A Little Past Freddy Point

I am the only one who’s been on a wolf hunt before so they put me up front. It’s one thing to shoot a wolf that’s gnawing on a sheep in your backyard; it’s another to go find him in his den. The wolves are disappearing and they say it’s a national problem but for all I know it’s mostly our problem and that of the folks in Idaho. Before they were forced back on us the biggest talk in town was the high school football season or whose cow will tilt the scales further. Now everybody’s heated up about the wolf. Every time you enter a bar you hear tall tales about people coming face to face with a beast and scaring it with a mean look and a stick or a punch in the nose, soon this town will be full of wolf wrestlers.

The sun is just crowning and the wind shouldn’t be on our tails before at least an hour. If we haven’t reached the lair by then we’ll have to cancel the operation.

Watching the rangers come and go I have a general idea of where the den is and yesterday’s rain is going to make any fresh tracks easier to follow. The quickest way into the thicker part of the woods goes by a small clearing that runs along Lovers Creek. That’s where the University Predator Control Center has set up shop. My son lives there, on the other side, working with those trying to discipline the wolf. For a bunch of pale-faced professors they surely got creative, giving them shock collars, tying up ropes and flags around the pastures – first white then red, now it looks like they have settled on orange. Right now the cabin’s empty, I made sure they’d be busy with some bogus call about a wolf caught in a trap on the other side of the valley. I gave them Ratty Jasper’s address. I also gave Jasper a call.

It takes a little climbing to reach Freddy Point, where some rocks tumbled down to make a cave, and the guys behind me are huffing and puffing like they’ve got marshmallows in their lungs. Most of them were too small to remember when Fred Dreckel, a kid from Great Falls, got arrested for draft dodging. He had spent the whole fall season in the mountains when his family and everybody else thought he was in Canada. I guess he expected a national amnesty law before winter came. If he hadn’t started helping himself to Sal’s traps and if Sal hadn’t been curious we could have had our own local Ötzi.

Fresh brown droppings are waiting for us by a patch of white wintergreens. I fumble around for a stick to test how firm they are. If they’re too hard they’ve been laid more than six hours ago and won’t be much of an indication. Someone says they look like his dog’s, just more wooly and sheds a little tear for the sheep that got digested. I feel like the company wants to get chatty so I pretend to hear something and duck swiftly with my hand up in the air. We start walking in slow motion, half-crouched, peering left and right like movie Indians. I don’t know when they’ll realize there’s nothing around. To them I’m just an old ranch hand, the meek that shall not inherit the earth; it’s not my place to tell them to shut up.

The smell of weeping sap is everywhere. I take a deep breath and the taste is on my tongue, sweet and sharp. The light amber colored pieces are the ones you want to use in old-fashioned Christmas puddings or, if you’re the fire-eating type, to fix yourself a drink. Fermented sap has no patience with Sunday drinkers and will smack you on the head, but if you ease into it, it’s as good a brew as any. The ranch takes all my time for now but I’ll be retired soon and I’m thinking of starting my own production. I’m not talking big scale moonshine, no, just enough liquid on the shelf to honor the spirit of Montana hospitality. My son used to whisper to me to pass him the flask whenever we brought some with us on a hunting trip. The wolves were long gone when he was young but he would follow me into the forest and we would look for deer or elk. I don’t think he liked venison but he shot his fair amount of game, took part in hunting stories and listened to those of the people who had done and seen more than him. That was before the wolf became his religion and his conversation turned as dry as bone stew. Talking about bones we haven’t seen a single deer carcass so far. I guess they mostly focus on the livestock in the valley.

Past a certain altitude the ground gets craggier and we have to walk carefully while scanning the underbrush. A stubborn horsefly has set its aim on me, buzzing around my face like a high school flirt. It lands on my leg two seconds too long, too bad for it I still got reflexes. I’m wiping my hand on a rock when I see a bright flash from the corner of my eye. I’m ready to swat it too except it’s not a bug – it’s a gray clump of hair tangled to a gooseberry bush, trying to escape with the breeze. Next to it is a beautiful wolf paw print. As I part the bush to size the print one of the stems grabs hold of me and digs in my arm like an IV. It leaves a fresh scar close to the one I brought back from the war, the war Freddy spent in prison. “Damn Larry, you got yourself in a thorny situation,” I hear. They chuckle and I chuckle with them. I brought some gauze and it should do for now. If I try to disinfect it here the wolf will smell us from a mile away, and I am not even sure he’s that far judging from the mark he left. We follow the track up to a large fallen tree cracked open in the middle that forces us to head south for a bit.

A little higher up we spot two muddy prints facing a puddle. It must be very close now; the mud hasn’t even caked yet. We resume our walk slowly, clenching our rifles tight.

My body sees the wolf before my eyes do and I freeze just in time. It hasn’t detected us and is lounging on the ground. It’s a small beast, probably a female. It looks alone. I prick my ears and after a minute I catch the high-pitched voices of at least two young ones. My heart skips a beat. It’s the right season for pups but I hadn’t planned for them, somehow. Binoculars confirm two cubs are playing near the mother, visibly trying her patience every chance they get. Their fur is matted with dirt and sticky pine needles but they still look cuddly enough, they can’t be more than a week old. I wonder if my son has seen them.

Before long a bigger, whiter animal comes out, the father. Maybe he knows. It’s too late anyway, we’ve already flanked them on the right and Mark, our sharp shooter, is moving left. I don’t like to kill the young ones but they’ve got to go. Wolves are hunters; you can’t treat them like dogs, give them collars and hope they’ll behave when there’s a banquet next door. I know that if my son learns about this he won’t forgive me. Or maybe he will, when he finally gets tired of all that professor talk and learns that there is no sin when it comes to fighting for supremacy.

We’re almost in position when they become aware of our presence. In a second the mother is arching her back and the cubs are retreating into the den. Their anxious squeals are fueling her anger as she growls in Mark’s direction, her head tilted sideways, baring a flushed gum and a pair of fangs like lightening bolts on a face the color of storm. Meanwhile the father has quickly circled the area, taking note of each of our scents and just stopped on a small promontory twenty yards away from me. His head looks enormous even from that distance. I can feel his eyes searching for mine. He looks back at the female one last time, then with an angry thrash of the tail launches forward to meet his challenger.

Bio: Eléonore Le Corvaisier is originally from France. She married into a family of Wisconsinites after moving to the USA and enjoyed several vacations in Door County near Baileys Harbor. She currently lives in Austin, Texas with her husband where she reads and writes, preferably in the shade.