Spirit Wolf (15 page)

“You might be a little careful,” he said. “Bullsnake won't take kindly to this morning, and he'll come at us. Not head-to-head, but he'll come at us.”

Uriah and Nash nodded, and the two rode out of camp heading a little more north than east. The ride was glorious in the early morning light. Most of the world was white, with ribbons of blue marking the gentle convolutions of the earth and the shadows of pine, sage, and juniper. Whatever was not white or blue was black. The eye shut out the flash of the sun and made silhouettes, startlingly clear silhouettes, of everything else.

“If Bullsnake could have just laughed this morning, he wouldn't have gotten so mad,” Nash said.

“If Bullsnake had laughed, he wouldn't be Bullsnake,” Uriah replied.

“Looks like Flynn's rheumatism is wrong again. It's warming up. We might even have a chinook coming in.”

But over the next hour Nash noticed the bite had come back to the air.

Uriah kept the same general north by north east course, hugging ravines and stands of pine for cover, and finally, as they were nearing the top of the long ridge that ran roughly parallel to their path, Uriah pulled his roan to a stop and climbed down.

“We're going to go over the top as quiet as we can,” Uriah whispered, “and take a peek over the other side. Stay low.”

The hill was steep and slick with snow. The last fifty or sixty feet, Nash had to grab the branches of juniper bushes to keep his balance. Once he slipped, the branch he was holding broke under his weight,
crack!
Uriah scowled and motioned for Nash to be more careful.

By the time they reached the top, both were puffing, and they stopped a moment to catch their breath. The air was redolent with the scent of pine, and Nash couldn't remember ever having seen a more brilliant day.

The ridge was the edge of an ancient bed of sandstone that had broken in a long-past convulsion of the earth's surface. As the ridge had risen, the adjoining slab of rock had settled into a wide valley. Over the years, wind and rain had cut into the exposed sandstone, leaving ridges and coulees leading to the valley below. The shady sides of the coulees were thick with pine and fir, while the sunward slopes tended toward juniper.

Uriah studied the scene below, trying to think as a wolf might. A wolf would want cover that would allow him to travel from water below to the ridgetop without being seen. He would want to be near game trails and the brushy cover that mice and rabbits made their homes. But Uriah's conjecture couldn't narrow the scope of the hunt. There were miles and miles of country that fit these criteria. Finding the wolf would, after all, be an exercise of the legs and not the mind.

“Nash, I'll move up the ridge, and you move down. Keep back out of sight, and watch for trails. We'll scout it out today and hunt it tomorrow. Be ready just in case.”

Nash nodded. He broke open the action of the double-barrel and dropped a couple shells into the breech. He had walked only about fifteen feet when he saw it.

“Dad,” Nash whispered, trying to keep his voice down and relay the urgency he felt at the same time. Uriah looked back, and Nash waved him over.

Nash hadn't really seen it at first, but the blue shadow where there shouldn't have been a shadow drew his eye back to it. The track was in the snow next to the line of rock brushed clean by the wind playing along the edge. Uriah saw it, too, and he knelt to examine the track. It was huge, five or six inches across, and clear in the skiff of snow.

“Three toes,” Uriah said. “A three-toed wolf. I'll be damned.”

Uriah rose and stalked along the rim, searching for a sign indicating where the wolf had abandoned the bare rock for snow. Once the animal stepped into the snow, they could track him, come back and get the horses, and run him to the ground.

Uriah's heart was beating faster. He had stepped up to a higher plane of consciousness that only the predator and the prey know. He heard a scramble in a tree fifty yards away. It was a tiny bird hopping from one branch to another. Uriah's vision was so sharp that he could identify individual feathers on the bird's breast. He could hear each of Nash's measured breaths, and the thump of the boy's heart, too.

Even so, he almost missed the point where the wolf next left sign. A snow-laden bush had been touched enough to shower its load on the bare rock. There was only that, nothing more, but it was enough to stop Uriah, to focus his attention.

“Down there, Nash. See that little lip sticking out of the rim? Yeah, there. About fifteen feet down.”

The wolf had leapt off the top of the rim, aiming for the little ledge. He barely made it, and once he was there, the tracks revealed that he had scrambled to find purchase on the tiny sanctuary. Had he fallen, he would have dropped twenty-five feet to the rocks below. But he hadn't slipped.

“There, Dad. See the juniper bush?”

Uriah nodded. The wolfs next leap had carried him into a juniper bush growing from precious little soil in a crack in the rim, and from there, the wolf had jumped to the ground. There was no way for Nash and Uriah to get down the rim. The rope was back with the horses. And from the top of the rims, there was no way to know which way the wolf had run. He could duck under the overhang of the giant slab of rock and travel for miles absolutely invisible to anyone above.

Uriah shook his head in frustration. “He must have heard or seen us,” he whispered. “Or he wouldn't have risked a jump like that. He's safe now. No way to get to him with the horses, and without the horses, we'll never see him again.”

Uriah sat back on his haunches and turned his attention to the valley floor below. There was something wrong. The valley was disappearing into a sea of ice crystals that marked the approach of Arctic air. And out of that sea came deer, straggling into long fearless lines like perverse lemming marching away from the sea. Over the deer a flock of birds swirled about, a living gray cloud carried on some unfelt capricious wind.

The animals seemed oblivious of everything but the need to find cover. They walked out of the mist overtaking the valley below like ghosts, their fear of predators revoked by the storm. Storms were the most vicious predators of all, and no respecters of either hoof or claw.

In the stinging cold, Montana was a hell's Eden where predator and prey alike ran from the killer cold, seeking shelter, seeking life.

“They're bunching up, Nash. There's a storm coming, a bad one, and they're bunching up.”

Uriah was up and running. He yelled for Nash to follow. Nash could barely hear his father. The wind was keening now, in anticipation. He ran along the edge of the rim where the snow didn't impede his steps. It wasn't far back to the horses, but Nash knew the trail stretched from life to death.

And then they were there, taking deep gulping breaths of frigid air into their lungs. The horses were nervous, jumpy, and when the Brues mounted, both animals wheeled around and put their tails to the wind. Uriah pointed them south-southwest and kicked the horses into a trot.

“We have to try to get back to camp before the snow hits. Keep close. Don't let me out of your sight.”

It was a race against the elements, and the elements won. There were just a few flakes at first, zipping past like stones from a sling. Then the wind picked up, and the world disappeared. There was only Uriah and Nash and the horses and brutal cold. Mostly there was the cold.

The wind played hide-and-seek across the two hunters' backs, seeking chinks in the layers of clothing laid on like armor. When the wind breached the wool and cotton, it crept forward like a line of skirmishers, leaving the flesh cold and dying in its wake. The cold was the veteran of many battles and never had it lost an encounter. The victim fled to the cover of a cave or teepee or cabin and survived, or the victim died.

Nash and Uriah were fleeing now, Uriah occasionally pulling his compass from his pocket to set their general direction. They had been lucky so far. The wind had held relatively true, and the horses' instinct to run before it had kept them moving toward camp. But they were traveling blind. Sometimes Nash would feel Nell lunging up a hill or brushing past a copse of trees and think, This is where we skirted the top of that coulee, or, This is the hill where we first saw the ridge. But each time, he shook his head in disbelief. They had to be farther than that. If they weren't, they couldn't make it, not in that cold.

The wind screamed at them now. It tore the breath from Nash, and he wrestled with it so that he would not suffocate. But each time he stole a breath from the keening wind, it seared his lungs with cold.

Nash's feet and hands hung unfeeling from his arms and legs. There was a certain relief in that; at least he didn't hurt so much. He was tired now, and he wanted to sleep for a while, take a nap on Nell's back. There was no harm in that. Nell would follow the roan anyway. The roan! Nash didn't know where the roan was. He hadn't seen the horse or his father for some time. The implications of that were beginning to sink in to his mind when Nell rocked to a stop. A nagging thought crept into Nash's mind. If Nell stopped, he would die. Suddenly, he was very, very frightened. He must find his father, or he would die. His fear chased away the somnolence the cold had brought him, and he knew, crystal clear in his mind, that he must make Nell move. Nash screamed and kicked the horse in the ribs, harder than he had ever kicked anything. She plunged ahead and down—and foundered.

Nash knew he was dead then. He had committed the unpardonable sin. He had panicked for a moment in a Montana snowstorm, and now he was dead. Nell had smelled the trap. She couldn't see through the stinging wind any better than Nash, but she knew the coulee ahead of her had drifted shut with snow. She knew if she tried to cross it, she would founder in the drift and die. She didn't know the same way Nash knew he was dead, but she knew nevertheless. Still when Nash raked her sides with his heels, she jumped willingly enough. Old habits die hard.

Nash got off Nell, sliding into snow up to his armpits. He struggled like a man trying to pull himself from his own grave. Death would take him, but only after a fight, feeble as that might be. He tried swimming through the snow back to solid ground, paddling and kicking with dead feet and dead hands, but he was only sinking deeper. It seemed warmer, somehow, buried away from the wind. Maybe he would sleep for a moment, rest up before trying again. Nash closed his eyes and the world disappeared into nothingness.

Uriah had allowed the roan to have his head when he came to the snow-filled gully, trusting the horse's senses over his own instincts. The roan hesitated and then turned at right angles to the wind, following the edge of the hidden gully to its head.

Uriah knew his trust in the horse was well founded when the roan turned his back to the wind again, holding true to the same rough compass reading they had been following. It was at that point that Uriah felt compelled to look behind him, to turn his face into the stinging wind to search for Nash. Uriah didn't understand that compulsion any more than he understood the roan's decision to turn away from the hidden gully, but he didn't hesitate to follow its dictates, searching the white, shifting land for the hazy shape that would be Nell and Nash. It wasn't there.

Uriah waited a moment for Nash to appear. He
needed
to have Nash appear. Uriah didn't want to face the obvious any more than he wanted to face the stinging wind.

If Nell had stepped off the trail, if she went down, or if Nash slipped out of the saddle, he would likely be lost forever. Even now in this frigid, godforsaken wind, Nash might be lying in the snow out there, stiffening in the cold as the wind covered him.

Uriah yanked the roan's head around. The gelding fought the reins, reluctant to turn into the wind. Uriah fought the panic he felt. He wanted to gallop screaming into the wind, shouting for his son, his only child. But he knew that would mean death for him and Nash, so he gritted his teeth and leaned into the wind and the desperation he felt.

The roan's tracks had disappeared almost on the horse's heels, hidden by that screaming, evil wind. But there were still tiny drifts marking some of the tracks, clues the wind had left to lure him back to death. Uriah followed them until they turned at right angles to the wind. They disappeared then, but Uriah followed the gully, marking its edge by the way the roan shied whenever he neared it. Uriah was watching the edge, face turned away from the wind, when the roan stopped.

There, through the wind and snow and the fear, Uriah saw Nell, foundered in snow over her shoulders, and beside Nell, a small dark object lay motionless in the snow.
Nash!

Uriah fought off the urge to leap after Nash. That would come later, when all else failed. But for now, Uriah took the lariat off his saddle, tied a loop in one end with numb fingers, and threw the loop toward Nash. A gust of wind took the loop and carried it away from Nash, teasing him. He pulled the loop back and threw it again, and again. He was trying very hard to control the panic he felt. Uriah didn't know if Nash was alive or dead, he didn't know if Nash was dying while he watched. But he knew the only hope he and Nash had now came from his ability to reason. He must remain calm. He threw the loop again.

Nash was asleep when something struck him on the face. He didn't know what had awakened him, but then it seeped into his consciousness the way the cold had seeped through his clothes. It was a rope: his father had thrown him a lifeline. Nash slipped the loop over his head and chest and under his arms. Uriah backed the roan, and Nash slipped out to the edge of the coulee. It was so easy, and it had seemed so hard.

Uriah helped Nash to his feet. Nash could see fear in his father's face, hear it in his father's hoarse voice. “Nash, stamp your feet. Turn your back to the wind and stamp your feet.”

Nash did as he was told. There was an unreal quality to the exercise. He was stumbling more than running in place, his frost-dead feet striking frost-dead ground. The movement set his heart pumping faster and the muscles of his legs helped force warm blood through his feet. The deadness went away a little, and his feet began to ache. That was a good sign. Maybe he would live. Maybe he wouldn't lose his feet.