Consequences (3 page)

The hunter and I looked at Christopher like
he’d just stepped off the moon. Quickly regaining my thoughts, I
turned and looked into the guy’s eyes for myself … he was crying,
standing open-mouthed, staring at Christopher, tears rolling down
his astonished face. “It’s true. Everything he just said is true. I
haven’t even told my wife about my fears riding on the coming
storm.”

“If this is true …why didn’t you talk to
someone about your situation? We have resources through the local
food bank. I’ve delivered game there myself, to be distributed to
families in need. Don’t you think that is a better way to feed your
family? Your kids don’t need their father to be put in jail, on top
of dealing with starvation.” People’s pride always blows my mind,
how hard is it to ask for help?

Christopher squinted at me like he was making
up his mind on something. Then nodding he forced his scrutiny back
on the hunter. “I’d listen to the warden, sir … he’ll make sure you
and your family find the help you need.” With that ending remark,
he turned and walked back into the cabin like nothing unusual had
passed between us.

Not sure what to make of what had happened; I
went back to business as usual. The hunter didn’t put up a fight,
and we had his paperwork done in no time. We waved the fines with a
warning that if we caught him again, we could take everything he
used during the illegal hunt, including his guns and vehicle. Then
I personally drove him over to the food bank and helped him get
signed up with the appropriate programs, and then put him in touch
with separate public welfare groups that would help with his
family’s other needs.

I still check on him and his family; smiling,
I can picture the kids putting weight back on, a healthy glow
returning to their smiling faces.

Christopher got under my skin from the
beginning, but after asking him about his ‘talents’, as he calls
them, I couldn’t leave him alone. Then he found that wolf, injured
when she was hit by a logging truck. She wasn't in too bad of a
state, probably just nicked by the bumper, but she definitely had
some recouping to do. He had already started nursing her back to
health when I discovered that he was hiding her. I should have
taken her to my biologist or vet, but I was afraid that taking her
away from Christopher, and his crazy dog, would kill her. I’ve
never seen a stranger connection before in my life … now she has
become our secret. Some part of me, which agrees with my common
sense, keeps telling me she’s wild and dangerous … god help me if
she hurts the kid, and people find out I’ve been covering for
them.

After working together on interrogations,
using his skills as a truth detector with my informants, and
talking on ride-alongs, I find myself looking after Christopher,
like he's a younger brother. He has always been forthcoming about
what he can do, and even though I’ve seen it first hand, I still
have a hard time believing my own senses.

Without Christopher, I wouldn’t have been
able to take down a whole poaching ring … it was awe-inspiring to
watch him simply pull information out of someone’s head. When he
explained that he “hears” the truth said, but unspoken, in
someone’s mind, I couldn’t believe my luck. We have a routine now,
I ask certain questions that would bring up information, and
questions that I know would be answered in lies. Meanwhile
Christopher stands outside the door and listens to the honest
answers forming secretly in the individual's mind. No one sees the
kid, and after the interrogation, he heads back to his cabin. Later
he tells me everything he has uncovered, and no one is the
wiser.

I’m hoping that Christopher is starting to
trust me enough to tell me the whole story … like who he talks to
all the time. Where the scars, he’s always fingering, came from?
What is he hiding from? Every time he figures out that I’m digging
for information, he turns his talents on me. This last time was too
much, he went too far … asking about Lilly. All I did was ask him
who this ‘Ellie’ was that he keeps talking to. Then I recognized
his glazed expression as he searched through my head, inevitably
pulling out my heart. I knew right away the connection between
Ellie and Lilly is love; he is consumed by love for his Ellie,
plain and simple.

Cloudy and suffocating, the memories the he
pulled are drowning me, as if they happened yesterday. They led me
to the whiskey last night; the memories have a mind of their own,
leaving me feeling drained with an acidic taste, like bile, in the
back of my throat. I understand love … vicious and unfair. The
greatest paradox is that something as insubstantial as a chemical
reaction in the brain … can break you and lift you up in one
breath. Saying “I love you” for the first time makes your hands
shake, and turns your insides into mush … but when it’s forbidden,
the nerves can crush you.

I told Lilly that I loved her, idiot that I
am. When I was sick with a fever; she held me together when I
thought I was falling apart. Crushing me now, I remember the night
I left my uncle’s ranch … turning to look at her … she stood
stunned in her kitchen. Her lips glistened slightly, still wet from
my kiss. My last words, young and inexperienced, “I can only give
you love.” Forever preserved in my head, “I will give you
love.”

Sober, shaking, and sweaty, I walk into my
kitchen in the present again … and as I pour a cup of coffee, I
realize that not even the thick black ambrosia is going to pull me
out of the daydreams turned nightmares, about Lilly. What was I
supposed to do? She was married with a child, loveless in spirit…
but married nonetheless. I wanted to save her, more than anything
else in the world I wanted to give her a life … but that was my
dream, not hers. I wanted a life where we could talk about
anything, from theology to fishing … I could talk to her, I loved
talking to her.

I would fantasize at night about her having a
life with me … never judgmental; she made me feel good in my own
skin, seeing even my flaws as strengths. Six years difference, six
irrelevant years. God, I wished I was born earlier, but then
there’s no way to know if we would have ever met. In your teens and
twenties, six years might as well be a lifetime. She was getting
married around the time I was celebrating my 15th birthday. I was
fantasizing about the girl that sat in front of me in English,
while Lilly was preparing for the arrival of her son.

When I went to work at my uncle’s ranch, I
never could have imagined that I’d find my heart attached to the
wife of the foreman. I was so young, emotionally inexperienced, I
should have been attending frat parties … but I had to make money
if I ever hoped to finish my degree. Every night when the rest of
the workers would go to the bar in town, I’d stay behind … and
watch her. Walking across the yard, dried weeds would grab at the
bottom of her skirt and scratch at her ankles … I memorized her
movement, the flow of her steps.

To this day, I can feel the weight of her
breath and the smell of the air in her wake: clean, like she
cleared the dust away just by walking through. I remember looking
through the kitchen window, watching her dance alone … clumsy yet
so seductive. Smiling at her charm, I would wonder if this was what
it was like to find your soul mate. If this was what it was like,
to truly understand the shape of your heart … not the
one-dimensional shape in a deck of cards, but a creature existing
in multiple dimensions painfully thrashing in my rib cage.

So naive, so thick … I thought she would be a
passing phase; I was bound to outgrow my feelings. Now, six years
later, everything inside me still tells me, I’ll never feel that
overwhelmed by another person again. But what was I supposed to do?
Try to break up her marriage? There was a child involved; she would
never let ‘us’ hurt that little boy. She would rather live,
accepting the deal she was given … than hurt her son in any
way.

All these memories stirred up by that kid
poking around in my head. He had to ask that one question … damn
him, “I see a wadded up note … written in smeared ink, 'I love you,
too … but I can’t even give you that much. I’m sorry.' Signed;
'Always yours in spirit, Lilly'. It’s constantly in your thoughts.
Then, I see you walking away, suitcase in hand. You throw the note
into a fire … why?”

I can understand the innocence in
Christopher’s question. He couldn’t possibly know that burning
Lilly’s note, my only keepsake of her, was one of the most stupid
and painful things I’ve ever done.

Holding my mug like it was some sort of
safety line, I sat down at the computer to check my E-mail. As soon
as I saw the letter from Christopher, I knew I was going to be
spending my next three days off, at his cabin, waiting for the
arrival of our pups. Good; maybe I can finally get the answers I’ve
been looking for.

Christopher and Lune have been acting like
impatient fathers, waiting for the whelping to start. I’ve taken
over two garbage bags full of news paper for the birthing, and
stockpiled other supplies like a stethoscope, hemostats, blunt-end
scissors, a bottle of iodine, and a rubber pediatric bulb syringe …
better to be prepared. Last week when I checked on Ursa, I noticed
she had started shedding out, blowing her coat; her body is getting
ready to start nursing. She was already lactating, and her belly
had dropped ... to tell the truth, I’m surprised she hasn’t gone
into labor yet. During my visit, I explained how to build a
whelping pen, and told Christopher to put it near the wood burning
stove. I hope he listened to me, and spent time with her in the
pen, so she would get use to the idea of delivering her pups in the
confined space, with an audience. I have to admit, I’m excited,
too. Hell, the anticipation has turned me into that pacing idiot in
a delivery waiting room … luckily Ursa is patient with us guys; any
other expectant mother would have started throwing things at us by
now.

After loading up my truck with everything we
might need, and a bag of clothes to last through the next three
days, I'm ready to go. Christopher has asked me to stay with them
during my days off, if Ursa hasn’t given birth yet. As much as I’ve
become attached to the kid and his animals, my skin still crawls at
the prospect of spending that much time alone with Christopher’s
'gifts'.

Pulling up in front of his cabin, I noticed
that the generator was already running ... Christopher must have
been making sure there was a fresh charge in the cabin’s
battery.

Walking up to the front door, I knocked … but
no one answers. I can't hear Lune or Ursa’s nails clattering around
on the hard-wood floor. I try the door handle, unlocked … huh,
that’s strange. Maybe Christopher took Ursa and Lune out for a
walk. I hope he’s keeping track of where Ursa’s wandering around,
just in case she has one of the pups.

I decide to unload the truck, and check on
the progress of the whelping pen. I think mostly, I am just biding
time until I can watch the interaction between the kid and the
wolf. Their connection gives me the willies, but at the same time I
catch myself watching them like they are the starring act at the
local circus.

After about twenty minutes, I decide I
probably ought to search for them, just in case Ursa went into
labor while they were out. Tracking has always been second nature
to me, but Christopher has an amazing talent for hiding his tracks
if he doesn’t want to be found … luckily that wasn’t the case
today. His heavy boot prints, and Lune’s paws, left holes pressed
into the deep snow… they were being lead by Ursa’s huge prints. She
definitely knew exactly where she was going, but trudging through
the snow had to be hard on her, in her condition. I can tell she
was having problems: some of her tracks were strained, and she had
to sit a few times to rest. Whatever drew them out here; it must
have been extremely important to her. By this stage, if she was
still in the wild, she would be looking for a quiet place to hunker
down and give birth, not wading through two-and-three-foot snow
drifts.

“What are they up to? Where did they need to
go?” I can see my breath when I whisper the words, like steam
hanging over a hot spring in winter.

As I approach an opening in the trees, I can
hear the panting and muffled growls erupting out of more than two
muzzles.

“The pack! Damn him! Like one wolf wasn’t
enough to worry about, he has to play with the entire, damn pack!”
I curse myself for speaking out loud, but fortunately Christopher
and his 'friends' are too busy to pay attention to my
interruption.

If I thought, watching Christopher and Ursa
was amazing; watching him with the pack is mind-blowing. The Alpha
sits next to him on his right, Ursa and Lune on his left. An older
female is doting over Ursa, licking her face and putting her muzzle
under the pregnant wolf’s chin. The nurse-wolf is inspecting her as
if to say; look up so I can check your eyes. And how have you been
holding up? In the meantime Christopher nods once in awhile in the
Alpha’s direction, and then says something that sounds like deep
incomprehensible mumbling. As this meeting happens on the
sidelines, the real show is going on in front of them, where five
other members of the pack wrestle and play. The intricate dance is
a jumbled mess of teeth and fur, the only clue to its friendly
nature are the tails wagging happily in the air.

The sight of the pack is breathtaking; they
are the epitome of grievous beauty. I’ve never seen a human
standing among them like this. Usually, when I work with the
biologists, we have to tranquilize them so that we can check their
health stats and chip them. We would never assume that approaching
them like this was a good idea.

I remember asking Christopher why he named
Ursa that, instead of the name the biologist gave her. He told me
when he asked her what her name was; she showed him a picture of
the constellation Ursa Major. I thought he was full of crap. The
connection between the kid and the wolf was hard to ignore, but
communicating … that was just impossible.