The Wolf Road (5 page)

“Are you hungry?” he said, and darted ’bout the place looking for that hunk a’ bread she’d already ate. “Where do you live? I can take you home.”

“But—” I started, but he quick cut me off.

“Hush, Elka, you done enough.”

“D-Dalston,” Missy said.

Trapper nodded and held out his hand to help her to her feet. She took it and gave me a look like I was the one to be fearing.

“It’s not far,” Trapper said. “I’ll take you back, make sure you get home safe. But it’s late, you’re welcome to stay the night.”

She said she just wanted to go home, please thanks.

He took off his coat and wrapped it ’round her shoulders, and if my eyes could a’ bugged out my head they would.

“Elka, you stay here while I take Missy back,” he said, then he opened the door for her. What in the good goddamn? Trapper don’t open doors for people. Trapper don’t never speak to people.

“Sorry, Elka,” Missy said, “but thank you for the bread.”

I was ’bout to say,
No, don’t you take my new momma away
, when Trapper turned ’round to go out the door.

Trapper was gone all that night and all the next day. I never saw Missy again a’ course.

When he came back, we didn’t speak ’bout her nor ’bout me getting a momma. He didn’t whip me, didn’t shout at me, acted like it never happened. He was Trapper again, none a’ that honey in his voice, none a’ that sweetness no more and not never again.

Week after Missy, when my hand was healing up nice, I came to the woodpile and found the ax sharp enough to shave a leg off a cricket afore it’d even notice.

“People—
women
—are dangerous, Elka girl. Some are fierce as wolves, some are meek as deer, but you don’t figure out which till they’re in too close.”

Never asked him right what he meant; Trapper didn’t take kind to back talk. He came and stood next to me at the woodpile.

“Just you and me, Elka girl,” Trapper said to me, “it can only be you and me.”

I never went searching for a momma again, ’cause I knew he was right. He’d never let me have no one else, and for another seven winters that’s how we stayed. He showed me how to shoot that rifle a’ his and how to break it down for cleaning. Every year we stocked up for winter and he kept that ax sharp for me. We built a bigger smokehouse as I was growing and we needed the space for more food and he got us a pressure cooker so we could can the meat in case a’ leaner times. That burn scar faded to silver then to nothing you’d notice if you didn’t know it was there. I forgot all ’bout the pain what put the scar on my arm, but the kindness that soothed it stuck with me. Missy didn’t have nothing but she gave me a piece a’ herself and she did it gladly. That’s something I kept inside me, secret from Trapper and anything else what might go looking.

When I was tall as his shoulder he figured I was grown enough and took me on hunts. First it was just for skinning and hauling but as the years went on, he let me shoot all kinds a’ game like rabbits, bear, and even a moose. All ’cept deer. I’d turned seventeen few months past and less’n a week ago, Trapper let me take first shot at a buck—not more’n a few years old but enough to feed us for days with some left to trade for bullets and salt for curing. Deer was Trapper’s chocolate and he was precious ’bout it. That’s when I knew he trusted me all the way, that’s when we was closer’n we’d ever been. That’s when I weren’t afraid to call him Daddy out loud.

In Dalston, a scrap-and-shit mining town, one deerskin and three rabbit pelts got me a box of shotgun shells and bed and board in the Stonecutter’s Inn. Trapper had no worries in sending me to town by myself, not now I was grown. Ten years in the woods grows you quick. I never stayed long, never traded for drink or company and he knew I could handle a blade should any of the miners take a more’n passing interest.

Dalston was one of them places that God and man both forgot at the same time. Two rows of buildings, half wood, half stone, all half-finished. Everyone in Dalston got a look of coal-soot fury on ’em. I don’t like people at the best of times, give me trees and wild things any day, but in Dalston, they were a special breed. They were full of grim luck them boys, ’specially then, coming to the end of summer when the air outside is chill but the mines are no more’n stone ovens. Like chipping stone in hell. Every time I came back from that pit town I washed twice.

One hand on my deer-horn knife, other clutching the ammo, I stopped dead when I saw Trapper’s face tacked up outside the Stonecutter’s. Someone had drawn him in charcoal and written some kind of letters and numbers around him. They got his tattoos just right.

“You know this man?” a woman asked me. Clean, sharp voice, cold like water lapped right out a frozen lake.

Funny thing was, I didn’t hear her come near me, didn’t hear her stepping on the boards, didn’t catch her scent on the air. I can hear a bear farting on the other side of the mountain. Can smell it too, and follow it back to its den afore the beast has time to scratch.

This woman crept up on me, and that set my bones shaking. I looked at her. All in black with a black ribbon tied tight around her neck and a silver chain dangling. Six-shooter on her belt. No need to hide it, best not to in a town like Dalston. Taller’n me and I was no short stack, Trapper said I was tall as a big gray wolf was long, tail an’ all, and just as skinny. The woman had a straight back and blue eyes cold as her voice. Made me feel right uncivilized, that straight back. Never seen a woman like her before nor since.

“Do you know him?” she said, slower, like she was trying to get answers out of stubborn cattle.

“Never seen him afore,” I said.

Don’t think she believed it, ’cause she kept talking at me. Trapper’s first rule he told me was don’t tell no one ’bout him. He wanted a quiet life in the forest and I couldn’t argue with that.

“His name is Kreagar Hallet and he is wanted for the murders of eight women and one child.”

At that word
child
, she shifted slight. Gave herself away.

“We think he lives out in the forest. The women”—she raised them perfect eyebrows at me like she was looking for a lie—“were abducted from their homes and hunted, like animals.”

“What’s it to you?” I asked. Didn’t want to be around her. There was something about her. Felt like she could look right into me, see my soul and my sins. Feeling like ants crawling all up inside my skin. Trapper’s face. Talk a’ killing. Them things didn’t add up in my head.

“Murder is against the law.”

I had to laugh. “Ain’t no law here, lady, never has been.”

She put her hand on her gun and mine went to my knife. “There is now,” she said, and her voice went from cold to steaming.

“Who in hell are you?”

“Jennifer Lyon, Magistrate of Dalston, Ridgeway, Erminton. Hell, all south BeeCee is in my jurisdiction.”

“Fancy name, fancy words. Don’t mean nothing to real folk out here,” I said.

“And what about you?” she said. Didn’t seem put out by my laughing. “Do you have a name?”

I smiled wide, showed off all my teeth at her and said, “I got a few. Now if you’ll ’scuse me, lady Jennifer Lyon, Magistrate, I’ll be on my way.”

I waved my hand in circles and bowed low and grand. I started walking, suddenly didn’t want to stay the night in the same town as her. Cold went through my bones. That charcoal picture was Trapper, no doubt in my head, but she’d called him Kreagar. Said he killed women. Said he killed a kid. Something froze in me. Hunted women, she said, out in the forest, but there’s a lot a’ hunters in BeeCee. A lot a’ men out there in the woods, living away from people. Maybe they had my Trapper mixed up with one a’ them. Must be that. Figured I should warn him, least I could do.

I weren’t thinking all that straight, that Lyon woman put some kind a’ fear in me and it made my feet clumsy. My boot caught on the edge a’ the step down to the street and I shot out my hand ’gainst a post to stop falling. Silver scar. Old burn. Missy. Seven years passed without so much as a thought ’bout her and now her face was right there in the front a’ my head. That long black hair. That look a’ terror in her eyes. Was she running from this Kreagar fella? Lyon said them poor women was taken from they houses. All them memories a’ Missy came back like a smack upside the head. What she say? Went to bed, saw a shadow at her window.

That Lyon woman didn’t seem like the type to get things wrong. I stopped and looked back at her.

“When these killings happen?”

She took a few steps closer to me. “The most recent was four nights ago, a few hours before dawn, another was a few days before that, but we believe they go back as far as ten years, probably even longer. He could have killed dozens,” she said. Hand came off her gun and she started fiddling with whatever was on the end of that silver chain.

Week ago, me an’ Trapper had gone deer stalking. First time he let me be on point. Bagged a buck on my first shot. Few days later Trapper had gone wolf hunting by himself. He didn’t come back with a pelt, but he came back with blood on his shirt. I reckon now, looking back, that’s why he started killing in his skin; less evidence, as Lyon would say.

“And you say you’ve never met him?” she said.

I shook my head. “Never met no one called Kreagar Hallet,” I said, plain truth it was. Them ants was burrowing deep in my skin and scratching on my bones. I wanted away from that woman and that town fast as I could.

I got back to the forest and got back to my home. Seeing my hut, place what I ate and slept and lived so many years a’ my life, made me think that Lyon woman was wrong, had to be. It weren’t the same fella. Anyone can have tattoos on they face, not anyone can go murdering. No ma’am, I thought, ain’t my Trapper on them posters.

Trapper weren’t home so I stoked up the fire and went out to check the trap line. That’s when it all went to crap. Trap line came up empty save for a few rotten wood pigeons. Trapper sometimes set the snares too loose and open, let them critters sneak right through. I baited them and reset them, hid ’em better in the brush.

I got back to the hut and saw someone moving around inside. It weren’t Trapper and they weren’t alone. Three of ’em, and three horses tied up outside. They were banging up something fierce, throwing over the table, smashing the cups. Trapper’s chair crashed through the window, spooked the horses. Then that woman came out the door. Holding something. Trapper’s box, a wooden thing I weren’t allowed to touch no matter what. I seen him, after he came back from his wolf hunts, sometimes after a deer hunt, putting something in that box and hiding it ’neath the floorboards where he thought I wouldn’t go looking. I didn’t, out of respect you see, but that’s not to say I weren’t tempted.

That Magistrate Lyon had followed me home and taken that box. I took out my knife, silentlike, and held it ready to throw. She opened the box and started shaking. Her face and eyes went blood-red. She took something out, I tried to see, I wanted to see, but I couldn’t risk moving.

Lyon held up a scrap of skin.

I know all types of skin, see. I know moose, deer, hare, pig, boar, even grouse and goose ’neath the feathers. But that weren’t any skin I’d cut before. That was human, that was a scalp of bloody hair. Lyon dropped the box and them hard little lumps went skittering about. One a’ them still had long, silky black hair attached.

Silky black hair I’d combed, felt ’tween my fingers, all them years ago. Felt sick down deep. Felt that silver scar on my hand burn and itch.

“It’s not his,” Lyon said, and two men, one tall and bony, other stocky like he was made out a’ packed meat, came out the hut. “But this one matches the other recent victim.”

I never figured out who she was talking about. Chittering somewhere in the tree above me said squirrels were coming out. I couldn’t see them, but I had squirrel poles up in all sorts a’ places so I’d catch some no doubt. Trouble was, thought a’ eating anything set my stomach churning.

Faster’n I could blink, Lyon drew her gun and fired. The sound near deafened me, and a squirrel, or what was left of it, fell right at my feet. Right then I figured I wouldn’t get the best of that woman, least not in a fair fight.

I held my breath, felt my heart raging up in my chest. Didn’t move. That woman’s eyes, like hawk eyes, scanned the trees, trying to pick out her prey.

“No doubt,” she said, “this is the place.” She threw the scalp on the deck. It slapped and stuck. “Hallet won’t come back now we’ve been here,” she said, then mounted her horse in one quick move. “Burn it down.”

One of the men flung kerosene about like it was holy water and my home for ten years was kindling. I watched it burn for a while after they left. All in one go I’d lost my hut and, when I saw that scrap a’ Missy’s hair fizzle and twist in the flames, like my heart was doing, burning and ripping apart inside me, I knew I’d lost a man I thought of as Daddy. Trapper weren’t Trapper. I didn’t know what he was in truth. Lyon said he was Kreagar Hallet. Murdering, kid killer. I couldn’t figure it. I couldn’t unravel all them strands, all them lies and feelings what got knotted up over the years. Any lie can turn to truth if you believe it long enough and I knew, right in the dark part a’ me, that Trapper didn’t take Missy home that night. I’d been telling myself lies all along to make his lies all the more convincing.