Savage Run

31

On Sunday morning before the sun rose, and cool air was flexing through the trees and over the mountainside, about the time Joe should have been home mixing pancake batter and frying bacon for his girls, Britney Earthshare came scrambling down from the ridge through the shale saying she had just seen Charlie Tibbs.

Stewie had been stretching and commenting how good bacon and eggs would be for breakfast.

“Show me where,” Joe said, and followed her back to the ridge.

She pointed to a series of openings on the mountainside on the other side of the valley. Joe looked with his binoculars but could see nothing.

“He came out of the trees into the clearing and then he went back into the trees,” she said, her teeth chattering from fright and the early morning cold.

“Where was it again?”

She pointed generally.

“Can you be more specific?”

She hissed angrily. “Damn you, I saw what I saw!”

“Was he on horseback or on foot?”

She glared at him. “Horseback, I think.”

“You think,” he repeated, still glassing the mountain. The binoculars gathered more light than his naked eye, but it was still too shadowy even in the meadows to see Charlie Tibbs. “Was he coming our way?”

“Straight at us,” she declared.

Joe lowered the binoculars and looked at her, trying to decide if she had actually seen Tibbs or had only thought she had seen him. He had already been making plans about returning to the cabin and his pickup, plotting how they could travel up the ridge and work their way back through the heavy timber covering a massive saddle slope to the south. If the terrain was agreeable, they could be back by noon.

But if Tibbs was coming straight at them, had found their track, they would have to either make a stand or run.

“There he is!” Britney screamed, gesturing frantically across the valley. “Oh, my God!”

Joe wheeled and jerked his binoculars to his eyes. He saw a tiny movement on the edge of a far-off meadow. It was dark and passed into the trees before he could see it clearly. But it could have been the shoulders and head of a man on horseback.

Stay in the elk trail,” Joe cautioned as they scrambled down the mountain, away from the camp and the ridge. “If nothing else, the trail may foul him up a little.”

The path of the elk herd from the night before wasn’t hard to follow. They had churned up a two- to three-foot swath of earth, mashing pine needles into the dark loam and littering the trail with upturned black divots. Joe was pleased by the way their own tracks blended into the elk tracks.

“I’m sure getting hungry.” Stewie sang out. “If we catch those elk I might need to take a bite out of one of ’em.”

“Yuck,” Britney said. She had already mentioned that she didn’t eat meat. She made a point about how the elk had become their metaphysical guides through the wilderness and how Emily’s wolves played a part in providing the trail.

“Seeing those wolves running wild and free last night was, like, awesome,” Britney rhapsodized. “It was, like, orgasmic. These beautiful creatures were all around us and for a minute there, I felt like I was one of them. Once you’ve seen those magical creatures with your own eyes, it makes it really hard to understand why they were trapped and killed almost to extinction. It really makes you hate the people who did that. What were they possibly thinking, to want to kill a magnificent animal like a wolf?”

They walked.

“There’s an irony to all of this whole situation that I bet neither one of you know about,” Stewie said.

“What’s that?” Britney asked.

“Whatever it is, I hope it’s short,” Joe grumbled.

Stewie giggled at that. “The irony is that just before I headed out here and got married to Annabel and got blown up by a cow, the executive board of One Globe had a meeting and kicked me out!”

“You’re kidding!” Britney was outraged.

“It’s true.” He was starting to breathe hard with the exertion of the fast trek. “They met at the new headquarters on K Street in Washington, D.C., and voted me off of the board, eight to one. My old buddy Rupert was the only one who stuck with me. They said they didn’t like my methods anymore, that I was an embarrassment to the organization. They said that direct action wasn’t as effective as lawsuits and that my egomania was holding back membership funds.”

“But you started One Globe!” Britney argued. “They can’t kick you out of your own organization.”

“Yes, they can,” Stewie said. “And they did. The suits took over. The fund-raisers beat the hellraisers.”

“Shameful!”

“So,” Stewie said, directing it at Joe, “the irony is that Charlie Tibbs is coming after a big, fat has-been.”

“You’re not a has-been,” Britney cooed.

Joe, however, was too preoccupied with the scene in front of him to answer Stewie.

A cow elk stood off of the trail, in a small clearing, in a yellow shaft of early morning sunlight. She was straddling what looked like a wet bundle of fur. She watched them approach with her large black eyes. As they neared, her big cupped ears rotated toward them. Her legs trembled, as did her moist black nose.

Joe stopped. Stewie and Britney froze behind him.

“Jesus,” Stewie whispered.

The bundle of wet fur was the cow’s dead calf. Joe could see now that the calf’s throat had been ripped open and its lower jaw was gone. It lay dead in a slick pool of dark blood. Near the calf, tufts of long canine fur clung to shafts of the long grass.

The cow elk would soon die as well. She had been disemboweled as she fought off the wolves that killed her calf. Loops of intestine, like long blue ropes, hung from her abdomen. One of her front forelegs had been skinned to the bone. Dark blood clotted in the thick fur of her upper shoulder.

Joe had seen female elk fight; they sat back on their haunches and lurched forward, striking with their hooves. The power of their strikes could crush the skull of a badger or break the back of a coyote. The mother elk had connected with at least one wolf from the pack, hence the fur in the grass.

Britney broke down. She covered her face with her hands.

“You’ve got to do something,” Britney sobbed. “It’s horrible.”

Joe scanned the trees that surrounded the clearing. The wolves were there, he was sure, but he couldn’t see them. They were in the shadows, or hunkered down and still in the brush. He could feel their eyes on him.

“Do something,” she begged, her voice wracked.

“Shoot that poor elk so she won’t have to suffer,” Stewie murmured.

“No,” Joe sighed. “A gunshot will give our position away.”

“Who cares about that?” Britney cried, her voice raising to an emotional pitch. “Who cares about that? Do something!”

Joe turned toward her, his face a tight mask. His glare was so intense that she involuntarily stepped behind Stewie for protection.

“Look away,” he hissed, his voice coldly furious. He strode toward the cow elk and unsheathed his Leatherman tool, pulling out the blade. The mother elk turned her head away, but did not have the strength to run or strike out, and he reached out and grabbed her ear to steady her while he cut her throat.

Stewie stood with an ashen face, watching, while Britney buried her head in his back. As Joe walked back to them, he heard the cow elk gurgle and settle into the grass on top of her calf.

“This is what wolves do,” Joe said, his voice calm, a betrayal of what he felt. “I’m not saying they shouldn’t be here, but this is what they do. They’re wolves. I know it sounds real nice to say they’re magical and beautiful and they balance nature and restore an ecosystem-and it’s true, they do that. But this is how they do it. They go after the weakest first. When the mother stays back, the wolves open a hole in her belly and pull out her entrails. Then they wait until she doesn’t have the strength to protect herself, then they’ll move in and tear her throat out.”

Joe slid the sticky Leatherman back into its case and wiped hot blood on his pants from his hand and sleeve.

“You people just like the idea of things, like bringing the wolves back. It makes you feel better.” He looked from Britney to Stewie, both of whom averted their eyes. “I agree that it is a beneficial thing overall. But you don’t like to see what really happens out here when those grand ideas become real, do you?”

They followed the elk trail to the bottom of the mountain, through another small stream swelling with icy runoff. They drank, and continued up the next mountain through twisted black timber, crawling in and out of scalpel-cut ravines.

The terrain finally flattened as they rose, and the walking became easier. Joe was drenched in sweat, and light-headed from lack of food. The water sloshed in his empty stomach as he hiked. The incident with the elk had dampened the enthusiasm and frequency of Stewie’s monologues, and Britney was still so angry with him that she didn’t talk-which was fine with Joe.

Trees thinned in number but the ones they hiked through became thicker and taller. Joe felt as if they had entered a land of giants, their bodies becoming specks on the forest floor as they trudged on. He thought about Marybeth, and Sheridan, Lucy, and April. At times, the thought of them almost overwhelmed him.

The trees cleared enough that he could now see the mountain behind them. As Britney and Stewie rested, he glassed the forest with his binoculars, guessing where the elk trail switchbacked down the mountain, and followed it all the way to the top with his binoculars. He saw no movement.

Then, far to the right on the shoulder of the mountain, a flock of spruce grouse rose out of the trees. They glided over the treetops, veered, and settled back into the timber out of view. Something, or someone, had spooked them.

“The elk trail threw him off,” Joe said, keeping his voice low. “He’s way over there to the right coming down through the trees. Probably trying to pick up our track.”

“Shit,” Stewie hissed, angrily throwing a pinecone away from him. “How far?”

Joe tried to estimate the distance between the flock of pine grouse and where they now stood. Charlie Tibbs was closing in on them.

“An hour. Maybe an hour and a half.”

“We can’t keep running,” Britney said, more to Stewie than Joe. “We’re exhausted, and we keep getting deeper into the wilderness. Maybe we can just talk to him. That’s something we haven’t tried.”

“You can stay and talk with him if you want,” Stewie grunted, as he pulled himself back to his feet. “This is the same guy that blew up my bride and shot his friend’s face off a foot away from me.”

Like tributaries feeding a great river, small individual tracks started to peel away from the elk trail. Joe noticed it first, how the once-prominent trail was diminishing as they walked.

He felt a sensation ahead of him that at first he couldn’t comprehend. It was a sense of vastness, of openness, that belied the dark woods.

He pushed through a thick wall of Rocky Mountain juniper. The branches were so full and tough that it seemed they were trying to throw him back. Stewie and Britney complained behind him that they were having trouble figuring out which way he went. Britney cried out as a branch whipped back from Stewie and hit her flush in the face.

The juniper was sharp smelling and acrid, and the dusty clustered berries that fell to the ground looked like rabbit pellets. Joe ducked his head forward so the brush wouldn’t knock his hat off.

With a hard push he cleared the brush wall and stumbled into the open and gasped.

One more clumsy step and he would have plunged seven hundred feet to the floor of the canyon known as Savage Run.