Raptor Read online

  “Have you lived here long?” I asked.

  “Five years,” Katharine said. “March built the place before I met him, but I helped him finish it up.”

  I sat down at a counter in the kitchen under a bunch of dried something and watched while Katharine put the water on. What were we going to talk about while it simmered? Gardening? Crystals?

  “You like being a lawyer?” she asked me.

  “There are things I like about it. I like having my own office. I’d like getting March out of jail.”

  “I bet,” she said, fondling the rock in the rope around her neck, getting in touch with the crystal energy. “March’s life is in danger while he sits in that hole. I want him home, here in bed with me, and soon. If you ask me all the law does is put the wrong people in jail, set criminals free and take forever to do it.”

  The wheels of justice grind slowly; I’d be the first to admit it. But how did she propose to get him out—crystal power?

  “It must be miserable work spending all day dealing with people’s greed and pain,” she continued. Or their yearnings to be compensated for something they had done or released for something they hadn’t. “It’s a rotten job if you ask me.”

  There was the question of what she did for a living—nothing, that I’d noticed so far—but I was charging for my time, why waste it? “Maybe, but someone has to do it,” I said and changed the subject. “I understand you didn’t like Pedersen.”

  Her face changed, the beauty slipping out as the anger slipped in. She let go of the crystal, took the teapot off the stove. “Let’s go outside. I want to show you something.”

  I noticed, as I followed her down the spiral staircase, that another face had been started on the backside of the post, but had been left unfinished. The scowling face, maybe, that Katharine presented to the world. “Pedersen was a poacher,” she said when we got outside under the overhang of the sun deck. “A scum.” Too foul, apparently, to even talk about in her living room.

  “Come here, Pookie,” she called and a thin, yellow, devoted dog limped up. “I found this dog beside the highway with a broken leg. Someone had hit him, driven off and just left him there to die.” Pookie gratefully accepted a pat on the head and followed us behind the house where an aviary was hidden from view. It was a series of wire cages housing birds that had been injured and nursed back to health by Katharine. “If they are capable of going back into the wild, I release them, but if they are not I keep them here. You have to be very careful with an injured wild creature so it doesn’t become too attached to you, it doesn’t lose its native distrust, it doesn’t identify you with food, because if that happens there’s no point in releasing them, no matter how whole they are. Animals have to fear man to live in the wild. That is the first order of survival. Most of my birds were found on the road, victims of highway accidents. People know what I do and they bring them to me to be healed.” She showed me a red-tailed hawk, a white snowy owl of unearthly feathered beauty and a tiny saw-whet owl; a wounded claw, a blind eye, a broken wing.

  “This crystal is rose quartz. It has healing properties for winged creatures.” She waved it over the saw-whet’s cage and then took him out to show me. “Ollie, say hello to Neil, March’s lawyer.” Ollie blinked his luminous indifferent eyes. My profession didn’t impress him either.

  She also had a shiny black bird in her aviary that cawed loudly when it saw us. “Is that a raven or a crow?” I asked.

  “Raven,” she replied.

  “I guess that’s a matter of a pinion.”

  She didn’t laugh. If Katharine had any sense of humor I had yet to see it. She shifted abruptly from childlike gentleness to extravagant outrage, grinding the gears as she went. Some humor might have greased the transition.

  She stroked the tiny owl, who seemed blissfully happy in her hands, then gently put him back in his cage and waved the crystal again. Not so gently she turned toward me. “I am furious when someone hurts an animal or removes it unnecessarily from the wild. Can you understand that? It is the worst sin in the world. Because man has the power to destroy everything in his path he has the responsibility not to. Wild birds should be free, free as the day they were born. This smuggling ring with Saudi princes and black marketeers is disgusting. So you still want to know what I think of Pedersen?” Her porcelain skin wrinkled in anger, her black eyes sparked. The transition was complete. Katharine the gentle bird tamer had become Katharine the Untamable again. “He was a poacher and like all poachers, a vile, evil man. He deserved what he got.”

  If there were a crystal to eliminate poachers from the face of the earth she probably would have used it. As far as I could see Pedersen was just another rotten human who’d fucked up, but then I was used to dealing with human greed and misery; I did it every day. She had made him into a devil and was crediting him with too much power. The only advantage to investing your opponent with superhuman qualities is that you make yourself even more powerful when you strike him down. It was myth making, the same mistake some feminists make, but men are only human, too. Nothing was to be gained from exaggerating anyone’s abilities, and Pedersen’s were suspect to begin with.

  “I’d like to see the wolf-wipers,” I said.

  “That’s why you came, isn’t it?”

  I agreed it was and we walked down to the shed, the front of which was filled with the normal implements of gardening and maintaining a place: shovels, axes, hoes, rakes. The back half looked like an inquisition chamber. There were the leg-hold traps that March had removed from the wilderness, shiny metal instruments that would hold a coyote’s leg in bondage until he got so desperate and crazed with fear and pain that he chewed it off. And then there were the wolf-wipers, three of them.

  “Betts has the fourth. Greg Porter came by with a warrant and took it. I guess you know that,” Katharine said. “You want to see how they work?”

  I nodded.

  “If it’s a wolf you’re after, you put the bait back here, see—the wolf pulls on it and sets off the cyanide. Or it can also be detonated by putting weight against this piece. A man on his hands and knees like this would be just about the height of a wolf. March said that the trap was set at a place where you’d have to crawl to get under the overhang. It was concealed by the red cedars. Pedersen put his hand into it like this.” She knelt down and placed her hand on the trap. I stepped back quickly.

  “Afraid I’m going to set it off? You’ve got to lean on it harder than that to detonate it. When you do, the cyanide blasts out right about here, into your face.”

  “Charming. Did they ever get any wolves in Freezeout?”

  “A couple, but that was half the population.”

  “March said he never did find out who was setting them.”

  She stood up and brushed the dirt from her palms and knees. “That’s bullshit.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s bullshit. Everybody knew who was doing it, March just didn’t want to believe it.”

  “Why not?”

  “He knows the guy. March never wants to believe anything bad about anybody, especially someone he knows, so he convinced himself it wasn’t him. But he’s a trapper and he makes traps that will kill anything. If he doesn’t use them himself, he sells them to someone who will.”

  “Does this guy have a name?”

  “Jimmy Brannen.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Warren, a few miles down the road.”

  “Maybe I should see him.”

  “You wouldn’t want to.” Her eyes narrowed.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s a scum.”

  “I’m used to dealing with rotten people. It’s my profession. Brannen might have some information that could help March.”

  She thought it over. “He might,” she replied, then gave me directions to Brannen’s place. I never did get my Orange Zinger, and if Katharine was sorry to see me leave she didn’t let it show, but Pookie followed me to the van. He wagged his skimpy tai
l, which set his rear end in motion and got his scrawny ribs shaking and then his whole self vibrating until I leaned over and patted him on the head.

  12

  THE KID’S POSTCARD, carefully addressed to 9 Callejon del Viento, little street of the wind, was still on the passenger’s seat. I’d have to go like the wind to get to Jimmy Brannen’s and back to Fire Pond in time to mail it today. It was already 3:15 by the clock in March’s van. Although it might not be correct about the minute, it probably was right about the hour. If I got the card in the mail tomorrow, he’d get it Thursday morning a few hours before I was due back anyway. “Sorry, Kid,” I thought. “It’s a lead—I have to check it out.”

  March’s directions had been simple and clear, as directions should be. Go five miles, turn left, go another mile and a half, turn right. Katharine’s directions were neither simple nor clear. There were too many inconsequential landmarks and too few measured distances. It made me wonder how badly she wanted me to get there. “A few miles down the road” turned out to be thirty. “After the town of Warren,” she’d said, “you go a little way and you’ll see a Texaco station on the left” (it wasn’t Texaco, it was Mobil). “When you see that, keep going. Then a little further down the road on the right is the Constant place where Jim and Mary used to live. After that there’s a road on the left that leads to the Forked River Ranch. Take the second left. Jimmy’s place is down that road on the right. You’ll see a sign.” I found the Forked River Ranch Road all right, but did she mean the second left down that road or the second left after that road? I tried both and began to think, as they say in New England, you couldn’t get there from here. It shouldn’t be that hard; there weren’t many roads in this area to begin with and even fewer houses. The first road I tried came to an abrupt end, no “places,” no sign for Jimmy Brannen. The second one went on and on. Neither had seen rain in recent history and, even with the windows rolled up, I was eating dust.

  I knew better than to go out in the West without a lot of gas and a container of drinking water. After five miles down the second “second left” I stopped, drank some water and let the dust settle. This expedition was beginning to resemble a nowhere love affair, when you’ve invested too much to quit but don’t see anything promising coming up either. Or those exits that you come across on unfamiliar interstates late at night. The sign says gas, you need it, so you get off. The gas station isn’t there, it’s somewhere down the road; you drive and drive and it doesn’t appear and you wonder if you’ve reached the point of no return, as pilots call it, when you’ve used up the better half of your tank. There’s not enough to get back, but there may not be enough to go forward either. It’s one of life’s hardest decisions—when to cut your losses—but five miles of road dust (ten counting the return trip) was enough for me. Besides, it got dark early at this time of year—November, the month when Montana is bare and brown and more lonesome than lonesome. It’s a time of brooding and introspection, a time to hide your nuts and prepare for the darker days to come. We don’t have November where I come from. We have summer and winter, which is similar to summer only colder, but we don’t have any dark brooding months.

  As the sun slipped out of the clouds and neared the horizon, long shadows formed wherever there was anything to make a shadow. I didn’t want to be driving around lost after nightfall, so I got back on the highway and stopped at the Mobil station for gas and help. The mechanic, with a Sam Shepard kind of snaggle-toothed smile and a certain clarity of expression, told me that the second left was the second left past the gas station and Jimmy Brannen was a mile down the road. Why hadn’t she just said so?

  JAMES EARL BRANNEN, read the letters burned onto a slab of wood, TRAPPER. The place was bare and brown as the season, a series of ramshackle, unpainted and unkempt buildings. There were no vehicles visible and it didn’t look like anyone was at home, if there was a home in this stack of weathered wood. I slammed the door loudly as I got out of the van just in case. “Hello?” I called. No response. “Anybody home?” I tried again. “I’m looking for Jimmy Brannen.” If anyone heard me, they didn’t let it show.

  Since I’d gone to this much trouble to find the place, I decided to peek around and see what I could before darkness settled in. There was the hum of a motor running somewhere at Jimmy Brannen’s, but otherwise it was quiet as Montana at dusk. I walked up a slight incline toward the buildings, hoping a snarling dog wasn’t going to leap out at me. None did and I made it to the first shed unmauled. The door was padlocked shut. I walked around it with my hand trailing along the rough planked siding. There weren’t any windows in this building, just a few chinks in the wood. I looked through one and couldn’t see anything but specks of dust in the waning light. I circled this shed and went on to the next, which was large enough to be called a barn. The door was wide open, so I went in. The glass that was left in the windows was filthy, but, as most of them had been smashed out, there was enough light to see a row of stalls—for horses I guessed—but it didn’t look like any horses had been there recently. There was still some hay in the stalls and a feathering of hay dust hung in the air and made me sneeze. I went on to the next building, another shed larger than the first, also padlocked, but with a heavier lock, a bigger bolt. The humming motor was in this building and when I put my hand to the wall I could feel a steady vibration like a mechanical heart. There were windows here, but high up. Even on tiptoe I couldn’t see in. I worked my way around the place looking for something to stand on and came across a large rock, which I rolled and pushed back to a window. I balanced on it, pressed my fingertips against the windowsill and peered in. I saw metal hooks and springs and chains. I couldn’t see what the motor was, but it was a place that hummed with pain and mutilation and death to come, with fear and paws and blood. It was a rotten way to make a living. I shuddered and climbed down, being careful not to twist my ankle as I stepped from the rock. I began kicking at it—no point in alarming Mr. Brannen by leaving it under the window—and was pushing it around the corner of the building when I looked up and found myself staring down the dark end of a rifle.

  “You looking for something?” a voice said. The man holding it, I noticed once I was able to disengage my eyes from the darkness that lurked in the depths of the barrel, was medium sized and skinny. He was wearing pants that resembled tree bark, a camouflage hat with a peak, like a feed-store giveaway, and a matching vest with lots of flaps and pockets and places to put ammunition. He’d camouflaged himself so good I hadn’t even known he was there.

  “I’m looking for Jimmy Brannen,” I said.

  “You found him.”

  “I couldn’t figure out which building was your office.”

  “Ain’t got one.”

  “While I was looking, I tripped over this rock and I thought I’d kick it out of the way before somebody sprained an ankle or something.” It sounded like bullshit, even to me.

  “That right?”

  “Would you mind putting down that gun? It’s hard to talk with a rifle staring at you. I’m not armed.” The barrel had a hypnotic pull like deep, dark, still water. I didn’t want to ever look into it again.

  He sized me up and could see that there was no place to hide a weapon in my well-worn Levi’s and sweater. He pointed the gun toward the ground, but kept his eyes on me.

  “So what are you looking for me for?”

  “I want to talk to you about traps.”

  “What kind of traps?”

  “Wolf-wipers.”

  “Wolf-wipers. Why? You got some varmint bothering you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  He inclined his head toward the road. “We can talk down there.”

  I led the way, wondering all the while which part of me the gun was pointed at. When we got to the van and his pickup he said, “Stop right here.” He leaned against his truck, I leaned against the van. This I guessed was his living room, the truck his couch. “Ain’t that March’s van?” he asked and spat in the dust.

  �
�Yeah.”

  “You taking Katharine’s place?”

  “No.”

  “Then why you drivin’ it?”

  I told him—why not? The best way to tell a lie is to put a little truth in, the best way to tell the truth is to put in everything you’ve got. “March is taking the rap for someone else, you know. He could spend the rest of his life in jail because of a trap he didn’t set,” I finished up.

  “Katharine told you how to get here?” was his comment.

  “More or less.”

  He spat a brown goober into the dust at his feet, just missing a combat boot, a soldier of fortune in spirit if not profession. “Did March tell you to come here, too?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. There’s a lot of loose talk around but March ain’t the kind of guy to accuse anybody unless he’s sure.” He relaxed a little and lay the gun down on the back of his truck—the coffee table. “He’s been pussy-whipped, but March ain’t a bad guy. He’s always been straight with me so I’ll tell you what I know about wolf-wipers. They’ll kill a predator like a wolf or a coyote pretty fast. They’ll also kill a human being.” The Velcro made a sucking sound as he ripped open one of the flaps on his vest. He pulled out a hunk of something brown and bit off a wad. “That’s all I know.”

  It was getting dark. Brannen had a lean and sinuous body, a body that could slide easily into tunnels and burrows, and he had the sharp little face that went along with it, a face with crevices for shadows to settle into. They spread beneath his eyes and alongside his nose and were about to swallow the face up. It was time to shine some light on his outdoor living room.

  “Oh, yeah, there’s one more thing. The kind of person who’d buy a trap like that wouldn’t worry too much about killin’. That answer your questions?”