth between us. As we stumbled along, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that I had taken something that floated through the forest like a spirit, and reduced it to dead weight and a fecal smell. At last we reached the little dirt road that followed Squaw Creek down toward the highway
and left the body there, beside a boulder. We would call Fish, Wildlife & Parks, so they could send someone up in the morning to collect the carcass for necropsy.

James insisted on taking a picture of me with the wolf. I knelt behind it and he snapped two shots with a disposable camera.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded, and when he looked away, I reached down, used my knife to slice a few long hairs from the wolf’s tail, and tucked them in my pocket.

S
leep was out of the question. After dinner I paced back and forth in the bunkhouse, growing more agitated every time I passed the front door. Without really knowing why, I laced up my boots, grabbed my shotgun and a flashlight, and headed out into the night.

I drove fast down the highway and turned through the gate at Squaw Creek, the truck a
speck of light moving across the new-moon blackness of the foothills, winding upward toward the Madison Range. Ahead the stretched oval of the headlights illuminated two dirt ruts and the rough bark of pines on either side. Beyond that the darkness was opaque, impenetrable.

I got out to open a gate and a chill passed over me that felt out of place on a late-July night. I pulled the truck through and went to close the gate behind it. From the rear, the taillights seemed like the last things left over from another world. I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were about to wink out.

I drove to where we had left the wolf earlier in the day, stretched out at the base of a pale boulder, just off the left-hand side of the road. He was straight-legged and silver in the headlight glare, and I watched closely from the cab as though he might move. A thin line of blood snaked between the wolf’s back teeth, crossed his dark-gray muzzle, and clumped in the dust. It curved like a creek leaving the mountains.

I could not stop seeing the kill. The wolf emerged again and again from the trees. Each time, I shouldered the rifle and squeezed the trigger, living again the explosion, the impact, and the ringing silence that followed.