The Loop (42 page)

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 nightscope. 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.

Only when they had feasted, did he get ready to shoot. The two uncollared wolves were side by side, their heads deep in the deer. Lovelace leveled the laser dot on the nearer one who was showing more chest. The wolf lifted its head to swallow. Lovelace could see a green gleam of blood on its muzzle.

He pulled the trigger.

The impact of the bullet lifted the wolf backward, clean off the rock and into the water. He’d only reckoned on getting one. The others, he thought, would spook and run. But they didn’t. They simply stopped feeding and stood staring down at the one he’d shot, who was now out of sight behind the rock. The old wolfer quickly levered another bullet into the chamber.

He shot the second clean through the head and it dropped stone dead beside the deer. This time, though, the other two wolves leapt like singed cats. In a flash they were splashing through the water, scrambling the icy bank and crashing off through the trees.

It took him almost an hour to wade down the creek and drag the dead wolves back through the water by their hind feet. They were only pups, but they still weighed sixty or seventy pounds apiece and after loading them on the back of the snowmobile and driving up to the mine, he could barely summon the strength to climb off.

He dumped them beside the overgrown airshaft he’d found the previous day and carefully levered aside the rotting pine logs that had once been laid to cover it.

One at a time, he hoisted the wolves over the edge of the shaft and lowered them gently in by their tails. He listened as they tumbled down in a clatter of rocks and landed with a distant splash in the belly of the mine below.

He stood there a moment, listening to the silence.

‘Do you think, Joseph, their life is the same as ours? I mean, what it’s made of, that little flicker or spirit or whatever it is, inside them. Do you think it’s the same as what we have inside us?’

‘No, dear, of course it’s not. How could it be?’

The wind had dropped. It was starting to snow again. By dawn his tracks would be gone.

 

It was still hard to believe she was going away.

Her flight was due to leave at six o’clock the following morning. Despite her protest, Luke had insisted he was going to drive her to the airport. Her bag lay already packed on her bunk.

Her father had sent her a brochure which showed the hotel they were all going to be staying in. It was called the Sandpiper Inn and it looked like heaven. There were palm trees and lawns going right down to the beach and this amazing, pale blue ocean, even better than the one in his dream, which he’d never told her about. The dining room was open at the sides and surrounded by exotic plants. He’d been trying not to fantasize too much about being there with her.

With such an early start in the morning, he should have gone home long ago, but he couldn’t bear to and was pretending to be doing something important on the computer. Helen was sitting across from him on the other side of the table, biting her lip and concentrating hard on her sewing, so it was easy to look at her. Sometimes she looked up and caught him, but it didn’t seem to bother her. The new haircut she’d gotten in Great Falls after buying the dress made her look younger.

She’d already taken the dress in at the sides and was nearly done shortening the hem. Earlier, after supper, she’d tried it on with the new shoes she’d bought and stood on a chair in the middle of the cabin while he pinned it up for her. It took forever, partly because he’d never done anything like that before but mostly because neither of them could stop laughing. It seemed kind of a funny thing to be doing in a mountain cabin in the dead of winter. To make things worse, Helen deliberately kept leaning one way, then the other, and would then complain that he hadn’t pinned it straight.

She would be gone ten whole days.

They’d worked it all out. While she was away, Luke was to stay up at the cabin to look after Buzz and keep the tracking going. Helen said if he was good, she would allow him a couple of hours off on Christmas Day. His parents were okay about it and Helen had cleared things with Dan Prior who said it was fine, provided it was all ‘unofficial’, which Helen said really meant, provided it didn’t cost him anything. Dan had offered to take him flying one day next week and do some aerial tracking.

She was finished now and broke the thread with her teeth. She held the dress up to inspect it.

‘I can’t get over how clever you were, finding this. The only summer dress in the whole of Montana.’

‘I guess I was born to shop.’

She laughed. Buzz suddenly started barking loudly. He’d probably sniffed some passing animal outside the cabin. It often happened. Helen told him to hush. She got up and took the dress over to the bed, folding it for packing.

‘Aren’t you going to try it on?’

‘You want me to?’

Luke nodded. She shrugged

‘Okay.’

He turned away and pretended to study the computer screen, as he’d done before when she changed, as he always did. He’d never found it easy, listening to her taking off her clothes, picturing it and feeling aroused and ashamed at the same time. Now, since the kiss, it was a kind of exquisite torture, almost more than he could take. It was all so confusing. How was he supposed to know what she felt about him?