Wolf Stalker Page 3

  Troy nodded, and watched as Steven climbed the few steps into the relocation office. Olivia started to explain to the kids that Mike had already gone ahead, and they were to meet him at Slough Creek.

  “I’m tired of riding in the tailgate, Mom,” Ashley complained. “How far is it to Stew Creek?”

  “Not Stew Creek,” Olivia corrected her. “Slough Creek. It’s spelled S-L-O-U-G-H, but it’s pronounced like ‘he slew the dragon.’ And we’ll be there in less than half an hour.”

  His eyes trained on the building in front of him, Troy twisted an end of his T-shirt into a thin rope. When he let it go, it fell into a mass of wrinkles. Finally, the screen door swung open and Steven clattered down the steps, shaking his head. “No news,” he said. “I’m sorry, Troy.”

  Quietly, they took their places back inside the jeep. During the half-hour drive to Slough Creek, they kept their voices low—that is, the Landons did. Troy didn’t talk at all. “I did get some more information about the dog’s death,” Olivia told them. “They know wolves were in the area where the dog was supposed to have been killed. But they lost contact with one of the wolves, a young male. His radio collar stopped transmitting. He could have wiggled out of it, or the batteries might have failed, or—”

  “Maybe he got killed, too,” Jack said.

  “Mmmm, that wouldn’t be why the collar stopped transmitting. When a wolf doesn’t move for four hours, the radio collar goes into what’s called ‘mortality mode’—it gives off a really rapid signal. This wolf’s collar just stopped working, period. The whole thing’s kind of mysterious.”

  The Landons discussed the possibilities, but Troy didn’t speak or move. He just sat with his hand over his eyes. Jack wondered if maybe he was crying about his mother. But no, a tough kid like Troy would never cry.

  CHAPTER THREE

  After they turned off the highway, they drove a few more miles down a dirt road to a parking lot in the middle of nowhere. A very odd place for a parking lot, Jack thought. But several campers and vans stood there, so people must have left their vehicles behind while they hiked the trails.

  “This time everybody can get out and stay out,” Olivia said. “Because there’s Mike, waiting for us.”

  A man came toward them.

  The first thing Jack noticed was the man’s cap, decorated with a logo of a wolf and the words Project Wolfstock, Yellowstone—definitely not part of the regulation Park Service uniform, but cool.

  The second thing Jack noticed was Mike’s expression. He looked very surprised to see all of them. “What’s with the kids?” he asked.

  It was Olivia’s turn to look surprised. “Didn’t you get my messages? I called and left several voice messages on your answering machine—that we were bringing our own two kids and an extra one.”

  “Shoot, Olivia,” Mike exclaimed. He took off his cap and scratched his head. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of day this has been! I’ve been out of the office all day because of all the trouble—demonstrators picketing, and about a zillion news reporters—”

  “We heard about it,” Steven told him.

  “I never even had a chance to check my voice messages,” Mike apologized. “Anyway, I figured it was just the two of you coming, so I only brought three horses. I wish we could take the kids with us—kids have such sharp eyes, they might notice things we miss—but there’s no time now to go back for more horses. If we don’t get started, we’re gonna run out of daylight.”

  The tall horses were already saddled and waiting, stamping, snorting, and touching each other neck-to-neck. Their reins were looped around hooks on a red trailer that was hitched to a Park Service truck.

  “That’s OK,” Steven said. “I’ll just stay here with the kids while you and Olivia ride up to the site.”

  “No, Steve, that won’t work. I need you to take pictures of the scene. And we need to get there as fast as possible.” Mike tugged the brim of his cap, pulling it down to his eyebrows. “Not just because of the light, but because of scavengers getting at that dead dog’s remains. Every minute we wait, another raven comes to feed on the carcass. If we don’t get there soon to examine the area and take some good pictures, the evidence will be gone.”

  Jack interrupted, “It’s OK, Mom and Dad. Us kids’ll just hang out here till you get back.” Before he even finished, he saw Steven shake his head.

  “Can’t do that,” Steven said.

  “Why not?” Mike asked. “They’re big kids.”

  “No. Definitely no,” Olivia declared.

  Troy scowled. “Because of me, right? You think I’m gonna run. Where would I go, around here?” He gestured at the steep hills that rose into even steeper mountains, covered with pines and thick scrub.

  No one answered, because all of them knew that the road they’d driven in on cut through those mountains, right back to the highway only a couple of miles away. Troy could easily hike back and thumb a ride. With the grown-ups gone, there was no way Jack and Ashley would be able to stop him.

  “Tell you what,” Mike said. “Since you brought your cell phone, I’ll call over to headquarters and have one of the park rangers come by to get the kids. Nicole,” he said to Olivia. “That’s her name. In fact, right now she’s not far from here, at Roosevelt Lodge. She can drive here in ten minutes.” When Olivia unfolded the small phone and handed it to him, Mike dialed the number.

  They couldn’t hear what he was saying into the phone because Steven gathered the three kids around him and started talking. “I don’t know how this is going to work out for you guys,” he said. “I’m not sure how long we’ll be gone.”

  “Probably four or five hours,” Olivia broke in.

  “Ask Nicole to take you straight to Roosevelt Lodge,” Steven decided. “She’ll stay with you until we get back. I’ll give you money so you can get something to eat.” Jack and Ashley nodded.

  Mike snapped the phone shut and gave it back to Olivia. “It’s all set,” he told them. “Nicole’s on her way. You kids wait right here beside the truck.”

  “How will we know it’s Nicole and not a stranger?” Ashley asked.

  Mike grinned at her. “Because she’ll be wearing a national park ranger’s uniform with a name tag that says ‘Nicole Hardy.’ That’s how you’ll know. OK?”

  Ashley smiled back at him. “Just checking.”

  While Steven loaded his camera equipment into the saddlepacks of one of the horses, Olivia adjusted the stirrups on another one.

  “I forgot you’re a short person,” Mike teased her, “or I would have pulled those stirrups way up high.” He looked at his watch. “We need to mount up and get moving. Nicole should be here in about two minutes. The kids’ll be all right for that long.”

  From high in her saddle, Olivia looked down at Jack and Ashley. Jack could tell his mother was worried. “Mom, we’ll be fine,” he echoed. “We’ll stay right here till the ranger comes. Promise.”

  With a creak of saddle leather and the crunch of hoofs on gravel, the three horses moved out of the parking lot, toward the banks of Slough Creek. Steven was already deep in conversation with Mike. Olivia turned to wave and called out, “Take care, OK?”

  After the adults were out of sight, Troy kicked at some rocks. Then he picked up half a dozen stones and threw them, one at a time, hitting a metal sign that showed a circle with a crossbar across a picture of a dog on a leash. “No dogs,” it meant. Not even on leashes.

  Bored with that, Troy climbed onto a fender of the horse trailer and peered inside. Next he tested the door of the Park Service truck, but it was locked. “How long are we supposed to wait here?” he grumbled.

  Ashley was rummaging through the tailgate of the jeep, searching for something to eat. “Look, Jack,” she called out. “Here’s my parka and your parka and here’s Dad’s old red one. I bet Mom packed that for Troy, ’cause it’ll get cold tonight.” She held it up for Troy to see.

  Troy sniffed disdainfully. “You think I’d wear that? No way! It�
��s red!”

  “Just wait,” Jack said, “till the temperature drops really low and we’re in a cabin tonight and you have to go to the bathroom—which is about a block away from the cabins. You’ll wear it.”

  “I wear black,” Troy said.

  It wasn’t worth arguing about. Jack didn’t have a watch on, but it seemed to him that Nicole, the ranger, should have reached them by now. Tree shadows were beginning to lengthen; the sun hung halfway down the sky.

  “Bring my backpack when you get out of the jeep,” he told Ashley. He had a new issue of Photography Today in it; while he was waiting, he might as well give it a look-through.

  Dragging her parka and Jack’s along with Jack’s pack, Ashley backed out of the jeep. When her feet touched the ground, she slammed the door. Immediately she said, “Uh-oh,” and looked worried.

  “What?” Jack asked.

  “I think I kicked the lock button on my way out.” She tested the jeep doors. “Yep. It’s all locked up. Can’t get in.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jack said. “We don’t need anything from in there. The ranger’s going to take us to Roosevelt Lodge and Dad already gave me money for dinner. It’s in my pocket.”

  “Where is she?” Ashley wondered.

  “She’ll get here soon,” Jack answered, and opened his magazine.

  More minutes dragged by. “I want to see some wolves,” Troy announced. “Your mom said there were wolves in this part of Yellowstone.”

  “We have to stay here,” Jack said, not looking up.

  “I’m just gonna walk along the creek and look for wolves.” Troy narrowed his eyes as if challenging Jack to try to stop him.

  The creek was only a couple of hundred yards away, close enough that the ranger could easily see them when she arrived.

  Even though his father hadn’t instructed him to, Jack knew he’d better stick pretty close to Troy. “I’m going with him. Ashley, you wait here for the ranger.”

  “Forget that! I’m not staying all by myself in this parking lot with the jeep locked so I can’t get inside,” Ashley answered. “If you’re going, I’m going too.”

  Jack hesitated, but only for a minute, because Troy was running toward the creek bank. If he climbed down the bank, Jack might lose sight of him. “OK,” he told Ashley, “you can come. But bring—” He stopped to think what he ought to take with them. Always prepare for the worst—that was his mother’s motto. If they started fooling around near the creek bed, Ashley might fall in, and the water was cold. “Bring your parka,” he ordered her. “Mine too. And my backpack. It’s right there.”

  Ashley wrinkled her nose at him. “If you want it, you can carry it. I’m not carrying your backpack for you.”

  Jack said, “No one asked you to, tick-brain. And I want it because my camera’s in it, and hurry up because I need to catch up to Troy so he won’t get lost.”

  “Lost?” Ashley began to protest. “How can he—?”

  “Just COME!” Jack grabbed his backpack and took off, not even waiting to see whether Ashley followed. After a minute he heard her footsteps behind him, but Troy was getting harder to see because he’d gone behind some trees. Between the branches, Jack caught flashes of Troy’s shiny black jacket. It was moving away from them, fast.

  That jerk Troy! He was heading down the nature trail!

  He was close now. As the wolf and his mate sniffed the air, the man squinted through his rifle scope, locking on the silver wolf’s forehead. “Hold on…hold on,” he whispered as his finger found the trigger. Suddenly the wolf bolted out of his crosshairs and cantered down the mountain. “Demon wolves,” the man muttered. “Don’t matter. You’ll be dead soon enough.”

  Below him, the man could see Slough Creek glittering in the afternoon sun. He knew its nearness made his plan risky, and for a moment he considered turning back. Then, his jaw tightening with resolve, he concentrated on his objective: the execution of the wolf.

  Cussing under his breath, Jack ran along the dirt path. Or tried to run. Every hundred feet, it seemed, the trail was blocked by a fallen tree. Some of them were low enough to the ground that he could jump over them; others he had to stop and climb over. Twice his backpack caught on branches; once it got jerked right off his arm and landed hard on the path. When Jack worriedly opened the pack to make sure his camera hadn’t been damaged, Ashley caught up to him.

  “Isn’t it pretty here?” she asked. She pointed to the ground cover, just beginning to take on its autumn colors; to small lavender asters growing against the roots of a toppled pine; at the wide, shallow creek that rippled serenely on their left, reflecting sky and clouds and the thick stands of evergreens that grew along its banks.

  “Who cares about pretty!” Jack exploded. “When I catch up to that—that—he’s nothing but trouble!”

  “Troy just wants to see some wolves,” Ashley said quietly.

  “And what are the chances?” Jack cried. “Even if you catch a look at wolves, they’re always so far away you can’t see much, and Troy’s such a dumb city kid he probably wouldn’t know the difference between a coyote and a wolf even if he fell over one.”

  Jack wrapped a pair of socks around his camera and stuffed it back inside his backpack. His camping pack was always stocked with things like extra socks that his mother made him carry.

  With Ashley behind him, he started out at a fast clip because he’d already lost too many minutes. Troy’d had plenty of time to get away. He could have bolted into the trees, or up the side of mountain, or across the creek without leaving any tracks that Jack could follow.

  But only a hundred yards ahead, as Jack hurried around a bend in the trail, he nearly bumped into Troy. Standing perfectly still, deep in the shadow of the trees, Troy was watching a young mule deer graze beside the creek.

  “Back off and shut up,” he muttered.

  Ordinarily Jack would have shouted insults at him, would have vented his rage at Troy for causing so much trouble and for being, in general, a total creep. But Jack had been trained from babyhood to tread softly around animals in the wild, to never startle them or disturb their feeding. He clenched his teeth and his fists and managed to stay silent.

  The yearling deer grazed peacefully in the mottled sunlight, switching his long ears forward and backward like a jackrabbit, and flicking his skinny white tail.

  A perfect picture, Jack thought, if he could only get to his camera. As carefully as he could, he lifted the flap of his backpack, but in the stillness, the Velcro fastener pulling apart sounded like a string of exploding firecrackers.

  The deer’s head shot up.

  For a moment it stared first at Ashley, next at Troy. Then, while Jack fumbled inside his pack for the camera, the young deer bounded away, splashing across the creek to the other bank, where four more mule deer, all adults, stood grazing.

  “Crud!” Jack exclaimed in disgust. “What a great shot—and I missed it.”

  “They’re right over there in the meadow,” Ashley told him. “You can still take a picture.”

  “From this far away it wouldn’t show anything. I’m really mad ’cause it was right in front of me and I blew it,” Jack complained. He’d brought only his little point-and-shoot automatic camera that was no good for distance shots. “Anyway, we need to get back. Come on, Troy.”

  Troy ignored him. Big surprise.

  “That ranger’s probably already there by now, and when she doesn’t find us she’ll call Mom and Dad and Mike on the cell phone and they’ll get all worried—”

  “She can’t,” Ashley declared.

  “Can’t what?”

  “Get ahold of Mom and Dad and Mike. Our cell phone’s locked inside the jeep, remember? Mom didn’t take it.”

  Whirling on them, Troy hissed, “Shut up! Something’s happening over there.”

  Loudly, Ashley asked, “Over where? What?”

  “I said shut up!” He gestured across the creek to the meadow, where the grass was no longer green, but had turned y
ellow with the near arrival of autumn.

  “What? Deer?” Ashley asked.

  Troy shook his head. He dropped to his knees and crouched behind the fallen log. Following the direction of Troy’s intense stare, Jack saw—wolves! Two of them. One black and one gray.

  The four large mule deer and the younger, smaller one had seen the wolves, too. They started to move away, at first ambling slowly, then running faster as the two wolves loped diagonally across the meadow toward them. The deer circled while the wolves chased them, almost lazily, like sheepdogs herding a flock.

  “Get on this side of the log and scrunch down,” Jack said softly to Ashley, pulling her belt until she toppled backward, almost on top of him. “Keep your head low,” he told her.

  “I want to see!”

  “You can see—just stay down. And keep quiet!”

  The young deer hurtled across the meadow toward the steep hillside, changing direction as the two wolves bounded after it, separating it from the rest of the small herd. The wolves seemed to be playing with the deer, trying to scare it rather than zeroing in for a kill.

  “I wish I had my binoculars,” Ashley whispered.

  “I’ve got mine,” Jack murmured. “But you couldn’t spot them—they’re running too fast.”

  With the wolves in pursuit, the young mule deer doubled back to race across the meadow, heading for the creek. Suddenly the black wolf broke away to chase the four adult deer once again as they sprinted around the trampled grass. Only the gray wolf kept after the young deer, which crashed into the creek, its eyes wide and white with fear.

  The deer was heading straight toward where Jack, Troy, and Ashley crouched behind the log, as if humans—even three of them—were less threatening than one large wolf.

  Jack picked up his camera. “Don’t move a muscle,” he whispered to Ashley.

  It took only seconds for the young deer to explode into the brush above the bank, right next to them. Jack tried to fire off a few pictures, but it was like trying to photograph lightning—the deer was just too swift.