Spirit Wolf (5 page)

The crowd was milling around, the men shouting directions, encouragement, and strategy at each other. Already conjecture had begun about which camp would likely claim the prize. Nash and Uriah walked through the men to where Ulysses was standing.

“That was some speech, Ulysses. Made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”

“Wasn't meant to do that,” Ulysses replied. “It was meant to straighten some backbones out there. This isn't going to be easy.” He turned to the boy. “Hello, Nash. I'm a little surprised to see you here.”

Ulysses glanced at Uriah, a question plain on his face.

“The boy will do fine,” Uriah said. “It's time he had a chance at something like this. Adventure or not, we could sure use the money.”

Ulysses looked again at Nash. “I wasn't even out of short pants when I was his age,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else, and then to Uriah, “I wish you well. If you have any trouble, come in. I'd rather give you the money than see either of you hurt.”

“I know that, Ulysses, but we wouldn't take the money.”

“I know, Uriah. I know.”

The three walked back toward the big house and the barn, where the horses were being cared for, Ulysses and Uriah talking about the ditch the Brues hoped to cut the next summer, Nash thinking about Ulysses's speech.

By the time the horses were ready and the good-byes said, the group of men destined, like Uriah and Nash, for the Dry Creek camp had already gone.

“No matter, Uriah,” Ulysses said. “You've been there before. Swing around that ridge there and follow it to the top. You'll cut their trail, and you can follow them into camp.”

Nash was quiet as he and his father rode from the ranch, but after they reached the top of the ridge, he kicked Nell up beside his father's roan.

“Was it really like that, like Ulysses said?” he asked.

“Yes, it was like that.” Ulysses polished it up a little. He's accustomed to speaking to people who don't know the West, so he doctored a little. But it's all true.

“He left a little out, too. There were a number of those ‘rustlers' strung up who weren't rustlers at all, just men alone where the cattlemen didn't think they should be. It was a different world then. Times have changed.”

“That man who pushed me, Dad. What were you talking to him about?”

“Just the weather, boy. Just the weather.”

But Nash suspected from the edge in his father's voice that more than the weather had been discussed.

3

They came into camp four hours later.

It was a broad-bottomed coulee, leading like an arm stuck straight out from Dry Creek. The creek was frozen nearly solid from the cold, but as the Brues rode up, a man was chipping a hole in the ice for the horses. There was a stand of lodgepole pine against the rims at the head of the meadow and a scattering of cottonwoods following the low ground that carried the water from melting snowbanks through the coulee in the spring.

It was a good spot for a camp. It was sheltered for the most part from the wind, and ranch hands from the Lazy KT had cut lodgepole to build a corral against the rimrocks for the horses. Shelter for the men was another matter. The thirty or so hunters assigned to the Dry Creek camp set about making themselves as comfortable as possible. Some of the men had tents, and Nash could hear their curses as they tried to pound stakes into the frozen ground. Tents were a luxury most of the hunters could ill afford. A village based more on imagination than substance was beginning to form, and the look of the jerry-built contrivances made Nash wonder what would happen if a bad storm swept through the area.

“We've got to hurry, Nash,” Uriah said. “We can't be caught out in this country without shelter.” They found two small lodgepole pines standing off from the heavy stand of timber that marked the head of the coulee and the horse corral.

Uriah dismounted and tugged at the gear strapped behind the saddle. He pulled off a large piece of canvas and spread it over the snow.

“Unload the gear here,” he said. “Keep it on the canvas so it won't get wet.”

Nash struggled with the packs, heavy sheepskin gloves making his hands clumsy. His father walked out a small square in the snow with the two trees as corners.

“I'll take the horses over and get them water and some oats,” Uriah said. “You take the saw and cut these trees off about shoulder high. Fall them back down the valley. That's where the wind will come from if it comes. Then clean all the snow out of the area I marked. All the snow. Take it down to the ground. If I'm not back by then, take the ax and start lopping off the branches. Shake all the snow off them and put them on the ground in the cleared-off area. We want the branches about a foot thick. We'll lay a tarp over that and make a mattress. You get cold from the ground up. Get with it, boy. No time for dawdling.”

Nash set about his tasks as his father led off the two horses. The Swede saw cut into the soft pine easily. First Nash undercut the notch on the creek side of the tree. Then he completed the notch and felled the trees with cuts from the opposite side. Sawing warmed him considerably, and he felt good, too, about dropping the trees exactly where his father had told him to. He took out the single-bitted ax he used to cut firewood at home. The hickory handle felt easy in his hands; if not an old friend, at least a long acquaintance.

He walked up the length of the trees, lopping off boughs, being careful always to trim from the opposite side of the trunk as his father had taught him. “Cut there, and if the ax bounces off, it won't bury itself in your leg.” Good advice.

He took one of the larger boughs and swept out the floor of what would be their home for the next couple of days. Just as he was finishing that, his father walked up.

“Looks good,” he said. They both picked up the boughs and spread them on the floor of the lean-to. Then his father took the saw and cut both poles about fifteen feet in length. With rope, he lashed each pole to its standing butt, and then tied the remaining treetop poles across the top and bottom of the lean-to, completing the structure for the roof.

“You, Nash. Go up along those rims and start hauling down some rocks. We need some big ones to pin down the canvas.”

While Uriah stretched canvas and pinned it, Nash hauled rocks. Then he helped his father carry the rest of the gear inside, storing it in the low end of the wedge. Inside it was surprisingly warm. The canvas held the air in one place long enough for the sun to warm it.

“Be sure you don't drag any snow in here. We have to keep this dry,” Uriah said. “Now we need a fire, unless you aren't hungry.”

It was another private joke. Nash was always hungry, or at least, that's what his father said.

Nash walked over to the stand of pines. Cowhands from the Lazy KT had cut a stack of dry pine, and hunters had already taken freely from the pile. Nash grabbed an armload and carried it back to the camp. As he started back for a second load, he heard his father splitting some of the wood into kindling. In the cold, the logs split at the touch of the ax blade, frozen moisture inside the wood making it brittle.

By the time he returned, his father had a fire going in a makeshift fireplace. The family's Dutch oven rested on a steel grill over the flames. “Nothing like Mary's stew to warm you up,” his father said, and Nash nodded, feeling the warmth of the fire against his face.

The two ate with relish, and after they had mopped up the last of the stew with bread sliced from a fresh loaf from home, Nash and his father scoured the tin utensils with snow.

It was full dark and colder. Both crowded the fire, warming hands and feet. The other men had set a bonfire downhill about in the center of the little tent village, and a crowd was gathering there, one and two at a time.

Nash was watching the light play against the men below when he heard steps behind him. He turned just as the bearded man of that afternoon stepped into the circle of light thrown out by the Brue campfire.

“Well, ain't this cozy,” he said. “Daddy and his little boy out camping in the hills. You better get down there, boy. There's a man there going to tell us all about the wolf. You're going to find out this is no place for kids still sucking at their mommy's teat.”

Uriah came to his feet in one smooth motion, fists doubled, but the stranger moved away, laughing a nasty little laugh.

Uriah had taken one step as though to follow the bearded man when the Brue camp had another visitor. It was Jack Flynn, the association representative.

“Who is he?” Uriah asked through clenched teeth.

“Wouldn't pay too much attention to him,” Flynn said. “He's got quite a reputation in Billings for beating up old men and drunks. He's been known to cuff a woman around now and then, too. But he doesn't usually tangle with anybody he doesn't outweigh by fifty or sixty pounds.

“He likes to be called Bullsnake. But he probably wouldn't like it so much if he knew that people call him that because he's all hiss and no vinegar.” Flynn chuckled at his joke and then added, “You might come down. Some of the nice lads have promised to keep me in whiskey while I tell them what I know about the wolf. And I'll talk as long as the whiskey holds out. It might give you some idea of what you got into here.”

“Who's the man with Bullsnake?” Uriah asked.

“Name's William Maxwell. Watch out for him. He's about half crazy, and he's handy with a knife. Bullsnake struts his stuff when Maxwell's backing him up.”

They rose, threw another log on the fire, and walked down to the bonfire.

The fire cast the scene below in an eerie amber light. Light and shadows from the flames flickered through the crowd, lending movement where there was none, building strange images on a backdrop of milling men. From the crowd came the occasional glint of whiskey bottles, steel, and brass, and the muffled sound of voices that quieted as Flynn approached.

Flynn took a place on the far side of the fire, and most of the men there edged around so they could see his face as he spoke. His face was something to see. Low light from the fire put the bones in stark relief, his eyes hidden in a bank of shadow. In that light and time and space, Flynn seemed nothing more than a skull hanging between the black of the night and the yellow of the fire.

Flynn took a deep swig from a bottle that floated out to him from the depths of the crowd and began to speak.

“There are a lot of stories that men tell about this wolf. I can't tell you all of them. I can tell you only what I know, what I have seen with my own eyes, and what ol' Charley told me.”

The bottle rose again to his lips.

“It all began with ol' Charley Spencer. He was a trapper. He had been a buffalo hunter once, and he never really shed himself of the stink of that. Maybe that's why he always lived alone.

“He had a cabin up here. Some of you will likely run across it. It wasn't much more than a lean-to, but it suited Charley just fine. Anyhow, Charley took hides in winter and collected bounty for coyotes and wolves during the summer. He didn't make much money, but then he didn't need much. There were plenty of deer and antelope around, and he wasn't above butchering a calf now and then for a change of diet, even if it didn't belong to him. He made enough to keep himself in flour, salt, and tobacco, and that's about all he needed.

“He was running a trapline, and one morning he set out to check it. He was coming downwind into one of the sets when he heard what he thought was a snarl. He didn't want the animal to chew off its foot before he got there, so he picked up his pace a little.

“Anyway, he came up to the clearing where the trap was, and he saw this wolf. It was a beautiful animal, white as snow with dark bands around the eyes and tapering off to gray at the tail. At first he couldn't tell how really big the animal was. It was crouching at the far end of the chain, hidden a little behind a rock. Well, as soon as Charley saw it, it had his complete attention. Those eyes. There was something about those big green eyes. Charley was staring at the wolf, kind of mesmerized when it leapt at him. All teeth and claws and eyes, like a messenger from hell, it was, and coming across that clearing on the fly. But before it got to Charley, the chain fetched up against its leg and it hit the ground with a thump.

“By then Charley knew what he was doing again, and he took his gun butt and clubbed it alongside the head, and it crumpled to the ground. Even then with it laying there in a heap, Charley knew he had something special, something no one else had ever seen before. So he rigged up a muzzle for it and tied all four feet together. Then he hitched it up to a tree so it was hanging upside down about four feet off the ground.

“Well, ol' Charley went back to his cabin and hitched up his horse to the wagon and came back where the wolf was. He had a hard time getting his horse to go anywhere near that clearing. She could smell that wolf a mile off and hear him thrashing against those ropes. If it had been anybody but Charley, the horse wouldn't have gone, but he was never a man to spare an animal. He got out his whip and worked her over something awful. It was a shame what he would do to that mare, but he finally got the rig backed underneath the wolf. He let the rope go, and the wolf hit the bed of that wagon like a boulder.

“That animal stood waist high to a tall man, and probably outweighed Charley by twenty pounds, and he was a long way from being little.

“It was an incredible animal … and those green eyes.”

A shudder went through Flynn, and he stood there for a moment staring at something none of them could see, something he could never forget. The wolf's eyes were captivating, pulling the viewer into their depths until he felt as though he were suspended alone—oh God, how alone—in a sea of green.

He shuddered again, took a healthy swig of whiskey and continued. “That wolf was scrambling around the wagon box, trying to get up, so Charley tied its feet to the tailgate and dropped a slipknot over its head. Then he headed for Billings. Every time the wolf moved, Charley would pull that slipknot till the animal started wheezing and its eyes bugged out. I know, because I met him on the trail going in, and he was showing off a little. I told him he should kill it, that was the only thing to do. But he wouldn't have none of that. He was having too much fun, he said.”