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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 to Mexico and not strike a crossfence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Spare language and motions laden with message ...
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.
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.
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.
Damn!
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.
You think you can make one? he said. Yessir. I think so.
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.
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
...more
No divorces amongst wolves.
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.
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 ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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
She’s carryin pups, he said.
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.
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.
Message delivered & received.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Escúchame, 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By damn, he said. By damn.
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 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.
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 struggling and he got hold of the rope end again and sat with it doubled in his fist and 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.
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.
