City Beasts Page 11

  It was fun, really.

  One afternoon in the living room her mother turned to her father and said in German, “Heinz, have you noticed how much happier our Opal is of late? She always has this big smile.”

  Opal understood exactly what she said and she smiled, and no matter what her mother thought, it really was a smile.

  IDAHO LOCAVORES

  A Trilogy of the Sawtooth Wolf

  The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.

  —William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell”

  Part One: Hunger on the Big Wood River

  Everybody wants to eat someone. A flock of ravens, black and hungry, flew out of the Sawtooth Range and picked up the winding trail of the Big Wood River, where the wolves would lead them to more food. The high ridges were still too frozen and snowbound to provide much food for hungry elk or moose, and they had wandered down to the stands of thin white aspen and black-barked cottonwood that filled the floodplains, where the first buds of spring could be eaten. There the wolves were waiting.

  Jack Bondy walked along the bank, not looking for the ravens or the elk. Little black bugs, midges, were hatching, a mysterious birth on the surface of the river. As he walked his boots sank into the soft unpacked snow, good skiing snow, he thought. But he would not ski today because it was March 31, the last day of the winter fly-fishing season on the Big Wood River, and rainbows were coming to the rippled icy surface because they wanted to eat the midges.

  Jack Bondy was the only one who was not trying to eat. To the others along the Big Wood, he was the only incomprehensible one. He was not allowed to keep the trout he caught this time of year, so he was not after food. All winter long he had been trying to catch one rainbow, who seemed to just laugh at his carefully tied flies. He had vowed to get this fish in his net before the season ended.

  He had had the fish on the line twice this winter. The first time, the guides on his rod had clogged with ice and the fish had broken away before he could strip any line. The second time, just three weeks before today, the fish leapt out of the water, trying to run as he set the hook. Bondy could see it was a female, fat with eggs, and maybe twenty-five or more inches long. While Bondy took in these calculations—only for a second—she unhooked herself and swam off. “I’m going to get you,” Jack Bondy swore to himself. He saw her two other times. Once, she was just a shadow, but he was sure it was she. But she wouldn’t rise. She wasn’t hungry. Another time she was holding up, working her fins to stay still in a pool so clear he could see her pink stripe. She might be even bigger than he thought. He tried several flies, but she wasn’t interested. He streamed a yellow nymph so close it almost bopped her on the nose, and this got her attention but the nymph was moving too fast in the current and she didn’t follow.

  If he caught her today and released her, he could catch her again in the summer when she would be even bigger. Every time a fly drifted past her she made a decision. She knew what would happen if she chose the wrong one. But she had to eat. With each choice she grew a little smarter. He could get smarter, too. That was the importance of having choices.

  Bondy sidestepped the elk droppings as he walked along the bank, stepping onto the slippery river rocks in a few places to cast. The elk had retreated up to a low ridge and looked down at him. He had caught one of the midges the day before and held it up to the sunlight, and a slight blue glow could be seen in the underbelly of the little black bug. So he had tied little black flies with a touch of blue down and had tied one on his line after a big yellow stone fly, a silly-looking thing that some rainbows were actually swimming up to just below the surface to eat.

  He walked along the bank, occasionally stepping into the slippery rocky-bottomed river, looking in all the deep pools he knew. Two black mergansers, their red beaks sticking out like fishing tackle, flew low over the river in tight formation just above the shining surface, banking their wings to take the bends in the river. They, too, were looking for fish, but Bondy could see that they weren’t having any more luck than he was.

  The trout had turned brilliant because they were ready to spawn, which was why the season was shutting down. They were hungry, rising all around him, with a flash of colors as fleeting as a dream. He was standing in a black-and-white world—gray sky, white mountains, black cottonwoods, white aspen, slate-colored water—and that split second of rainbow was dazzling. Its only matching color were the bright red willow twigs coming up thick and at odd angles along the black-and-white banks like the crests of angry fighting cocks. But unlike the willow, the trout had color for only a second until they plunged into the cold, clear water and turned dark again, indistinguishably green against the rocky riverbed, vanishing so that you could never be certain that you really saw it.

  His legs were held by the cold hug of the river against his waders. It was not so much his cold legs he worried about, it was his feet. Already some toes were numb. When he lost all feeling he would have to leave because the rocky bottom was slippery and he had to be able to step skillfully around the big rocks. If he fell he would have to leave and get out of his wet clothes quickly.

  When his cast was right, trout would hit his midge the second it landed, as though trying to catch him by surprise and steal his rod. When he held on, they swam off furiously. He would give them a little line, bring them in, unhook them, and watch them swim away. Most of them were small, brash young trout who would know better by next year.

  Bondy chose a favorite spot where the Warm Springs ran into the Big Wood. The beavers had been there and had knocked three cottonwoods into the river, built a little home with the twigs and branches, and stripped the bark to feed the family. The beavers had left the three logs white and shockingly naked in the stand of black-trunked trees. Dams always change rivers. Now the cold, rushing slate-gray water of the wrongly named Warm Springs charged into the Big Wood, gurgled angrily as it hit the logs, swirled past them, and rushed along the Big Wood, creating a deep and quiet pool on the other side of the log where a trout could rest in still water and feed on the midges that swept past him in the current. Bondy could cast just on the edge of the shallow golden water and the deep green. This was the spot.

  He was not looking for a brash young trout, though he hooked a few more of them. His quarry had size and experience and, no matter how hungry, never rushed to pounce. Bondy gingerly waded into the river, feeling the slippery rocks through his waders with his still-nimble toes, tying a fresh midge on his line, inching into casting position. He saw her now, at first just a shadow, maybe a rock. But then it moved. It was she.

  He backed toward the bank so that she couldn’t spot him. She stopped moving. She hadn’t seen him. He worked at an angle so that she wouldn’t see his shadow.

  Still undetected by the trout, he was being watched by a pair of keen yellow eyes—a gray wolf was hunkered in low in the beaver hutch, watching. There were no more beaver. The wolf, known in the pack as Nose, had taken care of them the day before. He crunched them in his jaws one by one—first the papa, then the mama, then the young one. The beavers were not quick enough to get away and for Nose it was an easy hunt. He didn’t need any pack mates.

  Wolves had not been hunted in the Sawtooth and White Clouds for more than forty years and Nose had no memory of people as dangerous. But Lord and Lady had a tremendous fear of them, not from their own experience but from genetic memory of poisonings, cowboys roping and dragging wolves to death, terrible things—they warned the pack to stay away from humans because they were extremely dangerous. As soon as the wolves picked up the human scent they hid, except that there were dogs with human smell and the wolves found these animals agreeable and would sometimes let them run with them.

  Nose, of course, listened to Lord and Lady and so when he smelled a human, he too hid. But now, for the first time, he could watch one up close. He watched
the human with fish all around him trying to do something foolish with the long stick and Nose couldn’t help wondering, How dangerous could they be?

  Lady had five pups that needed food. Nose ate Papa beaver, who was larger and he did not want to have to carry. Instead he brought back Mama for the pups. This day he had come back to get the young one that he had buried and frozen. The ravens who had feasted on the remainder of the papa beaver were back for more. But now there was a fisherman.

  Bondy dried off his flies by whipping his line back and forth, prescribing graceful elongated circles in the air over the river. Then with a flick of his wrist the line straightened out and the fly landed on the seam between the two colors of water—the fast green and the slow black. The fly drifted deliciously off the ledge in the river. Below, the big rainbow studied the passing midge. She was always hungry when she was ready to spawn, but something told her to pass this one by. Something about this one reminded her of those other ones, the bad ones that had nearly yanked her out of the river.

  She saw a midge she liked and she leapt and ate it and she retreated back to her spot in the pool. All afternoon Bondy drifted his feather midge past her and she was never fooled by it, leaping up for the right midges, letting Bondy’s pass.

  Hidden in the beaver dam, yellow eyes flashed side to side as Nose watched the human, spellbound, fascinated. He detected an elk smell, which at first he attributed to the droppings along the bank. Then he caught a glimpse of a cow on the ridge—several of them. He would deal with them later with the pack. For now he was watching the human. Overhead, the ravens were doing the same thing. They didn’t know what the wolf was going to do, but surely it would lead to food. Wolves always lead to food.

  Bondy did not see the wolf, did not sense him watching. It was unfortunate, because everyone was talking about wolves and he really hoped to one day see one.

  It started to snow and the wind brought in colder air and Bondy’s toes were numb from the cold through his boots and waders and he reeled in his line and walked off. The trout rose for another midge and landed with a splash. Bondy pretended not to hear it. The first day the Big Wood reopened for spring he would come back and get her. But for now the truth was that he had not eaten breakfast and he was getting very hungry.

  * * *

  Nose came out from his hiding place, leapt in the river with his jaws open, and crushed the trout, snapping her backbone before swallowing her whole, eggs and all. Nose would go tell the pack about the elk who had moved from the ridge, but all the while, Nose was thinking that these humans didn’t look all that dangerous. They couldn’t even hunt down a fish.

  Part Two: Sheepish in Sun Valley

  In his heart, the Lord did not fear humans. After all, they were the ones who put him in power. He was just a beta wolf in the north when he was captured. At first he was terrified of their cages and their strange smells. One thing all wolves agreed on, humans smell bad. But they treated him respectfully and brought him down here, where he could start his own pack and rule. They were gentle creatures full of kindness. They put a collar on him with a radio signal and he didn’t like wearing it. At first he would rub his neck against fir trees to try to get it off, but in time he was used to it.

  If he even looked at a human he would see the disapproving face in the Lady. The Lady was not a pure gray Canadian wolf. She was partly from a line of Rocky Mountain wolves, and within her nerves and synapses she carried memories of the bad times when they were tortured and beaten and poisoned, when wolf hides hung from houses and almost everyone was killed. She wanted the pack to stay away from the humans.

  So when the pack was together, such as on big hunts, when they took elk and the time they got the moose, they all avoided humans and their smell. But now the Lord and a lot of the boys and men had a sense that they were a big pack and didn’t have to fear anything. By summer, when the pups were grown, they would be nineteen. This was a pack that could rule the mountains and even have a presence in the valley.

  Sometimes late at night they would go into Ketchum. They would wait in the moon-sparkled cliffs at the edge of town until all the strangers had gone back up their mountain to rest up for another day of sliding down it—why?—and the locals would finally stumble out of the Pioneer and the Sawtooth and go home. Nose would watch these oafish stragglers and he couldn’t help thinking that if the pack ever wanted to take a human, they could get one of these at night. He wouldn’t do it, of course. Even he was not crazy enough to attack a human. Besides, they smelled so bad. But he had a good strategic mind and he could never resist thinking about possible lines of attack. He couldn’t help thinking that he had the mind of a leader.

  When the last light went out on Main Street in Ketchum, the male pack, ten of them, would gallop through town so fast that even if a human did see them he couldn’t be sure. Malcolm saw them one night on his way home and shook his head and thought he must be drunk, which in fact he was.

  After they ran through town they might keep going straight to the sheep fields, where there was easy food. The Lady had warned them about this meat, but she ate it anyway. To most of the pack it was better than elk, which could hurt you with a hoof, and definitely better than moose. They had gotten a moose last year and the giant had nearly killed half of them. Surely some of them would have died if Nose hadn’t grabbed on to the moose’s nose, the trick for which he was named, and held on until the others could get its haunches, belly, and finally tear out his huge windpipe. Sheep was better, even if it carried traces of human smell and even if sometimes it was necessary to fight off dogs that smelled human.

  The pack could grow because there was plenty of food, and sometimes, when they were all well fed, instead of going straight at the end of town they would turn left and run up to the mountains where the humans slid in the daytime. It was empty there at night. There was nothing to hunt except an occasional rabbit because the slopes smelled entirely of humans. But the wolves liked to play there, leaping and wrestling. Then they would run to the top of the highest human mountain, where there was a building that was always empty at night, and they would have a good howl and for just that moment, the human mountain was theirs.

  Tom LaMotte, hosting his Hollywood crowd in his villa, would stop the party, shsssh everyone, point a finger and pose the way he did in that thriller shot in Alaska, and whisper in his melodious baritone, “Wolves.”

  Clement Stedlick, in his low-roofed glass-and-concrete home cantilevered on a high ledge of mountain, would look up from his more or less empty computer screen and out at the moonlit slopes and feel haunted but not inspired, which is what he was hoping to feel.

  In their three-room house, Cathy, the high school science teacher, who loved nature and thought all the talk about the dangerous wolves was an exaggeration, turned to her husband and with her classroom authority pronounced, “Just coyotes.”

  Etxegarray, out on his sheep ranch, eyed his gun rack longingly.

  * * *

  Tom LaMotte walked into Annie’s, the brightest star in a celebrity crowd. In his silver ski suit with cobalt trim giving a reflected glow to his perfect body, he looked every inch the action hero he was supposed to be. Annie was known as a locavore, which Tom had quipped, “Sounds like a kind of wolf.” The crowd all laughed, not that it was funny—they had all heard disturbing rumors about Sawtooth wolves wandering into Sun Valley—but because it was Tom LaMotte. Annie was trying to cook with local products, an effort that had won her awards in national food magazines. The breakfast specialty was fresh eggs from Carey, trout—steelhead, since rainbow could not be taken—and fresh mountain herbs. Spring was late, but there was always rosemary, and she had found thickets of thyme and even a few spring onions in the lower valley fields.

  “Skiing today, Mr. LaMotte?” Annie asked as she hurried up to show him to the best table.

  “Tom. It’s Tom. I thought I’d try Baldy. I hear some of their expert trails are a pret
ty good ride.”

  “The best in the world—they say. I’ve never been on them.”

  “You don’t ski?”

  “Not on those trails. It’s straight down to Ketchum.”

  “No,” he said confidently, but not understanding that Annie had been joking, “you stop before that. You should let me take you sometime.”

  After breakfast he drove his red Porsche, which he had been able to rent, special order in advance, in Boise, to the nearby lift station to get a carriage up Baldy. He didn’t really like heights very much, and in moments when his compartment would swing gently over a deep, snow-filled gorge, he felt queasy. When he got out at the top stop, he pretended not to notice all the skiers in designer sweaters and well-styled nylon noticing him. Clutching his skis and poles, he made his way over to the most infamous trail. His boots hurt his legs. How could this be right? The expert shop in Los Angeles had insisted they were a perfect fit, but they hurt. When he got to his trail he took his position with his poles ready to shove off. The trail dropped straight down. It looked like he was about to slide off the edge of the earth. He looked around to assure himself that he was alone and then said in his deep film voice, “No other takers today, huh?”

  No one could hear him, but he just wanted to try out the line. Then he turned his feet sideways and began wedging his way down the slope, step by step. But it was even too steep for this. He could feel his entire body sweating, which, he calculated, would not look good, especially with his makeup. He looked around one more time to confirm that he was alone and then sat on his muscular posterior that had been so prominently displayed last year in the action feature Dark Run. It had not done that well in American theaters but had earned a fortune in the home market and in Europe and Asia.