The Crossing

I

WHEN THEY CAME SOUTH out of Grant County Boyd was not much more than a baby and the newly formed county they'd named Hidalgo was itself little older than the child. In the country they'd quit lay the bones of a sister and the bones of his maternal grandmother. The new country was rich and wild. You could ride clear toMexicoand not strike a crossfence. He carried Boyd before him in the bow of the saddle and named to him features of the landscape and birds and animals in both spanish and english. In the new house they slept in the room off the kitchen and he would lie awake at night and listen to his brother's breathing in the dark and he would whisper half aloud to him as he slept his plans for them and the life they would have.

On a winter's night in that first year he woke to hear wolves in the low hills to the west of the house and he knew that they would be coming out onto the plain in the new snow to run the antelope in the moonlight. He pulled his breeches off the footboard of the bed and got his shirt and his blanketlined duckingcoat and got his boots from under the bed and went out to the kitchen and dressed in the dark by the faint warmth of the stove and held the boots to the windowlight to pair them left and right and pulled them on and rose and went to the kitchen door and stepped out and closed the door behind him.

When he passed the barn the horses whimpered softly to him in the cold. The snow creaked under his boots and his breath smoked in the bluish light. An hour later he was crouched in the snow in the dry creekbed where he knew the wolves had been using by their tracks in the sand of the washes, by their tracks in the snow.

They were already out on the plain and when he crossed the gravel fan where the creek ran south into the valley he could see where they'd crossed before him. He went forward on knees and elbows with his hands pulled back into his sleeves to keep them out of the snow and when he reached the last of the small dark juniper trees where the broad valley ran under the Animas Peakshe crouched quietly to steady his breath and then raised himself slowly and looked out.

They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire. They moved down the valley and turned and moved far out on the plain until they were the smallest of figures in that dim whiteness and then they disappeared.

He was very cold. He waited. It was very still. He could see by his breath how the wind lay and he watched his breath appear and vanish and appear and vanish constantly before him in the cold and he waited a long time. Then he saw them coming. Loping and twisting. Dancing. Tunneling their noses in the snow. Loping and running and rising by twos in a standing dance and running on again.

There were seven of them and they passed within twenty feet of where he lay. He could see their almond eyes in the moonlight. He could hear their breath. He could feel the presence of their knowing that was electric in the air. They bunched and nuzzled and licked one another. Then they stopped. They stood with their ears cocked. Some with one forefoot raised to their chest. They were looking at him. He did not breathe. They did not breathe. They stood. Then they turned and quietly trotted on. When he got back to the house Boyd was awake but he didnt tell him where he'd been nor what he'd seen. He never told anybody.

The winter that Boyd turned fourteen the trees inhabiting the dry river bed were bare from early on and the sky was gray day after day and the trees were pale against it. A cold wind had come down from the north with the earth running under bare poles toward a reckoning whose ledgers would be drawn up and dated only long after all due claims had passed, such is this history. Among the pale cottonwoods with their limbs like bones and their trunks sloughing off the pale or green or darker bark clustered in the outer bend of the river bed below the house stood trees so massive that in the stand across the river was a sawed stump upon which in winters past herders had pitched a four by six foot canvas supply tent for the wooden floor it gave. Riding out for wood he watched his shadow and the shadow of the horse and travois cross those palings tree by tree. Boyd rode in the travois holding the axe as if he'd keep guard over the wood they'd gathered and he watched to the west with squinted eyes where the sun simmered in a dry red lake under the barren mountains and the antelope stepped and nodded among the cattle in silhouette upon the foreland plain.

They crossed through the dried leaves in the river bed and rode till they came to a tank or pothole in the river and he dismounted and watered the horse while Boyd walked the shore looking for muskrat sign. The Indian Boyd passed crouching on his heels did not even raise his eyes so that when he sensed him there and turned the Indian was looking at his belt and did not lift his eyes even then until he'd stopped altogether. He could have reached and touched him. The Indian squatting under a thin stand of carrizo cane and not even hidden and yet Boyd had not seen him. He was holding across his knees an old singleshot 32 rimfire rifle and he had been waiting in the dusk for something to come to water for him to kill. He looked into the eyes of the boy. The boy into his. Eyes so dark they seemed all pupil. Eyes in which the sun was setting. In which the child stood beside the sun.

He had not known that you could see yourself in others' eyes nor see therein such things as suns. He stood twinned in those dark wells with hair so pale, so thin and strange, the selfsame child. As if it were some cognate child to him that had been lost who now stood windowed away in another world where the red sun sank eternally. As if it were a maze where these orphans of his heart had miswandered in their journey in life and so arrived at last beyond the wall of that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever.

From where he stood he could not see his brother or the horse. He could see the slow rings moving out over the water where the horse stood drinking beyond the stand of cane and he could see the slight flex of the muscle beneath the skin of the indian's lean and hairless jaw.

The indian turned and looked at the tank. The only sound was the dripping of water from the horse's raised muzzle. He looked at the boy.

You little son of a bitch, he said.

I aint done nothin.

Who's that with you?

My brother.

How old's he?

Sixteen.

The indian stood up. He stood immediately and without effort and looked across the tank where Billy stood holding the horse and then he looked at Boyd again. He wore an old tattered blanketcoat and an old greasy Stetson with the crown belled out and his boots were mended with wire.

What are you all doin out here?

Gettin wood.

You got anything to eat?

No.

Where you live at?

The boy hesitated.

I asked you where you lived at.

He gestured downriver.

Haw far?

I dont know.

You little son of a bitch.

He put the rifle over his shoulder and walked out down the shore of the tank and stood looking across at the horse and at Billy.

Howdy, said Billy.

The Indian spat. Spooked everthing in the country, aint you? he said.

We didnt know there was anybody here.

You aint got nothin to eat?

No sir.

Where you live at?

About two miles down the river.

You got anything to eat at your house?

Yessir.

I come down there you goin to bring me somethin out?

You can come to the house. Mama'll feed you.

I dont want to come to the house. I want you to bring me somethin out.

All right.

You goin to bring me somethin out?

Yes.

All right then.

The boy stood holding the horse. The horse hadnt taken its eyes from the Indian. Boyd, he said. Come on.

You got dogs down there?

Just one.

You goin to put him up?

All right. I'll put him up.

You put him up inside somewheres where he wont be barkin.

All right.

I aint comin down there to get shot.

I'll put him up.

All right then.

Boyd. Come on. Let's go.

Boyd stood on the far side of the tank looking at him.

Come on. It'll be dark here in just a little bit.

Go on and do like your brother says, said the indian.

We wasnt botherin you.

Come on, Boyd. Let's go.

He crossed the gravel bar and climbed into the travois.

Get up here, said Billy.

He climbed out of the pile of limbs they'd gathered and looked back at the indian and then reached and took the hand that Billy held down and swung up behind him onto the horse.

How will we find you? said Billy.

The indian was standing with the rifle across his shoulders, his hands hanging over it. You come out you walk towards the moon, he said.

What if it aint up yet?

The indian spat. You think I'd tell you to walk towards a moon that wasnt there? Go on now.

The boy booted the horse forward and they rode out through the trees. The travois poles dragging up small windrows of dead leaves with a dry whisper. The sun low in the west. The indian watched them go. The younger boy rode with one arm around his brother's waist, his face red in the sun, his nearaEU'white hair pink in the sun. His brother must have told him not to look back because he didnt look back. By the time they'd crossed through the dry bed of the river and ridden up onto the plain the sun was already behind the peaks of the Peloncillo Mountains to the west and the western sky was a deep red under the reefs of cloud. They set out south along the dry river breaks and when Billy looked back the indian was coming along a half mile behind them in the dusk carrying the rifle loosely in one hand.

How come you're lookin back? said Boyd.

I just am.

Are we goin to carry him some supper?

Yes. We can do that I reckon.

Everthing you can do it dont mean it's a good idea, said Boyd.

I know it.

He WATCHED the night sky through the front room window. The earliest stars coined out of the dark coping to the south hanging in the dead wickerwork of the trees along the river. The light of the unrisen moon lying in a sulphur haze over the valley to the east. He watched while the light ran out along the edges of the desert prairie and the dome of the moon rose out of the ground white and fat and membranous. Then he climbed down from the chair where he'd been kneeling and went to get his brother.

Billy had steak and biscuits and a tin cup of beans wrapped in a cloth and hidden behind the crocks on the pantry shelf by the kitchen door. He sent Boyd first and stood listening and then followed him out. The dog whined and scratched at the smokehouse door when they passed it and he told the dog to hush and it did. They went on at a low crouch along the fence and then made their way down to the trees. When they reached the river the moon was well up and the Indian was standing there with the rifle yokewise across his neck again. They could see his breath in the cold. He turned and they followed him out across the gravel wash and took the cattletrail on the far side downriver along the edge of the pasture. There was woodsmoke in the air. A quarter mile below the house they reached his campfire among the cottonwoods and he stood the rifle against the bole of one of the trees and turned and looked at them.

Bring it here, he said.

Billy crossed to the fire and took the bundle from the crook of his arm and handed it up. The Indian took it and squatted before the fire with that same marionette's effortlessness and set the cloth on the ground before him and opened it and lifted out the beans and set the cup by the coals to warm and then took up one of the biscuits and steak and bit into it.

You'll black that cup, Billy said. I got to take it back to the house.

The indian chewed, his dark eyes half closed in the firelight. Aint you got no coffee at your house, he said.

It aint ground.

You cant grind some?

Not without somebody hearin it I caint.

The Indian put the second half of the biscuit in his mouth and leaned slightly forward and produced a beltknife from somewhere about his person and reached and stirred the beans in the cup with it and then looked up at Billy and ran the blade along his tongue one side and then the other in a slow stropping motion and jammed the knife in the end of the log against which the fire was laid.

How long you live here, he said.

Ten years.

Ten years. Your family own this place?

No.

He reached and picked up the second biscuit and severed it with his square white teeth and sat chewing.

Where are you from? said Billy.

From all over.

Where you headed?

The Indian leaned and took the knife from the log and stirred the beans again and licked the blade again and then slipped the knife through the handle and lifted the blackened cup from the fire and set it on the ground in front of him and began to eat the beans with the knife.

What else you got in the house?

Sir?

I said what else you got in the house.

He raised his head and regarded them standing there in the firelight, chewing slowly, his eyes half closed.

Such as what?

Such as anything. Somethin maybe I can sell.

We aint got nothin. You aint got nothin. No sir. He chewed. You live in a empty house? No. Then you got somethin. There's furniture and stuff. Kitchen stuff. You got any rifleshells? Yessir. Some. What caliber? They wont fit your rifle. What caliber. FortyaEU'four forty. Why dont you bring me some of them. The boy nodded toward the rifle standing against the tree. That aint a fortyaEU'four caliber. Dont make no difference. I can trade em. I caint bring you no rifleshells. The old man'd miss em. Then what'd you say anything about em for? We better go, said Boyd. We got to take the cup back. What else you got? said the indian. We aint got nothin, said Boyd. I wasnt askin you. What else you got? I dont know. I'll see what I can find. The indian put the other half of the second biscuit in his mouth. He reached down and tested the cup with his fingers and picked it up and drained the remaining beans into his open mouth and ran one finger around the inside of the cup and licked his finger clean and set the cup on the ground again. Bring me some of that coffee, he said. I caint grind it they'll hear it. Just bring it. I'll bust it with a rock. All right.

Let him stay here. What for? Keep me company. Keep you company. Yeah. He dont need to stay here. I aint goin to hurt him. I know you aint. Cause he aint stayin. The indian sucked his teeth. You got any traps? We aint got no traps. He looked up at them. He sucked his teeth with a hissing sound. Go on then, he said. Bring me some sugar. All right. Let me have the cup. You can get it when you come back. When they reached the cattlepath Billy looked back at Boyd and he looked back at the firelight among the trees. Out on the plainthe moon was so bright you could count the cattle by it. We aint takin him no coffee are we? said Boyd. No. What are we goin to do about the cup? Nothin. What if Mama asks about it? Just tell her the truth. Tell her I give it to a indian. Tell her a indian come to the house and I give it to him. All right. I can be in trouble. along with you. And I can be in more trouble. Tell her I done it. I aim to. They crossed the open ground toward the fence and the lights from the house. We ought not to of gone out there to start with, Boyd said. Billy didnt answer. Ought we. No.

Why did we?

I dont know.

It was still dark in the morning when their father came into their room.

Billy, he said.

The boy sat upright in the bed and looked at his father standing framed in the light from the kitchen.

What is the dog loin locked in the smokehouse?

I forgot to let him out.

You forgot to let him out?

Yessir.

What was he loin in there in the first place?

He swung out of the bed onto the cold floor and reached for his clothes. I'll let him out, he said.

His father stood in the door a moment and then went back out through the kitchen and down the hall. In the light from the open door Billy could see Boyd crumpled asleep in the other bed. He pulled on his trousers and picked up his boots off the floor and went out.

By the time he'd fed and watered it was daylight and he saddled Bird and mounted up and rode out of the barn bay and down to the river to look for the Indian or to see if he was still there. The dog followed at the horse's heels. They crossed the pasture and rode downriver and crossed through the trees. He pulled up and he sat the horse. The dog stood beside him testing the air with quick lifting motions of its muzzle, sorting and assembling some picture of the prior night's events. The boy put the horse forward again.

When he rode into the Indian's camp the fire was cold and black. The horse shifted and stepped nervously and the dog circled the dead ashes with its nose to the ground and the hackles standing along its back.

When he got back to the house his mother had breakfast ready and he hung his hat and pulled up a chair and began to spoon eggs onto his plate. Boyd was already eating.

Where's Pap? he said.

Dont you even breathe the steam and you aint said grace, his mother said.

Yes mam.

He lowered his head and said the words to himself and then reached for a biscuit.

Where's Pap.

He's in the bed. He's done ate.

What time did he get in.

About two hours ago. He rode all night.

How come?

I reckon cause he wanted to get home.

How long is he goin to sleep?

Well I guess till he wakes up. You ask more questions than Boyd.

I aint asked the first one, Boyd said.

They went out to the barn after breakfast. Where do you reckon he's got to? said Boyd.

He's moved on.

Where do you reckon he come from?

I dont know. Them was mexican boots he was wearin. What was left of em. He's just a drifter.

You dont know what a indian's liable to do, said Boyd.

What do you know about indians, said Billy.

Well you dont.

You dont know what anybody's liable to do.

Boyd took an old worn screwdriver from a bucket of tools and brushes hanging from the barn post and he took a rope halter off the hitchrail and opened the stall door where he kept his horse and went in and haltered the horse and led it out. He halfhitched the rope to the rail and ran his hand down the animal's foreleg for it to offer its hoof and he cleaned out the frog of the hoof and examined it and then let it back down.

Let me look at it, said Billy.

There aint nothin wrong with it.

Let me look at it then.

Go ahead then.

Billy pulled the horse's hoof up and cupped it between his knees and studied it. I guess it looks all right, he said.

I said it did.

Walk him around.

Boyd unhitched the rope and led the horse down the barn bay and back.

You goin to get your saddle? said Billy.

Well I guess I will if that's all right with you.

He brought the saddle from the saddleroom and threw the blanket over the horse and labored up with the saddle and rocked it into place and pulled up the latigo and fastened the backcinch and stood waiting.

You've let him get in the habit of that, said Billy. Why dont you just punch the air out of him.

He dont knock the air out of me, I dont knock it out of him, Boyd said.

Billy spat into the dry chaff in the floor of the bay. They waited. The horse breathed out. Boyd pulled the strap and buckled it.

They rode the Ibafiez pasture all morning studying the cows. The cows stood their distance and studied them back, a leggy and brocklefaced lot, part mexican, some longhorn, every color. At dinnertime they came back to the house stringing along a yearling heifer on a rope and they put her up in the pole corral above the barn for their father to look at and went in and washed up. Their father was already seated at the table. Boys, he said.

You all set down, their mother said. She set a platter of fried steaks on the table. A bowl of beans. When they'd said grace she handed the platter to their father and he forked one of the steaks onto his plate and passed it on to Billy.

Pap says there's a wolf on the range, she said.

Billy sat holding the platter, his knife aloft.

A wolf? Boyd said.

His father nodded. She pulled down a pretty good sized veal calf up at the head of Foster Draw.

When? said Billy.

Been a week or more probably. The youngest Oliver boy tracked her all up through the mountains. She come up out of Mexico. Crossed through the San Luis Pass and come up along the western slope of the Animas and hit in along about the head of Taylor's Draw and then dropped down and crossed the valley and come up into the Peloncillos. Come all the way up into the snow. There was two inches of snow on the ground where she killed the calf at.

How do you know it was a she, said Boyd.

Well how do you think he knows? said Billy.

You could see where she had done her business, said his father.

Oh, said Boyd.

What do you aim to do? said Billy.

Well, I reckon we better catch her. Dont you?

Yessir.

If old man Echols was here he'd catch her, said Boyd.

Mr Echols.

If Mr Echols was here he'd catch her.

Yes he would. But he aint.

THEY RODE after dinner the three of them the nine miles to the SK Bar ranch and sat their horses and halloed the house. Mr Sanders' granddaughter looked out and went to get the old man and they all sat on the porch while their father told Mr Sanders about the wolf. Mr Sanders sat with his elbows on his knees and looked hard at the porch floorboards between his boots and nodded and from time to time with his little finger tipped the ash from the end of his cigarette. When their father was done he looked up. His eyes were very blue and very beautiful half hid away in the leathery seams of his face. As if there were something there that the hardness of the country had not been able to touch.

Echols' traps and stuff is still up at the cabin, he said. I dont reckon he'd care for you to use whatever you needed.

He flipped the stub of the cigarette out into the yard and smiled at the two boys and put his hands on his knees and rose.

Let me go get the keys, he said.

The cabin when they opened it was dark and musty and had about it a waxy smell like freshkilled meat. Their father stood in the door a moment and then entered. In the front room was an old sofa, a bed, a desk. They went through the kitchen and then on through to the mudroom at the back of the house. There in the dusty light from the one small window on shelves of roughsawed pine stood a collection of fruitjars and bottles with ground glass stoppers and old apothecary jars all bearing antique octagon labels edged in red upon which in Echols' neat script were listed contents and dates. In the jars dark liquids. Dried viscera. Liver, gall, kidneys. The inward parts of the beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood. The jars stood webbed in dust and the light among them made of the little room with its chemic glass a strange basilica dedicated to a practice as soon to be extinct among the trades of men as the beast to whom it owed its being. Their father took down one of the jars and turned it in his hand and set it back again precisely in its round track of dust. On a lower shelf stood a wooden ammunitionaEU'box with dovetailed corners and in the box a dozen or so small bottles or vials with no labels to them. Written in red crayon across the top board of the box were the words No. 7 Matrix. Their father held one of the vials to the light and shook it and twisted out the cork and passed the open bottle under his nose.

Good God, he whispered.

Let me smell it, Boyd said.

No, said his father. He put the vial in his pocket and they went on to search for the traps but they couldnt find them. They looked through the rest of the house and out on the porch and in the smokehouse. They found some old number three longspring coyote traps hanging on the smokehouse wall but those were all the traps they found.

They're here somewheres, said their father.

They began again. After a while Boyd came from the kitchen. I got em, he said.

They were in two wooden crates and the crates had been piled over with stovewood. They were greased with something that may have been lard and they were packed in the crates like herrings.

What caused you to look in under there? said his father.

You said they was somewheres.

He spread some old newspapers on the linoleum of the kitchen floor and began to lift out the traps. They had the springs turned in to make them more compact and the chains were wrapped around them. He straightened one out. The greaseclogged chain rattled woodenly. It was forked with a ring and had a heavy snap on one end and a drag on the other. They squatted there looking at it. It looked enormous. That thing looks like a beartrap, Billy said.

It's a wolftrap. Number four and a half Newhouse.

He set out eight of them on the floor and wiped the grease from his hands with newspaper. They put the lid back on the crate and piled the stovewood back over the boxes the way Boyd had found them and their father went back out to the mudroom and returned with a small wooden box with a wirescreen bottom and a paper sack of logwood chips and a packbasket to put the traps in. Then they went out and fastened back the padlock on the front door and untied their horses and mounted up and rode back down to the house.

Mr Sanders came out on the porch but they didnt dismount. Just stay to supper, he said.

We better get back. I thank you.

Well.

I've got eight of the traps.

All right.

We'll see how it goes.

Well. You probably got your work cut out for you. She aint been in the country long enough to have no regular habits.

Echols said there wasnt none of em did anymore.

He would know. He's about half wolf hisself.

Their father nodded. He turned slightly in the saddle and looked out downcountry. He looked at the old man again.

You ever smell any of that stuff he baits with?

Yessir. I have.

Their father nodded. He raised one hand and turned the horse and they rode out into the road.

After supper they set the galvanized washtub on top of the stove and hand filled it with buckets and poured in a scoop of lye and set the traps to boil. They fed the fire until bedtime and then changed the water and put the traps back with the logwood chips and chunked the stove full and left it. Boyd woke once in the night and lay listening to the silence in the house and in the darkness and the stove ticking or the house creaking in the wind off the plain. When he looked over at Billy's bed it was empty and after a while he got up and walked out to the kitchen. Billy was sitting at the window in one of the kitchen chairs turned backwards. He had his arms crossed over the chairback and he was watching the moon over the river and the river trees and the mountains to the south. He turned and looked at Boyd standing in the door.

What are you doin? said Boyd.

I got up to mend the fire.

What are you lookin at?

Aint lookin at nothin. There aint nothin to look at.

What are you settin there for.

Billy didnt answer. After a while he said: Go on back to bed. I'll be in there directly.

Boyd came on into the kitchen. He stood at the table. Billy turned and looked at him.

What woke you up, he said.

You did.

I didnt make a sound.

I know it.

WHEN BILLY got up the next morning his father was sitting at the kitchen table with a leather apron in his lap and he was wearing a pair of old deerhide gloves and rubbing beeswax into the steel of one of the traps. The other traps were laid out on a calfskin on the floor and they were a deep blueblack in color. He looked up and then took off the gloves and put them in the apron with the trap and set the apron on the calfhide in the floor.

Help me with the washtub, he said. Then you can finish waxin these.

He did. He waxed them carefully, working the wax into the pan and the lettering in the pan and into the slots that the jaws were hinged into and into each link in the heavy fivefoot chains and into the heavy twopronged drag at the end of the chain. Then his father hung them outside in the cold where the house odors would not infect them. The morning following when his father entered their room and called him it was still dark.

Billy.

Yessir.

Breakfast be on the table in five minutes.

Yessir.

When they rode out of the lot it was breaking day, clear and cold. The traps were packed in the splitwillow basket that his father wore with the shoulderstraps loosed so that the bottom of the basket carried on the cantle of the saddle behind him. They rode due south. Above them Black Point was shining with new snow in a sun that had not yet risen over the valley floor. By the time they crossed the old road to Fitzpatrick Wells the sun was up there also and they crossed to the head of the pasture in the sun and began to climb into the Peloncillos.

Midmorning they were sitting their horses at the edge of the upland vega where the calf lay dead. Where they'd come up through the trees there was snow in the tracks his father's horse had made three days ago and under the shadow of the trees where the dead calf lay there were patches of snow that had not yet melted and the snow was bloody and trampled and crossed and recrossed with the tracks of coyotes and the calf was pulled apart and pieces scattered over the bloody snow and over the ground beyond. His father had taken off his gloves to roll a cigarette and he sat smoking with the gloves in one hand resting on the pommel of his saddle.

Dont get down, he said. See if you can see her track.

They rode over the ground. The horses were uneasy at the blood and the riders spoke to them in a sort of scoffing way as if they'd make the horses ashamed. He could see no traces of the wolf.

His father stood down from his horse. Come here, he said. f You aint goin to make a set here?

No. You can get down.

He got down. His father had slipped the packbasket straps and stood the basket in the snow and he knelt and blew the fresh snow out of the crystal print the wolf had made five nights ago.

Is that her?

That's her.

That's her front foot.

Yes.

It's big, aint it?

Yes.

She wont come back here?

No. She wont come back here.

The boy stood up. He looked off up the meadow. There were two ravens sitting in a barren tree. They must have flown as they were riding up. Other than that there was nothing.

Where do you reckon the rest of the cattle have got to?

I dont know.

If they's a cow dead in a pasture will the rest of the cattle stay there?

Depends on what it died of. They wont stay in a pasture with a wolf.

You think she's made another kill somewheres by now?

His father rose from where he'd squatted by the track and picked up the basket. There's a good chance of it, he said. You ready?

Yessir.

They mounted up and crossed the vega and entered the woods on the far side and followed the cattletrail up along the edge of the draw. The boy watched the ravens. After a while they dropped down out of the tree and flew silently back to the dead calf.

His father made the first set below the gap of the mountain where they knew the wolf had crossed. The boy sat his horse and watched while he threw down the calfhide hairside down and stepped down onto it and set down the packbasket.

He took the deerhide gloves out of the basket and pulled them on and with a trowel he dug a hole in the ground and put the drag in the hole and piled the chain in after it and covered it up again. Then he excavated a shallow place in the ground the shape of the trap springs and all. He tried the trap in it and then dug some more. He put the dirt in the screenbox as he dug and then he laid the trowel by and took a pair of caEU'clamps from the basket and with them screwed down the springs until the jaws fell open. He held the trap up and eyed the notch in the pan while he backed off one screw and adjusted the trigger. Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable. He put his hand under the open jaws and tilted the pan slightly with his thumb.

You dont want it to where a squirrel can trip it, he said. But damn near.

Then he removed the clamps and set the trap in the hole.

He covered the jaws and pan of the trap with a square of paper soaked in melted beeswax and with the screenbox he carefully sifted the dirt back over it and with the trowel sprinkled humus and wood debris over the dirt and squatted there on his haunches looking at the set. It looked like nothing at all. Lastly he took the bottle of Echols' potion from his coatpocket and pulled the cork and dipped a twig into the bottle and stuck the twig into the ground a foot from the trap and then put the cork back in the bottle and the bottle in his pocket.

He rose and handed up the packbasket to the boy and he bent and folded the calfskin with the dirt in it and then stood into the stirrup of the standing horse and mounted up and pulled the hide up into the bow of the saddle with him and backed the horse away from the set.

You think you can make one? he said.

Yessir. I think so.

His father nodded. Echols used to pull the shoes off his horse. Then he got to where he'd tie these cowhide slippers he'd made over the horse's hooves. Oliver told me he'd make sets and never get down. Set the traps from horseback.

How did he do it?

I dont know.

The boy sat holding the packbasket on his knee.

Put that on, his father said. You'll need it if you're goin to make this next set.

Yessir, he said.

By noon they'd made three more sets and they took their dinner in a grove of blackjack oaktrees at the head of Cloverdale Creek. They reclined on their elbows and ate their sandwiches and looked out across the valley toward the Guadalupes and southeast across the spur of the mountains where they could see the shadows of clouds moving up the broad Animas Valley and beyond in the blue distances the mountains of Mexico.

You think we can catch her? the boy said.

I wouldnt be up here if I didnt.

What if she's been caught before or been around traps before or somethin like that?

Then she'll be hard to catch.

There aint no more wolves but what they come up out of Mexico, I reckon. Are they?

Probably not.

They ate. When his father had finished he folded the paper bag the sandwiches had come in and put it in his pocket.

You ready? he said.

Yessir.

When they rode back through the lot and into the barn they'd been gone thirteen hours and they were bone tired. They'd come the last two hours through the dark and the house was dark save for the kitchen light.

Go on to the house and get your supper, his father said.

I'm all right.

Go on. I'll put the horses up.

THE WOLF had crossed the international boundary line at about the point where it intersected the thirtieth minute of the one hundred and eighth meridian and she had crossed the old Nations road a mile north of the boundary and followed Whitewater Creek west up into the San Luis Mountains and crossed through the gap north to the Animas range and then crossed the Animas Valley and on into the Peloncillos as told. She carried a scabbedover wound on her hip where her mate had bitten her two weeks before somewhere in the mountains of Sonora. He'd bitten her because she would not leave him. Standing with one forefoot in the jaws of a steeltrap and snarling at her to drive her off where she lay just beyond the reach of the chain. She'd flattened her ears and whined and she would not leave. In the morning they came on horses. She watched from a slope a hundred yards away as he stood up to meet them.

She wandered the eastern slopes of the Sierra de la Madera for a week. Her ancestors had hunted camels and primitive toy horses on these grounds. She found little to eat. Most of the game was slaughtered out of the country. Most of the forest cut to feed the boilers of the stampmills at the mines. The wolves in that country had been killing cattle for a long time but the ignorance of the animals was a puzzle to them. The cows bellowing and bleeding and stumbling through the mountain meadows with their shovel feet and their confusion, bawling and floundering through the fences and dragging posts and wires behind. The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old protocols.

She crossed the Bavispe River and moved north. She was carrying her first litter and she had no way to know the trouble she was in. She was moving out of the country not because the game was gone but because the wolves were and she needed them. When she pulled down the veal calf in the snow at the head of Foster Draw in the Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico she had eaten little but carrion for two weeks and she wore a haunted look and she'd found no trace of wolves at all. She ate and rested and ate again. She ate till her belly dragged and she did not go back. She would not return to a kill. She would not cross a road or a rail line in daylight. She would not cross under a wire fence twice in the same place. These were the new protocols. Strictures that had not existed before. Now they did.

She ranged west into Cochise County in the state of Arizona, across the south fork of Skeleton Creek and west to the head of Starvation Canyon and south to Hog Canyon Springs. Then east again to the high country between Clanton and Foster draws. At night she would go down onto the Animas Plains and drive the wild antelope, watching them flow and turn in the dust of their own passage where it rose like smoke off the basin floor, watching the precisely indexed articulation of their limbs and the rocking movements of their heads and the slow bunching and the slow extension of their running, looking for anything at all among them that would name to her her quarry.

At this season the does were already carrying calves and as they commonly aborted long before term the one least favored so twice she found these pale unborn still warm and gawking on the ground, milkblue and near translucent in the dawn like beings miscarried from another world entire. She ate even their bones where they lay blind and dying in the snow. Before sunrise she was off the plain and she would raise her muzzle where she stood on some low promontory or rock overlooking the valley and howl and howl again into that terrible silence. She might have left the country altogether if she had not come upon the scent of a wolf just below the high pass west of Black Point. She stopped as if she'd walked into a wall.

She circled the set for the better part of an hour sorting and indexing the varied scents and ordering their sequences in an effort to reconstruct the events that had taken place here. When she left she went down through the pass south following the tracks of the horses now thirtyaEU'six hours old.

By evening she'd found all eight of the sets and she was back at the gap of the mountain again where she circled the trap whining. Then she began to dig. She dug a hole alongside the trap until the caving dirt fell away to reveal the trap's jaw. She stood looking at it. She dug again. When she left the set the trap was sitting naked on the ground with only a handful of dirt over the waxed paper covering the pan and when the boy and his father rode through the gap the following morning that was what they found.

His father stood down from the horse onto the calfhide and surveyed the set while the boy sat watching. He remade the set and rose and shook his head doubtfully. They rode the rest of the line and when they returned the following morning the first set was uncovered again and so were four more. They took up three of the sets and used the traps to make blind sets in the trail.

What's to keep a cow from walkin in em? the boy said.

Not a thing in the world, said his father.

Three days later they found another calf dead. Five days later one of the blind sets in the trail had been dug out and the trap overturned and sprung.

They rode in the evening down to the SK Bar and called on Sanders again. They sat in the kitchen and told the old man all that had occurred and the old man nodded his head.

Echols one time told me that tryin to get the best of a wolf is like tryin to get the best of a kid. It aint that they're smarter. It's just that they aint got all that much else to think about. I went with him a time or two. He'd put down a trap someplace and there wouldnt be the first sign of anything usin there and I'd ask him why he was makin a set there and half the time he couldnt answer it. Couldnt answer it.

They went up to the cabin and got six more of the traps and took them home and boiled them. In the morning when their mother came into the kitchen to fix breakfast Boyd was sitting in the floor waxing the traps.

You think that will get you out of the doghouse, she said.

No.

How long do you intend to stay Bulled up?

I aint the one that's sidled up.

He can be just as stubborn as you can.

Then I reckon we're in for it, aint we?

She stood at the stove watching him bent at his work. Then she turned and took the iron skillet from the rack and set it on the stove. She opened the firebox door to put in wood but he'd already done it.

When they'd done eating breakfast his father wiped his mouth and put his napkin on the table and pushed back his chair.

Where's the traps at?

Hangin from the clothesline, said Boyd.

He rose and left the room. Billy drained his cup and set it on the table in front of him.

You want me to say somethin to him?

No.

All right. I wont then. Probably wouldnt do no good noway.

When his father came back from the barn ten minutes later Boyd was at the woodpile in his shirtsleeves splitting stove chunks.

You want to go with us? his father said.

That's all right, said Boyd.

His father went on in the house. After a while Billy came out.

What the hell's wrong with you? he said.

Aint nothin wrong with me. What's wrong with you?

Dont be a ass. Get your coat and let's go.

It had snowed in the night in the mountains and the snow in the pass to the west of Black Point was a foot deep. Their father led his horse afoot through the snow tracking the wolf and they followed her all morning through the high country until she ran out of snow just above the Cloverdale Creek road. He got down and stood looking out over the open country where she'd gone and then he remounted and they turned and rode back up to check the sets on the other side of the pass.

She's carryin pups, he said.

He made four more blind sets in the trail and then they went in. Boyd was shivering in the saddle and his lips were blue. His father fell back alongside him and took off his coat and handed it to him.

I aint cold, Boyd said.

I didnt ask you if you were cold. Put it on.

Two days later when Billy and his father ran the line again one of the blind sets in the trail below the snowline was pulled out. A hundred feet down the trail was a place where the mud had washed out in the snowmelt and in the mud was the track of a cow. A little further on they found the trap. The prongs of the drag had caught and she'd pulled loose leaving a swag of bloodied hide accordioned up on the underside of the trapjaws.

They spent the rest of the morning looking through the pastures for the lame cow but they couldnt find her.

Be a good job for you and Boyd tomorrow, his father said.

Yessir.

I dont want him leavin the house half naked like he done the other day.

Yessir.

He and Boyd found the cow in the early afternoon of the day following. She was standing at the edge of the cedars watching them. The rest of the cattle were drifting along the lower edge of the vega. She was an old dry cow and she'd probably been alone when she walked in the set up on the mountain. They turned into the woods above her to head her out into the open but when she saw what they were about she turned and went back into the cedars. Boyd booted his horse through the trees and cut her off and got a loop on her and dallied and when she hit the end of the rope the girthstrap broke and the saddle was snatched from under him and disappeared down the slope behind the cow whacking and banging off of the trunks of the trees.

He'd done a somersault backwards off the horse and he sat on the ground and watched the cow racketing down through the cedars and out of sight. When Billy rode up he'd already mounted again bareback and they set off after the cow.

They started finding pieces of the saddle almost immediately and after a while they found the saddle itself or what was left of it, just the wooden tree with pieces of leather hanging off of it. Boyd started to get down.

Hell, just leave it lay, Billy said.

Boyd slid down off the horse. It aint that, he said. I got to come out of some of these clothes. I'm damn near afire.

They brought the cow limping in at the end of a rope and put her up and their father came out and doctored the leg with Corona Salve and then they all went in to get their supper.

She tore up Boyd's saddle, Billy said.

Can it be fixed?

There wasnt nothin left to fix.

The latigo busted?

Yessir.

When was the last time you looked at it?

That old hull never was any account, Boyd said.

That old hull was all the hull you had, said their father.

The next day Billy ran the line by himself. Another of the sets had been walked in but the cow left nothing in the trap save some peels and scrapings of hoof. In the night it snowed.

Them traps are under two feet of snow, said his father. What is the use in goin up there?

I want to see where she's usin.

You might see where she's been. I doubt it will tell you where she's goin to be tomorrow or the next day.

It's got to tell you somethin.

His father sat contemplating his coffee cup. All right, he said. Dont wear your horse out. You can hurt a horse in the snow. You can hurt a horse in the mountains in the snow.

Yessir.

His mother gave him his lunch at the kitchen door.

You be careful, she said.

Yes mam.

You be in by dark.

Yes mam. I'll try.

You try real hard and you wont have any problems.

Yes mam.

As he rode Bird out of the barn his father was coming from the house in his shirtsleeves with the rifle and saddlescabbard. He handed them up.

If by any chance at all she should be in a trap you come and get me. Unless her leg is broke. If her leg is broke shoot her. Otherwise she'll twist out. Yessir. And dont be gone late worry in your mama neither. Yessir. I wont. He turned the horse and went out through the stockgate and into the road south. The dog had come to the gate and stood looking after him. He rode out a little way on the road and then stopped and dismounted and strapped the scabbard alongside the saddle and levered the breech of the rifle partly open to see that there was shell in the chamber and then slid the rifle into the scabbard and buckled it and mounted up and rode on again. Before him the mountains were blinding white in the sun. They looked new born out of the hand of some improvident god who'd perhaps not even puzzled out a use for them. That kind of new. The rider rode with his heart outsized in his chest and the horse who was also young tossed its head and took a sidestep in the road and shot out one hind heel and then they went on.

The snow in the pass was half way to the horse's belly and the horse trod down the drifts in high elegance and swung its smoking muzzle over the white and crystal reefs and looked out down through the dark mountain woods or cocked its ears at the sudden flight of small winter birds before them. There were no tracks in the pass and there were neither cattle nor tracks of cattle in the upper pasture beyond the pass. It was very cold. A mile south of the pass they crossed a running branch so black in the snow it caused the horse to balk just for any slight movement of the water to tell that it was no bottomless crevice that had split the mountain in the night. A hundred yards farther the track of the wolf entered the trail and went down the mountain before them.

He stood down into the snow and dropped the reins and squatted and thumbed back the brim of his hat. In the floors of the little wells she'd stoven in the snow lay her perfect prints. The broad forefoot. The narrow hind. The sometime dragmark of her dugs or the place where she'd put her nose. He closed his eyes and tried to see her. Her and others of her kind, wolves and ghosts of wolves running in the whiteness of that high world as perfect to their use as if their counsel had been sought in the devising of it. He rose and walked back to where the horse stood waiting. He looked out across the mountain the way she'd come and then mounted and rode on.

A mile further she'd left the trail and gone down through the juniper parklands at a run. He dismounted and led the horse by the bridlereins. She was making ten feet at a jump. At the edge of the woods she turned and continued along the upper edge of the vega at a trot. He mounted up again and rode out down the pasture and he rode up and back but he could see no sign of what it was she'd run after. He picked up her track again and followed it across the open country and down along the southfacing slope and onto the benchland above Cloverdale Draw and here she'd routed a small band of cattle yarded up in the junipers and run them off the bench all crazed and sliding and falling enormously in the snow and here she'd killed a two year old heifer at the edge of the trees.

It was lying on its side in the shadow of the woods with its eyes glazed over and its tongue out and she had begun to feed on it between its rear legs and eaten the liver and dragged the intestines over the snow and eaten several pounds of meat from the inside of the thighs. The heifer was not quite stiff, not quite cold. Where it lay it had melted the snow to the ground in a dark silhouette about it.

The horse wanted no part of it. He arched his neck and rolled his eyes and the bores of his nose smoked like fumaroles. The boy patted his neck and spoke to him and then dismounted and tied the bridlereins to a branch and walked around the dead animal studying it. The one eye that looked up was blue and cast and there was no reflection in it and no world. There were no ravens or any other birds about. All was cold and silence. He walked back to the horse and slid the rifle from the scabbard and checked the chamber again. The action was stiff with the cold. He let the hammer down with his thumb and untied the reins and mounted up and turned the horse down along the edge of the woods, riding with the rifle across his lap.

He followed her all day. He never saw her. Once he rode her up out of a bed in a windbreak thicket on the south slope where she'd slept in the sun. Or thought he rode her up. He knelt and placed his hand in the pressed grass to see if it was warm and he sat watching to see if any blade or stem of grass would right itself but none did and whether the bed was warm from her or from the sun he was in no way sure. He mounted up and rode on. Twice he lost her track in the Cloverdale Creek pasture where the snow had melted and both times picked it up again in the circle he cut for sign. On the far side of the Cloverdale road he saw smoke and rode down and came upon three vaqueros from Pendleton's taking their dinner. They did not know that there was a wolf about. They seemed doubtful. They looked at one another.

They asked him to get down and he did and they gave him a cup of coffee and he took his lunch from his shirt and offered what he had. They were eating beans and tortillas and sucking at some sparelooking goatbones and as there was no fourth plate nor any way to divide what any had with any other they passed through a pantomime of offer and refusal and continued to eat as before. They talked of cattle and of the weather and as they were all workscouts for kin in Mexico they asked if his father needed any hands. They said that the tracks he'd followed were probably of a large dog and even though the tracks could be seen less than a quarter mile from where they were eating they showed no inclination to go and examine them. He didnt tell them about the dead heifer.

When they'd done eating they scraped their plates off into the ashes of the fire and wiped them clean with pieces of tortilla and ate the tortillas and packed the plates away in their mochilas. Then they tightened the latigos on their horses and mounted up. He shook out the grounds from the cup and wiped it out with his shirt and handed it up to the rider who'd given it to him.

Adios compadrito, they said.

Hasta la vista.

They touched their hats and turned their horses and rode out and when they were gone he got his horse and mounted up and took the trail back west the way the wolf had gone.

By evening she was back in the mountains. He followed afoot leading the horse. He studied places where she had dug but he could not tell what it was she was digging for. He measured the remaining day with his hand at arm's length under the sun and finally he stood up into the saddle and turned the horse up through the wet snow toward the pass and home.

Because it was already dark he rode the horse past the kitchen window and leaned and tapped at the glass without stopping and then went on to the barn. At the dinner table he told them what he had seen. He told them about the heifer dead on the mountain.

Where she crossed back goin towards Hog Canyon, said his father. Was that a cattletrail?

No sir. It was not much of a trail of no kind.

Could you make a set in it?

Yessir. I would of had it not been gettin on late like it was. Did you pick up any of the sets?

No sir.

You want to go back up there tomorrow?

Yessir. I'd like to.

All right. Take up a couple of traps and make blind sets with em and I'll run the line with you on Sunday.

I dont know how you think the Lord is goin to bless your efforts and you dont keep the Sabbath, their mother said.

Well Mama we aint got a ox in the ditch but we sure got some heifers in one.

I think it's a poor example for the boys.

His father sat looking at his cup. He looked at the boy. We'll run it on Monday, he said.

Lying in the cold dark of their bedroom they listened to the squalls of coyotes out in the pasture to the west of the house.

You think you can catch her? said Boyd.

I dont know.

What are you goin to do with her if you do?

What do you mean?

I mean what will you do with her.

Collect the bounty, I reckon.

They lay in the dark. The coyotes yammered. After a while Boyd said: I meant how will you kill her.

I guess you shoot em. I dont know no other way.

I'd like to see her alive.

Maybe Pap will bring you with him.

What am I goin to ride?

You could ride bareback.

Yeah, Boyd said. I could ride bareback.

They lay in the dark.

He's goin to give you my saddle, Billy said.

What are you goin to ride?

He's gettin me one from Martel's.

A new one?

No. Hell, not a new one.

Outside the dog had been barking and their father went out to the kitchen door and called the dog's name and it hushed instantly. The coyotes went on yapping.

Billy?

What.

Did Pap write Mr Echols?

Yeah.

He never heard nothin though. Did he?

Not yet he aint.

Billy?

What.

I had this dream.

What dream.

I had it twice.

Well what was it.

There was this big fire out on the dry lake. There aint nothin to burn on a dry lake.

I know it.

What happened.

These people were burnin. The lake was on fire and they was burnin up.

It's probably somethin you ate.

I had the same dream twice.

Maybe you ate the same thing twice.

I dont think so.

It aint nothin. It's just a bad dream. Go to sleep.

It was real as day. I could see it.

People have dreams all the time. It dont mean nothin.

Then what do they have em for?

I dont know. Go to sleep.

Billy?

What.

I had this feelin that somethin bad was goin to happen.

There aint nothin bad goin to happen. You just had a bad dream is all. It dont mean somethin bad is goin to happen.

What does it mean?

It dont mean nothin. Go to sleep.

IN THE WOODS on the southfacing slopes the snow was partly melted from the prior day's sun and it had frozen back in the night so that there was a thin crust on top. The crust was just hard enough for birds to walk on. Mice. In the trail he saw where the cows had come down. The traps in the mountains lay all undisturbed beneath the snow with their jaws agape like steel trolls silent and mindless and blind. He took up three of the sets, holding the cocked traps in his gloved hands and reaching under the jaw and tripping the pan with his thumb. The traps leapt mightily. The iron clang of the jaws slamming shut echoed in the cold. You could see nothing of their movement. Now the jaws were open. Now they were closed.

He rode with the traps packed under the calfhide in the floor of the packbasket where they would not fall out as he rolled sideways in the saddle to duck low branches. When he came to the fork in the trail he followed the track she'd taken the evening before going west toward Hog Canyon. He made the sets in the trail and cut and placed stepping sticks and returned along a route of his own devising a mile to the south and continued down to the Cloverdale road to visit the last two sets on the line.

There was still snow in the upper stretches of the road and there were tiretracks in the road and horsetracks and the tracks of deer. When he reached the spring he left the road and crossed through the pasture and dismounted and watered his horse. It was near noon by the sun and he intended to ride the four miles into Cloverdale and go back by way of the road.

While the horse was drinking an old man in a Model A pickup truck pulled up out at the fence. Billy pulled the horse's head up and mounted and went back out to the road and sat the horse alongside the truck. The man leaned out the window and looked up at him. He looked at the packbasket.

What are you trappin? he said.

He was a rancher from the lower valley along the border and Billy knew him but didnt say his name. He knew the old man wanted to hear that he was trapping coyotes and he wouldnt lie, or wouldnt exactly lie.

Well, he said. I seen a lot of coyote sign down here.

I aint surprised, the old man said. They done everthing down at our place but come in and set at the table.

He scanned the country with his pale eyes. As if the little jackal wolves might be afoot on the plain in broadest day. He took out a pack of readymade cigarettes and shucked one up and took it in his mouth and held up the pack.

Smoke?

No sir. Thank you.

He put the pack away and took from his pocket a brass lighter that looked like something for soldering pipe, burning off paint. He struck it and a bluish ball of flame whooshed up. He lit the cigarette and snapped the lighter shut but it continued to burn anyway. He blew it out and dandled it in one hand to cool it. He looked at the boy.

I had to quit usin the hightest, he said.

Yessir.

You married?

No sir. I aint but sixteen.

Dont get married. Women are crazy.

Yessir.

You'll think you've found one that aint but guess what?

What?

She will be too.

Yessir.

You got any big traps in there?

Like how big?

Number four, say.

No sir. Truth to tell, I dont have none with

What did you ask me how big for then?

Sir?

The old man nodded at the road. There was a mountain lion crossed about a mile down here yesterday evenin.

They're around, the boy said.

My nephew's got some dogs. Got some blueticks out of the Lee Brothers' line. Pretty good dogs. He dont want em walkin in no steeltraps though.

I'm back up here towards Hog Canyon, the boy said. And up towards Black Point.

The old man smoked. The horse turned its head and sniffed at the truck and looked away again.

You hear about the Texas lion and the New Mexico lion? the old man said.

No sir. I dont believe so.

There was this Texas lion and this New Mexico lion. They split up on the divide and went off to hunt. Agreed to meet up in the spring and see how they'd done and all and whenever they done it why the old lion been over in Texas looked just awful. Lion from New Mexico he looked at him and he said Lord son you look awful. Said what's happened to you. Lion been over in Texas said I dont know. Said I'm about starved out. Other old lion said well, said tell me what all you been doin. Said you might be doin somethin wrong.

Well the Texas lion said I just been usin the old tried and true methods. Said I get up on a limb overlookin the trail and then whenever one of the Texans rides underneath it why I holler real big and then I jump out on top of him. And that's what I been a doin.

Well, the old New Mexico lion looked at him and he said it's a wonder you aint dead. Said that's all wrong for your Texans and I dont see how you got through the winter atall. Said look here. First of all when you holler thataway it scares the shit out of em. Then when you jump on top of em thataway it knocks the wind out of em. Hell, son. You aint got nothin left but buckles and boots.

The old man fell across the steering wheel wheezing. After a while he began to cough. He looked up and wiped his watery eyes with one finger and shook his head and looked up at the boy.

You see the point? he said. Texans?

Billy smiled. Yessir, he said.

You aint from Texas are you?

No sir.

I didnt allow you was. Well. I better get on. You want to catch coyotes you come down to my place.

All right.

He didnt say where his place was. He put the truck in gear and pulled the sparklever down and pulled away down the road.

WHEN THEY RAN the traps on Monday the snow had melted off everywhere save in the northfacing rincons or in the deeper woods below the north slope of the pass. She'd pulled out all the sets save for the ones in the Hog Canyon trail and she had taken to turning the traps over and springing them.

They took the traps up and his father made two new sets with double traps, burying one trap under the other and the bottom trap upside down. Then he made blind sets in the perimeter about. He laid these two new sets and they returned home and when they ran the traps the next morning there was a coyote dead in the first set. They pulled this set entirely and Billy tied the coyote on behind the cantle of his saddle and they went on. The coyote's bladder leaked down the horse's flank and it smelled peculiar.

What did the coyote die of? he said.

I dont know, said his father. Sometimes things just die.

The second set was dug out and all five traps sprung. His father sat looking at it for a long time.

There was no word from Echols. He and Boyd rode the outlying pastures and began bringing the cattle in. They found two more calves dead. Then another heifer.

Dont say nothin about this less he asks, Billy said.

Why not?

They sat their horses side by side, Boyd sitting Billy's old saddle and Billy in the mexican saddle his father had traded for. They studied the carnage in the woods. I wouldnt of thought about her pullin down a heifer that big, Billy said.

Why not say nothin? said Boyd.

What would be the use in worryin him over it?

They turned to go.

He might want to know about it anyways, Boyd said.

When's the last time you heard bad news you were glad to get?

What if he finds it himself?

Then he'll find it.

What are you goin to tell him then? That you didnt want to worry him?

Damn. You're worse than Mama. I'm sorry I raised the question.

He was left to run the traps on his own. He rode up to the SK Bar and got the key from Mr Sanders and went to Echols' cabin and studied the shelves in the little mudroom pharmacy. He found some more bottles in a crate in the floor. Dusty bottles with greasestained labels that said Lion, that said Cat. There were other bottles with curled and yellowed labels that bore only numbers and there were bottles made of purple glass dark near to blackness that had no label at all.

He put some of the nameless bottles in his pocket and went back to the front room of the cabin and looked through Echols' little packingcrate library. He took down a book calledTrapping North American Furbearers by S Stanley Hawbaker and sat in the floor studying it but Hawbaker was from Pennsylvania and he didnt have all that much to say about wolves. When he ran the traps the next day they were dug out as before.

HE LEFT the next morning on the road to Animas and he was on the road seven hours getting there. He nooned at a spring in a glade of huge old cottonwoods and ate cold steak and biscuits and made a paper boat of the bag his lunch had come in and left it turning and darkening and sinking in the clear still of the spring.

The house was on the plain south of the town and no road to it. There had been a track at one time and you could see where it ran like the trace of an old wagonroad and that was where he rode till he came to the cornerpost of the fence. He tied thehorse and walked up to the door and knocked and stood looking out over the plains toward the mountains to the west. Four horses were walking along the final rise out there and theystopped and turned and looked his way. As if they'd heard his rapping at the door two miles distant. He turned to rap again but as he did the door opened and a woman stood looking at him. She was eating an apple but she didnt speak. He took off his hat.

Buenas tardes, he said. El senor esta?

She bit crisply into the apple with her big white teeth. She looked at him. El senor? she said.

Don Arnulfo.

She looked past him toward the horse tied to the fencepost and she looked at him again. She chewed. She watched him with her black eyes.

El esta? he said.

I'm thinking it over.

What's there to think about? He's either here or he aint.

Maybe.

I aint got no money.

She bit into the apple again. It made a loud cracking noise. He dont want your money, she said.

He stood holding his hat in his hands. He looked out to where he'd seen the horses but they had disappeared over the rise.

All right, she said.

He looked at her.

He's been sick. Maybe he wont say nothin to you.

Well. He will or he wont.

Maybe you like to come back some other time.

I aint got some other time.

She shrugged. Bueno, she said. Pasale.

She held open the door and he stepped past into the low mud house. Gracias, he said.

She gestured with her chin. Atras, she said.

Gracias.

The old man was in a dark cell of a room at the back of the house. The room smelled of woodsmoke and kerosene and sour bedding. The boy stood in the doorway and tried to make him out. He turned and looked back but the woman had gone on to the kitchen. He stepped down into the room. There was an iron bedstead in the corner. A figure small and dark prone upon it. The room smelled as well of dust or clay. As if it might be that which the old man smelled of. But then even the floor of the room was mud.

He said the old man's name and the old man shifted in his bedding. Adelante, he wheezed.

He stepped forward, still holding his hat. He passed like an apparition through the banded rhomboid light from the small window in the western wall. The routed dustmotes reeled. It was cold in the room and he could see the pale wisps of the old man's breath rise and vanish in the cold. He could see the black eyes in a weathered face where the old man lay on the bare ticking of his pillow.

Guero, he said. Habla espanol?

Si senor.

The old man's hand rose slightly on the bed and fell again. Tell me what you want, he said.

I come to ask you about trappin wolves.

Wolves.

Yessir.

Wolves, the old man said. Help me.

Sir?

Help me.

He was holding up one hand. It hung trembling in the partial light,disembodied, a hand common to all or none. The boy reached and took it. It was cold and hard and bloodless. A thing of leather and bone. The old man struggled up.

La almohada, he wheezed.

The boy almost put his hat on the bed but he caught himself. The old man's grip suddenly tightened and the black eyes hardened but he said nothing. The boy put the hat on and reached behind the old man and got hold of the limp and greasy pillow and stood it against the iron bars of the bedstead and the old man clutched his other hand as well and then leaned back fearfully until he came to rest against the pillow. He looked up at the boy. He'd a strong grip for all his frailty and he seemed loath to release the boy's hands until he'd searched out his eyes.

Gracias, he wheezed.

Por nada.

Bueno, the old man said. Bueno. He slacked his grip and Billy freed one hand and took off his hat again and held it by the brim.

Sientate, the old man said.

He sat gingerly on the edge of the thin pad that covered the springs of the bed. The old man did not turn loose of his hand.

What is your name?

Parham. Billy Parham.

The old man said the name in silence to himself. Te conozco?

No senor. Estamos a las Charcas.

La Charca.

Si.

Hay una historia alla.

Historia?

Si, said the old man. He lay holding the boy's hand and staring up at the kindlingwood latillas of the ceiling. Una historia desgraciada. De obras desalmadas.

The boy said that he did not know this history and that he would like to hear it but the old man said that it was as well he did not for out of some certain things no good could come and he thought this was one of them. His raspy breath had faded and the sound of it had faded and the faint whiteness of it also that had been briefly visible in the cold of the room. His grip on the boy's hand remained as before.

Mr Sanders said you might have some scent I could buy off of you. He said I ought to ask.

The old man didnt answer.

He give me some that Mr Echols had but the wolf s took to diggin out the traps and springin em.

Donde esta el senor Echols?

No se. Se fue.

El murio?

No sir. Not that I've heard.

The old man closed his eyes and opened them again. He lay against the ticking of the pillow with his neck slightly awry. He looked as if he'd been thrown there. In the failing light the eyes betrayed nothing. He seemed to be studying the shadows in the room.

Conocemos for to largo de las sombras que tardio es el dia, he said. He said that men took this to mean that the omens of such an hour were thereby greatly exaggerated but that this was in no way so.

I got one bottle that says Number Seven Matrix, the boy said. And another that dont say nothin.

La matriz, the old man said.

He waited for the old man to continue but the old man did not continue. After a while he asked him what was in the matrix but the old man only pursed his thin mouth in doubt. He continued to hold the boy's hand and they sat that way for some time. The boy was about to put some further query to the old man when the old man spoke again. He said that the matrix was not so easily defined. Each hunter must have his own formula. He said that things were rightly named its attributes which could in no way be counted back into its substance. He said that in his opinion only shewolves in their season were a proper source. The boy said that the wolf of which he spoke was in fact herself a shewolf and he asked if that fact should figure in his strategies against her but the old man only said that there were no more wolves.

Ella vino de Mexico, the boy said.

He seemed not to hear. He said that Echols had caught all the wolves.

El senor Sanders me dice que el senor Echols es medio lobo el mismo. Me dice que el conoce to que sabe el lobo antes de que to sepa el lobo. But the old man said that no man knew what the wolf knew.

The sun was low in the west and the shape of the light from the window lay suspended across the room wall to wall. As if something electric had been cored out of that space. Finally the old man repeated his words. El lobo es una cosa incognoscible, he said. Lo que se tiene en la trampa no es mas que dientes y forro. El lobo propio no se puede conocer. Lobo o to que sabe el lobo. Tan como preguntar to que saben las piedras. Los arboles. El mundo.

His breath had gone wheezy from his exertions. He coughed quietly and lay still. After a while he spoke again.

Es cazador, el lobo, he said. Cazador. Me entiendes?

The boy didnt know if he understood or not. The old man went on to say that the hunter was a different thing than men supposed. He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there. Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them.

You want to catch this wolf, the old man said. Maybe you want the skin so you can get some money. Maybe you can buy some boots or something like that. You can do that. But where is the wolf? The wolf is like the copo de nieve.

Snowflake.

Snowflake. You catch the snowflake but when you look in your hand you dont have it no more. Maybe you see this dechado. But before you can see it it is gone. If you want to see it you have to see it on its own ground. If you catch it you lose it. And where it goes there is no coming back from. Not even God can bring it back.

The boy looked down at the thin and ropy claws that held his hand. The light from the high window had paled, the sun had set.

Escuchame, joven, the old man wheezed. If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.

He had pulled himself slightly erect in order to utter these proclamations and now he subsided against the ticking and his eyes seemed to study only the roofpoles overhead. He eased his thin cold grip. Where is the sun? he said.

Se fue.

Ay. Andale, joven. Andale pues.

The boy withdrew his hand and he rose. He put on his hat and touched the brim.

Vaya con Dios.

Y tu, joven.

Yet before he reached the door the old man called to him again.

He turned and stood.

Cuantos anos tienes? the old man said.

Dieciseis.

The old man lay quietly in the dark. The boy waited.

Escuchame, joven, he said. Yo no se nada. Esto es la verdad.

Esta bien.

The matriz will not help you, the old man said. He said that the boy should find that place where acts of God and those of man are of a piece. Where they cannot be distinguished.

Y que clase de lugar es este? the boy said.

Lugares donde el fierro ya esta en la tierra, the old man said. Lugares donde ha quemado el fuego.

Y como se encuentra?

The old man said that it was not a question of finding such a place but rather of knowing it when it presented itself. He said that it was at such places that God sits and conspires in the destruction of that which he has been at such pains to create.

Y por eso soy hereje, he said. Por eso y nada mas.

It was dark in the room. He thanked the old man again but the old man did not answer or if he did he didnt hear him. He turned and went out.

The woman was leaning against the kitchen door. She was silhouetted against the yellow light and he could see her figure through the thin dress she wore. She did not seem troubled that the old man lay alone in the dark at the rear of the house. She asked the boy if the old man had told him how to catch the wolf and he said that he had not.

She touched her temple. He dont remember so good sometimes, she said. He is old.

Yes mam.

No one comes to see him. That's too bad, hey?

Yes mam.

Not even the priest. He came one time maybe two but he dont come no more.

How come?

She shrugged. People say he is brujo. You know what is brujo?

Yes mam.

They say he is brujo. They say God has abandoned this man. He has the sin of Satanis. The sin of orgullo. You know what is orgullo?

Yes mam.

He thinks he knows better than the priest. He thinks he knows better than God.

He told me he didnt know nothin.

Ha, she said. Ha. You believe that? You see this old man? You know what a terrible thing it is to die without God? To be the one that God has cast aside? Think it over.

Yes mam. I got to go.

He touched the brim of his hat and stepped past her to the door and walked out into the evening dark. The lights of the town strewn across the prairie lay in that blue vale like a jeweled serpent incandescing in the evening cool. When he looked back at the house she was standing in the doorway.

Thank you mam, he said.

He is nothing to me, she called. No hay parentesco. You know what is parentesco?

Yes mam.

There is no parentesco. He was do of the dead wife of my dead husband. What is that? You see? And yet I have him here. Who else would take this man? You see? No one cares.

Yes mam.

Think it over.

He unlooped the bridlereins from the post and untied them.

All right, he said. I will.

It could happen to you.

Yes mam.

He mounted up and turned the horse and raised one hand. The mountains to the south stood blackly against a violet sky. The snow on the north slopes so pale. Like spaces left for messages.

La fe, she called. La fe es toda.

He turned the horse out along the rutted track and rode on. When he looked back she was still standing in the open door. Standing in the cold. He looked back one last time and the door was still open but she was not there and he thought perhaps the old man had called her. But then he thought probably that old man didnt call anybody.

TWO DAYS LATER riding down the Cloverdale road he turned off for no reason at all and rode out to where the vaqueros had nooned and sat his horse looking down at the dead black fire. Something had been digging in the ashes.

He dismounted and got a stick and poked through the fire. He mounted up again and walked the horse about the perimeter of the encampment. There was no reason to think that the scavenger had been anything other than a coyote but he rode anyway. He rode slowly and turned the horse nicely. Like a show rider at a judging. On his second circling a little farther from the fire he stopped. In the windshadow of a rock where the sand had drifted lay the perfect print of her forefoot.

He dismounted and knelt holding the reins behind his back and he blew at the loose dirt in the track and pushed at the delicate edges of the track with his thumb. Then he mounted up and went back out to the road and home.

The following day when he ran the traps that he'd reset with the new scent they were pulled out and sprung as before. He set them again and made two blind sets but his heart was not in it. When he rode down through the pass at noon and looked out over the Cloverdale Valley the first thing he saw was the thin spire of smoke in the distance from the vaqueros' cookfire.

He sat the horse a long time. He put his hand on the cantle and looked back toward the pass and he looked out over the valley again. Then he turned and rode back up the mountain.

By the time he'd pulled the traps and packed them in the basket and ridden down into the valley and crossed the road it was early evening. Once more he checked the sun by the width of his hand on the horizon. He had little more than an hour of daylight.

He dismounted at the fire and took the trowel from the packbasket and squatted and began to clear a space among the ashes and charcoal and fresh bones. At the heart of the fire there were live coals yet and he raked them aside to cool and dug a hole in the ground beneath the fire and then got a trap from the basket. He didnt even bother to put on the deerskin gloves.

He screwed down the springs with the clamps and opened the jaws and set the trigger in the notch and eyed the clearance while he backed off the clampscrew. Then he removed both clamps and dropped the draghook and chain into the hole and set the trap in the fire.

He placed one of the squares of oiled paper over the jaws that no coals lodge under the pan to keep it from tripping and he drifted ash over the trap with the screenbox and scattered back the charcoal and the charred bits of wood and he put back the bones and rinds of blackened skin and drifted more ashes over the set and then rose and stepped away and stood looking at the cold fire and wiping the trowel on the side of his jeans. Lastly he smoothed a place in the sand before the fire, digging out small clumps of grass and buckbrush, and there he wrote a letter to the vaqueros, etching it deep that the wind not take it. Cuidado, he wrote. Hay una trampa de lobos enterrado en el fuego. Then he flung away the stick and dropped the trowel back into the basket and shouldered the basket and mounted up.

He rode out across the pasture toward the road and in the cold blue twilight he turned and looked a last time toward the set. He leaned and spat. You read my sign, he said. If you can. Then he turned the horse toward home.

It was two hours past dark when he walked into the kitchen.

His mother was at the stove. His father was still sitting at the table drinking coffee. The worn blue ledgerbook in which they kept accounts lay on the table to one side.

Where you been? his father said.

He sat down and his father heard him out and when he was done he nodded.

All my life, he said, I been witness to people showin up where they was supposed to be at various times after they'd said they'd be there. I never heard one yet that didnt have a reason for it.

Yessir.

But there aint but one reason.

Yessir.

You know what it is?

No sir.

It's that their word's no good. That's the only reason there ever was or ever will be.

Yessir.

His mother had got his supper from the warmer over the stove and she set it down in front of him and laid down the silver.

Eat your supper, she said.

She left the room. His father sat watching him eat. After a while he rose and took his cup to the sink and rinsed it out and set it upside down on the sideboard. I'll call you in the mornin, he said. You need to get over there fore you catch you one of them Mexicans.

Yessir.

We never would hear the end of it.

Yessir.

Aint no guarantee that a one of em can read.

Yessir.

He finished his supper and went to bed. Boyd was already asleep. He lay awake a long time thinking about the wolf. He tried to see the world the wolf saw. He tried to think about it running in the mountains at night. He wondered if the wolf were so unknowable as the old man said. He wondered at the world it smelled or what it tasted. He wondered had the living blood with which it slaked its throat a different taste to the thick iron tincture of his own. Or to the blood of God. In the morning he was out before daylight saddling the horse in the cold dark of the barn. He rode out the gate before his father was even up and he never saw him again.

Riding along the road south he could smell the cattle out in the fields in the dark beyond the bar ditch and the running fence. When he rode through Cloverdale it was just gray light. He turned up the Cloverdale Creek road and rode on. Behind him the sun was rising in the San Luis Pass and his new shadow riding before him lay long and thin upon the road. He rode past the old dance platform in the woods and two hours later when he left the road and crossed the pasture to the vaqueros' noon fire the wolf stood up to meet him.

The horse stopped and backed and stamped. He held the animal and patted it and spoke to it and watched the wolf. His heart was slamming inside his chest like something that wanted out. She was caught by the right forefoot. The drag had caught in a cholla less than a hundred feet from the fire and there she stood. He patted the horse and spoke to it and reached down and unfastened the buckle on the saddlescabbard and slid the rifle free and steppeddown and dropped the reins. The wolf crouched slightly. As if she'd try to hide. Then she stood again and looked at him and looked off toward the mountains.

When he approached she bared her teeth but she did not growl and she kept her yellow eyes from off his person. White bone showed in the bloody wound between the jaws of the trap. He could see her teats through the thin fur of her underbelly and she kept her tail tucked and pulled at the trap and stood.

He walked around her. She turned and backed. The sun was well up and in the sun her fur was a grayish dun with paler tips at the ruff and a black stripe along the back and she turned and backed to the length of the chain and her flanks sucked in and out with the motion of her breathing. He squatted on the ground and stood the rifle before him and held it by the forestock and he squatted there for a long time.

He was in no way prepared for what he beheld. Among other things he'd not considered simply whether he could ride to the ranch and be back with his father before the vaqueros arrived at noon if they would so arrive. He tried to remember what his father had said. If her leg were broke or she were caught by the paw. He looked at the height of the sun and he looked back out toward the road. When he looked at the wolf again she was lying down but when his eyes fell upon her she stood again. The standing horse tossed its head and the bridlebit clinked but she paid no attention to the horse at all. He rose and walked back and scabbarded the rifle and took up the reins and mounted up and turned the horse and headed out to the road. Half way he stopped again and turned and looked back. The wolf was watching him as before. He sat the horse a long time. The sun warm on his back. The world waiting. Then he rode back to the wolf.

She rose and stood with her sides caving in and out. She carried her head low and her tongue hung trembling between the long incisors of her lower jaw. He undid the string from his catchrope and slung it over his shoulder and stepped down. He took some lengths of pigginstring from the mochila behind the saddle and looped them through his belt and unlimbered the catchrope and walked around the wolf. The horse was no use to him because if it leaned back on the rope it would kill the wolf or pull it from the trap or both. He circled the wolf and looked for something to tie to that he could stretch her. There was nothing that his rope would reach and double and finally he took off his coat and blindfolded the horse with it and led it forward upwind of the wolf and dropped the reins that it would stand. Then he paid out the rope and built his loop and dropped it over her. She stepped through it with the trap and looked at it and looked at him. Now he had the rope over the trapchain. He looked at it in disgust and dropped the rope and walked out in the desert until he found a paloverde and he cut from it a pole some seven feet long with a forked branch at the end and came back trimming off the limbs with his knife. She watched him. He snared the loop with the end of the pole and pulled it toward him. He thought she might bite at the pole but she did not. When he got the loop in his hand he had to pay the whole forty feet of rope back through the honda and begin again. She watched the rope make its traverse with great attention and when the end of it had passed over the trapchain and withdrew through the dead grass she lay down again.

He built a smaller loop and came forward. She stood. He swung the loop and she flattened her ears and ducked and bared her teeth at him. He made two more tries and on the third the loop dropped over her neck and he snatched the rope taut.

She stood twisting on her hindlegs holding the heavy trap up at her chest and snapping at the rope and pawing with her free foot. She let out a low whine which was the first sound she had made.

He stepped back and stretched her out till she lay gasping on the ground and he backed toward the horse paying out rope and then looped the rope about the saddlehorn and came back carrying the free end. He winced to see her bloodied foreleg stretched in the trap but there was no help for it. She got her hindquarters up off the ground and scrabbled sideways and she twisted and fought the rope and slung her head from side to side and even once got completely to her feet again before he pulled her down. He squatted holding the rope just a few feet from her and after a while she lay gasping quietly in the dirt. She looked toward him with her yellow eyes and closed them slowly and then looked away.

He stood on the rope with one foot and took out his knife again and reached carefully and got hold of the paloverde pole. He cut a threefoot length from the end of it and put the knife back in his pocket and took a length of the pigginstring from his belt and made a noose with it and took it in his teeth. Then he stepped off the rope and picked up the end of it and moved toward her with the stick. She watched with one almond eye, deep yellow, deepening to amber at the iris. She strained at the rope, her face in the dirt, her mouth open and her teeth so white, so perfectly made. He pulled the rope tighter where it was belayed around the saddlehorn. He pulled until he'd shut off her air and then he jammed the stick between her teeth.

She made no sound. She bowed up and twisted her head and bit at the stick and tried to get quit of it. He hauled on the rope and stretched her out wild and gagging and forced her lower jaw to the ground with the stick and stepped on the rope again with his boot not a foot from those teeth. Then he took the pigginstring from his mouth and dropped the loop of it over her muzzle and jerked it tight and seized her by one ear and made three turns of the cord about her jaws faster than eye could follow and halfhitched it and fell upon her, kneeling with the living wolf gasping between his legs and sucking air and her tongue working within the teeth all stuck with dirt and debris. She looked up at him, the eye delicately aslant, the knowledge of the world it held sufficient to the day if not to the day's evil. Then she closed her eyes and he slacked the rope and stood and stepped away and she lay breathing heavily with her forefoot stretched behind her in the trap and the stick in her mouth. He stood gasping himself. Cold as it was he was wringing wet with sweat. He turned and looked at the horse where it stood with his coat over its head. By damn, he said. By damn. He coiled the loose rope from off the ground and walked back to the horse and lifted the rope up and over the saddlehorn and untied the coatsleeves from under the horse's jaw and unhooded it and laid the coat across the saddle. The horse lifted its head and blew and looked toward the wolf and he patted it on the neck and spoke to it and got the clamps out of the mochila and pulled the coil of rope up over his shoulder and turned back to the wolf.

Before he could reach her she leapt up and lunged against the trapchain twisting and slinging her head and pawing at her mouth with her free foot. He pulled her down with the rope and held her. A white foam seethed between her teeth. He approached slowly and reached and held her by the stick in her jaws and spoke to her but his voice seemed only to make her shudder. He looked at the leg in the trap. It looked bad. He got hold of the trap and put the clamp over the spring and screwed it down and then did the second spring. When the eye of the spring dropped past the hinges in the plate the jaws fell open and her wrecked forefoot spilled out limp and bloody with the white bone shining. He reached to touch it but she snatched it away and stood. He was amazed at her quickness. She stood squared off at him, her eyes level with his where he knelt, still not meeting his gaze. He slid the coil of rope off his shoulder to the ground and picked up the end of it and wrapped it around his fist in a double grip. Then he let go slack the short end of the rope by which he held her. She tested the injured foot on the ground and drew it up again.

Go on, he said. If you think you can.

She turned and wheeled away. So quick. He hardly had time to get one heel in front of him in the dirt before she hit the end of the rope. She did a cartwheel and landed on her back and jerked him forward onto his elbows. He scrambled up but she was already off in another direction and when she hit the end of the rope again she almost snatched him off the ground. He turned and dug both heels in and took a turn of the rope around his wrist. She had swung toward the horse now and the horse snorted and set off toward the road at a trot with the reins trailing. She ran at the end of the rope in a circle until she passed the cholla that had first caught the trapchain drag and here the rope brought her around until she stood snubbed and gasping among the thorns.

He rose and walked up to her. She squatted and flattened her ears. Slobber swung in white strings from her jaw. He took out his knife and reached and got hold of the stick in her mouth and he spoke to her and stroked her head but she only winced and shivered.

It aint no use to fight it, he told her.

He cut the trailing length of the paloverde off short at the side of her mouth and put the knife away and walked the end of the rope around the cholla till it was free and then led her twisting and shaking her head out onto the open ground. He could not believe how strong she was. He stood spraddlelegged with the rope in both hands across his thighs and turned and scanned the country for some sight of his horse. She would not quit strugglingand he got hold of the rope end again and sat with it doubled in his fistand dug both heels in and let her go. When she hit the end of the rope this time she flew into the air and landed on her back and lay there. He hauled on the rope and dragged her towards him through the dirt.

Get up, he said. You aint hurt.

He walked down and stood over her where she lay panting. He looked at the injured leg. There was a flap of loose skin pushed down around her ankle like a sock and the wound was dirty and stuck with twigs and leaves. He knelt and touched her. Come on, he said. You've done run my horse off so let's go find him.

By the time he'd dragged her out to the road he was all but exhausted. The horse was standing a hundred yards away grazing in the bar ditch. It raised its head and looked at him and bent to graze again. He halfhitched the catchrope to a fencepost and took the last length of cord from his belt and tied the honda to the rope that the noose could not back off loose and then he rose and walked back across the pasture to pick his coat up off the ground and to get the trap.

When he got back she was snubbed up against the fencepost and half strangling where she'd gone back and forth. He dropped the trap and knelt and unhitched the rope from the post and paid the whole length of it back and forth through the wires until he had her free again. She got up and sat in the dusty grass and looked off wildly up the road toward the mountains with the foam seething between her teeth and dripping from the paloverde stick.

You aint got no damn sense, he told her.

He rose and put on his coat and jammed the clamps into his coatpocket and slung the trap over his shoulder by the chain and then dragged her out into the middle of the road and set off with her behind him sliding stifflegged and raking a trail through the dust and gravel.

The horse raised its head to study them, chewing ruminatively. Then it turned and set off down the road.

He stopped and stood looking after it. He turned and looked back at the wolf. In the distance he could hear the chug of the old rancher's Model A and he realized that she had heard it some time ago. He shortened up the rope a couple of reaches and dragged the wolf through the bar ditch and stood by the fence and watched the truck come over the hill and approach in its attendant dust and clatter.

The old man slowed and leaned and peered. The wolf was jerking and twisting and the boy stood behind her and held her with both hands. By the time the truck had pulled abreast of them he was lying on the ground with his legs scissored about her midriff and his arms around her neck. The old man stopped and sat the idling truck and leaned across and rolled down the window. What in the hell, he said. What in the hell.

You reckon you could turn that thing off? the boy said.

That's a damn wolf.

Yessir it is.

What in the hell.

The truck's scarin her.

Scarin her?

Yessir.

Boy what's wrong with you? That thing comes out of that riggin it'll eat you alive.

Yessir.

What are you doin with him?

It's a she.

It's a what?

A she. It's a she.

Hell fire, it dont make a damn he or she. What are you doin with it?

Fixin to take it home.

Home?

Yessir.

Whatever in the contumacious hell for?

Can you not turn that thing off?

It aint all that easy to start again.

Well could I maybe get you to drive down there and catch my horse for me and bring him back. I'd tie her up but she gets all fuzzled up in the fencewire.

What I'd like to do is to try and save you the trouble of bein eat, the old man said. What are you takin it home for?

It's kindly a long storyaEU'.

Well I'd sure like to hear it.

The boy looked down the road where the horse stood grazing. He looked at the old man. Well, he said. My daddy wanted me to come and get him if I caught her but I didnt want to leave her cause they's been some vaqueros takin their dinner over yonder and I figured they'd probably shoot her so I just decided to take her on home with me.

Have you always been crazy?

I dont know. I never was much put to the test before today. How old are you?

Sixteen.

Sixteen.

Yessir.

Well you aint got the sense God give a goose. Did you know that?

You may be right.

How do you expect your horse to tolerate a bunch of nonsense such as this.

If I can get him caught he wont have a whole lot of say about it.

You plan on leadin that thing behind a horse?

Yessir.

How you expect to get her to do that?

She aint got a whole lot of choice either.

The old man sat looking at him. Then he climbed out of the truck and shut the door and adjusted his hat and walked around and stood at the edge of the bar ditch. He had on canvas pants and a blanketlined canvas coat with a corduroy collar and he wore boots with walkingheels and a full beaver John B Stetson hat.

How close can I get, he said.

Close as you want.

He crossed the ditch and came up and stood looking at the wolf. He looked at the boy and he looked at the wolf some more.

She's fixin to have pups.

Yessir.

Damn good thing you caught her.

Yessir.

Can you touch her?

Yessir. You can touch her.

The old man squatted and put his hand on the wolf. The wolf bowed and writhed and he snatched his hand away. Then he touched her again. He looked at the boy. Wolf, he said.

Yessir.

What do you aim to do with her?

I dont know.

I guess you'll collect the bounty. Sell the hide.

Yessir.

She dont much like bein touched, does she?

No sir. Not much.

When we used to bring cattle up the valley from down around Cienega Springs why first night we'd generally hit in about Government Draw and make camp there. And you could hear em all across the valley. Them first warm nights. You'd nearly always hear em in that part of the valley. I aint heard one in years.

She come up from Mexico.

I dont doubt it. Ever other damn thing does.

He rose and looked off down the road to where the horse was grazing. You want my advice, he said, you'll let me fetch you that rifle I see sticking out of the boot yonder and shoot this son of a bitch right between the eyes and be done with it.

If I can just get my horse caught I'll be all right, the boy said.

Well. You suit yourself.

Yessir. I aim to.

The old man shook his head. All right, he said. Wait here and I'll go get him.

I aint goin nowheres, the boy said.

He went back to the truck and got in and drove down to where the horse was standing. When the horse saw the truck coming it crossed through the bar ditch and stood against the fence and the old man got out and walked the horse down along the fence until he could catch the trailing reins and then he led the horse back up the road. The boy sat holding the wolf. It was very quiet. The only sound along the road was the faint dry clop of the horse's hooves in the gravel and the steady chugging of the truck where the old man had left it idling by the roadside.

When he dragged the wolf out to the road the horse backed and stood facing her.

Maybe you better tie the horse, the old man said.

If you'll just hold him a minute I'll be all right.

I aint sure but what I'd about as soon hold the wolf.

The boy paid out enough slack so that the wolf could get to the bar ditch but not enough for her to reach the fence. He dallied the rope to the saddlehorn and turned the wolf loose and she scampered for the ditch on three legs and hit the rope end and flipped endwise and got up and crouched in the ditch and lay waiting. The boy turned and took the reins from the old man and put one knuckle to his hatbrim.

I'm much obliged, he said.

That's all right. It's been a interestin day.

Yessir. Mine aint over.

No it aint. You mind she dont get that mouth loose, you hear? She'll take a chunk out of you you couldnt put in your hat.

Yessir.

He stood in the stirrup and swung up and checked the dally and nudged his hat back and nodded to the old man. I'm much obliged, he said.

When he put the horse forward the wolf came up out of the ditch at the end of the rope with the game foot to her chest and swung into the road and went dragging after the horse stifflegged and rigid as a piece of taxidermy. He stopped and looked back. The old man was standing in the road watching them.

Sir? he said.

Yes.

Maybe you better go on by and get your truck. So you wont have to pass us.

I think that's a good idea.

He walked down and got into the truck and turned and looked back at them. The boy raised his hand. The old man looked like he might be going to call something to him but he didnt and he lifted his hand and turned and pulled away down the road toward Cloverdale.

He went on. Gusts of wind were blowing dust off the top of the road. When he looked back at her she had her windward eye asquint against the blowing grit and she was hobbling along after the horse with her head lowered. He stopped and she came slightly forward to slack the rope and then turned and went down into the bar ditch again. He was about to put the horse forward when she squatted in the ditch and began to make water. When she was done she turned and sniffed at the spot and checked the wind with her nose and then came up into the road and stood with her tail between her hocks and the wind making little furrows in her hair.

The boy sat the horse a long time watching her. Then he got down and dropped the reins and got his canteen and walked around to where she was standing. She backed along the reach of the rope. He slung the canteen over his shoulder and stepped over the rope and held it between his knee and pulled her to him. She twisted and stood but he got hold of the noose and doubled it in his fist and forced her down into the grass by the side of the road and got astraddle of her. It was all he could do to hold her. He slung the canteen around and unscrewed the cap with his teeth. The horse stamped in the road and he spoke to it and then holding the wolf by the stick in her mouth with her head against his knee he began slowly to pour water into the side of her mouth. She lay still. Her eye stopped moving.

Then she began to swallow.

Most of the water ran out on the ground but he continued to trickle it between her teeth along the greenstick bit. When the canteen was empty he let go of the stick and she lay quietly getting her breath. He stood and stepped back but she didnt move. He swung the cap up by its chain and screwed it back onto the canteen and walked back out to the horse and slung the canteen over the mochila and looked back at her. She was standing watching him. He mounted up and nudged the horse forward. When he looked back she was limping along at the end of the rope. When he stopped she stopped. An hour down the road he stopped for a long time. He was at Robertson's crossfence. Ahead an hour's ride lay Cloverdale and the road north. South lay the open country. The yellow grass heeled under the blowing wind and sunlight was running over the country before the moving clouds. The horse shook its head and stamped and stood. Damn all of it, the boy said. Just damn all of it.

He turned the horse and crossed through the ditch and rode up onto the broad plain that stretched away before him south toward the mountains of Mexico.

Midday they crossed through a low pass in the easternmost spur of the Guadalupes and rode out down the open valley. They saw riders on the plain in the distance but the riders rode on. Late afternoon they passed through the last low cones of hills on that volcanic ground and an hour later they came to the last fence in the country.

It was a crossfence running east and west. On the other side was a dirt track. He turned the horse east and followed the fence. There was a cattletrail along the fence but he rode a rope length from it that the wolf not cross under the wires and by and by he came to a ranch house.

He sat the horse on a slight rise of ground and studied the house. He could see no safe place to leave the wolf so he continued on. At the gate he dismounted and unpinned the chain and swung the gate open and led horse and wolf through and closed the gate again and remounted. The wolf was standing bowed up in the road with its hair all wrong like something pulled backwards out of a pipe and when he put the horse forward she came skidding behind with her legs locked. He looked back at her. If I'd been eatin these people's cows, he said, I wouldnt want to come callin neither.

Before he could put the horse forward again there was a great howl from the direction of the house and when he looked three large hounds were coming up the road very low and very fast.

Shit almighty, he said.

He stepped down and snubbed the reins to the top fencewire and snatched the rifle out of the scabbard. Bird's eyes were rolling and he began to stamp about in the road. The wolf stood stock still with her tail up and her hair straight out. The horse turned and backed at the reins, the fencewire bowed. He heard in the melee a staple pop and he suddenly saw as in an evil dream the specter of the horse at full gallop on the plain with the wolf behind at the end of the rope and the dogs in wild pursuit and he snatched the rope from about the saddlehorn just as the reins broke and the horse wheeled and went pounding and he turned with the rifle and the wolf to stand off the dogs suddenly all about him in a bedlam of howling and teeth and whited eyes.

They circled scrabbling in the dirt of the road and he pulled the wolf hard up against his leg and yelled at them and whacked them away with the barrel of the rifle. Two were carrying broken lengths of chain at their collar and the third wore no collar at all. In all that whirling pandemonium he could feel the wolf trembling electrically against him and her heart hammering.

They were working hounds and although they circled and bayed he knew that they would be loath to attack anything a man held in absolute custody even if it was a wolf. He turned with them and caught one of them in the side of the head with the barrel of the rifle.Git, he shouted. Git. By now two men were coming from the house at a trot.

They called the dogs by name and two of the dogs actually stopped and looked back down the road. The third arched its back and came at the wolf with a mincing sidelong step and popped its teeth at her and drew away again and stood howling. One of the men had a dinnernapkin hanging from the neck of his shirt and he was breathing heavily. You Julie, he called. Git. Damnation. Get a stick or somethin, RL. Good God.

The other man unlatched his buckle and whipped his belt out through the loops and began to lay about him with the buckle end. Instantly the dogs were yelping and scurrying. The older man stopped and stood with his hands on his hips catching his breath. He turned to the boy. He saw the napkin in his shirt and pulled it free and wiped his forehead with it and stuck the napkin in his back pocket. You mind tellin me what the hell you're doin? he said.

Tryin to keep these damn dogs off of my wolf.

Dont give me no smart answer.

I aint. I come up on your fence and went to huntin a gate is all. I didnt know all hell was fixin to bust loose.

What the hell did you expect was goin to happen?

I didnt know there was dogs here.

Well hell, you seen the house didnt you?

Yessir.

The man squinted at him. You're Will Parham's boy. Aint you?

Yessir.

What's your name?

Billy Parham.

Well Billy this might sound to you like a ignorant question but what in the hell are you doin with that thing?

I caught it.

Well I reckon you did. It's the one with the stick in its mouth. Where are you started with it?

I was started home.

No you wasnt. You was headed yonway.

I was started home with it when I changed my mind.

What did you change it to?

The boy didnt answer. The dogs were pacing up and down, the hair standing along their backs.

RL, take the dogs on to the house and put em up. Tell Mama I'll be there directly.

He turned to the boy again. How do you aim to get your horse back?

Walk him down, I reckon.

Well it's about two miles to the first cattleguard.

The boy stood holding the wolf. He looked off down the road in the direction the horse had gone.

Will that thing ride in a truck? the man said.

The boy gave him a peculiar look.

Hell, the man said. I want you to listen at me. RL can you take him in the truck to catch his horse?

Yessir. Is his horse hard to catch?

Your horse hard to catch? the man said.

No sir.

He says it aint.

Well unless he just wants to go ridin I reckon I can get his horse for him.

You dont want to ride with that wolf is what it is, the man said.

It aint that I dont want to. It's that I aint goin to.

Well I was fixin to say that since it's liable to jump out of the bed of the truck why dont you take it up front in the cab with you and the boy can ride in the back?

RL had the dogs by their trailing pieces of chain and was fastening the third dog to them with his belt. I got a life sized picture of me ridin up the road with a wolf in the cab of my truck, he said. I can just see it plain as day.

The man stood looking at the wolf. He reached to adjust his hat but he had no hat on so he scratched his head. He looked at the boy. And here I thought I knowed all the lunatics in this valley, he said. Country crowdin up the way it is. You caint hardly keep up with your own neighbors even. Have you had your supper?

No sir.

Well come on to the house.

What do you want me to do with her?

Her?

This here wolf.

Well I guess it'll just have to lay around the kitchen till we get done eatin.

Lay around the kitchen?

It's a joke, son. Hell fire. You brought that thing in the house you could hear my wife in Albuquerque with the wires down.

I dont want to leave her outside. Somethin's liable to jump her.

I know that. Just come on. I wouldnt leave her out for nobody to see noways. They'd come and get me with a butterfly net.

They put the wolf in the smokehouse and left her and walked back to the kitchen. The man looked at the rifle the boy was carrying but he didnt say anything. When they got to the kitchen door the boy stood the rifle against the side of the house and the man held the door for him and they went in.

The woman had put the supper above the oven to warm and she brought everything out again and set a plate for the boy. Outside they heard RL start the truck. They passed the dishes, bowls of mashed potatoes and pinto beans and a platter of fried steaks. When he had his plate loaded with about all it could hold he looked up at the man. The man nodded at his plate.

We done blessed the food once, he said. So unless you got some personal business to conduct just tuck on in.

Yessir.

They began to eat.

Mama, the man said, see if you can get him to tell us where it is he's headed with that lobo.

If he dont want to say he dont have to, the woman said.

I'm talon her to Mexico.

The man reached for the butter. Well, he said. That seems like a good idea.

I'm goin to take her down there and turn her loose.

The man nodded. Turn her loose, he said.

Yessir.

She's got some pups somewheres, aint she?

No sir. Not yet she dont.

You sure about that?

Yessir. She's fixin to have some.

What have you got against the Mexicans?

I dont have nothin against em.

You just figured they might could use another wolf or two. The boy cut a piece from his steak and forked it up. The man watched him.

How are they fixed for rattlesnakes down there do you reckon?

I aint talon her to give to nobody. I'm just talon her down there and turnin her loose. It's where she come from.

The man troweled butter very methodically along the edge of a biscuit with his knife. He put the top back on the biscuit and looked at the boy.

You a very peculiar kid, he said. Did you know that?

No sir. I was always just like everbody else far as I know.

Well you aint.

Yessir.

Tell me this. You aint plannin on just dumpin that thing across the line are you? Cause if you are I'm goin to follow you out there with a rifle.

I was goin to take her back to the mountains.

Take her back to the mountains, the man said. He looked at the biscuit speculatively and then bit slowly into it.

Where all is your family from? the woman said.

We're up at the Charcas.

She means before that, the man said.

We come out of Grant County. And De Baca fore that.

The man nodded.

We been down here a long time.

What's a long time?

Goin on ten years.

Ten years, the man said. Time just flies, dont it?

Go on and eat your supper, the woman said. Dont pay no attention to him.

They ate. After a while the truck pulled into the yard and passed the house and the woman got up from the table and went to get RL's plate from the warmer over the stove.

When they walked out after supper it was evening and growing cold and the sun was low over the mountains to the west. Bird stood in the yard tied by a rope halter to the gate and the bridle and reins were hung over the saddlehorn. The woman stood in the kitchen door and watched them cross toward the smokehouse.

Let's be careful about openin this door, the man said. If that thing has come out of that muzzletie you'll wish you was in a bathtub with a alligator.

Yessir, the boy said.

The man lifted the open lock from the haspstaple and the boy pushed the door in carefully. She was standing, backed into the corner. There was no window in the little adobe building and she blinked when the light fell across her.

She's all right, the boy said.

He pushed the door open.

That poor thing, the woman said.

The rancher turned patiently. Jane Ellen, he said, what are you doin out here?

That leg looks awful. I'm goin to get Jaime.

You're goin to what?

Just wait here.

She turned and set off across the yard. Half way she pulled off the coat she'd thrown over her shoulders and put it on. The man leaned in the door and shook his head.

Where was she goin? the boy said.

More craziness, the man said. We could be in a epidemic.

He stood in the doorway and rolled a smoke while the boy sat holding the wolf by the rope.

You dont use these do you? the man said.

No sir.

That's good. Dont start.

He smoked. He looked at the boy. What would you take for her cash money, he said.

She aint for sale.

What would you take if she was?

I wouldnt. Cause she aint.

When the woman came back she had with her an old Mexican who carried a small green tin deedbox under his arm. He greeted the rancher and nudged his hat and entered the smokehouse with the woman behind him. The woman was carrying a bundle of clean sheeting. The Mexican nodded to the boy and touched his hat again and knelt in front of the wolf and looked at it.

Puede detenerla? he said.

Si, said the boy.

Necesitas mas luz? the woman said.

Si, said the Mexican.

The man stepped out into the yard and dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. They moved the wolf toward the door and the boy held her while the Mexican took her by the elbow and studied the damaged foreleg. The woman set the tin box on the floor and opened it and took out a bottle of witchaEU'hazel and doped a piece of the sheeting with it. She handed it to the Mexican and he took it and looked at the boy.

Estas listo, joven?

Listo.

He renewed his grip on the wolf and wrapped his legs around her. The Mexican took hold of the wolf's foreleg and began to clean the wound.

She let out a strangled yelp and reared twisting in the boy's arms and snatched her foot out of the Mexican's grip.

Otra vez, the Mexican said.

They began again.

On the second attempt she slung the boy about the room and the Mexican stepped back quickly. The woman had already backed away. The wolf was standing with the slobber seething in and out between her teeth and the boy was lying on the floor beneath her hanging on to her neck. The rancher out in the yard had started to roll another cigarette but now he put the sack back in his shirtpocket and adjusted his hat.

Hang on a minute, he said. Damnation. Just hold it a minute.

He climbed through the door and reached and got hold of the wolf by the rope and twisted the rope in his fist.

People hear about me givin first aid to a damn wolf I wont be able to live in this county, he said. All right. Do your damndest. Andale.

They finished their surgery in the last light of the sun. The Mexican had pulled the loose flap of skin into place and he sat patiently sewing it with a small curved needle clamped in a hemostat and when he was done he daubed it with Corona Salve and wrapped it in sheeting and tied it. RL had come out and stood watching them and picking his teeth.

Did you give her some water? the woman said.

Yes mam. It's kindly hard for her to drink.

I guess if you took that thing off of her she'd bite.

The rancher stepped over the wolf and out into the yard. Bite, he said. Good God almighty.

When he rode out thirty minutes later it was all but dark. He'd given the trap to the rancher to keep for him and he had a huge lunch wrapped in a cloth packed away in the mochila along with the rest of the sheeting and the jar of Corona Salve and he had an old Saltillo blanket rolled and tied behind the saddle. Someone had spliced new leather into the broken bridlereins and the wolf was wearing a harnessleather dogcollar with a brass plate that had the rancher's name and RFD number and Cloverdale NM stamped into it. The rancher walked out to the gate with him and undid the gatelatch and swung it open and the boy led the horse through with the wolf behind and mounted up.

You take care, son, the man said.

Yessir. I will. Thank you.

I thought about keepin you here. Send for your daddy.

Yessir. I know you did.

He may want to whip me over it.

No he wont.

Well. Watch out for the banditos.

Yessir. I will. I thank you and the missus.

The man nodded. The boy raised one hand and reined the horse about and set out across the darkening land with the wolf hobbling behind. The man stood at the gate watching after him. All to the south was the dark of the mountains where they rode and he could not skylight them there and soon they were swallowed up and lost horse and rider in the oncoming night. The last thing he saw on that windblown waste was the white bandaged leg of the wolf moving random and staccato like some pale djinn out there antic in the growing cold and dark. Then it too vanished and he closed the gate and turned toward the house.

THEY CROSSED in that deep twilight a broad volcanic plain bounded within the rim of hills. The hills were a deep blue in the blue dusk and the round feet of the pony clopped flatly on the gravel of the desert floor. The night was falling down from the east and the darkness that passed over them came in a sudden breath of cold and stillness and passed on. As if the darkness had a soul itself that was the sun's assassin hurrying to the west as once men did believe, as they may believe again. They rode up off the plain in the final dying light man and wolf and horse over a terraceland of low hills much eroded by the wind and they crossed through a fenceline or crossed where a fenceline once had been, the wires long down and rolled and carried off and the little naked mesquite posts wandering singlefile away into the night like an enfilade of bent and twisted pensioners. They rode through the pass in the dark and there he sat the horse and watched lightning to the south far over the plains of Mexico. The wind was thrashing softly through the trees in the pass and in the wind were spits of sleet. He made his camp in the lee of an arroyo south of the pass and gathered wood and made a fire and gave the wolf all the water she would drink. Then he tied her to the washedout elbow of a cottonwood and walked back and unsaddled and hobbled the horse. He unrolled the blanket and threw it over his shoulders and took the mochila and went and sat before the fire. The wolf sat on her haunches below him in the draw and watched him with her intractable eyes so red in the firelight. From time to time she would bend to try the bindings on her leg with her sideteeth but she could not grip them for the stick in her jaws.

He took a sandwich of steak and lightbread from the mochila and unwrapped it and sat eating. The little fire sawed about in the wind and the fine sleet fell slant upon them out of the darkness and hissed in the coals. He ate and watched the wolf. She pricked her ears and turned and looked out at the night but whatever was passing passed and after a while she stood and looked bleakly at the ground that was not of her choosing and circled three times and lay down facing the fire with her tail over her nose.

He woke all night with the cold. He'd rise and mend back the fire and she was always watching him. When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood's alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one.

The last few hours before dawn he did sleep, cold or no. He rose in the gray light and pulled the blanket about him and knelt and tried to blow life into the dead ashes of the fire. He walked out to where he could watch the east for the sunrise. A mottled scud of clouds lay across the neutral desert sky. The wind had abated and the dawn was soundless.

When he approached the wolf holding the canteen she did not bridle or arch her back at him. He touched her and she edged away. He held her by the collar and pushed her down and sat trickling the water between her teeth while her tongue worked and her gullet jerked and the cold slant eye watched his hand. He held his hand under her jaw at the far side to save the water running out on the ground and she drank the canteen dry. He sat stroking her. Then he reached down and felt her belly. She struggled and her eye rolled wildly. He spoke to her softly. He put the flat of his hand between her warm and naked teats. He held it there for a long time. Then he felt something move.

When he set out across the valley to the south the grass was golden in the morning sun. Antelope were grazing on the plain a half mile to the east. He looked back to see if she had taken notice of them but she had not. She limped along behind the horse steadfast and doglike and in this fashion they crossed sometime near noon the international boundary line into Mexico, State of Sonora, undifferentiated in its terrain from the country they quit and yet wholly alien and wholly strange. He sat the horse and looked out over the red hills. To the east he could see one of the concrete obelisks that stood for a boundary marker. In that desert waste it had the look of some monument to a lost expedition.

Two hours later they'd left the valley and begun to climb through the low hills. Sparse grass and ocotillo. A few thin cattle trotted off before them. By and by they struck the Cajon Bonita which was the main trail south through the mountains and by the side of this track an hour later they came upon a small rancho.

He sat the horse and pulled the wolf close to him by the rope and he called out and waited to see if dogs would show but none did. He rode slowly. There were three crumbling adobe houses and a man dressed in rags stood in the doorway of one of them. The place had the look of an old waystation fallen into ruin. He rode forward and halted in front of the man and sat with his hands crossed at the wrists and resting on the pommel of his saddle.

Adonde va? the man said.

A las montanas.

The man nodded. He wiped his nose with his sleeve and turned and looked toward the mountains so spoken. As if he had not properly considered them before. He looked at the boy and at the horse and at the wolf and at the boy again.

Es cazador usted?

Si.

Bueno, said the man. Bueno.

The day was cold for all that the sun shone and yet the man was half naked nor was there any smoke coming from the buildings. He looked at the wolf.

Es buena cazadora su perm?

The boy looked at the wolf. Si, he said. Mejor no hay.

Es feroz?

A veces.

Bueno, said the man. Bueno. He asked the boy if he had tobacco, if he had coffee, if he had meat. The boy had none of these things and the man seemed to accept the inevitable truth of it. He stood leaning in the doorway, looking at the ground. After a while the boy realized that he was discussing something with himself.

Bueno, the boy said. Hasta luego.

The man flung up one arm. His rags flapped about him. Andale, he said.

He rode on. When he looked back the man was still in the doorway. He was looking out back down the trail as if perhaps to see who might be coming next.

By late afternoon when he would dismount and advance toward her with the canteen she would dip slowly to the ground like a circus animal and roll onto her side waiting. The yellow eye watching, the ear shifting with little movements within the arc of its rotation. He didnt know how much of the water she was getting or how much she needed. He sat trickling the water between her teeth and looking into her eye. He touched the pleated corner of her mouth. He studied the veined and velvet grotto into which the audible world poured. He began to talk to her. The horse raised its head from its trailside grazing and looked back at him.

They rode on. The country was high rolling desert and the trail ran the crests of the ridges and although it seemed traveled he saw no one. On the slopes were acacia, scrub oak. Open parks of juniper. In the evening a rabbit appeared in the middle of the trail a hundred feet in front of him and he reined the horse up and put two fingers to his teeth and whistled and the rabbit froze and he stepped down and shucked the rifle backward out of the scabbard and cocked it all in a single movement and raised the rifle and fired.

The horse shied wildly and he snatched the reins out of the air and hauled it around and got it calmed. The wolf had vanished into the trailside brush. He held the rifle at his waist and levered the spent shell out of the chamber and caught it and put it in his pocket and levered a fresh shell in and let down the hammer with his thumb and undallied the rope and let the reins drop and walked back to see about the wolf.

She was trembling in the weeds just short of a small twisted juniper where she'd sought to hide. At his approach she sprang against the rope and stood thrashing. He stood the rifle against a tree and walked her down along the rope and held her and talked to her but he could not calm her and she did not stop trembling. After a while he took the rifle and went back out to the horse and shoved the rifle into the scabbard and walked back up the trail to look for the rabbit.

There was a long furrow down the center of the track that the rifle slug had plowed and the rabbit had been slung up into the bushes where it lay with its guts hanging in gray loops. It was all but in two pieces and he pooled it up all warm and downy in his hands with the head lolling and carried it out through the woods till he could find a windfall tree. There he kicked away the loose pinebark with the heel of his boot and brushed and blew it clean and laid the rabbit across the wood and took out his knife and straddling the log he skinned the rabbit out and gutted it and cut off the head and feet. He diced up the liver and heart on the log with his knife and sat looking at it. It didnt look much. He wiped his hand in the dead grass and took the rabbit and began to fillet strips from the back and hindquarters and to dice them as well until what he did have made a handful and then he wrapped them in the skin of the rabbit and folded away the knife.

He walked back and spiked the dead rabbit on a broken pine limb and went to where the wolf lay crouched. He squatted and held his hand out to her but she backed away at the end of the rope. He took a small piece of the rabbit's liver and held it to her. She sniffed it delicately. He watched her eyes and the speculation in them. He watched the leather nostrils. She turned her head to one side and when he offered the piece again she tried to back away.

Maybe you just aint hungry enough yet, he said. But you're fixin to get that way.

He made camp that night in a little swale under the windward side of the ridge and he skewered the rabbit on a paloverde pole and set it to broil in front of the fire before he even went to see about the horse and the wolf. When he approached her she stood and the first thing he saw was that the wrapping was gone from her leg. Then he saw that the stick between her teeth was gone. Then he saw that the cord with which her mouth was tied was gone.

She stood square to him with the hackles standing along her back. The catchrope tied to her collar and looped along the ground was frayed and wet where she'd been chewing it.

He stopped and stood dead still. He backed along the rope until he reached the horse and then untied the rope from the saddlehorn. He didnt take his eyes from her.

Holding the free end of the rope he began to circle the wolf. She turned in place watching him. He put a small pine tree between them. He tried to move in a casual manner but he felt all his motives naked to her. He handed the rope in a loop over the top of a high limb and caught it again and then backed away and pulled the rope taut. The slack came uncoiled out of the weeds and pine needles and tugged at her collar. She lowered her head and followed.

When she was standing under the limb he pulled the rope until her forefeet were all but off the ground and then slacked it just slightly and tied the rope off and stood looking at her. She bared her teeth at him and turned and tried to move away but she could not. She seemed to be at odds what to do. After a while she raised her injured leg and began to lick it.

He went back to the fire and piled on all the wood he'd collected. Then he got the canteen and he took one of the last of the sandwiches from the mochila and shucked it out of its wrapper and carried the canteen and the paper back to the wolf.

She watched while he scooped out a hole in the soft turf and she watched while he beat it smooth with the back of his bootheel. Then he spread the paper in the depression and weighed it with a rock and poured it full from the canteen.

He untied the rope and paid out slack as he backed away.

She stood watching him. He stepped back a few more paces and squatted on the ground holding the rope. She looked at the fire and she looked at him. She sat on her haunches and licked her sore chops. He rose and went to the hole and poured in more water and splashed it about. Then he screwed the cap back on the canteen and stood it beside the waterhole and backed away again and sat. They watched each other. It was almost dark. She stood and tested the air with small nudging motions of her nose. Then she began to come forward.

When she reached the water she sniffed at it tentatively and raised her head to look at him. She looked at the fire again and at the shape of the horse beyond the fire. Her eyes glowed in the light. She lowered her nose to sniff at the water. Her eyes did not leave him or cease to burn and as she lowered her head to drink the reflection of her eyes came up in the dark water like some other self of wolf that did inhere in the earth or wait in every secret place even to such false waterholes as this that the wolf would be always corroborate to herself and never wholly abandoned in the world.

He squatted there watching her with the rope in both hands. Like a man entrusted with the keeping of something which he hardly knew the use of. When she'd drunk the hole dry she licked her mouth and looked at him and then leaned and sniffed at the canteen. The canteen fell over and she jerked away from it and then backed off to her site under the limb and sat again and began to lick her foot again.

He pulled the rope snug overhead and tied it and then walked back to the fire. He turned the rabbit on its spit and got the rabbitskin with the diced pieces and walked back and wafted it in front of her. Then he spread the skin open on the ground and untied and slacked the rope and backed away with it.

He watched her.

She leaned and sniffed the air.

It's rabbit, he said. I guess you aint ever eat any rabbit before.

He waited to see if she would come forward but she would not. He took the wind's direction by the smoke from the fire and gathered up the skin and carried it around upwind of her and held it out again in one hand while he held the rope with the other. He laid the skin down and backed away but still she made no move.

He walked around and tied off the rope as before and went back to the fire. The rabbit on the spit was half burnt and half raw and he sat and ate it and then with his knife constructed a muzzle out of his belt and out of two long pieces of leather that he cut from the fender of the saddle. He fitted the pieces with slits and latigos, studying the wolf from time to time where she lay curled under the tree with the rope ascending vertically in the firelight.

I reckon you think you'll wait till I'm asleep and then you can see about gettin loose, he said.

She raised her head and looked at him.

Yeah, he said. I'm talkin to you.

When he had the muzzle done he turned it in his hand and tried the buckle. It looked pretty good. He folded the knife away and stuffed the muzzle into his back pocket and got the last lengths of pigginstring from out of the mochila and hung them through his beltloop and took the horse's hobbles and put them in his other back pocket. Then he walked over to where the rope was tied. The wolf rose and stood waiting.

He pulled her slowly up by her collar. She pawed at the rope and tried to get at it with her teeth. He spoke to her and tried to calm her but there seemed no point in it so he just hauled her up and halfhitched the rope with her standing upright and half garrotted and her head almost touching the limb overhead. Then he dropped to the ground and crawled to where she stood twisting and tied her back feet together with one of the hobbles and looped the free end of the catchrope around the hobble and tied it and rolled away from under her and stood and backed away. He pulled the halfhitch free and paying out slack to the collar end of the rope with one hand he began to pull her towards him by the legs with the other. If anybody was to see this, he told her, they'd come and carry me off to the loonybin in a rig just like it.

When he had her stretched out he took out the other hobble and tied her back legs to the little jackpine he'd been using for a snubbingpost and then freed the end of the catchrope from her legs and looped up the slack and slung it over his shoulder. When she felt the rope go slack she wrenched herself up and began to snap at the ropes on her legs. He hauled her down again and then walked in a wide swath around her till he could reach the limb the rope was looped over. He paid the free end of the rope back over the limb and stepped away and stretched her out flat on the ground.

I know you think I'm tryin to kill you, he said. But I aint.

He tied the rope off to another of the little jackpines and took the pigginstring from his beltloop and approached her where she lay taut and quivering and gasping between the ropes. He made a noose of the cord and tried to drop it over her nose. On the second try she grabbed it in her mouth. He stood over her, waiting for her to turn loose of it. The yellow eyes watched him.

Turn loose, he said.

He got hold of the cord and pulled at it.

All right, he said. Dont get stupid on me now. He wasnt talking to the wolf. She gets hold of you, he said, they wont even find a beltbuckle.

When she would not turn loose of the pigginstring he got hold of the rope to her collar and pulled on it until he'd cut off her air. Then he reached and got the pigginstring and still holding the rope taut he slung it loose and slipped it over her mouth and pulled her mouth shut and made three passes with the cord and halfhitched it and let go the rope again. He sat back. The fire was dying and with it the light. All right, he said. Dont quit now. Hell, you still got ten fingers.

He pulled the muzzle from his pocket and fitted it over her nose. It fit pretty well. The nosepiece was too loose and he took it off again and took out his knife and made new slits and redid the latigos and refitted it and then buckled it behind her ears. Then he buckled it a notch tighter. He fastened the two trailing jesses to her collar and then he reached through the side of the muzzle with the knife and cut the pigginstring he'd tied her mouth with.

The first thing she did was to suck in a long drink of air. Then she tried to bite the leather. But he'd used the saddle leather around her nose in a broad bosal and she couldnt get it between her teeth for the stiffness of it. He untied her back legs and stepped away. She got up and began to pitch and toss at the end of the rope. He squatted in the pine needles watching her. When she finally quit he rose and untied the rope and led her to the fire.

He thought she'd be terrifed of it but she was not. He hitched the rope midlength to the horn of the saddle where it stood drying before the fire and he got out the sheeting and the jar of salve and sat astraddle of her and cleaned and dressed the leg and rewrapped it. He thought she'd try to bite him even with the muzzle on but she did not. When he was done he let her up and she rose and walked to the end of the rope and sniffed at the wrapping and lay down watching him.

He slept with the saddle for a pillow. Twice in the night he woke with the saddle moving under his head and he reached and snatched at the rope and spoke to her. He lay with his feet to the fire so that if she circled in the night and dragged the rope through the fire she'd have to drag it over him and so wake him. He already knew that she was smarter than any dog but he didnt know how much smarter. Coyotes were yapping in the hills below them and he turned to see if she paid any mind to them but she appeared to be asleep. Yet as soon as his glance fell on her she opened her eyes. He looked away. He waited and then tried it again with more stealth. The eyes opened as before.

He nodded and slept and the fire drew down to coals and he woke in the cold to find the wolf watching him. When he woke again the moon was down and the fire was all but out. It was bitter cold. The stars stood fixed in their places like stampings in a tin lantern. He got up and fed wood to the fire and coaxed back the flame with his hat. The coyotes had hushed and the night was all darkness and silence. He'd had a dream and in the dream a messenger had come in off the plains from the south with something writ upon a ledgerscrap but he could not read it. He looked at the messenger but that face was obscured in shadow and featureless and he knew that the messenger was messenger alone and could tell him nothing of the news he bore.

In the morning he rose and built back the fire and squatted shivering before it wrapped in the blanket. He ate the last sandwich the rancher's wife had made for him and then he got the rabbitskin from the mochila and walked over to where the wolf was lying. She stood at his approach. He unwrapped the stiffening skin and held it out to her. She sniffed at it and glanced at him and circled two steps and stood looking at it with her ears slightly forward.

I believe you'd almost eat, he said.

He walked off and found a broken section of limb and cut it to length and with his knife carved one end of it into a thin spatula. Then he walked back and sat on the ground and got hold of the wolf by the collar and pulled her down against his leg and held her till she quit struggling. He spread the skin on the ground and scooped up a bit of the dark heartmeat and held that feral head to him and passed the spatula back and forth for her to smell. Then cupping her long nose in his hand he raised with his thumb the strange black leather fold of her upper lip. She opened her mouth and when she did he slid the spatula through the leather straps and between her teeth and turned it over and wiped it clean on her tongue and withdrew it.

He thought she would very likely bite the spatula but she didnt. She closed her mouth. He saw her tongue move. Her gullet jerk. When she opened her mouth again she had swallowed the meat.

When she had eaten all of the small handful of the rabbit he had for her he pitched away the skin and wiped the stick in the grass and put it in his pocket and walked out to where he'd last seen the horse. The horse stood half way down the mountain in a swale of winter grass and he walked it down with the bridle in his hand and led it back up to the camp and saddled it and tied the wolfs rope to the saddlehorn and mounted up and rode out south along the Cajon Bonita deeper into the mountains with the wolf at heel.

He rode all day. The wolf seemed to take an interest in the country and she would raise her head and look out over the rolling meadowlands of yellow grass and standing lechugilla that fell away to the west of the saddleridges. He'd stop at the crest of a rise to let the horse blow and she would skulk into the trailside weeds and squat and make water and turn to sniff at the spot. The first pilgrims they encountered trekking north with their loaded burros halted a hundred yards out and gave the trail at his approach. They greeted him sparingly. The wolf crouched and pressed herself into the grass with her hackles up. Then the first of the burros caught her scent.

The animal's nostrils opened like two holes in wet mud and its eyes went blind white. It flattened its ears back and bowed up and shot out both hind heels and stove a leg from under the burro behind it. This animal fell down screaming beside the trail and in the space of a heartbeat all bedlam was loosed. The burros snapped their leads on every side and went rocketing off down the side of the mountain like enormous partridges with the arrieros after them and the animals careening off the sides of the trees and falling and rolling and righting again and running and the rude wood kiacks breaking up and the panniers breaking open and trailing down the mountainside behind them the baled pelts and hides and blankets and chattelgoods they contained.

He reined in the horse where it stamped and skittered and reached and untied the rope from the saddlehorn. The wolf had run off down the mountain and wrapped herself around a tree and he rode down to get her. By the time he came back dragging her behind him stifflegged and half crazed the trail was deserted save for an old woman and a young girl who sat in the grass by the trailside passing tobacco and cut cornhusks between them and rolling cigarettes. The girl was a year or two younger than he was and she lit her cigarette with an esclarajo and passed it to the old woman and blew smoke and tossed her head and stared at him boldly.

He coiled the rope and dismounted and dropped the reins and hung the coiled rope over the saddlehorn and touched the brim of his hat with two fingers.

Buenos dias, he said.

They nodded, the older woman spoke his greeting back. The girl watched him. He walked the wolf down along the rope to where it crouched in the weeds and knelt and talked to it and led it by the collar back out into the trail.

Es Americano, the woman said.

Si.

She sucked fiercely on the cigarette and squinted at him through the smoke.

Es feroz la perm, no?

Bastante.

They wore homemade dresses and huaraches cobbled up out of leather scraps and rawhide. The woman had on a black shawl or rebozo about her shoulders but the girl was all but naked in the thin cotton dress. Their skin was dark like an Indian's and their eyes coal black and they smoked the way poor people eat which is a form of prayer.

Es una loba, he said.

Como? said the woman.

Es una loba.

The woman looked at the wolf. The girl looked at the wolf and at the woman.

De veras? said the woman.

Si.

The girl looked as if she might be about to rise and back away but the woman laughed at her and told her that the caballero was only having a joke with them. She put the cigarette in the corner of her mouth and called to the wolf. She patted the ground for it to come.

Que paso con la pata? she said.

He shrugged. He said that she had caught it in a trap. Far below them on the side of the mountain they could hear the cries of the arrieros.

She offered their tobacco but the boy thanked her no. She shrugged. He said that he was sorry about the burros but the old woman said that the arrieros were inexperienced and had little control over their animals anyway. She said that the revolution had killed off all the real men in the country and left only the tontos. She said moreover that fools beget their own kind and here was the proof of it and that as only foolish women would have aught to do with them their progeny were twice doomed. She sucked again on the cigarette which was now little more than ash and let it fall to the ground and squinted at him.

Me entiende? she said.

Si, claro.

She studied the wolf. She looked at him again. The eve half closed was probably from some injury but it lent her the air of one demanding candor. Va a parir, she said.

Si.

Como la jovencita.

He looked at the girl. She didnt look pregnant. She had turned her back on them and sat smoking and looking out over the country where there was nothing to be seen although a few faint cries still drifted up the slope.

Es su hija? he said.

She shook her head. She said that the girl was the wife of her son. She said that they were married but that they had no money to pay the priest so they were not married by the priest.

Los sacerdotes son ladrones, the girl said. It was the first she had spoken. The woman nodded her head at the girl and rolled her eyes. Una revolucionaria, she said. Soldadera. Los que no pueden recordar la sangre de la guerra son siempre los mas ardientes para la lucha.

He said that he had to go. She paid no mind. She said that when she was a child she'd seen a priest shot in the village of Ascencion. They'd stood him against the wall of his own church and shot him with rifles and gone away. When they were gone the women of the village came forward and knelt and lifted up the priest but the priest was dead or dying and some of the women dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood of the priest and blessed themselves with the blood as if it were the blood of Christ. She said that when young people see priests shot in the streets it changes their view of religion. She said that the young nowadays cared nothing for religion or priest or family or country or God. She said that she thought the land was under a curse and asked him for his opinion but he said he knew little of the country.

Una maldicion, she said. Es cierto.

All sound of the arrieros had died away on the slopes below them. Only the wind blew. The girl finished her cigarette and rose and dropped it in the trail and stomped on it with her huarache and twisted it into the dirt as if it contained some malevolent life. The wind blew her hair and it blew her thin dress against her. She looked at the boy. She said the old woman was always talking about curses and dead priests and that she was half crazy and to pay her no mind.

Sabemos to que sabemos, the old woman said.

Si, said the girl. Lo que es nada.

The old woman held out one hand palm up in the direction of the girl. As if to offer her in evidence of all that she claimed. She invited him to observe the one who knew. The girl tossed her head. She said that at least she knew who was the father of her child. The woman threw her hand up. Ay ay, she said.

The boy held the wolf against his leg by the rope. He said that he had to go.

The old woman jutted her chin at the wolf. She said that the wolf's time was very near at hand.

Si. De acuerdo.

Debe guitar el bowl, said the girl.

The woman looked at the girl. The girl said that if the perra should have her puppies in the night she should lick them. She said that he should not leave her muzzled at night because who could say how near her time was? She said that she would have to lick the pups. She said that all the world knew this.

Es verdad, the woman said.

The boy touched his hat. He wished them a good day.

Es tan feroz la perm? the girl said.

He said that she was. He said that she could not be trusted. She said that she would like to have a little dog from such a bitch because it would grow up to be a watchdog and it would bite everyone who came around. Todos que vengas alrededor, she said. She made a sweep with her hand that took in the pines and the wind in the pines and the vanished arrieros and the woman watching her out of the dark rebozo. She said that such a dog would bark in the night if there were thieves about or anyone at all who was not wanted.

Ay ay, said the woman, rolling her eyes.

He said that he had to go. The woman told him to go with God and the jovencita just told him to go if he wished and he walked out the trail with the wolf and caught his horse and tied the rope to the saddlehorn and mounted up. When he looked back the girl was sitting beside the woman. They werent talking but just sitting side by side, waiting for the arrieros to return. He rode out along the ridge to the first turning in the trail and looked back again but they had not moved or changed in attitude and they seemed at that distance much subdued. As if his departure had wrested something from them.

The country itself was changeless. He rode on and the high mountains to the southwest seemed no nearer at the day's end than had they been some image in the eye itself. Toward evening riding up through a stand of dwarf oak he flushed a flock of turkeys.

They'd been feeding in the wood below him and they sailed out over a wash and disappeared into the trees on the far side.

He sat the horse and marked them with his eye. Then he rode down off the trail and stepped down and tied the horse and unhitched the rope and tied the wolf to a tree and took the rifleand jacked forward the lever to see that there was a shell chambered and then set off across the little valley with one eye on the sun where it was already backlighting the trees at the head of the draw to the west.

The turkeys were on the ground in a glade, passing back and forth among the slatted treetrunks in the deepening dusk like gallery birds in a carnival booth. He squatted and got his breath and began to advance slowly upon them. When he was still the better part of a hundred yards above them one of the hens stepped clear of the banded shadows and stood in the open and paused and craned her neck and stepped again. He cocked the rifle and took a grip on the trunk of a small ashtree and laid the barrel over his foreknuckle and wedged it against the side of the tree with the back of his thumb and took a sight on the bird. He allowed for drop and he allowed for the way the light lay sidelong in the riflesights and fired.

The heavy rifle bucked and the echo of the shot went caroming out over the country. The turkey lay flopping and twisting on the ground. The other birds came boring out of the trees in every direction, some of them passing almost directly over him. He stood and ran toward the bird that was down.

There was blood everywhere in the leaves. She was lying on her side and her legs were running in the leaves and her neck was doubled back oddly. He grabbed her and pressed her to the ground and held her. The shot had broken her neck low and torn open the shoulder of one wing and he saw that he had very nearly missed her altogether.

He and the wolf between them ate the whole bird and then they sat by the fire side by side. The wolf snubbed up close on the rope and starting and quivering at every small eruption among the coals. When he touched her her skin ran and quivered under his hand like a horse's. He talked to her about his life but it didnt seem to rest her fears. After a while he sang to her.

In the morning riding out he came upon a party of mounted men, the first such he'd seen in the country. They were five in number and they rode good horses and all of them were armed. They reined up in the trail before him and hailed him in a manner half amused while their eyes took inventory of everything about him.Clothes, boots, hat. Horse and rifle. The mutilated saddle. Lastly they studied the wolf. Who'd gone to try to hide herself in the thin highcountry bracken a few feet off the trail.

Que tienes alla, joven? they called.

He sat with his hands crossed on the pommel of his saddle. He leaned and spat. He studied them from under the brim of his hat. One of them had put his horse forward the better to see the wolf but the horse balked and did not want to go and he leaned forward and slapped its cheek and hauled it about roughly with the reins. The wolf lay flat on the ground with her ears back at the end of the rope.

Cuanto quieres por to lobo? the man said.

He gathered the small slack out of the rope and rehitched it.

No puedo venderlo, he said.

Por que no?

He studied the horseman. No es mia, he said.

No? De quien es?

He looked at the wolf where she lay quivering. He looked at the blue mountains to the south. He said that the wolf had been entrusted into his care but that it was not his wolf and he could not sell it.

The man sat holding the reins loosely in one hand, the other hand on his thigh. He turned his head and spat without taking his eyes from the boy.

De quien es? he said again.

The boy looked at him and at the waiting riders in the trail. He said that the wolf was the property of a great hacendado and that it had been put in his care that no harm come to it.

Y este hacendado, said the rider, el vive en la colonia Morales?

The boy said that he did indeed live there and in other places as well. The man studied him for a long time. Then he put his horse forward and the other riders put their horses forward with him. As if they were joined together by some unseen cord or unseen principle. They rode past. They rode according to seniority and the last to pass was much the youngest and as he passed he looked at the boy and put his forefinger to the brim of his hat. Suerte, muchacho, he said. Then all rode on and none looked back.

It was cold in the mountains and there was yet snow in the high passes and snow on the Sierra de la Cabellera. Above the Cabellera Canyon snow lay in the trail for the better part of a mile. The snow in the trail was new snow and he was surprised to see the number of travelers who had been upon it and it occurred to him to wonder if there might not be in that country pilgrims so fearful as to quit the track entirely at the approach of any horseman. He studied the ground more closely. Tracks of men and burros. Tracks of women. A few bootprints but mostly the flat heelless prints of huaraches leaving the improbable imprint of tiretracks in that high wilderness. He saw the tracks of children and the tracks of the horses of the riders he had passed that morning. He saw the tracks of people barefoot in the snow. He rode on and as he rode he watched the wolf to see if she might betray the proximity of any travelers crouched in hiding by the wayside but she only trotted on behind the horse swinging her nose to test the air and leaving her own big tracks in the snow for the serranos to wonder at themselves.

They camped that night in the floor of a stone ravine and he led the wolf to a pool of standing water in the rocks below them and held the rope while she stepped down into the water and lowered her mouth into the pool to drink. She raised her head and he could see her gullet moving and the water running from her jaws. He sat in the rocks and held the rope and watched her. The water was black among the rocks in the deepening blue dusk and her breath smoked over the surface of it. She lowered and raised her head, drinking in the manner of birds.

For his supper he had a couple of tortillas with beans wrapped in them given to him by the sole other party he'd passed that day. They were Mennonites making their way north with a young girl to seek medical help. They looked like rustics out of a painting from the century before and they spoke little. They did not say what the girl's trouble was. The tortillas were leathery and the beans were beginning to sour but he ate them. The wolf watched. It aint nothin a wolf would eat, he told her. So dont be lookin.

He finished eating and took a long drink from the new cold water in the canteen and then he built up the fire and circled the perimeter of its light for all the wood he could collect. He'd pitched his little camp a good way below the trail but the glow of it could be seen at some distance in that country and he half expected late travelers might make their way to him in the night. None did. He sat wrapped in the blanket while the night grew cold and the stars ran burning down the sky to the south over the black shapes of the mountains where it must be that the wolves lived and had their home.

The day following in a southfacing valley he saw small blue flowers among the rocks and toward noon he passed through a broad gap in the mountains and stood looking out over the Bavispe River Valley. A faint blue haze hung over the trail in the switchback below. He was very hungry and he sat the horse and he and the wolf tested the air with their noses and then they rode on more cautiously.

The smoke was coming from a draw below the trail where a party of Indians had nooned for their meal. They were laborers from the mines in western Chihuahua and they bore the mark of the tumpline across their narrow brows. There were six of them journeying overland to their village in Sonora bearing with them the body of one of their number killed under a scaffolding. They had been three days enroute and three days more lay before them and they had been fortunate in the weather. The dead body lay apart from them in the leaves upon a rude bier of poles and cowhide. It was wrapped in canvas and tied with bindings of grass and rope and the canvas of the shroud was worked with red and green ribbons and laid over with branches of the mountain ilex and one of the Indians sat by it to guard it or perhaps to keep the dead man company. They spoke some Spanish and they invited him to eat with little ceremony, such was the custom of the country. To the wolf they paid no attention whatever. They squatted in their thin homemade clothing eating pozole out of painted tin bowls with their fingers and passing from hand to hand a common pail that held tea made from some herb they favored. They sucked their fingers and dried them on the backs of their arms and rolled in cornhusks their punche cigarettes. None asked his business. Where he was from or where bound. They told him of uncles and fathers who'd fled to Arizona to escape the wars visited upon them by the Mexicans and one of them had been in that country himself just to see it, walking nine days through mountain and desert till he got there and nine days back. He asked the boy if he were from Arizona and the boy said that he was not and the Indian nodded and said that it was customary among men to overstate the virtues of their own country.

That night from the edge of the meadow where he made his camp he could see the yellow windowlights of houses in a colonia on the Bavispe ten miles distant. The meadow was filled with flowers that shrank in the dusk and came forth again at the moon's rising. He made no fire. He and the wolf sat side by side in the dark and watched the shadows of things emerge on the meadow and step and trot and vanish and return. The wolf sat watching with her ears forward and her nose making constant small correction in the air. As if to make acts of abetment to the life in the world. He sat with the blanket over his shoulders and watched the moving shadows while the moon rose over the mountains behind him and the distant lights on the Bavispe winked out one by one till there were none.

In the morning he sat the horse on a gravel bar and studied the moving water where the broad clear river ran down and he studied the light on the riffles downriver where it bowed in the river's bend. He loosed the wok's rope from the saddlehorn and dismounted. He led horse and wolf into the shallows and all three drank from the river and the water was cold and slatey to the taste. He rose and wiped his mouth and looked out across the country to the south where the high wild ranges of the Pilares Teras stood in the morning sun.

He could find no ford shallow enough for the wolf to cross without swimming. Still he thought he could keep her afloat and he rode back upriver to the gravel bar and here he put the horse into the river.

He'd not gone far before the wolf was swimming and he'd not gone far before he saw that she was in trouble. Perhaps she could not breathe for the muzzle. She began to chop the water with rising desperation and the wrapping on her foreleg came loose and was flailing about in the water and this seemed to terrify her and she was trying to turn back against the rope. He halted the horse and the horse turned and stood with the water in flumes about its legs and faced the pull of the rope on the horn but by then he had dropped the reins in the river and stood down into water half way up his thigh.

He caught her by the collar and held her up and it was all he could do to stand. He got his other hand under her brisket to lift her up, his hand under the cold leather nipples that were almost naked of hair. He tried to calm her but she was trudging the water wildly. The catchrope lay in a long loop downriver and it was tugging at her collar and he held her up and worked his way back to the horse with the stones on the bottom of the river shifting under his boots and the water surging about his legs and he unhitched the rope and let the end of it float free. It uncoiled itself down the river and straightened and lay swaying in the current. The wrap of sheeting about the wolf's leg had come loose and floated off. He looked back toward the river bank. As he did so the horse surged past him and went clambering and half trotting across the shallows and up onto the gravel bar where it turned and stood smoking in the morning cold and then walked on downriver shaking its head.

He struggled back with the wolf, talking to her and keeping her head up. When they reached the shallows where she could get her footing he let go of her and walked up out of the river and stood on the bar and coiled the trailing rope out of the water while the wolf shook herself. When he had the rope coiled and hung over his shoulder he turned and looked for his horse.

Downriver on the gravel bar side by side were two horsemen watching him.

There was nothing about them that he liked. He looked past them to where his horse stood browsing in the willows with the stock of the rifle sticking out of the bootscabbard. He looked at the wolf. She was watching the riders.

They were dressed in dirty chino workclothes and they wore hats and boots and they had U S Government 45 automatic pistols in black leather holsters hanging from their belts. They had already put their horses forward and they rode at an insolent slouch. They rode up on his left side and one halted his horse and the other rode past and halted behind him. He turned, watching them. The first rider nodded to him. Then he looked back downriver at his horse and he looked at the wolf and he looked at him again.

De donde viene? he said.

America.

He nodded. He looked out across the river. He leaned and spat. Sus documentos, he said.

Documentos?

Si. Documentos.

No tengo ningunos documentos.

The man watched him for a while.

Que es su nombre, he said.

Billy Parham.

The man gestured downriver with a slight jerk of his chin. Es su caballo?

Si. Claro.

La factura por favor.

The boy looked at the other rider but the sun was behind him and his features were darkened. He looked to his inquisitor again. Yo no tengo esos papeles, he said.

Pasaporte',

Nada.

The rider sat his horse, his hands crossed loosely at the wrist.

He nodded to the other rider and the other rider detached himself and rode off down the gravel bar and caught the boy's horse and brought it back. The boy sat down in the gravel and pulled off his boots, one, the other, and poured the river water out of them and pulled them on again. He sat there with his elbows over his knees and he looked at the wolf and he looked across the river to the high Pilares rising in the sun. He knew that this day at least he would not be going there.

They took the path downriver, the leader riding with the boy's rifle across the bow of his saddle and the boy riding behind with the wolf close at the horse's heels and the third rider bringing up the rear a hundred feet behind. The path diverged from the river and ran out through a broad meadow where cattle were grazing. The cattle raised their heads with their slow jaws milling sideways and studied the riders and then bent to graze again. The riders rode on through the meadow until they struck a road and then turned south along the road and went on until they entered a settlement consisting of a handful of mud houses decomposing by the roadside.

They passed along the rutted street looking neither left nor right. A few dogs rose from their particular places in the sun and fell in behind the horses and sniffed after them. At an adobe building at the end of the street the riders halted and dismounted and the boy tied the wolf to the hounds of a wagon standing there and all entered.

The room had a musty odor to it. On the walls were faded frescoes and faded traces of a painted dado. The ruins of a linen ceiling hung in rags from the high vigas overhead. The floor was of large unglazed clay tiles and like the walls was badly out of true and the tiles were broken in many places where horses had walked upon them. The windows ran only along the south and east walls and contained no glass and they were shuttered that still had shutters while through the others the wind and dust blew and swallows passed in and out. At the far end of the room stood an old refectory table and a carved and ornate chair with a high back and against the wall behind it stood a steel filing cabinet whose top drawer had at one time been opened with an axe. There were tracks everywhere over the dusty tiles of birds and mice and lizards and dogs and cats. As if the room were a constant enigma to all things living in its vicinity. The riders stood under the mosslike hangings of the ceiling and the leader crossed to the double doors at the side of the room with the rifle cradled in one arm and tapped at the door and called out and then removed his hat and stood waiting.

In a few minutes the door opened and a young mozo stood there and he and the rider spoke and the man nodded toward the outside and the mozo looked toward the outer door and at the other rider and at the boy and then withdrew and shut the door. They waited. Outside in the street dogs had begun to assemble in front of the building. Some of them were visible through the open door. They sat looking at the tethered wolf and looking at each other while a rangy cur the color of ashes paced up and back before them with its tail up and the hair roached along its back.

It was a young and halelooking alguacil appeared in the door. He glanced briefly at the boy and turned to the man standing with the boy's rifle.

Donde esta la loba? he said.

Afuera.

He nodded.

They donned their hats and crossed the room. The man holding the rifle pushed the boy forward and the alguacil looked at him again.

Cuantos anos tiene? he said.

Dieciseis.

Es su rifle?

Es de mi padre.

No es ladron usted? Asesino?

No.

He jerked his chin at the man and told him to give the boy his rifle and then stepped out through the open door.

In the road in front of the house were upward of two dozen dogs and almost as many children. The wolf had crawled up under the wagon and was backed against the wall of the building. Through the webs of the homemade muzzle you could see every tooth in its mouth. The alguacil crouched and pushed back his hat and set his hands palm down on his thighs and studied her. He looked at the boy. He asked if she were vicious and the boy said that she was. He asked him where he'd caught her and he said in the mountains. The man nodded. He rose and spoke to his deputies and then turned and went back into the building. The deputies stood uneasily and looked at the wolf.

Finally they untied the rope and dragged her from under the wagon. The dogs had begun to howl and to pace back and forth and the big gray dog darted in and snapped at the wolf s hindquarters. The wolf spun and bowed up in the road. The deputies pulled her away. The gray dog circled in for another sally and one of the deputies turned and fetched it a kick with his boot that caught it underneath the jaw and clapped its mouth shut with a slap of a sound that set the children to laughing.

By now the mozo had come from the house with a key and they dragged the wolf across the street and unlocked and unchained the doors to an adobe shed and put the wolf inside and locked the doors again. The boy asked them what they intended to do with the wolf but they only shrugged and they got their horses and mounted up and trotted back down the road, curbing the horses' heads this way and that and setting them to prancing as if there were women about. The mozo shook his head and went back inside with the key.

He sat by the door of the house all through the noon. He'd levered the shells out of the rifle and dried them and dried the rifle and reloaded it and put it back in the scabbard and he drank from the canteen and poured the rest of the water into the crown of his hat and watered the horse out of the hat and drove the pack of dogs away from the shed door. The streets were empty, the day cool and sunny. In the afternoon the mozo appeared at the door and said that he'd been sent to ask what he wanted. He said that he wanted his wolf. The mozo nodded and went back in again. When he came out again he said that he'd been sent to say that the wolf was seized as contraband but that he was free to go thanks to the clemency of the alguacil who had considered his youth. The boy said that the wolf was not contraband but was property entrusted into his care and that he must have it back. The mozo heard him out and then turned and went back into the house.

He sat. No one came. Late in the afternoon one of the pair of deputies returned at the head of a small and illsorted procession. Immediately behind came a small dark mule of the type used in the mines of that country and behind the mule an oldfashioned carreta with patched wooden wheels. Behind the cart a motley of people of the country all afoot, women and children, young boys, many of them bearing parcels or carrying baskets or pails.

They halted in front of the shed and the deputy stepped down and the cartdriver climbed down from the rude wood box of the carreta. They stood in the road drinking from a bottle of mescal and after a while the mozo came from the house and unlocked the shed doors and the deputy drew the chains rattling through the wooden barslots and flung the doors open and stood.

The wolf was in the farthest corner and she rose and stood blinking. The carretero stepped back and divested himself of his coat and put it over the mule's head and tied the sleeves under its jaws and stood holding the animal by the cheekstrap. The deputy entered the shed and picked up the rope and dragged the wolf into the doorway. The crowd fell back. Made bold by drink and by the awe of the onlookers the deputy seized the wolf by the collar and dragged her out into the road and then picked her up by the collar and by the tail and hefted her into the bed of the cart with one knee beneath her in the manner of men accustomed to loading sacks. He passed the rope along the side of the cart and halfhitched it through the boards at the front. The people in the road watched every movement. They watched with the attention of those who might be called upon to tell what they had seen. The deputy nodded to the carretero and the carretero loosed the knotted sleeves from under the mule's jaw and drew away the coat. He gathered the drivingreins together up under the mule's throat and stood holding the animal to see how it would do. The mule raised its head slightly to test the air. Then it jacked itself up onto its forelegs and kicked through the leather strap and stove in the bottom board of the carreta where the wolf was tied. The wolf came sliding and scrambling out of the open back of the cart dragging the broken board after it and the people cried out and turned to run. The mule screamed and flung itself sideways in the harness and broke away the offside camshaft and fell into the road and lay kicking.

The carretero was strong and nimble and he managed to leap astride the little mule's neck and seize the mule's ear in his teeth till he could cover its head with thecoat again. He looked about, gasping. The deputy who had been in the act of remounting his horse now stepped into the road again and seized the trailing rope and snatched the wolf up short. He untied the rope where it was hitched about the broken board and flung the board away and dragged the wolf back into the shed and shut the doors. Mire, called the carretero, lying in the road holding his coat over the mule's head, waving a hand at the wreckage. Mire. The deputy spat into the dust and walked across the road and into the house.

By the time they'd sent for someone to repair the camshaft with lath and rawhide and by the time he'd done these repairs the day was well advanced. The pilgrims who had followed the cart into the town had deployed themselves under the shade of the buildings on the west side of the road and were eating their lunches and drinking lemonade. By late afternoon the cart was ready but the deputy was nowhere to be found. A boy was sent to the house to inquire. Another hour passed before he made his appearance and he adjusted his hat and eyed the sun and bent to examine the repair to the camshaft as if he were deputized also to inspect such work and then he went back into the house. When he came out again he was accompanied by the mozo and they crossed the road to the shed and unlocked and unchained the doors and the deputy brought out the wolf again.

The carretero stood with the mule's blindfold head against his chest. The deputy studied him and then called for a mozo de cuadra. A young boy stepped forward. He instructed the boy to take charge of the mule and told the carretero to get in the wagon. The carretero relinquished the mule with some misgiving. He gave the muzzled shewolf a wide berth and climbed into the cart and unwrapped the reins from the stanchion and stood at the ready. The deputy once more lifted the wolf into the carreta and tied it close against the boards at the rear. The carretero looked back at the animal and looked at the deputy. His eyes moved over the waiting pilgrims now reassembled until he met the eyes of the young extranjero from whom the wolf had been appropriated. The deputy nodded to the mozo de cuadra and the mozo pulled away the carretero's coat from the mule's head and stepped away. The mule sprang forward wildly in the traces. The carretero fell back clutching at the topmost boards of the cart and trying not to fall on the wolf and the wolf lunged at her lead and let out a wild sad cry. The deputy laughed and booted his horse forward and snatched the coat from the mozo and swung it overhead like a lariat and threw it after the carretero and then reined up again in the road laughing while mule and cart and wolf and driver went bowling out through the settlement in a great clatter of wood and creation of dust.

The people were already gathering up their parcels. The boy went and got his saddle from the side of the house and saddled the horse and buckled up the saddlescabbard and mounted up and turned the horse into the rutted track. Those afoot pressed to the side of the road when the horse's shadow fell upon them. He nodded down to them. Adonde vamos? he said.

They looked up at him. Old women in rebozos. Young girls carrying baskets between them. A la feria, they said.

La feria?

Si senor.

Adonde?

En el pueblo de Morelos.

Es lejos? he said.

They said that it was not far by horseback. Unas pocas leguas, they said.

He walked the horse beside them. Y adonde va con la loba? he said.

A la feria, sin duda.

He asked what was the purpose in taking the wolf to the fair but they seemed not to know. They shrugged, they tramped beside the horse. An old woman said that the wolf had been brought from the Sierras where it had eaten many schoolchildren. Another woman said that it had been captured in the company of a young boy who had run away naked into the woods. A third said that the hunters who had brought the wolf down out of the Sierras had been followed by other wolves who howled at night from the darkness beyond their fire and some of the hunters had said that these wolves were no right wolves.

The road left the river and the river flats and led away to the north through a broad mountain valley. With dusk the company fell out in a high meadow and built a fire and set about cooking their supper. The boy tied his horse and sat in the grass, not quite one of them and not quite apart. He twisted the cap from his canteen and drank the last of his water and put the cap back and sat holding the empty container in his hands. After a while a boy came up to him and invited him to the fire.

They were elaborately polite. They called him caballero for all his sixteen years and he sat with his hat pushed back and his boots crossed before him and ate beans and napolitos and a machaca made from dried goatmeat that was rank and black and stringy and dusted with dry red pepper for traveling. Le gusta? they said. He said he liked it very much. They asked him where he came from and he said Nuevo Mexico and they glanced at one another and they said that he must be very sad to be so far from his home.

In the dusk the meadow looked a camp of gypsies or refugees. Their number had swelled with new arrivals along the road and there were new fires built and figures drifted back and forth across the darkened spaces between. Burros grazed on the meadow slope where it banked away against the dark lilac sky to the west and the little carretas stood tilted on their tongues in silhouette one behind the next like orecarts. Several men were in the company by now and were passing a bottle of mescal among themselves. In the dawn two of them were sitting yet before the cold dead ashes. The women turned out to cook breakfast, building back the fire and setting about slapping tortillas from the masa and laying them out on a corral cut from roofingtin. They worked around the seated drunks and around the packsaddles over which blankets had been hung to dry all with equal disregard.

It was midmorning before the caravan was under way. Those too drunk to travel were shown every consideration and room made for them among the chattels in the carts. As if some misfortune had befallen them that could as easily have visited any among them.

The road they traveled led through wilderness enough that they passed no habitation nor met upon it any other traveler at all. They made no stop at noon but soon thereafter passed through a gap in the mountains where two miles below them the river ran and the sparse houses of Colonia Morelos stood along the quadrature of its four streets like markers in a child's game drawn in the dust.

He left the company while they set up their camp on the floodplain south of the town and he turned his horse into the road downriver to see if he could find the wolf. The road was dried clay corrugated with cart tracks set so hard they would not break under the horse's hooves. The river was clear and cold where it came out of the high Sierras to the south and it turned at the settlement to run south again under the western wall of the Pilares. He turned off the road and followed a path out along the river and stood the horse to drink from the cold riffles. An old man with a burro was gathering driftwood out on the gravel flats. The pale and twisted shapes of wood arranged atop the burro looked like some tapestry of bones. The boy put his horse forward upriver, the horse's hooves trudging in the round river gravels.

The town that he entered was an old Mormon settlement from the century before and he passed brick buildings with tin roofs, a brick store with a false wood front. In the alameda opposite the store bunting had been strung tree to tree and the members of a small brass band sat in the little kiosk as if perhaps awaiting the arrival of some dignitary. Along the streetfront and in the alameda were vendors selling cacahuates and ears of steamed corn dusted with red pepper and bunuelos and natillas and paper spills of fruit. He dismounted and tied the horse and took the rifle from the scabbard lest it be stolen and walked toward the alameda. Among the fairgoers in that little park of dried mud and starveling trees were visitors more alien than even he, families in rags that moved agape among the patched canvas pitchtents and Mennonites got up like medicineshow rubes in their straw hats and bib overalls and a row of children halted half dumbstruck before a painted canvas drop depicting garish human abnormalities and Tarahumara Indians and Yaquis carrying bows and quivers of arrows and two Apache boys in deerskin boots with grave and coalblack eyes who'd come from their camp in the sierras where the last free remnants of their tribe lived like shadowfolk of the nation they had been and all of them with such gravity that the shabby circus of their beholding could as well have been the pageantry of some dread new dispensation visited upon them.

He found the wolf readily enough but he lacked the ten centavos required to see her. They'd rigged a makeshift tent of sheeting over the little tumbril of a cart and they'd put up a sign at the front that gave her history and the number of people she was known to have eaten. He stood and watched the few people filing in and out. They did not seem much animated by what they'd seen. When he asked them about the wolf they shrugged. They said a wolf was a wolf. They did not believe that she'd eaten anyone.

The man collecting the money at the fly of the pitchtent listened with his head bowed while the boy explained to him his situation. He raised his head and looked into the boy's eyes. Pasale, he said.

She was lying in the floor of the cart in a bed of straw. They'd taken the rope from her collar and fitted the collar with a chain and run the chain through the floorboards of the cart so that it was all that she could do to rise and stand. Beside her in the straw was a clay bowl that perhaps had held water. A young boy stood with his elbows hung over the top board of the cart with a jockeystick held loosely across his shoulder. When he saw enter what he took for a paying spectator he stood up and began to prod the wolf with the stick and to hiss at her.

She ignored the prodding. She was lying on her side breathing in and out quietly. He looked at the injured leg. He stood the rifleagainst the cart and called to her.

She rose instantly and turned and stood looking at him with her ears erect. The boy holding the jockeystick looked up at him across the top of the cart.

He talked to her a long time and as the boy tending the wolf could not understand what it was he said he said what was in his heart. He made her promises that he swore to keep in the making. That he would take her to the mountains where she would find others of her kind. She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no despair but only that same reckonless deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart. He turned and looked at the boy. He was about to speak when the pitchman ducked inside under the canopy and hissed at them. El viene, he said. El viene.

Maldiciones, the boy said. He threw aside his stick and he and the pitchman set about taking down the sheets and untying the cords from the stakes they'd driven into the mud. As the sheets fell the carretero came at a trot across the alameda and fell in to help them, snatching up the sheets and hissing at them to hurry. Soon they were backing the little blindfold mule between the shafts of the cart and fitting the harness and buckling it about.

La tablilla, cried the carretero. The boy snatched up the sign and pushed it under the pile of ropes and sheeting and the carretero mounted up into the cart and called out to the pitchman and the pitchman snatched away the blindfold from the mule's eyes and mule and cart and wolf and driver went rattling and clattering out into the street. Fairgoers scattered away before them and the carretero looked back wildly up the road where the alguacil and his entourage were just entering the town from the southaEU'alguacil and attendants and retainers and friends and mozos de estribo and mozos de cuadra all with their equipage winking in the sun and trotting among the legs of the horses upwards of two dozen hunting dogs.

The boy had already turned and started toward the street to get his horse. By the time he'd untied it and shoved the rifle into the scabbard and mounted up and swung the horse into the street the alguacil and his party were passing along the alameda four and six abreast, calling out to one another, many of them garbed in the gaudy attire of the norteno and of the charro all spangled and trimmed with silver braid, the seams of their trousers done with silver shells. They rode saddles worked in silver with flat pommels the size of plates and some were drunk riding and doffed their enormous hats in gestures of outlandish courtliness at women their horses had forced against buildings or into doorways. The hunting dogs trotting neat of foot beneath them seemed alone sober and purposive and they paid no mind at all to the town dogs that sallied out bristling behind them or indeed to anything at all. They were some of them black in color or black and tan but for the most part they were bluetick dogs brought into the country from the north years before and some were so like in pattern and color to the speckled horses they paced that they seemed tailored from the same piece of hide. The horses sidled and stepped and tossed their heads and the riders pulled them about but the dogs trotted steadily upon the road before them as if they had a lot on their minds.

He waited in the crossroads for them to pass. Some nodded to him and wished him a good day as to a fellow horseman but if the alguacil in passing recognized him sitting his horse in this new wayplace he gave no sign so. When they had passed horses dogs and all he put his horse into the road again and set out behind them and behind the carreta now vanished upriver in the distance.

THE HACIENDA through whose gates they passed was sited on a level plain between the road and the braided flats of the Batopito River and it was named for the mountains to the east through which they'd ridden. It lay hazy in the distance in a long thin bight of limewashed walls under the thin green spires of a cypress grove. Downriver were groves of fruit trees and pecans in ordered rows. He turned down the long drive as the hunting party was entering the gates of the portal ahead of him. In the fields were crossbred bulls with long ears and humped backs of a kind new to the country and workers raised up and stood with their short hoes in their hands and watched him pass. He raised his hand in greeting but they only bent to their work again.

When he rode through the standing gate of the portal there was no sign of the party. A mozo came to take his horse and he stepped down and handed over the reins. The mozo appraised him by his clothes and nodded toward the kitchen door and a few minutes later he was seated at a table along with the retainers of the newly arrived party some dozen in number and all of them eating great slabs of fried steak with beans and flour tortillas hot from the corral. At the end of the table sat the carretero.

He stepped over the bench with his plate and sat and the carretero nodded to him but when he asked about the wolf the carretero said only that the wolf was for the feria and more he would not say.

When he'd eaten he rose and carried his plate to the sideboard and asked the cocinera where the patron might be but she only glanced at him and then made a sweeping gesture that took in the thousands of hectares of land running north along the river which comprised the hacienda. He thanked her and touched his hat and walked out and crossed the compound. On the far side stood stables and a bodega or granary and the long row of mud houses where the workers were billeted.

He found the wolf chained in an empty stall. She was standing backed into the corner and two boys were leaning over the stall door hissing at her and trying to spit on her. He went down the stable hall looking for his horse but there were no horses in the stable. He walked back out into the compound. From upriver where they'd gone to course the dogs the alguacil and his party were returning toward the house. In the yard behind the house the carretero had harnessed the little mule into his cart again and had mounted up into the box. The flat pop of the reins carried across the compound like a distant pistolshot and mule and cart set forth. They passed out through the portal gate just as the first of the riders and the first of the dogs swung into the road before them.

Such a company makes no way for mules and carts and the carretero pulled his rig off into the grass by the side of the road to let them pass, standing in the box and taking off his hat with a flourish and searching with his eyes among the approaching riders for the alguacil. He slapped the reins again. The mule trudged sullenly and the cart tilted and creaked and rattled over the bad ground by the roadside. As the dogs and riders passed the lead dog raised its nose and caught the scent from the cart on the wind and let out a deep bay and turned and swung in behind the cart where it trundled past just off the road. The other dogs surged about, the hair bristling along their shoulders, swinging their muzzles in the air. The carretero looked back in alarm. As he did so the mule humped and kicked and snatched the little cart about and set off across the fields at a gallop with the dogs in full cry behind.

The alguacil and his minions stood in their stirrups and shouted after them, laughing and whooping. Some of the younger horsemen of the company roweled their mounts forward and set out after the runaway mule and cart, calling out to the carretero and laughing. The carretero clutched the boards and leaned over the side with his hat to slap at the dogs leaping and scrabbling at the cart. Tall as the cart was they yet began to leap in, three or four of them, and to rummage through the straw howling and whining and finally raising a leg and urinating and lurching and falling against the side of the cart and spraying the carretero and spraying each other and fighting briefly and then standing with their forefeet along the top boards of the cart and barking down at the dogs that raced beside.

The riders overtook them laughing and circled the cart at a full gallop until one of them took down his reata and dropped a loop over the mule's head and brought it to a halt. They whooped and called out to one another and beat away the dogs with their doubled rope ends and led the cart back to the road. The dogs coursed out over the fields and the girls and young women working there squealed and put their hands atop their heads while the men stood with their hoes clubbed in their hands. In the road the alguacil called to the carretero and fished a silver coin from his pocket and pitched it to him with great accuracy. The carretero caught the coin and touched the brim of his hat with it and stood down into the road to inspect the cart and the rudely cohered wooden wheels and the harness and the fresh repair to the camshaft. The alguacil looked past the riders to where the boy stood afoot in the road. He took another coin from his pocket and pitched it spinning.

Por el Americano, he called.

No one caught it. It fell in the dust and lay there. The alguacil sat his horse. He nodded to the boy.

Es for you, he said.

The riders watched him. He stooped and picked up the coin and the alguacil nodded and smiled but there was no thanking or touching the hat. The boy walked up to him and held the coin up.

No puedo aceptarlo, he said.

The alguacil arched his brow and nodded his head vigorously.

Si, he said. Si.

The boy stood at the alguacil's stirrup and gestured at him with the outheld coin. No, he said.

No? said the alguacil. Y como no?

The boy said that he wanted the wolf. He said that he could not sell her. He said that if there was a fine that he would work to pay the fine or if there was a fee for a permit or a toll to cross into the country he would work for that but that he could not part with the wolf because the wolf had been put in his care.

The alguacil heard him out and when he was done he accepted the coin and then pitched it to the watching carretero as a coin once given cannot be taken back and then he turned his horse in the road and called to his men and driving the dogs before them they all rode on toward the hacienda and vanished through the standing gates of the portal.

The boy looked at the carretero. The carretero had climbed again into his cart and he unwrapped the reins and looked down at the boy. He said that the alguacil had given the coin to him. He said that if the boy had wanted the coin he should have taken it when it was offered. The boy said he did not want the man's money then or now. He said that the carretero might work for such a man but he did not. But the carretero only nodded as if to say he did not expect the boy would understand but that someday with luck he might. Nadie Babe para quien trabaja, he said. Then he slapped the drivingreins against the mule's rump and set off down the road.

He walked back out to the stable where they'd chained the wolf. An old mozo from the house had been set to guard her and to see that she not be molested. He sat with his back to the stable door in the half dark smoking a cigarette. His hat lay in the straw beside him. When the boy asked if he could see the wolf he drew deeply on the cigarette as if contemplating the request. Then he said that no one could see the wolf without the permission of the hacendado and in any case there was no light to see her by.

The boy stood in the doorway. The mozo spoke no more and after a while he turned and went out again. He walked back across the compound to the house and stood looking in at the patio gates. Men were laughing and drinking and there was a veal calf roasting on a spit under the wall at the far side of the enclosure and under the smoky light of the cressetlamps burning in the long blue desert dusk were tables laden with savories and sweets and fruits to feed a hundred people and more. He turned and went back around the side of the house to find one of the mozos de cuadra and to see about his horse. Mariachi music struck up behind him in the courtyard and new arrivals were dismounting at the gates, coming out of the darkening shapes of the mountains to the east along the road accompanied by dogs at their horses' heels and hoeing up in the light at the gateposts where torches burned in iron pipes driven into the ground.

The horses of the lesser guests such as himself were tied by halter ropes along a rail at the rear of the establos and he found Bird standing among them. He was still saddled and the bridle and bridlereins hung from the pommel and he was eating feed from a twoaEU'board unsheathed trough nailed along the wall. He raised his head when Billy spoke to him and looked back chewing.

Es su caballo, said the mozo.

Si. Claro.

Todo esta bien,

Si. Bien. Gracias.

The mozos were working their way along the line of horses pulling off saddles and brushing horses and pouring feed. He asked that they leave his horse saddled and they said that they would do as he wished. He looked at his horse again. You fell into it pretty good, didnt you, he said.

He walked around to the stable and entered the door at the far end and stood. It was almost dark in the stable hall and the mozo in charge of the wolf seemed to be sleeping. He found an empty stall and walked in and kicked up the hay in one corner with his boots and lay down with his hat on his chest and closed his eyes. He could hear the cries of the mariachis and the howling of the chained hounds in an outbuilding somewhere and after a while he slept.

He slept and as he slept he dreamt and the dream was of his father and in the dream his father was afoot and lost in the desert. In the dying light of that day he could see his father's eyes. His father stood looking toward the west where the sun had gone and where the wind was rising out of the darkness. The small sands in that waste was all there was for the wind to move and it moved with a constant migratory seething upon itself. As if in its ultimate granulation the world sought some stay against its own eternal wheeling. His father's eyes searched the coming of the night in the deepening redness beyond the rim of the world and those eyes seemed to contemplate with a terrible equanimity the cold and the dark and the silence that moved upon him and then all was dark and all was swallowed up and in the silence he heard somewhere a solitary bell that tolled and ceased and then he woke.

Men with torches were passing singlefile down the stable past the open door of the stall where he'd been sleeping, their figures reeling outsized across the farther walls. He rose and put on his hat and went out. They were dragging the wolf from her stall by her chain and she cringed in the smoky light and drew back and tried to keep low to the ground to protect her underbelly. Someone with an old rakehandle fell in behind her to goad her on and in the distance somewhere beyond the domicilios the hounds had set up a fresh clamor.

He followed them out and across the darkened lot. They passed through an open wooden carriage gate where the doors were hung in stone piers and the howling of the hounds grew louder and the wolf shrank back and struggled against the chain.

Some of the men following behind were stumbling drunk and they kicked at her and called her cobarde. They passed along the stone bodega where the light from the eaves fell along the upper walls and carried the shadows of the interior rafters out into the dark of the yard. The illumination from within seemed to bow the walls and in the apron of light before the open doors the shadows of figures inside reeled and fell away and the company entered dragging the wolf over the packed clay. A way was made for them with much cheering and calling out. They handed off their torches to mozos who snuffed them in the dirt of the floor and when all had entered and were inside the mozos pushed shut the heavy wooden doors and dropped the bar.

He made his way along the edge of the crowd. They were a strange egality of witnesses there gathered and among the merchants from adjacent towns and the neighboring hacendados and the petty hidalgos de gotera come from as far as Agua Prieta and Casas Grandes in their tightly fitted suits there were tradesmen and hunters and gerentes and mayordomos from the haciendas and from the ejidos and there were caporals and vaqueros and a few favored peons. There were no women. Along the far side of the building were bleachers or stands scaffolded up on poles and in the center of the bodega was a round pit or estacada perhaps twenty feet in diameter defined by a low wooden palisade. The boards of the palisade were black with the dried blood of the ten thousand gamecocks that had died there and in the center of the pit was an iron pipe newly driven into the ground.

He shouldered his way through from the rear just as they were dragging the wolf over the boards and into the pit. Those along the bleachers stood to see. The man in the pit chained the wolf to the pipe and then dragged her to the end of the chain and stretched her out while they removed the homemade muzzle. Then they stepped back and slipped the noose of the rope they'd stretched her with. She stood up and looked about. She looked small and ragged and she stood with her back bowed like a cat. The wrapping was gone from her leg and she favored it as she moved sideways to the end of the chain and back, her white teeth shining in the light from the tin reflectors overhead.

The first casts of dogs had already been brought in by their handlers and they leaped and tugged at their leads and bayed and stood upright against their collars. Two of them were led forward and spectators in the crowd called out to the owners and whistled and named their wagers. The hounds were young and uncertain. The handlers boosted them over the parapet into the pit where they circled bristling and bayed at the wolf and looked at each other. The handlers hissed them on and they circled the wolf warily. The wolf crouched and bared her teeth. The crowd began to hoot and catcall and after a while a man at the far side of the pit blew a whistle and the handlers came forward and grabbed the ends of the trailing chains and hauled the dogs back and dragged them over the parapet and led them away, the dogs standing at their collars again and baying back at the wolf.

The wolf paced and circled limping on three legs and then crouched by the iron stake where it seemed she'd made her querencia. Her almond eyes ran the circle of faces beyond the pit and she glanced briefly up at the lights. She crouched on her elbows and then rose and circled and came back and crouched again. Then she stood. A fresh cast of dogs was being handed scrabbling over the parapet.

When the handlers slipped loose the dogs they sprang forward with their backs roached and bowled into the wolf and the three of them rolled into a ball of snarling and popping teeth and a rattle of chain. The wolf fought in absolute silence. They scrabbled over the ground and then there was a high yip and one of the dogs was circling and holding up one foreleg. The wolf had seized the other dog by the lower jaw and she threw it to the ground and straddled it and snatched her grip from the dog's jaw and buried her teeth in its throat and bit again to improve her grip where the muscled neck slid away in the loose folds of skin.

The boy had worked his way around to the bleachers. He stood by one of the stone piers and he took off his hat so that those behind could see but then he realized no one else had taken off theirs so he put it back on. Left alone the wolf might well have killed the dog but the arbitro blew his whistle and one of the handlers came forward with a sixfoot length of cane and with it blew into the wolfs ear. She abandoned her hold and leaped back and spun on her haunches. The handlers got hold of their dogs by the chains and led them away. A man came forward and stepped over the low wooden barricade and began to circle about with a pail out of which he laved and flung water like some bemused and halfwitted horticulturist, methodically slaking the dust in the floor of the pit while the wolf lay panting. The boy turned and made his way along the edge of the crowd to the door at the rear through which the hounds had gone and stepped outside into the cool dark. A handler with two fresh dogs was already coming through the door.

Some boys smoking cigarettes at the back wall of the bodega turned and looked at him in the light of the door's opening. The howling of the dogs in the crib beyond was loud and continuous.

Cuantos perms tienen? he asked them.

The nearest boy looked at him. He said they had four dogs. Y usted? he said.

He explained that he meant all the dogs how many but they only shrugged.

Quien sabe? they said. Bastante.

He walked past them and out to the crib. It was a long building with a tin roof and he took a lantern down from a pole and lifted the wooden stake from out of the doorhasp and pushed open the door and entered with the lantern aloft. Along the wall the hounds leaped and bayed and lunged at their chains. There were upwards of thirty of them in the shed, mostly redbone and bluetick dogs bred in the country to the north but also nondescript animals from newaEU'world bloodlines and dogs that were little more than pitbulls bred to fight. Chained at the end of the shed separate from the others were two enormous airedales and when the light from the lantern ignited their eyes the boy saw a thing that not even the pit dogs possessed in such absolute purity and he backed away mistrustful of the chains that held them. He backed out and shut the door and dropped the stake into the hasp and rehung the lantern on the pole. He nodded to the boys standing along the wall and went past and entered the bodega again.

The crowd seemed actually to have swelled in his brief absence. On the far side of the arena stood the members of the mariachi band in their white and illfitting suits. Through the crowd he could glimpse the wolf. She was squatting on her haunches with her mouth wide and she was alternately darting at one and then the other of the two dogs circling her. One of the dogs had been bitten through the ear and both handlers were freckled with blood where it had circled shaking its head. He pushed his way through the crowd and when he reached the wooden parapet he stepped over it and walked out into the pit.

He was taken at first for yet another handler but it was the handlers he approached. They were now at the farther side of the pit crouching and feinting in such postures of attack and defense as they would have the dogs adopt and calling out in highpitched chants to seek the dogs on and twisting and gesturing with their hands in an antic simulation of the contest before them. When the nearer of them saw him coming he raised up and looked toward the arbitro. The arbitro stood with the whistle to his mouth but he seemed not to know what to make of what he saw. The boy stepped past the handlers and entered the perimeter of the twelvefoot circle of torn ground defined by the chain to which the wolf was tethered. Someone called out a warning and the arbitro blew his whistle and then there was a hush fell over the bodega. The wolf stood panting. The boy stepped past her and seized the first dog by the loose skin of the saddle and hauled its hindquarters up off the ground and squatted and got hold of its chain and backed away with it and turned and handed the chain to the handler. The handler took the chain and pulled the lunging dog against his leg. Que paso? he said.

But the boy had already started after the second dog. By now some of the spectators had begun to call out and there was an ugly murmur running through the bodega. The handlers looked toward the arbitro. The arbitro blew the whistle again and gestured toward the intruder. He in turn hauled up the second dog by its chain and walked it on its hindlegs to the other handler and then turned and went back after the wolf.

She stood spraddlelegged with her sides heaving and her black mouth pleated back from the white and perfect teeth. He crouched and spoke to her. He had no way to know if she would bite him or not. A handful of men had climbed over the estacada and were advancing toward him but when they reached the perimeter of the torn ground they stopped as if they'd come to a wall. No one spoke to him. All seemed to be watching to see what he would do. He rose and stepped to the iron stake piked in the ground and wrapped a turn of chain about his forearm and squatted and seized the chain at the ring and tried to rise with it. No one moved, no one spoke. He doubled his grip and tried again. The beaded sweat on his forehead shone in the light.He tried yet a third time but he could not pull the stake and he rose and turned and took hold of the actual wolf by the collar and unsnapped the swivelhook and drew the bloody and slobbering head to his side and stood.

That the wolf was loose save for his grip on her collar did not escape the notice of the men who had entered the ring. They looked at one another. Some began to back away. The wolf stood against the guero's thigh with her teeth bared and her flanks sucking in and out and she made no move.

Es mia, the boy said.

People in the stands began to call out but those in any proximity to the unchained wolf seemed hesitant as to what course to take. In the end it was neither the alguacil nor the hacendado who came forward but the hacendado's son. They gave way before him, a young man who bore on the braided jacket he wore the scent of the young women he'd so recently danced with. He stepped into the pit and advanced and stood with his boots spread and his thumbs hung loosely in the blue sash about his waist. If he was afraid of the wolf he gave no evidence so.

Que quieres, joven? he said.

The boy repeated what he'd said to the riders he'd met with on the Cajon Bonita in the mountains to the north. He said that he was custodian to the wolf and charged with her care but the young hacendado smiled ruefully and shook his head and said that the wolf had been caught in a trap in the Pilares Teras which mountains are barbarous and wild and that the deputies of Don Beto had encountered him crossing the river at the Colonia de Oaxaca and that he had been intent on taking the wolf to his own country where he would sell the animal at some price.

He spoke in a high clear voice like one declaiming to the crowd and when he was done he stood with his hands folded one across the other before him as if there were no more to be said.

The boy stood holding the wolf. He could feel the movement of her breathing and the light tremor of her body against him. He looked at the young don and he looked at the ring of faces in the light. He said that he had come from Hidalgo County in the state of New Mexico and that he had brought the wolf with him from that place. He said that he had caught her in a steeltrap and that he and the wolf had been on the trail six days coming into this country and had not come out of the Pilares at all but were in the act of attempting to cross the river and enter those same mountains when they were turned back because of the swiftness of the water.

The young hacendado took his hands from before him and clasped them behind. He turned and took a few steps in contemplation and turned again and looked up.

Para que trajo la loba aqui? De que sirvio?

He stood holding the wolf. All waited for him to answer but he had no answer. His eyes ran the assemblage, searching the eyes that watched him. The arbitro stood with his pocketwatch still outheld before him. The handlers stood with doubled grip upon the collars of the dogs. The man with the watercan waited. The young hacendado turned to look at the gallery.

He smiled and turned again to the boy. Then he spoke in english.

You think that this country is some country you can come here and do what you like.

I never thought that. I never thought about this country one way or the other.

Yes, said the hacendado.

We was just passin through, the boy said. We wasnt botherin nobody. Queriamos pasar, no mas.

Pasar o traspasar?

The boy turned and spat into the dirt. He could feel the wolf lean against his leg. He said that the tracks of the wolf had led out of Mexico. He said the wolf knew nothing of boundaries. The young don nodded as if in agreement but what he said was that whatever the wolf knew or did not know was irrelevant and that if the wolf had crossed that boundary it was perhaps so much the worse for the wolf but the boundary stood without regard.

The spectators nodded and murmured among themselves. They looked to the boy to see how he would reply. The boy only said that if he were allowed to go he would return with the wolf to America and that he would pay whatever fine he had incurred but the hacendado shook his head. He said that it was too late for that and that anyway the alguacil had taken the wolf into custody and it was forfeit in lieu of the portazgo. When the boy said that he had not known that he would be required to pay in order to pass through the country the hacendado said that then he was in much the same situation as the wolf.

They waited. The boy looked aloft toward the roofbeams where the dust and the smoke had risen and where it moved slowly in slow coils across the lights. He looked among the faces for any there to whom he might plead his case but he saw nothing. He reached down and unbuckled the leather dogcollar from about the wolf's neck and pulled it away and stood. Those nearest tried to back into the crowd. The young gentryman drew a small revolver from his waistband.

Agarrala, he said.

He stood. Some several other of the spectators had also drawn their arms. He looked like a man standing on a scaffold seeking in the crowd some likeness to his own heart. Nothing to come of the looking even though all there might arrive at their own such standing soon or late. He looked at the young don. He knew that he would shoot the wolf. He reached down and pulled the collar back around the bloodied ruff of the wolfs neck and rebuckled it.

Ponga la cadena, said the hacendado.

He did so. Stooping and picking up the snap end of the chain and hooking it through the ring of the collar. Then he dropped the chain into the dirt and stepped away from the wolf. The little pistols disappeared as silently as they had come.

They made a path for him and watched him as he went. Outside the night had grown colder yet and the air smelled of woodsmoke from the cookfires over in the domicilios of the workers. Someone closed the door behind him. The square of the light in which he stood drew narrow slowly in the door's shadow to darkness. The tranca dropped woodenly into place within. He walked back up in the dark to the establo where the horses were being tended. A young mozo stood up and greeted him. He nodded and walked down and got his horse and slipped off the halter and hung it over the hitchrail and bridled the horse. He unrolled his blanket from behind the saddle and pulled it around his shoulders. Then he mounted up and rode out past the standing horses and nodded down to the mozo and touched his hat and rode toward the house.

The gate to the patio was closed. He stood down and opened it and then mounted up again. He bent forward in the saddle to clear the gateway arch and rode through with the stirrups dragging along the plaster and clicking off the iron jambs. The patio was paved with clay tiles and the sound of the horse's hooves upon them caused the servant girls to look up from their tasks. They stood holding tablecloths and plates and wicker baskets. Along the wall the oil lamps still burned atop their poles and the staccato shadows of hunting bats crossed the tiles and vanished and reappeared and crossed back. He crossed the courtyard horseback and nodded to the women and leaned from the saddle and took an empanada from a platter and sat eating it. The horse leaned its long nose down over the table but he pulled it away. The empanada was filled with seasoned meat and he ate it and leaned down and took another. The women went on with their work. He finished the empanada and then took a sweet pastry from a tray and ate that, putting the horse forward along the tables. The women moved away before him. He nodded to them again and wished them a good evening. He took another pastry and rode the circuit of the courtyard eating it while the horse shied at the passing bats and then he rode out through the gate again and down the drive. After a while one of the women crossed the patio and shut the gate behind him.

When he struck the road he turned south toward the town riding slowly. The howling of the dogs receded behind him. A half moon hung cocked in the east over the mountains like an eye narrowed in anger.

He'd reached the outer lights of the colonia before he halted the horse in the road. Then he reined it about and turned back.

When he pulled up before the door of the bodega he slid one foot out of the stirrup and slammed at the door with the heel of his boot. The door rattled against the crossbar within. He could hear the shouts of the men and he could hear the snarling of the dogs in the shed at the far side of the bodega. No one came. He rode around to the rear of the building and down along the narrow walled passageway between the bodega and the crib where the hounds were penned. Some men who had been squatting along the wall stood up. He nodded to them and stepped down and slid the rifle out of the scabbard and tied the reins together and dropped them over the post at the corner of the shed and walked past the men and pushed open the door and entered.

No one paid him any mind. He made his way through the crowd and when he reached the estacada the wolf was alone in the pit and she was a sorry thing to see. She'd returned to the stake and crouched by it but her head lay in the dirt and her tongue lolled in the dirt and her fur was matted with dirt and blood and the yellow eyes looked at nothing at all. She had been fighting for almost two hours and she had fought in casts of two the better part of all the dogs brought to the feria. At the far side of the estacada a pair of handlers were holding on to the airedales and there was a discussion going on with the arbitro and with the young hacendado. No one was anywhere near the airedales and they stood at their leashes and popped their wet teeth and jerked the handlers roughly about. The dust hanging in the lights glistened like silica. The aguador stood by with his pail of water.

He stepped over the parapet and walked toward the wolf and levered a shell into the chamber of the rifle and halted ten feet from her and raised the rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the bloodied head and fired.

The echo of the shot in the closed space of the barn rattled all else into silence. The airedales dropped to all fours and whined and circled behind the handlers. No one moved. The blue riflesmoke hung in the air. The wolf lay stretched out dead.

He lowered the rifle and ratcheted the spent casing out and caught it where it spun and put it in his pocket and levered the breech of the rifle shut again and stood with his thumb over the hammer. He looked at the crowd surrounding him. No one spoke. Some of them were looking toward the rear but it was not the young don who made his way to the estacada but the alguacil's deputy last seen hazing the carretero with his own coat down the street of the upriver colonia. He stepped over the barricade and walked out into the pit and demanded of the boy his rifle. The boy stood. The deputy unsnapped the flap on his holster and drew the 45 automatic already cocked.

Deme la carabina, he said.

The boy looked at the wolf. He looked at the crowd. His eyes were swimming but he did not let down the hammer of the rifle or move to relinquish it. The deputy raised the pistol and sighted it upon his upper chest. Spectators at the far side of the estacada squatted or dropped to their knees and some of them lay face down in the dirt with their hands over their heads. In the silence the only sound was the low whining of one of the dogs. Then someone spoke from the bleachers. Bastante, he said. No le molests.

It was the alguacil. All turned to him. He was standing in the upper tiers of the rough board scaffolding with men at either side of him in their seven x beaver hats, some smoking puros as was the alguacil. He gestured with one hand. He said it was finished. He said for the boy to put up his rifle and that he would not be harmed. The deputy lowered the pistol, the watchers in the gallery rose from the ground and dusted themselves off. The boy laid the barrel of the rifle across his shoulder and lowered the hammer with his thumb. He turned and looked up at the alguacil. The alguacil made a small sweeping motion with the back of his hand. Whether to him or to the crowd at large he knew not but the spectators began to talk among themselves once more and someone opened the doors of the bodega onto the cool Mexican night.

The man to whom the hide had been promised had stepped across the boards and come forward. He walked around the dead wolf and stood facing her with his beltknife in his hand. The boy asked him what the hide was worth and he shrugged. He watched the boy carefully.

Cuanto quiere por el? the boy said.

E1 cuero?

La lobs.

The claimant to the hide looked at the wolf and he looked at the boy. He said that the hide was worth fifty pesos.

Acepta la carabina? the boy said.

The claimant's eyebrows rose but he regained his composure. En un huinche? he said.

Clam. Cuarenta y cuatro.

He unlimbered the rifle from his shoulder and pitched it across to the man. The claimant jacked open the lever and closed it again. He bent and picked up the ejected cartridge from the dirt and wiped it on his shirtsleeve and fed it back into the receiver. He raised the rifle and sighted at the lights overhead. It was worth a dozen mutilated wolfhides but he held it and weighed it in his hand and looked at the boy before nodding. Bueno, he said. He put the rifle over his shoulder and held out his hand. The boy looked down at the hand, then slowly took it and they sealed their barter by handclasp in the center of the pit while the populace filed past toward the open door. They studied him with their dark eyes in passing but if they were disappointed in their sport they gave no notice for they also were guests of hacendado and alguacil and they kept their own counsel as the custom of the country decreed. The claimant of the hide asked the boy if he had any more cartridges for the rifle but he only shook his head and knelt down and gathered up the limp shape of the shewolf in his arms which thin as she was yet was all he could carry and he crossed the pit and stepped over the barricade and went on toward the door at the rear with the head lolling and the slow blood dripping in his tracks.

When he rode out from the shadow of the building with the wolf across the bow of the saddle he had wrapped her in the remainder of the sheeting the rancher's wife had given him. The yard was filled with departing horsemen and with their shouts to each other. Dogs swarmed baying about the legs of his horse and the horse shied and stamped and kicked out at them and he rode past the open door of the bodega and on through the gate and out across the fields toward the river, leaning from the saddle and batting away the last of the dogs with his hat. To the south over the town rockets were rising in long sputtering arcs and breaking open in the darkness and falling in a slow hot confetti. The crack of their bursting reached him well behind the flare of light and in each flare of light hung the smudged ghosts of those gone before. He reached the river and turned downstream and rode through the shallow riffles and out along the broad gravel flats. A flight of ducks passed him going downriver in the dark. He could hear their wings. He could see them where they rose against the sky and flared away over the dark country to the west. He rode past the town and the small lights of the carnival and the shapes of the lights that lay slurred in the slow black coils of water along the river shore. A burntout catherinewheel stood smoking beyond the willow bracken. He studied the rise of the mountains, how they lay. The wind coming off the water smelled like wet metal. He could feel the blood of the wolf against his thigh where it had soaked through the sheeting and through his breeches and he put his hand to his leg and tasted the blood which tasted no different than his own. The fireworks died away. The moon's half hung over the black cape of the mountains.

At the junction of the rivers he rode across the broad gravel beach and sat the horse at the ford and he and the horse looked away to the north where the river was running clear and cold down out of the darkness of the country. He almost reached to draw the rifle from the scabbard to keep it out of the river but then he just put the horse forward into the shoals.

He could feel the horse's hooves muted on the cobbled rocks of the river floor and hear the water sucking at the horse's legs. The water came up under the animal's belly and he could feel the cold of it where it leaked into his boots. A last lone rocket rose over the town and revealed them midriver and revealed all the country about them, the shoreland trees strangely enshadowed, the pale rocks. A solitary dog from the town that had caught the scent of the wolf on the wind and followed him out stood frozen on the beach on three legs standing in that false light and then all faded again into the darkness out of which it had been summoned.

They crossed through the ford and rode dripping up out of the river and he looked back at the darkening town and then put the horse forward through the shore willows and standing cane and rode west toward the mountains. As he rode he sang old songs his father once had sung in the used to be and a soft corrido in spanish from his grandmother that told of the death of a brave soldadera who took up her fallen soldierman's gun and faced the enemy in some old waste of death. The night was clear and as he rode the moon dropped under the rim of the mountain and stars began to come up in the east where it was darkest. They rode up the dry course of a creekbed in a night suddenly colder, as if the moon had had warmth to it. Up through the low hills where he would ride all night singing softly as he rode.

By the time he reached the first talus slides under the tall escarpments of the Pilares the dawn was not far to come. He reined the horse in a grassy swale and stood down and dropped the reins. His trousers were stiff with blood. He cradled the wolf in his arms and lowered her to the ground and unfolded the sheet. She was stiff and cold and her fur was bristly with the blood dried upon it. He walked the horse back to the creek and left it standing to water and scouted the banks for wood with which to make a fire. Coyotes were yapping along the hills to the south and they were calling from the dark shapes of the rimlands above him where their cries seemed to have no origin other than the night itself.

He got the fire going and lifted the wolf from the sheet and took the sheet to the creek and crouched in the dark and washed the blood out of it and brought it back and he cut forked sticks from a mountain hackberry and drove them into the ground with a rock and hung the sheet on a trestlepole where it steamed in the firelight like a burning scrim standing in a wilderness where celebrants of some sacred passion had been carried off by rival sects or perhaps had simply fled in the night at the fear of their own doing. He pulled the blanket about his shoulders and sat shivering in the cold and waiting for the dawn that he could find the place where he would bury the wolf. After a while the horse came up from the creek trailing the wet reins through the leaves and stood at the edge of the fire.

He fell asleep with his hands palm up before him like some dozing penitent. When he woke it was still dark. The fire had died to a few low flames seething over the coals. He took off his hat and fanned the fire with it and coaxed it back and fed the wood he'd gathered. He looked for the horse but could not see it. The coyotes were still calling all along the stone ramparts of the Pilares and it was graying faintly in the east. He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and bare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.