Wolf Stalker Read online

  “So he’s not one of the mean, nasty ranchers who hate wolves,” Ashley said.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” Mike glanced quickly at the three kids in the back seat. “Ranchers aren’t mean and nasty—at least the vast majority of ranchers aren’t. You need to realize they make their living raising cattle and sheep. When a wolf takes down one of their livestock, it’s a serious loss to them.”

  “Oh,” Ashley said meekly.

  “Just figure,” Mike went on, “if the rancher has a cow that could be auctioned off for $500, but a wolf kills it first. Maybe, then, the rancher won’t be able to afford new tires for his pickup that winter, or college books for his daughter at Montana State.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ashley began, her lips held stiffly, as though she was getting ready to cry or maybe throw up.

  Jack hoped she wouldn’t do either.

  “Naturally, when there’s any controversy, I most often take the side of the wolves,” Mike explained, grinning. “Not surprising, since I’m a wolf biologist. I’ve spent the past few years of my life trying to make this reintroduction program work. But don’t go thinking ranchers and their families are the bad guys. They’re not. They’re just regular people trying to—”

  The last words broke off as Ashley rapidly lowered the window, stuck out her head, and took some deep breaths.

  “You OK?” Jack asked.

  Olivia glanced back nervously, but Ashley gasped, “I’m fine.” She slumped back into the seat.

  After they bumped four or five more miles down an unpaved road, with Ashley’s face pressed against the partly opened windowpane, Mike stopped the van. “We’re here,” he announced.

  They were parked in shadow, at least a hundred yards from the dilapidated ranch house.

  No one made a move to get out. Through the gray dusk, they all watched a dimly lit window behind the front porch. The curtains moved, but no one came to the door, and the evening stayed silent, with not even a bark from a dog. But then, George Campbell’s dog could no longer bark.

  “You know,” Mike finally said, “I think I’ll take a little walk around the place. I’d like to check….” He didn’t finish. “You guys want to wait in the van? Or maybe, since Ashley’s feeling kind of green around the gills, you might want to wait outside in the fresh air.”

  “Good idea,” Steven said. “OK, everybody out.”

  As Mike took off into the darkness, the Landons stood together at the bottom of the driveway, if you could call it that. It was nothing more than a twin-rutted dirt track that led up to the front door.

  George Campbell’s small house was made of wood that had dried to the color of chicken bones. Right away Jack noticed how beaten down the house looked. Suddenly Troy exclaimed, “Hey, everybody, look over there!”

  In one corner of the yard stood a doghouse as weathered as the Campbell home. A rusty metal chain snaked from inside it to wind around an empty water dish. Propped against the side of the doghouse was a large cardboard tombstone made from what Jack guessed was a refrigerator box. A can of black spray paint lay tipped over on the ground nearby, next to a paint-stained rag. The sign read:

  Rex

  MURDERED BY WOLVES

  Your dog could be next.

  Or YOU!

  “Oh, please,” Olivia groaned, color rising to her face. Steven reached out and squeezed her elbow lightly. “Stay cool, lady. Blow it off. It’s just a publicity stunt.”

  “Now we know there’s a doghouse,” Jack said. “So we can collect some of Rex’s hair.”

  Walking close together, they approached the crudely lettered monument to Rex. “I just gotta get some pictures of that,” Steven said. “Jack, stand over on that side and hold the strobe light so we don’t get too much shadow.”

  As Jack took his position where his father told him to, Steven fired off about ten shots from different angles.

  When he finished, Olivia got down on her knees. “Looks like there’s plenty of hair inside. We’ll have to ask Mr. Campbell if he’ll allow us to take a sample.”

  None of them noticed the man who’d stepped out onto the front porch. “No need to stand in the cold. Come on in,” he yelled. When they whirled around to stare, they saw him rotating his hands like a traffic cop, urging them to move forward. “Come on, come on.”

  “That has to be George Campbell,” Olivia said softly. “He certainly seems anxious to get us in his house.”

  “I guess it’s ok,” Steven answered. “Mike will figure out we’ve gone inside.”

  As they moved up the dirt driveway Steven added, “Jack, hang on to my camera—carefully!—while I fit this strobe back into the camera case. And when we get in the house, I don’t want you kids to say a single word except ‘hello.’ You got that? Just keep quiet and stay still. You can look around as much as you want to, but don’t move around.”

  The stairs up to the porch sagged forward; as Jack walked up them he felt slightly off-balance. His parents paused on the top step while Troy, Ashley, and Jack jostled for position behind them.

  “Howdy!” George Campbell was a big man, tall and heavyset, and he had a big voice. “Come in, come in, come in,” he almost shouted. Then, rubbing his hand over his stubbly chin, he said, “Guess you saw my sign over there. I noticed you out here takin’ pictures.”

  “We did,” Olivia answered calmly. “We’re all very sorry about your dog.”

  “Demon wolves,” he grunted, as he led them inside. “They killed my dog and could have killed me. I’m tryin’ to rally some right-thinking citizens to get together and demand that every last one of those critters gets exterminated.”

  Blinking hard, Olivia followed Mr. Campbell. The rest of them filed in behind her, and the screen door banged shut.

  The inside of the house was as dark and cramped as Jack imagined it would be. To the left stood a wood-burning stove. On all four walls hung stuffed heads of deer and elk. One wall held a bison head, and next to it the mounted head of a young grizzly bear. Where had he gotten that, Jack wondered. Glass eyes seemed to follow them as Mr. Campbell motioned Olivia and Steven to sit on a sofa with a faded knit afghan thrown over the top.

  Ashley perched on the end of the sofa while Steven and Olivia sank low in the sagging middle. Jack and Troy hung back against the wall.

  “You kids want to sit?” Campbell asked, pointing to the floor.

  Nudging Jack with his elbow, Troy shook his head quickly.

  “No thanks,” Jack told him. “We’ve been sitting a long time. We’ll just stand over here.”

  “Suit yourself,” the man said, eyeing the camera in Jack’s hand and the camera case Steven set on the floor.

  The boys took positions on either side of a tall cabinet, the only new, expensive-looking piece of furniture in the room. Behind the glass front stood four high-powered hunting rifles. One, with a long black barrel, looked like it could blow a hole in brick. Troy stared at the cabinet, then glanced toward George Campbell. From the tense way Troy pressed backward against the wall, with his palms flat against the rough wood paneling, Jack could tell that something about the gun case had excited him. But what?

  Clearing her throat, Olivia leaned forward. She had a small tape recorder in her hand. “Do you mind if I tape our interview, Mr. Campbell? I find it very helpful.”

  “Go right ahead,” George agreed. “I already told my story a hundred times, but I don’t mind saying it again and again until somebody listens and does something about it. I’ve collected over $600 from people like me who hate those wolves. I’m planning on telling the whole world about—”

  “Six hundred dollars?” Olivia asked.

  “That’s just from people who heard me on talk radio. The newspapers will be even better.”

  What an old buzzard, Jack thought. His mother had pressed a button, and was holding the recorder in Campbell’s direction. “OK, Mr. Campbell. Would you like to talk about exactly what happened that day, step by step, starting with what you were doing in Yellowstone?
”

  “Hiking. I’m a—you know—a nature lover.”

  Yeah, right, Jack thought. He didn’t listen to any more, but let his eyes slide over onto Troy, who was still staring intently at the gun case.

  “…. no call for the government to tramp all over the rights of law-abiding citizens—”

  “Mr. Campbell,” Olivia broke in. “Let’s get back to your dog and the wolves.”

  “Sure. Right. I get carried away. So…which newspaper are you from?”

  Everyone froze. So that’s why George Campbell was being so friendly! He’d noticed the camera, had seen them taking pictures of the doghouse, and mistakenly thought they worked for a newspaper! They all waited, staying perfectly quiet—even Ashley—to see what Olivia would do.

  “We…uh…work in Jackson Hole,” she answered.

  So she was going to fake it! Jack bit his lip to keep from grinning.

  “Good!” George Campbell exclaimed. “The further this story reaches, the better. At midnight tonight I’m gonna be on talk radio in Denver.” Since he was oblivious to anyone but himself, Campbell hadn’t noticed the nervously exchanged glances or the bated breaths, and he didn’t notice it now when they all started breathing again.

  Troy was moving his lips, trying to say something silently to Jack, but Jack couldn’t make it out. Troy shook his head impatiently and mouthed the words again. Jack still didn’t understand.

  Moving slowly around to the other side of the cabinet, Jack got close to Troy and flattened himself against the wall the way Troy was doing. “What?” he whispered.

  “Look at that rifle barrel,” Troy breathed.

  Jack’s voice was so low he could barely hear himself. “Which one? I don’t know guns.”

  “Yeah? I do. That 308 in there’ll blast a hole the size of a dinner plate. But check out this rifle!” With his finger, Troy traced a path along the glass to point at a silver tube, only a couple inches long, that had been mounted beneath the barrel of one of the rifles.

  “Hey—what is this? What are you kids doin’ over there?” Campbell’s eyebrows knit together in a dark line as he glared at Jack and Troy. “Get them away from my guns,” he told Steven. “Those things are valuable, and I don’t want the kids fooling with them. I’ll get sued if they blow their heads off.”

  “Jack, Troy, don’t touch anything,” Steven ordered them.

  “We just want to look,” Troy said. “They’re…cool.”

  “You bet they are.” George Campbell nodded. “Nothin’s better than a powerful gun. You go on and look, but mind you don’t do more than that.”

  Satisfied, George Campbell turned around with his back to the boys and started right in again. Olivia didn’t have to ask him any questions at all, because Campbell needed no encouragement. He was a talker. Give him an audience, and his mouth took over.

  But Troy was growing agitated. Moving his head a little toward Campbell, he whispered, “Check the shirt.”

  It was a gray sweatshirt with a team logo. “Oakland Raiders,” Jack said.

  “No! The one he’s got on underneath!”

  Although the gray sweatshirt reached all the way up to Campbell’s neck and down to his wrists, hanging out from the bottom edge in back was a bit of shirttail, wrinkled and limp. Then Jack saw it. The shirttail was blue plaid.

  “Yes!” Jack hissed. “That’s the same color the shooter had!”

  Troy’s jaw clenched and his face reddened. Suddenly, he took two steps forward and yelled, “You—you shot Silver. And you pointed your gun at my friend Jack. You jerk!”

  “What?” George Campbell sputtered. “Are you talkin’ to me?”

  “Yeah. You, man!”

  Jack stared at Troy, shocked by the rage burning in his face. Then the words penetrated, and Jack felt a sensation like ice in his chest. Was it true what Troy was saying, that George Campbell had pointed his high-powered rifle at Jack?

  “The red dot! The red dot!” Troy was shouting. “It came from the laser sight on that rifle right there. He was pointing it right at Jack when Jack took the pictures.”

  “Pictures? What pictures?” George Campbell asked loudly.

  “We got lots of pictures. We got pictures of the wolf, and of you aiming that laser sight right at Jack,” Troy hollered. “Holding a gun on a kid! How’s that gonna sound on talk radio?”

  The big man reeled backward. “Don’t be crazy! I’d never shoot a kid!”

  “We got proof. We saw you, and we heard you, and we got it on film. You shooting Silver in your blue plaid shirt.” It seemed as if Troy’s fury would split his skin.

  “My…shirt?” George Campbell’s eyes darted around the room before glancing down. He hurriedly shoved his shirttail into his pants.

  “It was you,” Ashley cried. “I saw you in the binoculars! You tried to kill Silver.”

  “Now look, maybe you got pictures of me with a gun, but I swear, shootin’ the wolf—that was—uh, accidental. The gun went off when it bumped against a tree,” Campbell said, speaking not to Ashley, but to Olivia and Steven as though kids didn’t matter; only adults needed explanations. “You say you got a picture of that?”

  “Accidental? We got pictures of you pointing the gun at Jack!” Troy yelled. “You could have blown a hole right through him!”

  Campbell whipped around to face the boys. “Nah, it wasn’t anything like that. See, what I was doin’—” Again he turned toward Steven and Olivia, declaring, “I was just usin’ my rifle’s spotting scope like a telescope ’cause I heard someone yellin’ and I was tryin’ to see who it was. A spotting scope—you know—magnifies. The laser sight wasn’t even on.”

  “Sure it was,” Jack said hotly. His anger mounted, too, as Campbell tried to worm out of what he’d done. This man, who’d almost killed Silver and could have killed Jack himself, was lying right to their faces. “Your laser sight showed up real clear in the pictures I took yesterday when you shot the wolf.”

  Bluffing, he held his father’s camera high. “See this lens? It can focus a quarter of a mile away. Right, Dad?”

  “Yeah. That’s right.” Steven replied haltingly, as though he wasn’t sure what his lines were supposed to be in this scene, but he hoped he was getting them right. “It’s a special lens for long-distance nature photography,” he said. He didn’t add that he’d never dream of letting Jack use that expensive lens by himself, and that the camera Jack had yesterday was nothing more than a little point-and-shoot that couldn’t even zoom.

  Jack could hardly believe what was happening! First Olivia had bluffed, and now the rest of them were faking it, too, and somehow they’d stumbled onto the unexpected fact that George Campbell had been there, yesterday, pointing a gun when Silver got shot! And the man was admitting it!

  “Look folks, it was all accidental! I swear! I’ll stand before a judge and so-help-me-God I’ll tell him I never meant to shoot that wolf—”

  “You’re lying! Our pictures prove you meant to kill Silver,” Ashley cried, jumping up and waving the prints. “We got the red dot right here—”

  “Don’t show him!” Jack yelled, but it was one of those times when Ashley decided to ignore her brother.

  “No!” Jack cried. He lunged at her, but it was too late. She’d already handed the prints to Campbell.

  “What? These?” As he shuffled the prints—one, two, three—like winning cards in a poker hand, Campbell laughed out loud.

  “You call this evidence? You can’t see nothin’ in those pictures.” Striding across the room, he pulled open the door of the wood-burning stove and tossed them inside.

  “We still have the negatives,” Jack said defiantly.

  Campbell left the stove door open. Heat from the flames reflected in his face as he turned on them and roared, “You can’t fool me. You’re not from the newspaper! This is a government conspiracy. You come in here with fake pictures that say I shot a wolf—well, I say—prove it! In court! Half the hunters in this state own laser sights on their
rifles, and you couldn’t tell it was me anyways ’cause I was standing way back in the trees and I don’t even show in those pictures. I’ll deny it all. You got nothing on me!”

  Surrounded by his animal heads, seeming to grow larger in the flickering shadows like a villain in a bad movie, George Campbell sneered, “So how you gonna prove anything, huh?”

  No one answered, because they all knew the answer, all except George Campbell. Suddenly he figured it out, too. As he focused on the tape recorder in Olivia’s hand, his eyes grew wide. “Hey! Give me that thing!” he bellowed.

  He lunged toward Olivia. Before Steven could unwind himself from the sagging sofa, Troy and Jack leaped in front of Campbell, blocking him. “This is my house,” Campbell screamed. “You can’t come in here and—I’m a law-abiding citizen! I want that tape recorder, or you’re not getting out of here.”

  “Are you threatening us?” Olivia asked him, jumping up.

  Steven was on his feet too, swerving in front of her to protect her.

  George Campbell weighed more than Troy and Jack put together. For a few seconds the big man strained against them, pushing forward as the boys struggled to hold him back. He was so tall….

  “Give—me—that—tape,” Campbell grunted.

  Jack tried to grip his arm, but Campbell clutched him and yanked Jack back against his armpit, nearly choking him. “Hey—let me go!” Jack’s yelling was muffled as Campbell squeezed him tighter.

  “Let go of them!” Steven demanded, grappling with Campbell, trying to break his hold on the boys.

  “OW! Dang it!” Campbell yelled and swore, because Troy was stomping on his foot. In a sudden move he butted both boys with his shoulders, knocking them loose so that they staggered. At the same time he shoved Steven hard. But before he could push past Steven to reach Olivia, Ashley grabbed the tape recorder from her mother’s hand. Quick as lightning, she dashed across the room and yanked open the door.

  On the porch she nearly collided with Mike, who was on his way in.

  “What’s goin’ on here?” Mike cried.