The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Winters Are Hard - STEVEN POPKES

Steven Popkes made his first sale in 1985, and in the years that followed has contributed a number of distinguished stories to markets such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy amp; Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Science Fiction Age, Full Spectrum, Tomorrow, The Twilight Zone Magazine, Night Cry, and others. His first novel, Caliban Landing, appeared in 1987, and was followed in 1991 by an expansion to novel-length of his popular novella “The Egg,” retitled Slow Lightning. (“The Egg,” in its original form, was in our Seventh Annual Collection.) He was also part of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop project to produce science fiction scenarios about the future of Boston, Massachusetts, that cumulated in the 1 994 anthology, Future Boston, to which he contributed several stories. He lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, with his family, works for a company that builds aviation instrumentation, and is learning to be a pilot.

In the compelling story that follows, he shows us that although it might be an admirable goal to get close to nature, maybe you shouldn’t get too close…

Once I got through to Sam Orcutt, Jack Brubaker wasn’t hard to find.

“There he is,” yelled Sam over the roar of the engine and started flying the ancient Cessna in a circle. I suppose the idea of a floatplane is that there is always some lake or river one can land in but I didn’t see any water larger than a pigeon. We were flying deep in the heart of Montana: the Beck-Lewis Wildlife Refuge.

Sam had to be circling for a reason so I looked down the left wing toward the center and sure enough there was a man dressed entirely in fur. He watched us circle for a minute or so, then waved.

Sam leveled out immediately. “He sees us!” he shouted, obviously relieved.

I nodded and checked over Goldie, the red-tailed hawk perched on my shoulder. I’m a freelance human-interest reporter (“HIR” in the trade) and I don’t make that much money. Do I hire a crew? Too expensive. Do I get a partner? In my old Kindergarten class one of the report cards stated: “Does not work well with others.” That particular genetic trait had stayed with me all my life. Instead, I blew a year’s earnings on Goldie. Her visual centers had been modified to download cam quality material to the storage unit and monitor I kept on my belt and she’d been trained to hunt for good camera angles and to watch for my cues.

I lifted her wing to check the readings and the test monitor. If things went well I’d be out here for two weeks and I didn’t want anything to go wrong. The broadcast circuitry passed final self-tests and everything was fully charged. I gave her a strip of steak from a sealed bag in my pocket. She ate it between taking shots of Sam, the airplane, the landscape and me.

We flew up over a ridge and on the other side was a convenient pond no smaller than a postage stamp where we landed. Sam brought the plane up to the shore and we tied it off and unloaded. He brought out two folding chairs and sat them down, then brought out two beers and a six-pack of carbonated water. “Sit down,” he said. “The chairs are for us. He won’t use them.”

About an hour of uncomfortable silence later, Jack Brubaker came over the ridge in a lope. I pulled out my binoculars to see what I could see.

I thought I had seen a man dressed in fur but I was wrong. Jack was covered in fur, all right. His own: a thin pelt the color and texture of a German shepherd. Only the hair on his head and between his legs was different: thick, wiry curls. I couldn’t see any external genitalia. The only naked skin I could see was on the palms of his hands and the area around his eyes and nose. The exposed skin was heavily pigmented but the eyes that shone out under the thick brows were bright, cornflower blue.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah,” agreed Sam, nodding.

It was perhaps a mile from the top of the ridge down to the plane but Jack wasn’t even breathing hard when he reached us.

“Sam!” he said and grinned. He sniffed the air and glanced at me for a moment and nodded in my direction. “It’s good to see you,” he said to Sam. Then, he saw the bottles of seltzer and the grin grew even broader. “You remembered! Thanks.” He opened one immediately, drained it, belched loudly.

Jack was not especially tall-less than six feet, anyway. But he was as broad as a Samoan. His chest and shoulders were deep and even his head looked large. His legs were thick as logs but even so his knees and ankles seemed outsized. He didn’t smell like a man, even a man who had been in the bush for years without ever taking a shower. Instead, he gave off a musk, a flat, strong and unidentifiable scent. It made me think of tigers or hyenas or, of course, wolves. This man had been thoroughly modified.

“Nice bird,” he said, nodding towards Goldie.

“I said the same thing when I saw it,” said Sam. “This is Dan Perry. He wants to do a story on you.”

“A reporter.” He looked back at Sam and then at me.

I looked back. Jack’s eyes were unreadable. I could see no fear or apprehension. Nor could I see excitement or interest. His eyes had the same deep interest I had until now associated only with animals: the speculative eyes of cougars, the apprehensive eyes of raccoons. I wondered where his humanity had gone. How deep did the modifications go?

I let Sam earn his money. To say everybody has a price is to oversimplify the process. It is more precise to say that money is an inducement to self re-examination. In Sam’s case, it took enough money to hire enough staff to truly take charge of Beck-Lewis. I couldn’t front him the money; I’m not worth that kind of cash. I just helped him find the right people.

Sam drew him away. I turned up the gain on Goldie’s microphones.

“Look. It’s just for a couple of weeks. He’ll take some pictures and then he’ll be gone.” Sam gave me a quick glance. I tried not to look like I was listening.

“It’s enough money to secure this place,” he said, turning back to Jack. “Really secure it. He got me some real backers.”

“Who?” Jack popped open another bottle of seltzer and drained it, belched again.

“Companies with deep pockets. ADM, for one.”

“Supermarket to the world,” Jack said idly and I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic, bitter or what. He smiled gently, considering, then looked back at me. “Whatever you say, Sam. Send him east tomorrow and we’ll see what Akela and Raksha have to say about it.” Then, they fell to talking of other things. I recorded everything, even the belches.

Who were Akela and Raksha? I filed the names away for future reference.

The next morning Sam couldn’t wait to get rid of me. I took my pack and equipment and started back east over the ridge. Goldie took off and soared above me about sixty or seventy feet. Sam seemed to think Jack wouldn’t let me get lost or maybe he just didn’t care.

I kept walking. Near an outcropping of granite a voice behind me said: “Be very still.”

I stopped dead and didn’t move. A wolf the mixed color of wheat and iron appeared in front of me as quickly and suddenly as if it had been excreted from the earth. I had no idea where it came from.

This was no coyote or dog, but a big shouldered, deep-chested animal that had to be well over a hundred pounds. Its mouth was open and it panted slightly. I could see the bright white teeth below the heavy skull. Its eyes were yellow and watched me without any fear whatsoever. It glanced occasionally away from me-checking on Jack, perhaps. It didn’t have the half-myopic look of a dog; I could tell there was nothing wrong with its eyesight.

I was surprised it didn’t sniff me to find out who I was. I half started to hold out my hand to be sniffed as I would to a dog and its behavior changed totally. Gone was the easy appraisal to be replaced by a closed-mouth, no-nonsense menace. I lowered my hand back to my side very, very carefully.

This seemed to be enough and it made a low huffing sound. Behind me, I heard a similar sound as a reply. The wolf turned and trotted away.

I slowly relaxed and Jack put a hand on my shoulder. “Looks like you can stay for a while.”

“Was that Akela or Raksha?”

“Raksha, Akela’s mate. Akela is the alpha wolf. Raksha’s pups are behind the rock so she had to approve you before you could stay. Akela is off hunting somewhere but he’ll check you out when he gets back.” He started walking away. “I’ll show you where you can set up camp. We’ll be staying here another month or so before we head up north with the rest of the pack. If Akela approves, you can stay.”

Goldie came down and landed on my shoulder. I hoped she had caught some good footage. Something occurred to me. “Is my bird going to be all right?”

Jack stopped and turned back to me. “I think so. We’re all eating pretty well right now, though Akela might try to catch it just for sport if it gets too close. There are other hawks all around here but they don’t get close to the wolves. Why did you bring your pet along?”

“It’s my camera.”

“Ah.”

Jack led me to a spot that I thought was ridiculously close to where I knew the pups were but I figured he knew what he was doing. Then, he started walking away.

“Jack. I’ll need to talk to you at some point.”

He stopped and considered that. “Some kind of interview, I expect.”

“Yes.”

“Not now. I have to help Raksha.”

“When?”

“We’ll see.” He pointed to the top of the rock.

“You can watch from there, if you like.”

“Won’t that make Raksha nervous?”

Jack laughed shortly. “She knows you’re no threat.”

“Are you the one who named them?”

He nodded. “They sure don’t need them.”

Setting up camp consisted of pulling the ripcord on the tent and tossing it about six feet away. The tent took care of the rest. Human-interest stories usually happen at interfaces of conflict. Wilderness/civilization, suburbs/city, neighboring tribes. I had been out into the bush before. I had a lovely little tent with an active skin. Tiny engines moved air through the pores, warming or cooling as needed, storing power from the sun. My jacket was similarly designed and kept itself clean. Active cloth is a bit stiff so, like most people, I didn’t wear it. I had a nice shirt and pants that kept me warm at night and cool in the heat of day and would have fooled an Arab into thinking they were made of the finest cotton. The tent had a bag that if I left my clothes in it they would be magically fresh and soft the next morning. I knew where it was in the dark; it was right next to the water condenser. I had a food dispenser that would make nutritious bread from grass or any other source of cellulose, but that was for emergencies. I had brought a collection of freeze-dried meals. They made up most of the weight in my pack; the tent and sleeping bag took up no more space than a shoebox. Less, actually, since I had left out the entertainment unit. I find it distracting.

I climbed up on the rock to set the scene.

I knew where I was from several instruments: my locators, the map section of interface to the feeds, from my phone. I was north of Forsyth and south of the Fort Peck Lake. To the west of me the Rockies curved away towards Canada. The Missouri River started carving through the Dakota and Nebraska plains to the east of me. I could even bring a little piece of civilization here with a phone call or a request to the feeds.

But it was small tinder as I stood there on the rock and looked around.

Here, the world was huge.

On the slow rolling plain there were no trees and it felt as if I could touch the edge of the world. The sky was such a broad and featureless blue I became disoriented and had to look away before I fell down. The colors of the land were as diverse as the sky’s were singular: russets, purples, grays, yellows, ambers-an infinite impressionist palette.

Good stuff, I thought. I made notes and made sure Goldie was getting good panorama shots.

Below me, Raksha and Jack were doing a strange sort of skip-jump in the grass. Raksha would move slowly for a bit, then stop, frozen. After a moment, she inched forward, then pounced. She flipped some nondescript piece of fur into the air and caught it, chewed it a moment, and swallowed it down. After twenty or thirty of these, she trotted back towards me-or, rather, to the rock I was standing on. The pups spilled out onto the grass and she gently regurgitated some food for them.

I knew immediately what sort of thing was going to end up on the cutting-room floor.

Jack, for his part, was doing the same thing. He stalked these things carefully and snatched them out of the grass with his hands. I could see them more clearly when he picked them up. They were rodents of some kind. He was a bit less flamboyant when he ate them. Instead of tossing them in the air, he broke their necks with his fingers and then munched them down like they were chicken legs.

After she made sure her puppies had cleaned their plates, Raksha trotted back to the grass and rejoined Jack. The puppies played in front of the den. Apparently, Jack had eaten enough and as she sat and watched him, he caught rodent after rodent and tossed them to her, all in complete silence. Even the puppies’ enthusiastic cries were muted.

After perhaps an hour, Jack finished and walked over a small hummock and lay down. Raksha made herself comfortable lying next to him and leaned her head on his shoulder. He rested his hand on her shoulder. The two of them looked intimate, like a long married couple lying together. I felt curiously intrusive.

I checked on Goldie. She had been shooting the whole thing.

I waved to him and he ignored me for a moment. Then, he waved me away.

I would have to be patient.

That night, as I sat drinking tea in front of my tent, I listened to the crickets and frogs sing. I had sort of expected Jack to join me at my tent. For a lot of isolated people, a man drinking tea in front of a tent, symbolizing as it does an outpost of what they had left behind, was an irresistible lure. Not Jack. He paid no more attention to me than he did the rock. I didn’t even know where he was sleeping. Not in Raksha’s den-it was much too small. The heat unit put out a glow all around, looking for all the world like a campfire.

I had cooked a little curry, a little bacon, some brownies. A few things to tempt a person in the wild living exclusively on raw rodent. Nothing.

This might be trickier than I had thought.

The next afternoon I waved at him again and this time he didn’t wave me away.

I eased down from the rock and walked as non-threateningly as possible over to them.

Raksha lifted her head and examined me for an instant, rose and trotted over to her cubs.

Jack watched her leave. “I guess this is as good a time as any. What do you want to know?”

“Tell me about the modifications,” I said. This was a sure opener for every person I’d ever met who’d undergone elective modification. Like hospital patients, it was the one reliable subject they all wanted to talk about. Jack Brubaker and your Aunt Edda getting her gall bladder out had a lot in common.

“Yeah,” said Jack. “It’s all common sense stuff, really. You figure I had to be out here on my own all year around, I needed certain things. Thick skin. A summer and a winter pelt. Some brown fat to generate heat when I need it. A little more strength in my arms, legs and back. A little more stamina. Better hearing. Better sense of smell. Better eyesight. You can guess the drill.”

I pointed at his knees and hips. “What about those?”

He stared at his own knee for a minute, not quite understanding. “Oh, yeah,” he said suddenly. “I know what you mean. Bigger points for muscle attachment and just to generally beef things up. A sprained ankle would likely kill me. Even so, I got a strained ligament last winter. If it hadn’t been for Raksha, I wouldn’t have made it.” He looked into the distance for a moment. “Winters are hard.”

“So, are you as good a wolf as they are?”

“I’m not a wolf,” he said looking straight at me. I had clearly hit a nerve. “They accept me into the pack. I’m a sort of brother to Akela. An uncle figure. The idea was to live with the wolves, not become a wolf.”

“Interesting distinction.”

Jack scowled a moment. “I guess. Maybe I could have been modified into a wolf but it would have cost a lot more money than I had.”

I couldn’t have asked for a better segue. “How did you pay for it? Modifications like this are expensive.” I cued Goldie to concentrate on his face. Briefly, I looked up. As usual, she was one step ahead of me.

“Sam didn’t tell you?”

“Sam didn’t tell me much. He left me pretty much to my own devices.”

Jack chuckled and gestured to the empty landscape around us. “I expect he did. I won the Colorado lottery. Ten million dollars.”

“Come on. If a lottery millionaire had chosen to become a wolf-”

He glanced at me coldly.

“-chosen life with the wolves,” I amended. “I would have heard of it.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Sam and I came to the same conclusion. So, I lost the money at the Golden Hind Casino of Macau. It’s a neat trick. You contract for something illicit or secret and pay for it by losing. The casino takes ten percent. Had all the work done there, too, along with a couple of years of physical therapy to recover. Then, snuck back here through Canada broke as a penny.” He laughed. “Now, that was a pain in the ass. I look more or less normal if I depilate every day but it makes me itch like Hell.”

“Why choose this?”

He looked up at me as if I were crazy. Maybe to him I was. He looked back at Raksha. “It seemed the right idea at the time.”

“So, your whole life you spent thinking about wolves.”

He shrugged. “I saw a movie once that made it look pretty good. That’s about it.”

“Any regrets?”

“Quiet,” he said suddenly and his nostrils flared. “Akela’s coming.”

Akela was black with just a hint of brown along his belly. He had come up over the same ridge I had come the previous day. As soon as he saw us, he started running. It was at least a mile back to that ridge but he covered the ground quickly.

“Hold still,” said Jack.

That was okay for him to say. I’ve dictated live stories while mortars were exploding forty feet from me without losing a comma. But not this time. Maybe there is something to racial memory. All I knew was a black wolf was racing towards me Hell bent on evil. I remembered images out of folklore-legend, myth and majesty-and suddenly I was terrified. I turned and ran. I didn’t get two steps when Jack grabbed me by the jacket and hurled me to the ground. Then, he sat on me.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” I swore.

“Oh, shut up.”

“That wolf’s going to kill me.”

“True. He might,” Jack said judiciously. “You got a better chance with me sitting on you.”

Akela was much, much bigger than Raksha. He had to have been easily a hundred and fifty pounds. Unlike the trusting examination I’d gotten yesterday, Akela sniffed me over one end to the other.

When he was finished figuring out where I had been for the last several years by my smell, he walked stiff legged to face me. He made no sound but he was clearly considering whether or not to attack. A very slight huff came from Jack. Akela gave no sign of having heard. After a moment, though, he opened his mouth and seemed to grin. He leaped gracefully over my head and bowled Jack over. It was like having two Olympic wrestlers working out on my back.

Cautiously, I rose to my feet and turned around. Akela and Jack were rolling around on the grass. Jack grabbed Akela around his chest and started to roll over with him but Akela escaped and pushed him over.

I watched them dismally. I had been here two days and gotten some great footage but I knew almost nothing. It was time to start checking deep background.

Every HIR has his own techniques. I like to get just enough background to understand what I’m looking at before I start to interview the subject. This way the material always feels fresh. Other people do things differently. I know one HIR who won’t interview a subject without knowing everything down to the family tree.

My technique, though, is predicated on the subject cooperating. Usually it works out. Even people who are hostile to the idea will cooperate in some way-anger and hate are a form of emotional contact after all. It wasn’t working here. It wasn’t that Jack disliked cooperating. He just didn’t care. Somewhere in the back of people is a need to talk about themselves. It’s basic to our makeup. It’s fundamental. Jack didn’t seem to have it; he was just being polite. It was time I looked into alternatives. As I said, I was wired into the North American Communications Grid through my tent. Sam was only a few numbers away.

I could tell from the furniture behind him that Sam was in his office. His eyes were red and his expression surly. He was probably drunk.

“What do you want?”

“To talk to you. Jack’s not the only story here, you know.”

He looked at me suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

I smiled at him. “You’re part of this, too. After all, you run Beck-Lewis. He lives in your backyard, so to speak. You knew all about him. Why did you let him stay here?”

Sam didn’t say anything for a moment. “Didn’t want to arrest him. We grew up together.”

“Really?” I had guessed a connection of this sort. “Was he always like this?”

“Like what? Covered with hair? Nowadays, his dick and scrotum retract up into his belly. Did you think he was like that in high school?” Sam reached off camera and pulled back a bottle. “His dad ran the hardware store in Schmidt, north of the lake. He didn’t do very well at it and Jack was always helping out. Jack was almost always busy. He was the kind of kid that you could get to cooperate if you asked him but you’d run into a stone wall if you tried to force him. He hated taking orders or having anyone tell him what to do-it compromised his freedom, I guess. But if you asked him, he’d do everything he could for you.” Sam chuckled softly.

I wanted to yell: but how did he come here? That wouldn’t work. Sam had to tell the story in his own way.

“Whenever he had the chance, he lit out camping,” Sam said. He leaned forward into the screen. “You got to understand that Jack was talented. Look, as soon as he was old enough he got a hunting license. Every deer season he went out with a rifle and bagged the limit. Every time. Some guys go for years before they bag their first buck. Nobody gets his limit every year. Jack started out using his Dad’s 30-06, an old Springfield. That was too easy. Jack could take down a buck from a mile away and let you pick where to put the hole so it wouldn’t show when it was mounted. After a while, he went to a smaller bore and then to black powder. That got too easy so he went to bow hunting. He was fourteen years old at that point and bringing home a deer every time. Every time. That got too easy so he started stalking them with just a knife.”

Sam shook his head in admiration. “He was still this scrawny kid. He wasn’t that strong, but he was frightfully quick and it was like he could get inside the head of the game.”

“Deer hunting with a knife?”

“I think he could have got an elk, too, if he’d have tried.” Sam said with satisfaction. “You figure a two-hundred pound deer is one thing. A six-hundred or a thousand-pound elk is entirely different. Then, he quit hunting all at once. He said it just wasn’t fair. Instead, he started counting coup.”

“Counting coup?”

“Funny, eh? He’d go out there and get as close as he could and touch them on the head, or slap them or cut off a piece of tail or an ear. Not just elk but cougar and bear.”

“Bear? How did he do that?”

Sam laughed. “That wasn’t easy. He came back one time tore up so bad he looked like the only things holding him together were strings. But he had a piece of a grizzly’s ear.”

This was starting to sound like a tall tale. Pretty soon Sam would have Jack riding a tornado. “Did he count coup on wolves?”

“We didn’t have many wolves back then,” Sam said quietly. “He left them pretty much alone. I don’t know why. Then, he quit counting coup.”

“It got too easy?”

Sam shook his head. “No. This was something else. Something different. He was graduating college by this point and they were just putting Beck-Lewis on the boards.” Sam stopped a moment. “Do you really understand what Beck-Lewis is? It’s a park and a refuge, all right. But it’s bordered on all sides with corporate farms, ranches and gas wells. There are no roads into it. It’s a no-man’s land. It’s the badlands that nobody wanted so the corporations all decided to do something to protect their inside borders and appease the environmentalists. Every couple of years the Sierra Club or the National Geographic or a few scientists come out here and do some work. But to do it they got to get federal permits, state permits and then border permits from each one of the abutting corporations. It’s really hard to do so people go elsewhere, to the Grand Tetons, or Yellowstone or Glacier. Jack and I realized that this place was going to be cheap, underfunded, barely visible. It was perfect. Accidentally, Beck-Lewis was going to slip backwards two hundred years. So we both applied to be rangers and got jobs here. We might have been the only applicants-there sure wasn’t much competition. That was the way of it for ten years.”

Sam stopped and stared at me through the screen, coming back to himself. I didn’t say anything. This was his song, his eulogy. I wouldn’t have broken it for the world. Every word, every gesture was being recorded. It was great background.

“Then, the wolves started coming down from Canada. A few strayed up from Yellowstone. Not many but enough to start a small population. Beck-Lewis wasn’t part of the Wolf Restoration Project but wolves go where they want to go. We wanted the wolves but we didn’t want the WRP-too many strings. Too much visibility. We didn’t want the scientists and the tourist trade. So, we started hunting them, tranquilizing them, and pulling off the radio collars. We left the collars to be found in different places to make the WRP think the wolves had dropped them or been killed. Some we just destroyed-a few collars are lost every year. It was tricky but there weren’t very many wolves. It didn’t take long for Jack to first discard the plane, then the trank gun. Then, he was going out there just by himself. We were only getting one or two collars a year. He would stalk the wolves just like he stalked cougars and elk. But wolves are smarter. They knew who he was and wouldn’t sit still for it. He had to get to know them before they’d let him take the collars. He spent more time out there than anywhere else.”

“Then, he won the lottery,” I prompted.

“Damnedest thing. He stopped in for a six-pack of club soda-he has always had a passion for carbonated water. Go figure. Bought a ticket and a week later he’s a millionaire.” Sam shook his head. “I guess he was already pretty clear in his mind what he was going to do with the money. That was eight years ago. I was against it. I thought it would bring trouble.”

I let that slide. Arguing with him would only get in the way of the story. “What would you have done with the money?”

He snorted. “Same thing I’m doing now. Same thing I’m going to do with the grant money you got for me. Hire some more men. Put in real boundaries. Get ready to defend this place against all comers. Jack thinks Beck-Lewis will last forever. I know better. Beck-Lewis is a holding action, a way of Corporate America getting the rights to public land they knew they could use. Throw the dog a bone and it’s busy while you rob the store. I knew it was only a matter of time before the world found us. Only I figured it would be an economic way of mining the shale or harvesting the buffalo grass or full spectrum solar power or something like that. After all, the only thing that stops capitalism is more capitalism. I didn’t figure on you.”

Two days after Akela came back I only had Sam’s background stories, Goldie’s footage and a limited amount of conversation from Jack to show for it. There was enough here for a feature or two but I wanted more. This story had possibilities. This story had legs. I wanted to see Jack in action. I needed to capture the pack in a real hunt, not wolves living comfortably and easily on rats. Where’s the drama in that?

I tried to pin Jack down. He was lying on his back in the sun. Akela was sitting next to him and Raksha was in her customary curl, snuggled against him with her head on his shoulder. They looked like a couple. It was Akela that looked like a family friend.

Maybe that’s the way it was.

“So,” I began. Jack didn’t move but he tensed suddenly. “Why didn’t you have yourself anatomically altered?”

Jack sat up suddenly. Raksha rolled over, startled. “What do you mean?”

I gestured to Raksha. “It looks like there’s more than paternal affection between you two. Akela is the one that’s the uncle. Not you.”

He looked down. All this time, he had just been a primitive man living with the wolves. But now, he was suddenly brought back into civilization for a moment. The distance between him and the world had narrowed to nothing in a heartbeat. I could see it run through his mind as if he were shouting at me. Broadcasting the interchange between us that had just happened, if done in the right way, would brand him instantly a pervert. It didn’t even have to be true; the allegation would take on a life of its own and any perception of him would be defined by it. People he knew would reconsider all of their memories of him: did the rude gesture on the playground lead to this? Could he have meant that all along? People he didn’t know would make instant and unshakable judgments of him.

I read once that human beings were the only animals that were incapable of domestication. The man who wrote it did not understand people at all. Human beings are the most easily domesticated animal of all; they do it to themselves. Jack had forsaken all that for the love of the pack and now it had come back home to roost. Being thought a pervert mattered to him.

I could see him considering options. Denying it would make no difference. It was the allegation that caught the imagination, not the facts. Baring it all would be better and that was not acceptable. He could kill me-I could see the appraising expression. But he had no idea if the material was on my person. It could be anywhere-it could be broadcast already and then he would have nothing to lose. Besides that, killing someone opened up another whole basket of worms. Could he hush it up? Could he do it at all?

“I don’t work that way,” I said quietly. “I send the material to my home base and edit it later. I don’t do live work.”

He looked up at me with a flicker of hope. “What do I have to do to keep this private?”

“I need to see the pack in action. I need to see a hunt.”

He nodded. “Done. It might take some time to set it up.”

“I can wait.”

He lay back down. He stared into the sky with an absent expression. Before he had been a simple man living a simple life. Now, a secret contorted him. I wondered if he would be able to live here much longer.

“It wouldn’t be fair,” he said suddenly.

“Fair?” I shook my head in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“Being anatomically altered. I’m too smart-any human would be in the same position. I could become alpha but I’d be sterile. The pack wouldn’t have any offspring.”

“You could have had your testes replaced with that of a wolf,” I pointed out. “You could have sired more wolves.”

He looked at me with a weary patience. “And what would be the point? My pack has wolves for that.”

What would be the point to any of this? I almost said but thought better of it. I had what I needed.

I awoke to find Jack rummaging in a small rucksack. He was wearing clothes of a sort; he wore a tight loincloth whose edges were buried in his fur. He caught me looking at him.

“I can’t carry a knife in my hands all the time,” he said defensively. “Besides, it has a cup.”

“I thought everything… down there retracted.”

He pulled out a pair of knives, one with a nine-inch broad blade and the second a short curved one, and fastened them to the loincloth. “It does,” he said, checking his equipment. “But I’m still more vulnerable there than they are.”

He put on the rucksack. “I’m going north with Akela. It’ll take some hours to get some of the pack together. It won’t be a full hunt-we’re pretty spread out this time of year. But four or five of us will do. Do you have a locator with you?”

“Old style GPS and new style LLS. I know where I am.”

He nodded. “Go due north seven miles. There is a rock formation there that looks like old bread dough. Sam used to call it ‘The Dumplings’ when we were kids. Wait there for me. By that time, we should have everybody and know if there’s something nearby. We might have to wait some days but you said you could wait.”

“What are you going to hunt?”

“I don’t know yet.” He rose and barked at Akela. The two of them loped off into the distance while I packed up.

Raksha had stayed behind with the pups. The look she gave me was one of pure hatred.

It took six hours of walking to reach the Dumplings. No one, wolf or man, was waiting for me when I got there. I made camp and then climbed to the top of the boulders. I could see no one. Even Goldie failed to spot anyone as she flew above us. Darkness fell three hours later and still no sign of Jack or his pack.

Here I could see a couple of trees. Certainly, not enough deadwood to build a fire. Not to mention it was illegal to build any fire in Beck-Lewis. That didn’t stop me from wanting one. It was cold and lonely in the dark and the glow of the heater didn’t quite measure up. I was careful in the adjustment not to set a brush fire. I had a lot of resources even here in the wilderness but I couldn’t outrun a wind-driven fire.

The crickets and frogs were loud. Somewhere nearby there must have been a lake or a pond.

“Glad you made it,” Jack said sitting next to me. Akela lay down gracefully next to the light.

It only took a couple of minutes for my heart to start again. “That probably took a year of my life.”

“No doubt,” he said, indifferently. “We found a band of elk about two miles from here. Are you going to come with us personally or just send your bird?”

“I want to be there.”

“Okay. We’ll start before dawn.” He rubbed his hands in the glow of the heater. “Cozy.”

“Can’t wolves hunt at night?”

“Certainly, but I want you to get your money’s worth. We’re only going to do this once.” He fell silent.

I waited for him to speak. He clearly had something on his mind.

“Look,” he said at last. “We’re only going to pick off one but the others are going to react. It’s not a big herd but there are fifteen or so adults that weigh in at several hundred pounds. These aren’t pretty little cottontail deer or Yellowstone Park elk all nicely used to people. It’s been thirty years since they were hunted up here by human beings but wolves have been hunting them pretty steadily for the last twelve years or so. They have no fear of man and wolves piss them off. If they’re running and you’re in the way they won’t turn politely aside. They’ll run you down or pick you up and throw you away. You’re going to have to be very, very quiet on the way over and sit very still while we’re there. These elk may or may not remember the smell of people but they sure know the smell of wolves and when the hunt starts, you better stay out of the way.”

“You’re people.”

“I don’t smell that way to the elk.”

I didn’t say anything for a bit. “How do I be that quiet?”

“You’ll leave everything here. All your instruments. All your camping equipment. Everything except your clothes and whatever you need for your hawk. As it is we’re going to go in downwind with you and then leave you on your own while we go after them.”

Downwind, I thought. He’s going to drive them downwind. “Aren’t they going to come right at me? You’re not trying to get rid of me, are you Jack?”

Jack looked at me steadily. He looked more human right now than he ever had before. “Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind.” He stood up. Akela rose up with him and they walked out into the darkness.

I didn’t sleep well that night.

There was no hint of light when Jack woke me up. I had slept in my hiking clothes. I had nothing but Goldie, Goldie’s controller and a paper notepad. Jack nodded in approval but still pulled off the outer lining of my jacket.

“The material makes too much noise when you walk.”

He took off at a fast pace. There were no wolves in sight.

“Where’s Akela?” I said in a whisper.

“Still too loud,” he breathed. “Akela and the other wolves are ahead and waiting for us. Now, hush.”

We walked for perhaps an hour and a half-stumbled, really. The ground was uneven and filled with holes of voles or mice or other prairie animals. Jack caught me each time before I could make a noise. The sky was clear and filled with stars and cold. The dew on the grass made my pants wet and without the outer lining my legs grew numbingly cold. My hands ached and my feet felt about as sensitive as sullen blocks of wood.

A faint wind whispered in the dark and Jack stopped me. He looked around and sniffed the air. He pulled me a hundred yards in another direction and pushed me down into a crouch. I looked up and saw a bluff darkly leading away into more darkness. There had to be a river near here.

“Don’t send your bird up until you see us in action. You might spook them too early.”

“Okay.”

He grunted. “Should be quite a show.”

Nothing happened for a while as the sky gradually began to lighten. I held Goldie close to keep her warm. She muttered a bit to herself every now and then but it was no louder than my breathing.

It was going to be one of those clear, burnished summer mornings, when the air is so crystalline and still that every reflection is a point of sunlight, every color is glowing, every sound is sharp and precise. The world has crackling electricity wired into it and each movement, each action, releases energy.

I could see the elk in the distance now, huge beasts, five feet at the shoulder with another four feet of antler over their backs. As the light brightened, I saw them with their heads raised, tasting the air. I could tell the cows from the bulls by sheer size. The bulls were nearly twice as big. Some might have been over a thousand pounds. They jerked their heads in different directions. There was a wariness about them. Perhaps they had already scented the pack.

Then, the dawn broke and they started milling about uncertainly. Something was going on but I couldn’t see what.

Things happened at once, the herd started running this way and that, first trying one direction then another. Two bulls lowered their heads and charged but the grass hid their targets from me.

I sent up Goldie and in a moment I saw on the monitors two-no, three-no, five- wolves running in circular patterns, running into the herd briefly and out again. I had no idea what was going on.

On the ground, all I saw were quick brown streaks through the grass. Glimpses, only. I had no idea they were so fast. They barely registered before I lost them.

I watched their faces on the monitors, tongues out, running easily, looking as if they were laughing. It didn’t look serious. I couldn’t see Jack. I had Goldie fly in circles. I had to get pictures of Jack.

I finally caught him loping just below the herd. He was running easily, not working hard just yet. Watching the wolves. It looked like he was calling to them but Goldie’s audio couldn’t pick him out.

Then he changed direction and sprinted towards one edge of the herd. Three wolves came in behind a single huge bull and two others danced around between the herd and the bull.

“Jesus,” I said. Didn’t wolves go after the weak or the sick? Cows and calves? Maybe the bull was old.

The bull stood his ground against two of the wolves, menacing them with his antlers but that freed one to nip at his back legs. He lashed out and the wolf flew five feet and rolled, came up again and back towards the bull. This was not a weak or sick bull. This was a giant buck full in his prime.

The other two wolves succeeded in turning the herd away. The herd ran off to my left. Goldie got some good shots of them leaving. Now, the bull was on his own.

Goldie circled as the wolves worried the bull. He wouldn’t run. He faced one, then two, then three of them, all the while being worried by any wolf he was not directly facing. It didn’t look like hard work but foam came from his mouth and his sides were heaving.

Then he broke and ran and the wolves worked him into a circle, two wolves chasing him and nipping him, three holding back and taking turns. Jack moved between the bull and me. He pulled out his knife and then disappeared into the long grass.

The bull was growing tired. Even so, he caught one wolf that got too careless and tossed him twenty feet. The wolf lay still.

Three wolves shot forward and snapped at his legs while only one stayed in front.

The bull ran forward at the wolf. The wolf darted out of the way-I saw it was Akela. The bull was running straight towards me.

I saw him running directly at me, his eyes focused ahead, seeing his only chance and going for it. I could feel his hooves pounding through the soles of my shoes. I couldn’t seem to hear anything; all sound had disappeared from the world.

Jack leaped from where he had been hiding in the grass. In two eight-foot bounds, he was running just to the side of the bull’s head. Without stopping, the bull brought his head down to bring the antlers to bear on him. Jack leaped and caught them. He was in the air with his knife hand below the throat of the bull. The bull tossed his head back to throw Jack aside and the force of it drove the knife deeply in and across his throat.

Jack was thrown in the air, landed curled and rolling, bounced to his feet and ran after the elk.

The bull staggered, blood pouring from his throat as if from a bucket, ropes of it hanging from his muzzle. He shook his head slowly. Jack caught up with him and drove the knife into his eye. The elk fell, boneless and flaccid, to the ground.

Jack didn’t say anything for a long second. Then, he punched the air with his fist and cried out: “Yes!”

“Jesus,” I said.

Jack heard me, looked up at me and grinned.

I had never seen so much blood in my life. The ground was stained with it ten feet around the bull. The wolves were covered with it as they merrily tore the elk apart. Goldie stood on my shoulder and took sequence after sequence. This was great footage.

“Did you see that?” he said standing next to me. Jack was drenched in elk blood from neck to knees, his fur coarse with it, his hands burnt red to the elbows. “Did you just see it?” He shook his head and grinned at me. “I’ve wanted to do that for years. Since I was a kid.” Still grinning, he looked around.

“I bet,” I said, watching Goldie in the monitors.

After a moment, I noticed Jack had grown silent.

I looked up from the monitor and didn’t see him. “Jack?” I called.

“Over here.”

I followed his voice over a small rise and found him in the deep grass. He was tending to the fallen wolf. There was an angry set to his mouth. The wolf’s whole side had been opened and I could see the ribs and muscles exposed. Mostly, the wolf panted but every now and then he yipped as Jack probed the wound. Once, he snapped at Jack’s fingers.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Jack said suddenly and I wondered who he was trying to convince: himself or me.

“It looks pretty bad.”

Jack didn’t say anything for a moment, his lips thin. “Well,” he said finally. “It is pretty bad. But he’ll have two months to heal before the winter sets in. If this had happened in the winter it would have been all over for him. Winters are hard.” He leaned back and looked at the wolf. “Of course, we would never have attacked an elk like that in the winter.”

He pulled a capsule out of his rucksack and broke it under the wolf’s nose. The wolf lay down and closed his eyes. “I have about twenty minutes now.”

“Is that long enough?” I said. I checked and made sure Goldie was getting this.

“Sure,” he said as he pulled out his instruments. He cleaned out the wound expertly and splashed it with disinfectant and then sprinkled what I assumed was antibiotics over it. Then, with one practiced move after another, he sewed the wound shut. Once he had finished that, he plastered a bandage over it. The wolf was stirring as Jack measured out something from a vial and injected him. The wolf didn’t even flinch.

“He’ll walk back with me. There are enough voles for all of us back with Raksha. For now, we’ll just let him sleep for a while.”

“He’ll make it back?”

“Oh, yeah. It’ll take us most of tomorrow to walk back with him. Akela will probably run on back to Raksha. But me and him will take our time.”

A good portion of the fallen elk was gone when we returned. The four wolves were lying near the carcass looking very pleased with themselves.

I squatted next to it. There was nothing remaining of the bull’s haunting grandeur; he had become just another meal on the prairie. The air was thick with the smell of meat, bone and blood.

“I didn’t think wolves attacked anything this big.” I said.

“You didn’t like the show?”

“I was surprised.”

“Yeah, well, it was a little risky,” he conceded. I thought for a moment he was embarrassed. “But it’s still summer and we’re all in good health. Not like the winter.”

“So you said.” I stood up. “So you said.”

I pulled out my phone. I wondered how long I would have to wait for Sam to pick me up.

After three weeks in Montana, my apartment felt very warm and small, a friendly sheltered spot in the middle of Manhattan. I took a long, hot shower, an even longer bath, and then another shower. I sat in my big stuffed chair and had Chinese food and drank Italian beer for dinner. New York was still hot but the air conditioning was quite cool. I slept under a light sheet for twelve hours dreaming of elk. After that, I was ready to start.

The trick was to figure out the right tack for the story. There are a million events and tales but only a limited number of points of view. That’s how you manage a story. Every human experience is unique but the uniqueness prevents it from being usable. Like great art, the experience has to be brought down to a common theme that can be universally embraced: good versus evil, coming of age, man against nature, man for nature, conflict, resolution, corruption, purity. Once you connect one of these points of view to something that happened, you have a story. The closer the connection is to something with universal appeal determines the attractiveness and durability of the story, its legs.

I checked and made sure Goldie had been fully downloaded and went over what I had. It was even better than I had expected. First, I knocked together a story just using some of the footage I had from Sam and Jack and some pictures of the puppies. A long shot of the hunt gave the sense of reality I was looking for. Then, I did the intro, the voiceover and the outtro. That would be for the human interest section for the news feeds. That took me a couple of days. I held off submitting it for the moment.

Then, I contacted some anthropologists and psychologists and put together a nice half hour segment about Jack and the wolves. Something public broadcasting would like. Suitable for a segment of a larger show on something like human adaptation, for example. I reformulated some of the outtakes and made a second segment for the wildlife sites. That took a couple of weeks. Then, I submitted the news segment at a rock-bottom price as a teaser.

Using the public broadcasting segment as a base, I built a stand-alone show on Jack himself. This was on spec. I wasn’t sure if Jack had the legs for that. I worked on that while I submitted the news segment.

Two of the big feeds bought the same segment-unusual but not rare and the it took off. In an hour, Jack had a four percent share on the major discussion groups and seventy smaller feeds had asked for the segment and breaking rights-rights to cut the segment to fit around other segments. This was starting to be serious money. I put together a dozen or so tabloid articles and put them up for automatic purchase. Several hundred sales came from that alone.

I finished the full hour show by the time Wildlife America and Environment Today asked for a more detailed segment to fit into their national feeds-the half hour segment I’d already made. They also asked for breaking rights so I wasn’t sure where the shows would end up. Jack had become the central topic for ten percent of the major discussion groups. He had become part of the national conversation.

The major feeds are all international but most of the smaller feeds were local. Now, the small foreign feeds were asking about him. It had been a month since I had gotten back from Montana.

National Data called for a single topic show and I had the hour segment waiting for them. This was the big time. The longer segments would be bouncing around for a while. I could stop right now with what I had earned on Jack and not work for the next two years. This didn’t include subsales and residuals that would still be coming in for at least another year after that.

But staleness was already setting in on the original material. By October, I thought my part in Jack’s public career was over.

I took a vacation in Greece. For two months, I lived in a small villa on the Adriatic. I filtered my news, learned to drink Turkish coffee and had an affair with a lovely, tanned, poverty-stricken artist named Gina. She liked the way my rented sailboat cut the water and I liked the way she looked sunning herself on the deck. For a month, she used a room of my villa to paint horrible clashing abstract portraits of nude historical dictators when we weren’t sailing, eating, or having sex. Then, on the first of the year she went back to her husband in Germany. I helped her on the train with her new paintings. Gina kissed me passionately, gave me an abstract Stalin miniature, and left.

After that, I grew restless, so Stalin and I flew back to New York. I hung Stalin on the bathroom wall over the toilet and started going over the news.

Jack was all over the feeds, which surprised me. I knew he had legs but I didn’t think he’d last this long. I started reviewing the news back just before I left.

People liked Jack. More importantly, they liked his wolves. There were three segments of his constituency: those that found him and the wolves cuddly, those that found him a noble savage and those that found him dangerously erotic. There were seven official cameras hovering over him and his wolf pack twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Something like fifty or sixty temporary cams came and went, looking in on him regularly. Several articles and three books that had been written about him while I had been gone. None seemed to me to be as good as my work but perhaps I was biased. Jack dolls had become the Christmas toy of choice and came complete with a set of seven wolves. In a collateral event, interest in a twentieth-century figure, Wolfman Jack, escalated. Pop music started incorporating 1950s rock and roll into the sounds of steam engines and calliopes.

I tuned into one of the cams. It was a howling blizzard in Beck-Lewis right then. The wolves were not in sight. I guessed they were in a den or something. For a moment, I thought I saw Jack’s face in shadow but it disappeared in the snow.

Beck-Lewis also figured prominently in the feeds. Sam had gotten a good portion of the funding he wanted and B-L was getting new men and equipment. I smiled at that. Good for you, Sam, I thought.

The winter was cold out there. It sealed Jack and the wolves in and the rest of the world out. By that June, though, Jack was still a cultural item. The snow melted and tour groups started trespassing on Beck-Lewis looking for Jack. He wasn’t hard to find since eleven full-time cams were following the pack around. I watched them. They all looked lean. Jack himself looked haggard. The winter had not been good to them. Apparently, Sam and his people were able to keep most of these tour groups out but not all. Some of the groups were able to get through the mound of paperwork and some didn’t bother.

In July I was still idle but I was looking into a story about a man in South Africa who had attempted to graft into his mind a simulation of the skill and compositional ability of Mozart. He had failed and there had been significant consequences to his family. While I was finding the right people to talk to, I received an article alert from one of the feeds about a trial in Billings. Jack had killed somebody.

Tour groups attract three kinds of people: those that truly want to understand whatever it is the tour is about, those that just want to enjoy themselves in a new venue, and those who are complete idiots. It turned out a tourist, a man named Bernard, had broken away from the main group of Full Moon Tours and tried to steal one of the Raksha’s pups. Raksha had, quite rightly, attacked and torn off a finger. Bernard managed to pick up a rock and knock her down. Then, instead of attacking Raksha the idiot had killed the pup out of spite. Jack ripped his throat out.

National Data sent me to Billings to follow the trial. It wasn’t going to take long. All eleven cams had caught the killing, not to mention the cams carried by the tourists. Bernard’s father was a retired software engineer and his mother had been the financial officer of a Boston HMO. Environmental considerations aside, they were out for blood. On the other side, public sympathy was with Jack. The picture of Bernard killing the pup was everywhere. I found unofficial support funds for Jack’s defense that seemed to be legitimate and a lot of scams. With this sort of money, Jack could pull an O.J. and get off scot-free.

The tours had stopped but I saw twelve more cams added onto the feeds. At least half of them were handhelds. Everything about him, everything about the wolves attracted attention. The publicity of the trial had generated more interest in the wolves but no one event drove the feeds any longer. The feeds drove the attention which then drove the feeds which then drove the attention. Jack and the wolves had become a self-perpetuating lightning rod.

I checked into Billings the night before the trial. I was tired. I was by myself; I’d left Goldie at home. There were going to be enough cameras here. I was discouraged. The South Africa story wasn’t going anywhere. I’d taken the National Data job to get my head clear. I was watching the coverage of Jack’s impending trial when someone knocked on the hotel door.

I know. I should have checked first. I can only say I was too tired to think. I opened the door and Sam Orcutt was standing there. He didn’t say anything. He punched me in the side of the head and I went down seeing things in different colors and mixed up. He yelled at me while I tried to uncross my eyes.

After a minute or two, my own personal color separation came back into focus and I saw he was standing over me. Drunk, maybe, but certainly confused. “Why the hell didn’t you leave us alone?” He yelled as he stood over me. “Why did you have to stir things up? What the hell were you thinking?” I punched him in the balls.

He went down, moaning. I staggered out into the hall and got some ice for my face. He was still moaning when I got back. I sat down on the sofa and watched him for a minute.

“Nice to see you, too,” I said. My ear was hot and swelling and I heard a crack every time I worked my jaw.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” he whispered, holding himself.

“You throw up, you clean it up.” I put the ice on my forehead. I still felt dizzy. “What are you doing here, Sam?”

“He’s my friend,” he coughed. “That’s more than you are.”

“You hit me out of your friendship with Jack?”

He pulled himself onto his hands and knees and made his way to a chair. “I wanted to pay you back.”

“What did I ever do to you?”

“For what you did to him. To us. To me.”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t surprised. I’d been in the business a while. “That’s the way it goes. You should have protected him better. Kept those nasty tour groups away from him. I could have helped if you’d dropped me a line.”

“ You’re a bastard.”

“I’d sure like to continue this great conversation but I’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

For a minute, he looked like he was going to try again. I picked up the table lamp and watched him. He thought better of it and staggered out into the hall.

“If you’re ever in New York, look me up!” I shouted after him.

I shut the door and leaned against it. I felt terrible.

All bruises and bad feelings, I showed up the next day at the Billings Courthouse ready for a show. It didn’t happen.

All across the feeds, Jack’s attorney had described their case. They were going for insanity. They had statements of several psychiatrists to prove their point. One of their doctors had modified himself to be eight feet tall. Not that it would have made much difference. Jack had spent nearly ten million dollars to look like the star of an old horror movie. Who wouldn’t be inclined to think he was nuts?

Instead, Jack pleaded guilty.

It dawned on me the prosecution was smarter than they looked: they’d plea-bargained with him. The trial was over before it began. I couldn’t figure it out. With the public sympathy and the money, Jack could have gotten a complete acquittal. Hell, he could have ended up suing the State of Montana for libel and won.

Once he had entered his plea, the prosecutor, a hard-looking woman named Warburg, recommended the standard sentence of not more than ten years and not less than seven. The defense agreed. Agreed. Now I was really confused.

Jack saw me on the way out of the courtroom. He ignored me. I didn’t try to talk to him. I’m not sure why. Certainly, it didn’t make National Data any happier. Instead, I interviewed the several disgruntled psychiatrists who would have been substantially well paid to get on the stand had the defense not caved. It wasn’t a total loss. I managed to cause an argument between the Dean of Harvard Law School and the Grid Systems Legal Affairs Correspondent. It made good coverage and when the Dean took a swing at the Correspondent I was there with the National Data cams. It made me think of Sam. The Dean hit like a girl.

Jack was transported to Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge by the end of August. I spent a day or so setting up small segments for National Data and then the contract was finished. I didn’t see Sam again. I suppose he took his little floatplane back to some tiny lake deep in the heart of Beck-Lewis.

For one reason or another, I didn’t go back to New York right away. Instead, I caught a plane over to Forsyth.

Full Moon Tours operated out of an old and nearly abandoned strip mall. Wolf Pack Observation was only one of its many tourist packages. I wandered around in the office, checked out the brochures, the posters and the rough log walls and the soundproofed ceiling. Fishing trips, hiking trips, elk hunts-all in Beck-Lewis. I wondered if Sam knew about these people.

A pretty young woman with perky breasts worked the counter. She smiled radiantly at me and I smiled back. It wasn’t hard to smile at her; she reminded me of Gina.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Not really. I just stopped in. What about this one?” The brochure had a close-up picture of Jack and his wolves on the cover.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she apologized. “We don’t do that tour anymore.”

“Really?” I asked. “How come?”

“It was too hard to protect the clients from the wolves.” She looked at the brochure. “I’m sure we’ll offer something like it next year. We just have to get the bugs out of it.”

“Ah.” I nodded and left.

Deer Lodge was three hundred and fifty miles away and I suppose somewhere in my mind I was always planning to get there. Not that a detour to Forsyth would necessarily indicate that. I had no reason to go. Jack had nothing left I could use. The contract with National Data was over. Still, a few days later I stopped at the Montana State Prison. It had been a week since Jack had been brought here. I found Jack in the prison hospital.

I met Jack in the day room. He had the orange wrist brace of a possible violent offender, universal in this sort of facility. A sort of motion-activated tazer. I had done a story about brace abuse two years before. The guards at Riker’s Island had developed the nasty habit of tuning the braces down for inmates they didn’t like. Men were forced to stand like statues to keep from getting tazed.

Jack was sitting in an old plastic chair watching the trees outside. He turned slightly as I approached him.

I sat down beside him and looked at him. They had shaved him and the pigment of his skin was blotchy. His blue eyes were rimmed with red and he was gaunt and haggard and his hands shook. “You look like hell.”

He laughed shortly. “They tried to drug me the first couple of days I was here because I’m so much stronger than the other inmates. But the modifications interfered and messed me up. Now, I wear this.” He held up the brace. He turned back to the window.

I let the silence go on for a bit. “I wasn’t sure you would see me.”

He shrugged. “Why not? What could you do to me now?”

I ignored that. “You’re not a wolf anymore.”

“I was never a wolf.”

“Yes you were.”

He looked at me.

I spread my hands. “Not in shape, of course. But you had left people behind. You didn’t start coming back to civilization until I threatened you. Until you had something to lose.”

He watched me a moment, then looked back outside. “Autumn’s coming.”

“It does that.”

He grunted and didn’t speak.

Finally, I asked: “Why did you do it?”

“What?”

“Kill Bernard.”

Jack held up his hands. “What else could I do? He killed Raksha’s pup. Raksha would have killed him if I hadn’t killed him first. Then, she would have been destroyed. Better me than her.” He turned back to the window.

“You could have gotten off completely,” I said. “Did you know that?”

He shrugged.

“Was it Warburg’s idea?” I looked around the room, the antiseptic white and beige of the walls. Outside were the guards and the exercise field and the cells. “You can appeal. You can say you were given inadequate counsel. You were given inadequate counsel. That’s absolutely true. She should never have taken the deal. You could have been on your way back to Beck-Lewis that afternoon.”

“It wasn’t Warburg’s idea,” he said softly. “It was mine. All of this was my fault.” He looked up at me for a long time, shook his head and turned away.

And I understood.

I looked out the window. The weather had become clear and the late summer light had changed character and taken on the soft golden glow of approaching autumn. The air looked cool, a sheath of velvet pleasantly covering a cold knife.

Jack looked outside. In one of those rare and perfect telepathic moments between human beings, I knew what he was seeing. Through one of the many cams that hovered over the pack, or through the eyes of a tourist, or a naturalist or just somebody who wanted to touch her, was Raksha. Now the center of a hungry and ever-growing crowd, the elk gone, the grass trampled, playing as best she can with the now almost-grown pups, then joining with the rest of the pack, howling against the coming snow.

“Winters,” Jack said at last. “Winters are hard.”