The Loop

  Maybe Lovelace had some news to cheer him up.

  The wolfer steered the snowmobile down through the trees and out into the open snow of the top meadow above the house. It was bumpy and it hurt his back which already ached from all the snow he’d had to shovel off the tent and then off the snowmobile. But he was used to aches and pains and they did nothing to dampen his spirits. It had been some years since he’d had to bivouac in such a blizzard and though it was only a matter of having good gear and a little gumption, he was pleased he could still handle it.

  More to the point, he now knew where the wolves were.

  When the wind had died, around four in the morning, he’d heard them howl and when it got light, he’d found tracks, only a hundred yards from his tent. It was as if they’d heard he was there and had come to check him out. Now he knew what kind of terrain they were in, he was coming back to the trailer to work out a plan and pick up the things he would need for killing them.

  Below him now, at the foot of the meadow, a row of black cows were feeding on the hay that had been scattered on the snow for them. Beyond them, Lovelace could see Buck Calder’s car parked beside the Hicks’, outside the house.

  As he came onto the flatter land and veered toward the barn, he saw that the door of his trailer was open. Then, a second later, he saw a man step down out of it. It was Buck Calder. And now his son-in-law was climbing down too, shutting the door behind him. Hicks looked kind of sheepish, but Calder smiled and waved and waited while Lovelace steered the snowmobile up alongside them and stopped.

  ‘Mr Lovelace. Good to see you.’

  Lovelace turned off the engine.

  ‘What are you doing in my trailer?’

  ‘We were just looking for you, seeing if you were okay.’

  Lovelace didn’t say anything. He stared at Calder for a moment then got off the snowmobile and went to the trailer. As he passed them, he saw Hicks pull a face, like a naughty kid. Who the hell did they think they were, he thought, as he climbed inside. Snooping about like that, uninvited. He looked around, checking if they’d touched anything. It all seemed to be as he’d left it. He went back to the door and looked down at them.

  ‘Don’t do that again,’ he said.

  ‘We knocked and when there was no answer, we got worried that—’

  ‘If I need your help, I’ll ask.’

  Calder held up his hands. ‘Hey, I’m real sorry.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry, Mr Lovelace,’ Hicks chimed, like a parrot.

  Lovelace nodded coldly.

  ‘So how’s it going?’ Calder asked, all friendly, as if nothing had happened. ‘Did you catch ’em yet?’

  ‘When I’m ready to tell you, I will.’

  And he shut the door in their faces.

  Baby Buck was sitting on the edge of the kitchen table, while Kathy tried to zip him into his snowsuit. He wasn’t enjoying it and was letting the whole world know. The poor little mite had a cold and his face was all red and streaming. Eleanor sat at the other end of the table, chopping onions.

  It was Tuesday, the one evening in the week when Luke came home early and the only one when she made any real effort with the supper. They were having fish pie, for two good reasons: it was one of Luke’s favorites and his father couldn’t stand it.

  The baby let out a piercing scream.

  ‘He wants to stay with his grandma,’ Eleanor said. ‘Don’t you, honey?’

  ‘Hey, you can have him. Will you keep still, you little monster! Was I ever like this?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘There’s worse?’

  She was just getting his gloves on when the headlights of a car panned across the kitchen windows. A few moments later, while the baby was gathering breath for more bawling, they heard Luke coming up the path to the house. He was whistling a tune. Eleanor had never heard him do that before.

  ‘At least somebody’s happy,’ Kathy said.

  The baby started crying again.

  Luke came in and said hi and after he’d shed his hat and coat and boots and given Eleanor a kiss, he picked up little Buck and took him on a tour of the kitchen. The baby stopped crying at once.

  ‘Want a job?’ Kathy said.

  ‘I’ve got one already.’

  ‘One that has him out in blizzards all night,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Mom, we were fine.’

  Eleanor watched him waltzing the baby around while she finished the onions. It made her glow inside to see him so happy. Driving back from the bazaar, Kathy had told her people were starting to gossip about Luke and Helen Ross. Eleanor dismissed it as nonsense.

  Luke handed little Buck back to Kathy and went off to his room and soon Kathy took the baby to the car and went home, leaving Eleanor alone with her cooking.

  She had no idea where big Buck was. He was probably hiding somewhere, trying to work out how to play it when he came home. The thought made Eleanor smile.

  Ruth had told her about him coming by this morning. The poor woman still couldn’t quite fathom Eleanor’s attitude. Betrayed wives were supposed to be vengeful about ‘the other woman’, even murderous. And Eleanor knew Ruth was still slightly suspicious of how calmly she had taken it all. That it seemed to threaten neither their friendship nor - more importantly - their business arrangements still clearly mystified her. Which, to Eleanor, made it all the more enjoyable.

  In fact, Ruth’s affair with Buck hadn’t even been mentioned since the day Eleanor broke the news that she knew about it. There was really nothing more to be said. She sometimes felt a little ashamed of the way she had brought the matter up, asking Ruth, point blank, how long she’d been sleeping with him. Eleanor hadn’t been quite honest, for she was fairly sure the affair had been already over by then.

  To her credit, Ruth hadn’t tried to deny a thing. But she did ask how Eleanor had found out.

  ‘You were married once, weren’t you?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘About five minutes.’

  ‘Well, that’s probably not long enough. But after awhile, you just kind of know about these things. And Ruth, I’m afraid to say, I’ve had a lot of practice.’

  She spared her the details of how she’d found out this time. Of how, on that first day when she’d come into the shop and offered to get involved in the business, she’d found Ruth’s scent oddly familiar and later realized it was the same she smelled when Buck came home and tiptoed fatuously across the bedroom, thinking she was asleep. Of how she’d heard his car that night outside Ruth’s house and then found one of his cigars in the driveway.

  ‘There’s always some woman somewhere,’ Eleanor went on. ‘Sometimes several at the same time. Though often I don’t know who. And frankly, Ruth, I don’t really care anymore.’

  ‘I can’t believe that.’

  ‘It’s true. Of course, I used to care. And after I got over that, I’d care about people feeling sorry for me, when really it was Buck they ought to feel sorry for. But even that doesn’t bother me any longer. People can think what they like.’

  ‘Why do you stay with him?’

  Eleanor shrugged. ‘Where else would I go?’

  Poor Ruth had been quite shaken. And even though Eleanor had assured her their business arrangement remained entirely unaffected, Ruth had treated her ever since with caution and respect. Back at the shop, after the bazaar, Ruth had told her in a nervous whisper, while Kathy was in the bathroom changing the baby, that Buck had been in and what they’d talked about.

  So now he knew that Eleanor knew of their affair. And as she finished preparing supper, she allowed herself the smallest pang of pleasure over how he must now be feeling.

  It was another hour before she heard his car. When he came in, she was busy laying the table. She glanced up and saw that he looked contrite and edgy and gratifyingly pale.

  ‘Something smells good,’ he said.

  Eleanor smiled and told him they were having fish pie.

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sp; 27

  They had only kissed. Kissed and lain in each other’s arms on her bunk and talked until dawn paled the drifted windows. That was all. Where was the wrong in that?

  It was the question Helen had harassed herself with ever since Luke had gone home the previous evening and left her alone in the cabin with the nascent specter of her own guilt. So far, with varying degrees of success, she had refused to allow it substance. Her needs and Luke’s, she kept insisting, had been equal. And if each had found comfort in what had happened, why not? How could some modest discrepancy of age and, all right, of innocence too, make it wrong?

  She had almost managed to convince herself.

  Joel once told her she must have majored in guilt rather than biology and that her true vocation should be the construction industry, so deftly did she build prisons for herself. Luke, it emerged, was the same.

  In their huddled confession that night, she had told him of the guilt she felt for her parents’ loveless marriage. And Luke had then told her of his own for his brother’s death. With much passion and to no effect whatsoever, they had assured each other how absurd their respective guilts were. The absurdity of other people’s prisons was always so much easier to see.

  Today, they had come to Great Falls to buy Helen a dress for her father’s wedding. She was due to fly to Barbados the day after tomorrow. In a modest emulation of Caribbean weather, a chinook was blowing from the mountains and the snow was melting fast.

  They came in separate cars and met as arranged, like furtive lovers, in the mall parking lot. Helen arrived early, anchoring in the gray ocean of slush, and for ten minutes sat watching the highway for Luke’s Jeep. He was coming up from Helena after his therapy. Waiting for him, she started to worry that it might be awkward between them after what had happened. But when he arrived, he was sweet and natural and, albeit briefly, put his arm around her as they went into the mall.

  All the stores were decked out with Christmas lights and glitter and the walkways of the mall rang with piped carols. All they could find anywhere were winter clothes and Helen was starting to wonder how much of a dash she would cut in Barbados in a parka and ski pants, when Luke spotted something on a bargain rail. It was a simple, sleeveless yellow dress, in a size eight. She went into the fitting room, with no great enthusiasm, to try it on.

  It was four months since she’d last seen herself properly in a mirror and it came as a shock. Her haircut had grown out, giving her the look of a poorly stuffed scarecrow. And she hadn’t realized quite how much weight she’d lost. Her face was all cheekbones and in the harsh fluorescent light, her eyes looked ringed and cavernous. It was worse still when she took off her clothes. The skin was stretched so tightly over her ribs and her jutting hips that she fancied she could see through it to the bone. The dress had straps at the shoulder and she needed to try it on without a bra. Her breasts, when she unhooked it, seemed several sizes smaller. God, she thought, I look like one of Joel’s famine victims. She pulled the dress quickly over her head to banish the sight.

  Incredibly, it looked okay. It was too long and gaped slightly under the arms and she looked a little comical, all pale except for her wind-burnt face and the faded remains of a tan on her arms. But the color suited her. With a little make-up, or a lot, she might almost look passable.

  Luke was waiting outside the entrance to the fitting room, studying his boots and looking a little uncomfortable while two young women nearby discussed the merits of a sweater one had tried on.

  ‘Luke?’

  He looked up and saw her and she walked toward him in her bare feet, feeling exposed and embarrassed, like a girl in her first party frock. She stopped in front of him and did a little self-conscious pirouette. When her eyes came back to him, he was frowning and shaking his head a little.

  ‘No? You don’t like it?’

  ‘N-no, I mean, I do. It’s just that—’ He looked down for a moment and took a breath, as he did sometimes when he blocked, waiting for the words to come free. Then he looked up at her again.

  ‘It’s good,’ he said simply.

  But the way he smiled touched her heart.

  Lovelace sniffed the night air like a wolf.

  For the last hour he had been worried that the wind was shifting back around to the west and would suck his scent down into the canyon and over the creek where he’d set the carcass. If it did, he might as well pack up and go. But it had held and steadied on a northerly and would be drifting the smell of the deer’s blood down the canyon, exactly where he wanted.

  The chinook had blown till early afternoon, hauling slate-gray clouds down from the mountains and sending them hurtling away over the plains. All morning the forest had dripped and the rocks streamed and you could hear the snow crack as it melted and shifted and settled again. Twice he had seen avalanches and he had heard the boom of several more, rolling like muffled thunder through the higher canyons. Thus rearranged, the world had frozen hard again.

  It was nine o’clock. He’d been waiting nearly four hours.

  He was lying on his belly in his sleeping bag, wedged under a high fissured shelf that ran along the wall of the canyon. Below him was a sheer drop of at least two hundred feet, with almost the same again above him on the overhang.

  He’d had to slither like a lizard to get there but it was worth it, both for the shelter and for the view it gave him of the ice-crusted creek. The earth in the cave was dry and littered with shards of bone and the air smelled of mountain lion.

  Through the rifle’s nightscope now, he scanned the canyon again, letting its ghostly green circle of light travel slowly down the creek and the trail beside it which the wolves would likely use if they came. He saw a movement among the trees and his pulse quickened. But it was only a bobcat, picking its way among the snow-caked blowdown. As Lovelace watched, the cat sensed something and froze, its eyes glowing like headlights in the altered aura of the scope. Then it moved rapidly off into the trees and was gone.

  Lovelace panned the scope back up the creek until he found the slabbed island of rock where he’d laid out the young deer. The carcass hadn’t been touched. He had shot it at dusk farther up the creek, then dragged it downstream, wading through the water in his rubber boots, so as not to leave any tracks. The rocks on the creek bed were slippery and the shallows treacherously iced. The effort had drained him and he’d had to keep stopping to get breath into his aching lungs.

  On reaching the rock, he had carefully cut out the bullet, then opened the deer’s belly and its throat so the blood ran into the water. Then he arranged the guts around it on the rock to help the scent carry down the canyon.

  The chances of it working this first time were slim. He knew from tracks he’d found that morning that the wolves had been around here last night. But by now they might be twenty miles away. He could lie here every night for weeks on end and still draw a blank. And even if they did show, the shot was far from easy.

  He’d measured it when he found the place yesterday. The creek was about two hundred and seventy yards from the foot of the cliff, which was a fair enough shot in daylight. At night it was a long one. He had sighted in the rifle to allow for the right amount of bullet drop but the angle made it tricky. The crosswind made it trickier still. It was blowing a good twenty miles an hour. He’d have to allow for at least two feet of drift.

  Lovelace was almost sure the woman and the boy weren’t out night-tracking, and if they were, they couldn’t get up here without his hearing their snowmobile or seeing its light coming up the canyon. But there was always a chance that someone else might be around to hear the pop of the silencer. Maybe, after all, he should have set snares instead.

  For the first three hours, he’d kept himself alert. But now he was tired and his feet were getting cold. He put down the rifle, resting his head on his elbow, and closed his eyes

  When he opened them again and looked at his watch, he saw a whole hour had passed. Cursing himself, he snatched up the rifle and switched on the night
scope. The deer hadn’t been touched. But as he panned a fraction to the right Lovelace saw a shadow step right into his invisible spotlight of green.

  There were two of them, three now, four. Trotting in single file around a bend in the trail, their eyes glowing as though there were a phantom fluorescence burning in their skulls. The one in front must be almost white, he figured, though in the scope it looked a kind of milky green. From its size and prime position and from the height of its tail, Lovelace guessed it was the alpha female. He could see the collar on her neck and on the neck of the one behind her too. The other two were slighter, not quite full-grown.

  Lovelace’s heart started to thump. He couldn’t believe his luck. Silently, he slid the safety and switched on the laser sight.

  According to Calder, there were eight in the pack, so he kept his eyes on the bend of the trail, waiting for the others to show. But they didn’t. It was unusual, he thought, for them all not to be hunting together, but at least he had two to go for. He was going to leave the collared wolves until he’d killed all the others. So long as their signals kept chiming, the woman would likely think the whole pack was okay. Also - if he could only find the damned frequencies - they could lead him to the others.

  The wolves stopped now, where the trail dipped through a mound of willow scrub, about twenty yards downstream of the deer. The white one stood quite still with her nose raised and Lovelace worried that she might have picked up his scent on the wind. He settled the red dot of the laser on her chest. Maybe he should forget about the collar and take her now. Trouble was, the two uncollared wolves were largely masked by the willow. He’d only end up scaring them away. But now the white one was coming on again, more slowly, and the others followed.

  It took her ten minutes of pacing to and fro along the bank to decide it was safe to cross the ice and water to the altar of rock where the deer lay. Lovelace could have shot them each a dozen times, but he waited and watched. He wanted them all on the carcass and to eat enough of it for anyone finding it to think they’d killed it.