C. Box - Nowhere to Run

But he was getting pretty fed up with that pack of dogs. Especially Tube.

As he trudged and chanted in a pain-dulled daze, he thought of the legend of Hugh Glass for inspiration.

Hugh Glass was a mountain man in these same Rocky Mountains who, in 1823, was looking for berries to eat when he encountered a grizzly bear. The bear mauled Glass almost beyond recognition, chewing most of Glass’s scalp and face off, creating massive wounds all over him with its teeth and three-inch claws, including an exposed rib cage, and leaving him for dead. So did Glass’s companions, who, after five days of waiting in the middle of hostile Arikara Indian country for the comatose man to finally die, took his rifle and knife and left him.

But Hugh Glass didn’t die. And when he woke up and realized he’d been abandoned without food, water, or weapons, he had the determination to roll over and start to crawl south toward Fort Kiowa, nearly two hundred miles away. What kept him going was his will to live and his fantasies of bloody revenge on the men who’d left him to perish.

He couldn’t walk for weeks, and he lived off roots, grubs, and berries he found along the way. He managed to set his broken leg, and when his open wounds began to rot from gangrene, he opened a decomposing downed log and scooped the maggots he found inside into his wound to eat away the infected flesh.

The berries and roots kept him going until he happened on a freshly killed buffalo calf and the wolves who took it down. Using a heavy stick to scare the wolves away, he fell upon the calf and ate raw meat by the handfuls for days until the carcass began to purple and rot. But the meat strengthened him, his broken bones knitted, and he was finally able to stand. And he began his six-month trek to Fort Kiowa.

Compared to what Hugh Glass had gone through, Joe thought, this was a happy little picnic in the woods.

“Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April. ”

“Wolves,” Joe said aloud, startled by the realization that had come to him because of his recounting of the Hugh Glass story. “Those are wolves following me.”

Not Tube. Not dogs. Not his fevered imagination. Wolves . Six to eight of them, keeping just out of his vision on the other side of the creek but staying abreast of him.

But there weren’t supposed to be wolves in the Sierra Madre. The wolf packs were in the northwest section of the state, centered around Yellowstone where, years before, the federal government had introduced Canadian gray wolves into a region they may not have ever roamed. Joe had agreed with the idea initially, even though it was a controversial program much loved by most observers but despised by ranchers and hunters. The unintended consequences, though, were significant. Although the wolves were supposed to cull the expanding elk herds, domestic cattle were killed and moose numbers had been decimated. The wolf population had exploded into Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, although measures were in place-supposedly-to keep the numbers down and the wolf packs localized. Sure, there had been reports of wolves in the area in the past and even alleged sightings south into Colorado. But the federal wildlife agencies discounted the reports, insisting that citizens had seen coyotes, or large domestic dogs gone feral.

In a break in the buckbrush, he saw two of them. They saw him as well and stopped as if frozen in mid-stride. A large silver-and-white wolf, shadowed by a bigger one that was jet black. The silver wolf weighed maybe eighty pounds, and the black wolf was easily a hundred and twenty. Their round piercing amoral eyes cut holes through him.

“Go away,” he croaked, raising his left arm and waving it.

The sound startled them, and they flinched. The silver wolf backpedaled, turned on her haunches, and vanished into the brush. But the black wolf stood his ground, lowered his head, and arched his shoulders. For a terrifying moment, Joe braced for an attack.

“Get out of here!” he bellowed, and flung a pair of handcuffs from his belt. The cuffs arced through the air and landed with a jangle five feet in front of the wolf, and the animal turned with a lazy shrug and followed the silver wolf back into the shadows.

Joe stood for a moment, breathing hard, trying to hear where they’d gone, if anywhere. It was extremely rare for a wolf to attack a human in the wild. There were very few instances of its happening. But they’d certainly shadowed him for a mile or so, and he thought how appealing he must look to them: obviously wounded, caked with dried and fresh blood, without a serious weapon. He could imagine one of them darting across the creek and hamstringing him like wolves hamstrung elk and moose. Once their prey was incapacitated, the rest of the pack could move in.

He found a stout branch that was still heavy and green, that looked like it had been blasted from a tree by a lightning strike. The branch was nearly three feet long, bulbous on the butt end, and tapered like a baseball bat. His right shoulder was worthless, but he took a few practice swings with his left and the branch whistled cleanly through the air. He smacked the trunk of a pine tree with a reassuring thunk , which sent a shower of pine needles to the forest floor.

“Hear that?” he shouted into the air, hoping the wolves were listening. “That’ll be your head if you try to take a bite out of me!”

He could neither see nor hear where the wolves had gone, but despite his shouts and his club he didn’t think they’d gone far.

“Wolves this far south,” he thought, as he continued down the creek. “Wait until they hear about this in Cheyenne.”

Farther down the creek, Joe stumbled on a massive five-point elk antler that had been shed earlier that summer. He tossed the branch aside and picked up the antler, turning it and admiring the thick beam. One tine was sixteen inches long and an inch thick at the base. Forked tines on the end were six inches each and sharp as spear points. The antler was heavy but a hell of a weapon, he thought. Much better than a club.

If the wolves attacked he could really do some damage, he thought.

His mantra evolved from a country-and-western rhythm into reggae and then into blues. Joe kept thinking about what had happened, what he’d seen, what he didn’t know.

Why was Terri Wade in an isolated cabin? What was her relationship with the Grim Brothers? What was with the store-bought picture frames containing promotional shots? And could that have possibly been who he thought it was with them? The girl? He shook his head, not able to wrap his mind around the prospect. Again, he thought he’d seen her visage too many times on fliers and in the newspapers. He’d imagined her, he was sure. But there had been four faces. That, he was convinced of.

And what about the brothers themselves? Why were they up there and what were they doing? What caused them to hide in one of the roughest and most remote sections of the least populated state in the union?

It was almost imperceptible how the terrain changed, how cottonwoods took over from the pine trees, how bunches of cheater grass replaced the pine needle floor. Without actually realizing it, Joe knew he’d descended from the mountains into a valley. He veered right away from the creek and the trees, and as the sun set he was on the edge of a hay meadow. Instead of the smell of pine and the dank vegetation of the creek, he smelled the sweet smell of cut hay and thought he caught a whiff of gasoline.

Joe turned and looked behind him. The mountains went up and back, peak after peak, until the range melded with the sky countless miles away. He was struck by how big the mountains were, how hulking, imposing, and still. And he was awed by the fact that he’d actually walked out of them.