Savage Run

15

Choteau, Montana

June 29

Charlie Tibbs and the Old Man were parked behind a chain-link fence bordering an airstrip near Choteau, Montana. To the west were the broad shoulders of the Flathead range under a bleached denim sky. A morning rain-one of those odd ones where the bank of clouds had already passed out of view before the rain finally made it to earth-had dampened the concrete of the two old runways and beaded the black hood of the pickup.

Three-quarters of a mile away, a door opened on the second of four small private airplane hangars. Charlie Tibbs raised binoculars to his eyes. He would provide the commentary.

“They opened the door.”

“I see that,” the Old Man said.

The Old Man was, if possible, even more miserable than he had been the week before. Even though they had eaten a real dinner at a truckstop (steak, mashed potatoes, corn, apple pie, coffee) and had taken a break en route to Choteau to sleep the night at a motel in Lewistown, he didn’t feel like he had gotten any real rest. His mind was doing things to him that were unsettling and unfair. He had nightmares about Peter Sollito, Hayden Powell, and Stewie Woods, as well as dreams peopled by friends and neighbors he hadn’t seen in forty years. Everyone seemed to disapprove of him now. They clucked and pointed, and shunned him when he walked over to them. His own grandmother, dead for twenty-two years, pursed her lips defiantly and refused to speak to him. He’d had the same kind of disturbing, unconnected, fantastic dreams before, but only when he was feverish. His back was sore from sitting in the pickup and even the real bed two nights before hadn’t helped unbend him. His back muscles were in tight knots and it hurt to raise his arms. His eyes were rimmed with red and they burned when he opened them. He wouldn’t have been all that surprised if his reflection in the visor mirror showed two eyes like glowing coals. He had taken to wearing dark glasses. It flabbergasted him that Charlie Tibbs did not seem to require sleep. This must have been what the Crusades were like, the Old Man thought.

Now they were here in Choteau, 150 miles south of the Canadian border, waiting for a woman to get her airplane out of a hangar and fly away so she would die. The world did not seem particularly real to him this morning.

Their target was an effective and obsessive wolf-reintroduction advocate named Emily Betts. Betts had almost single-handedly brought about gray wolf reintroduction into Yellowstone and Central Idaho through her writings, protests, website, and testimony at hearings. The reintroduction was violently opposed by ranchers, hunters, and other locals. She had been photographed several years before walking side-by-side with the Secretary of Interior when he helped carry the first reintroduced wolves through the snow to their release pens in Yellowstone Park. The Old Man had once read the transcript of a speech Emily Betts gave before the Bring Back the Wolf Foundation in Bozeman. She had said that if the Western ranchers and Congress would not allow nature to exist in the sacred circle of predator and prey, then the same disgusting breed of animals that eliminated the predators in the first place must take the responsibility for their animal genocide and legally or illegally reintroduce the species they had destroyed. By “disgusting breed of animals” she meant humans, and by “animal genocide” she meant the poisoning, trapping, and shooting of wolves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But the reintroduction by the federal government wasn’t happening fast enough for Emily Betts, and so she was now running a secret operation of her own, funded by donations. Wolves were being trapped in Canada where they were plentiful, transported to Choteau, and reintroduced throughout the mountain West by Betts in a private plane.

Remarkably, when they arrived at the hangar at three A.M., the Old Man and Charlie Tibbs had found an unlocked side door and they quietly entered, shutting the door behind them. It was completely dark inside.

Before the Old Man could thumb the switch on his flashlight, there was a desperate scramble of sounds. They were not alone in the hangar.

The Old Man had instinctively dropped to one knee, and Charlie Tibbs did the same. The Old Man heard the distinctive sound of Charlie working the slide of his pistol to jack a cartridge into the chamber and fully expected a blaze of light to suddenly reveal them-caught at last! — followed by a volley of explosions as Charlie blazed away. But instead of light, there was a low rumbling growl that had chilled the Old Man to his bones.

They were frozen in place, completely in the dark, all senses tingling. The Old Man imagined the yawning muzzle of Charlie’s pistol sweeping across the inside of the hangar.

Finally, Charlie whispered for the light. The Old Man lowered the toolbox until it settled silently on the concrete floor and then unsnapped his gun holster. The Old Man aimed the unlit flashlight toward the sounds with his left hand and with his right, parallel to the flashlight, pointed his 9mm. He snapped on the flashlight and beyond the beam, in the gloom, eight dull red eyes looked back. The growl tapered into a whine.

Four full-sized gray wolves, ranging in color from jet black to light gray, their heads hung low, stared at Tibbs and the Old man with pagan laser eyes reflecting from behind the bars of a stout metal cage. The wolves had no doubt been live-trapped in Glacier Park or Canada, and transported to Choteau. From there they would be loaded on Emily Betts’s aging Cessna airplane and flown south to the unknown mountains to further reestablish the breed.

Tibbs and the Old Man stood up, their old bones crackling. Tibbs holstered his revolver and followed the Old Man toward the airplane.

It was simple work, but it required skill. The Old Man held the flashlight while Tibbs took a razor blade utility knife to a half-dozen black hydraulic hoses snaking out from the motor. He shaved long slices from them, but was careful not to cut through the hoses completely. The idea was to weaken the hydraulic hoses so that under pressure, in the air, they would burst. It wouldn’t do to cut all the way through the hoses and leave telltale puddles of hydraulic fluid beneath the aircraft that might be seen in the morning. The hoses need to burst in flight, while Emily Betts was flying down the spine of the Rocky Mountain front.

Whether Emily Betts would realize she was out of fluid from the gauge and turn back or continue on would make no difference. Either way, she wouldn’t likely be able to land safely, unless she was just one hell of a pilot. Tibbs had said he doubted that was the case.

Look. There she is,” Tibbs said, and leaned back. The Old Man rubbed his eyes beneath his dark glasses, trying to see.

The propeller of the small airplane was nosing out from the dark inside, as Emily Betts and a man pushed it out. Betts was wearing an olive-drab flight suit. She was a heavy woman, and looked strong as she bent forward, pushing the strut. The Old Man could not see her face clearly from such a distance.

“They must have already loaded the wolves in the airplane,” Tibbs said. “I wonder what kind of ruckus they make inside.”

“She’s opened the door and about to climb in,” Tibbs continued. “She started the engine. Oh-oh, there is fluid coming out of the engine. One of the hoses already broke.”

The Old Man felt himself tense up. The plan could go awry. If it did, they would have to stay until the job was done. The thought of that possibility nauseated him.

“It’s pouring out of the airplane,” Tibbs said. “I can’t tell whether her assistant can see it or not.”

“She’s going to check the gauges,” the Old Man speculated. “She’s going to know there’s something wrong.”

“The plane’s moving,” Tibbs countered.

The Old Man watched. The airplane was moving too quickly now for Tibbs to keep the binoculars on it. The Cessna built up speed on the runway. Both of them knew it still wasn’t too late for Emily Betts to notice the leakage and abort the takeoff. The sound of the engine wound up to a high pitch.

The Old Man held his breath and watched the airplane, and saw its shadow form below it as it moved down the runway. The shadow began to shrink, and then it shot away into the sagebrush. Emily Betts was airborne. Back at the hangar, the man who had helped Betts push the Cessna stood by the open door, watched the plane with a hand at his brow, and then went inside. The hangar door closed. He had obviously not noticed anything wrong.

They watched the Cessna turn south until it was a shiny white speck above the mountains.

The big black Ford was approaching the town of Augusta, Montana, from the north when the Old Man rolled his head over in the seat to address Charlie. The headrest pinched the bow of his dark glasses so that the lenses shifted on his face to the right, making his face look lopsided. He didn’t care.

“How many more, Charlie?” He asked.

Tibbs didn’t respond with his usual glare. He was always in an especially good mood when his plans worked out as intended.

“One,” Tibbs said. “Just one more.”

The Old Man let his breath whistle out through his teeth. “Thank God for that,” he said.

“You won’t mind this one,” Charlie said. “This one is a lawyer.”

The Old Man smiled, more at Charlie’s rare attempt at levity than the fact that the next target was a lawyer.

Tibbs turned and smiled an awkward smile back at the Old Man. “We’ve done good work. We’ve been losing for thirty years. We’ve just been sitting back and taking it and taking it and taking it because we think that somewhere, somehow the politicians or judges will wake up and set things right. But we’ve waited too long and we’ve been too quiet. We’ve let them have just about everything they want from us. It’s about damn frigging time our side went on the offensive. And you and me are the front line. We are the warriors,” Charlie’s voice hissed.

“We’ve opened a gaping hole in the front line of the environmentalists. All of those bastards with their sandals and little glasses and lawsuits and trust funds don’t even know what’s hit them yet. Now it’s up to our employers to take advantage of that gap in their front line and ram straight the hell through it. This is the first step in reclaiming our land, and our West.”

The Old Man was speechless. Since he had met Charlie Tibbs three months before, throughout the training and the traveling, Tibbs had not spoken this much in a single week. Charlie Tibbs was eloquent, determined, and filled with righteous vengeance and passion. He was also, the Old Man reflected, the most terrifying man he had ever met.