When We Were Wolves (10 page)

They bought all the amenities they could find in the Ekalaka IGA, which weren’t many, but they did get the Wild Turkey and the range-fed rib-eyes. “Cash or charge?” asked the lady in horn-rim glasses at the grocery.

“Government voucher,” Strain said. The lady looked up over her
glasses when she saw who the voucher belonged to. You guys look like bait fishermen, she was thinking, where did you steal this from?

“Hello, Horton,” a man in a bloody apron said. The counter lady seemed relieved. Horton greeted the butcher shortly and they stepped onto Main Street to the jingle of the doorbells.

At the truck Horton squinted toward him. “Now, I’m cynical, Strain, read too many of these espionage novels, but maybe they want you out for good.”

“That’s real possible,” Strain said and climbed in. They drove into a stiff headwind. Pronghorn and cattle. “Unless a man’s got oil wells mixed in with his cattle, he’d need a ranch the size of Delaware to scratch out a living on these scablands,” Horton said. The soil had been beaten by a hundred and twenty years of overgrazing and drought. “Rain never followed the plow to Harding County. It’s cursed. Rains down in the Black Hills. Even up to the North Dakota prairie. Won’t rain here because we’re cursed. And they send me, a hydrologist, out here on the taxpayer’s dollar. When I kick the bucket, throw me in the river.” The next twenty miles were silent save for the wind and tires on asphalt.

Horton spoke as they dropped out of the burn and neared the cottonwoods that signaled the river that saved Crook’s cavalry from dehydration a hundred and twenty years ago. “Maybe this is some sort of suicide mission. They’re trying by wrecking your home life. Make you choose. Fight fire and make your wife crazy, or love your wife. I made the wrong goddamned choice. At least the world will freeze over before the realtors get out here.” They were back in Camp Crook. The sky hung heavy with rain or snow, give or take a degree or two. “The thing about General Crook. After the Indian Wars on the Northern Plains, he retired to Arizona to chase Geronimo around the desert. Goddamn government sun-bird.”

“I’m gonna throw some bugs at some fish before the drinking begins. What’s in the river?”

“Carp, catfish mostly. Some perch and maybe a sauger or two. Ain’t trouty.”

“Smallmouth make it this far up?”

“Don’t believe. Want to borrow a baitcaster?”

“No, thanks.”

“Remember, Strain, whichever way you’re headed is north, east is to your right.”

Dark came early now. Dusk had begun to settle in. Strain didn’t wear a watch, another point of contention between him and his supervisors, so he didn’t know, didn’t care, what time it was. Maybe 1700. Like Horton said, Camp Crook time. Time to fish.

The Little Missouri ran muddy and shoaled from the summer of drought and fire. Strain needed the hike. He reached the closest bank, then walked upstream to find a hole to start with. He walked in ankle-deep water in his fire boots, to a sandbar, and began rigging up. Though grasshoppers still plagued the landscape, a bullet-head grasshopper pattern hadn’t yielded anything. Hoping for a sauger, maybe a perch, he chose a number ten renegade his father had sent him. His father spent his long retirement days tying bugs, the lion’s share of which he sent to his son in Wyoming. Strain clicked-in his floating-line spool, looped a twelve-foot 4x leader to the line, tied the renegade on with an improved clinch knot, and painted the fly with floatant. The renegade didn’t resemble anything in particular, but fish saw something in it. Strain thought of it as the bastard calf of the fly world, and if forced to have only one fly in his cache, he’d think long and hard about making it the renegade. He made several false casts, stripped line from the spool, and let the fly drop in the current and drift over the dark pools. He
fished the renegade on top drying it with false casts, then let the bug soak up river water and slowly sink.

A weak front passed and the evening cooled. Strain was used to the fall-like temperatures from summer night duty at altitude. He fished in his shirtsleeves.

Nothing worked the topwater. He covered the green-black area around him with the thoroughness of a room painter. The fluorescent chartreuse line cut through the dusk like a tracer round.

He felt the line go heavy on the back-cast and he missed the throw. Must have caught a limb, he thought. He retrieved the slack out of the line. A high screech, the pitch of a dog whistle filled the night behind him. Struggling on top of the eddy at the end of his leader, a bird of some kind. He carefully pulled the slack line and stepped into the water to retrieve what he could tell now was a Little Brown bat. With his left hand he cupped the wings, to keep the tiny mammal from hurting itself before he could cut the barb free. The bat was all of three inches long, rounded ears, face like a tiny bear cubs. He unclipped his Leatherman tool from his belt and unfolded the wire cutters against his pantleg. The number ten barb protruded through the bat’s lower mandible, below the tiny triangle of soft pink bat-mouth. “You like my renegade, eh,” Strain said in a calming voice. “Fish here don’t think much of em, but I fooled a pretty stealthy little exterminator anyway.”

He deftly clipped the barb and slipped the fly from the bat’s mouth, and in the same movement set the tool down and made a cave of both hands. “It’ll sting for a bit, but you’ll be back to eating your mosquitoes in no time.”

Gently, he blew warm breath on the wings and body, then placed the bat on the sand to finish drying. He stepped away backward, carefully, to let the bat dry in peace with a minimum of humiliation. The bat looked more human than birdlike, as if someday man
would evolve winged hands and a tail rudder. What seemed odd were so many grasshoppers in November; it didn’t seem at all odd for the Incident Commander, no incident in sight, to be talking to a maimed Little Brown bat.

He switched to a hare’s ear nymph and made a few more consolation casts before wiping his line clean with a Smokey Bear 50th Anniversary bandanna and wading to the bank for the long walk back to the ranger station, where whiskey and a card game would await him. He tried not to let the politics of his job enter his mind. “Yeah,” Horton could be telling them on the phone right now, “he knows it was a computer mistake. He’s out fishing on the clock right now. Tomorrow morning we’re gonna cook a big turkey.” Fuck ’em. He had what was important. He hoped that by now the NIFC Data General computer had disemboweled itself.

The walk back to the ranger station cleared his mind. He smelled wood smoke. It was cold enough so he could see his breath. Horton was messy, having dipped into the Wild Turkey, drinking it neat. Strain fried some potatoes and a couple of the rib-eyes. They ate, leaving the dishes on the counter, and played cards to KVOO-AM out of Tulsa. Horton hummed to the old bluegrass song “Atomic Power”; then came Merle Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues.” “Aw, keep workin’,” Horton sang as he dealt. Festus nosed his leg.

Two hours later Horton was asleep on an army cot in his office. Strain turned the heater to low and read some of the back editions of the
Rapid City Journal
and
Rocky Mountain News.
A good deal had happened without his noticing. At least the comics weren’t dated.

Waking, he could hear the unsteady ticking of the electric heater. After a candy bar and instant coffee, he stepped toward the door to walk back to the river. “Take Festus with you, will ya,” Horton said.

“He does love to fish. I’ll be drunk as ten Indians time you get back.”

From his fly box Strain selected a two-and-a-half-inch black egg-sucking leach. He fished heavy, using a sinking-tip line and a 2x leader. He liked the heavier six-weight line, even on trout, because he could fire the bigger flies he favored through most any wind. Guys who fished midges tended to be anal-retentive flatlanders. Bigger bugs, bigger fish.

He reached into his pack, pulled out a small bulb of garlic, and broke off a clove. With his jackknife he cut off the stem and peeled it. Then he cut the meat of the garlic against his thumb, letting the thin discs of meat fall into his palm. He placed the garlic on an MRE cracker and started working on the
PROCESSED CHEESE SPREAD—“KNEAD WELL BEFORE OPENING
,” it said on the camo-green package. This was lunch; it would get him through to Thanksgiving dinner. With the garlic oil strong on his hands he balmed the maribou leach and first few feet of leader until it no longer smelled to a fish of epoxy and human glands.

He cast upstream and let the leach soak up the muddy water and sink slowly. The light current swept the rig downstream, past him, and into a hole along the cut bank. He stripped line out until the current took up the slack a hundred or so feet below him. He reeled in and cast upstream again, then again.

Fishing for catfish held the same import for him as casting for Wind River rainbows or blue marlin off Tampico. Technically, he was at work, getting paid. He could see the Custer National Forest to the northwest; his fire was cold. He felt the line slacken, then go taut. He set the hook hard, then dealt out slack line until he could play the fish with the drag on the reel. The pawl drag on the Ross reel buzzed like a chain saw. The catfish went as deep as
she could, into the hole, trying desperately to find a sunken tree or barbed-wire fence. Strain could see the water muddy on top of the wallowing cat. Slowly he played the fish out, bringing it to the gravel at the edge of the sandbar. Four pounds, he guessed. He wet his hand and reached under her barbed whiskers, and with his hemostat, pulled the hook free and pushed her back into the current.

Though catching them now still held the same excitement as when he was a kid, Strain had never really liked eating catfish, especially since he knew what they ate, those old goats of the river, their fat full of DDT. Once he had suffered through a sermon by a Bible literalist on Old Testament foods—what was okay to eat, what wasn’t. Catfish, skin fish, weren’t okay, just like pork. Couldn’t eat oysters or shrimp. Ostrich. Crows. Was tuna in a can a skin fish? Bats, too. He remembered it wasn’t okay to eat bat, which had been just fine with him at the time. They went home after the sermon and his grandmother fixed a ham.

Anyway, today was Thanksgiving.

Now two
or so miles north of town he heard the old civil defense siren. He looked back toward Crook and saw a thick column of black smoke. A trailer house, perhaps. But there weren’t many structures in the entire town. He cut the leach from the tippet and reeled in. It had started to snow lightly. “Let’s go, Festus.” He shouldered his pack and walked south, slowly, thinking about irony and responsibility. Strain knew the fire came from the ranger station.

A short in the ancient wiring. A cigarette on flannel. Or Horton might have kicked a section of newspaper into the heater. The paper would have caught another paper until the flames reached the bone-dry pine walls. One wall would catch, leading to the ceiling, then to the attic, where a hundred gallons or more of petroleum-based paints and outdated agricultural chemicals were
stored. The Sioux Ranger District would be history in a matter of minutes.