Raptor Page 16

  “Well, I was right about that sting operation, wasn’t I?” Although he’d given the L and the W equal billing on his gate, I’d seen a lot more of the L so far than I had of the W. Unlike the bold and boastful lion, wolves are supposedly the shyest of creatures: sleek, swift, furtive, but nurturing pack animals. Only the leaders, the alpha pair, breed, but the whole pack participates in raising the young.

  “You were right.” I was willing to give him credit—not the same thing as giving him praise, but the difference was wasted on him.

  “Betts pulled in some big international dealers, I hear. He was wasting the taxpayers’ money by going after guys like me who keep a Mimi for a hobby when he had international operators and a Saudi Arabian prince.” The waitress plopped a cup of coffee in front of Leo, a cup of water with a tea bag floating in it in front of me.

  “Maybe he just set out the bait and waited to see who bit,” I said. I took the tea bag out of the cup and put it on a napkin—there was no saucer—where it left a brown stain. I prefer weak or better yet herb teas; they’re more colorful, but the New Age in tea bags hadn’t made it into the Aspen Inn yet.

  “A trapper wants to know what he’s after when he sets a trap. The kind of predator you’re after tells you where to set up, how to set up, what kind of bait and lures to use.”

  Trappers seemed to like to emphasize the word “predator” when they talked about their kills, I noticed, as if killing a killer made killing all right.

  Leo poured some white sugar into his black coffee. “They sell lures for every kind of animal you’d ever want to trap. Did you know that? They’ve got lures for coyote, fox, mink, coons and beavers, lures that will appeal to their hunger, their curiosity, their sex drive—those are a mixture of musk and glands and in-heat urine. My personal favorite has always been Cat Man Do. It’s kind of loud, but it’ll pull in a coyote every time. They can’t get enough of it. Now the use of urine is interesting. The smell of it will pull in the animal and it will also disguise the human odor. Some guys put trail scent packs on their boots with red fox urine scent in ’em when they hike to the trap. Covers up their smell. But in my experience if you’re trying to pull in people, the best lure is money. It’s more effective even than glands. Although that Kate’s got a nice musky scent; I might walk a mile to get into her boots.” He cradled his coffee in his large hands, sipping away without waiting for it to cool.

  “Well, I suppose if someone were setting a trap for a human and intended to use his own urine as a lure, a man would be more likely to do it than a woman. It’s a lot easier for a man to unzip and piss outdoors.”

  “Not if the woman’s wearing a skirt it isn’t. It’s easy enough for a woman to squat down and pee with a skirt on.”

  His dumb macho act was about as unappetizing as a slab of raw and bloody meat, but he wasn’t altogether as stupid as he liked to pretend. Since I was stuck with him at least until I’d finished my tea, I decided to take advantage of what knowledge he had. “Suppose you got it in your mind to trap a bird, how would you go about it?”

  “There’s a couple of ways. One is you make yourself a headset, a wire frame that will fit over your head and shoulders, and you cover it with weeds or leaves, whatever it takes for camouflage. You conceal yourself. Dig a shallow trench if you have to and cover yourself with dirt. You take a pigeon, tie a string to its leg, hold it in front of you and move it around to attract the hawk. Of course, you’ve got to have some reason to think the hawk’s gonna show up there. If she does, you wait until she attacks the pigeon and then you grab her around the legs. The other way is set up a spring-loaded bow net. It’s a small net and you conceal it carefully. Again you hide yourself in a blind and use pigeons to pull in the hawk. But handling a bow net can be tricky when you’ve got a hawk coming at you. Kind of like pulling a trout out of thin air.” He put down his coffee and flicked his own wrist in a fly casting gesture that was fluid and surprisingly graceful considering the size of his hands.

  “I don’t suppose just anybody can do it.”

  “Well, it takes a lot of skill to handle a bow net, but it takes more patience than skill to hide yourself and grab a hungry hawk around the legs.” He brought his hands back to the coffee cup and the conversation back to a favorite subject—Katharine. “So Kate’s been pulled in for blowing up the prince’s jet plane. It was a beauty, too, I hear.”

  “The razor’s edge of the performance envelope.”

  “That’s good. I like that.” He grinned. “She’s a wild woman.” He shook his head in admiration. “She’s not gonna like prison, but Betts will want to keep her there. The way he’ll put two and two together, if she’d blow up a prince, she’d trap a poacher.”

  “She’s got a lot of traps in her shed, too,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Why are you so eager to pin Pedersen’s murder on Katharine?” I asked him.

  “The way she’s acting she’s doing it to herself.”

  I’d have to agree with him on that one.

  “How’s March doing?” he asked.

  “Not great. He’s miserable in prison.”

  “The poachers been hassling him?”

  “Not any more. They think he’s a hero now that it has come out that Pedersen was a government operative.”

  “If Betts can pin the murder on Katharine, March’ll get out.”

  “Could be he won’t pin it on either one of them. Pedersen was pretty careless, you told me so yourself. Seems to me a more likely murderer would be someone who realized he was being set up. Someone Pedersen had talked to, someone he had the goods on.”

  “Like I told you before it wasn’t a falconer. They get all the excitement they need just from watching their birds.” He finished his coffee, put his cup down, waved at the waitress to get some more. “More for you?” he asked me.

  “No,” I replied. My teacup was still almost full. “Any falconer who ends up in the Fire Pond jail isn’t going to be seeing many birds.”

  “If Betts can make the charges stick.”

  “Did you come all the way into Fire Pond just to talk to me about that?”

  “No. I came in because the Fish and Wildlife Service asked me to. You a birder?”

  “Me? No way. I can tell the difference between a raven and a crow, though.”

  “Yeah? How’s that?”

  “It’s a matter of a pinion.”

  He laughed at the joke, the first person in recent memory to do so. You never know from what barren range a sense of humor will spring. “If you’re not a birder, what brought you to Montana in the first place?”

  It wasn’t hunger, it wasn’t sex, it wasn’t even money. “Curiosity,” I said. “Why did the Fish and Wildlife Service ask you to come in?”

  “Because I know a hell of a lot more about raptors than they do, and they have some sick birds in their custody, some that their operatives brought in, some that they took from poachers. They’ve already had to destroy five Finnish goshawks that a Canadian smuggler had because they’d gotten rickets from starvation diets. They’ve got sick falcons, birds with broken wings, birds that need care, and the Fish and Wildlife Service doesn’t know how to do it.

  “They’re the FWS, not the FBI. They hired incompetent agents, guys who don’t know a falcon from a duck, to go into the wilderness and take fledglings and even eggs from the nests. Between the great horned owls and the coyotes, a young falcon hasn’t got but a twenty-five to fifty percent chance in the wild anyway. And now they’ve got government agents to deal with. A falcon’s egg is a delicate thing. Some heavy-handed government operative took peregrine falcon eggs from a nest, I hear, and broke them. It kind of annoys me that the government can get away with that when it’s illegal for me to take a passager bird, train it to return to me and watch it fly and hunt like … like what? There’s nothing in the world you can compare a falcon to. Everything else that flies gets compared to them.”

  “What else has got a plane, a car, a TV seri
es and a movie named after it?”

  “A football team, too. The gyr is a beauty—talk about the outer edge of the performance envelope.”

  “You’ve seen her?”

  “I’ve been out to the aerie, sure. It was no secret where she was once March took you all out there and Pedersen got bumped. Just because the Fish and Wildlife Service says I can’t touch don’t mean I can’t look. She’s the biggest, whitest, swiftest bird I’ve ever seen.”

  “You’d love to have her, wouldn’t you?”

  “Wouldn’t you take Robert Redford if you had the chance?”

  “I could live without him.”

  “Some people think March is a great-looking guy.”

  “Not that great,” I said, putting down my teacup and bringing the conversation back to where I wanted it to be. “Wouldn’t it bother you to see a wild and free spirit like the gyr in captivity?”

  “If she were mine, I’d treat her well. A good falconer will feed his bird and tend it better than it would ever be in the wild. Some birds in captivity live to be thirty years old. They’d never make it that far on their own.”

  “Yeah, but in captivity they spend most of their lives tied to a perch.”

  “They get to fly, they get to hunt. A falcon is wild and stubborn as hell. It’s not a dog you can train to roll over and bark on command. In fact, you could beat the shit out of it—if you were inclined that way—and it still wouldn’t do anything it didn’t want to. It comes back to its trainer because it’s lazy, because it gets fed, because it’s a creature of habit. It’s on its own when it’s flying, there’s nothing to make it come back but habit and hunger.”

  He hadn’t, I noticed, mentioned love and devotion.

  “A hawk in the wild doesn’t do anything, anyway, unless it’s hungry. It just sits on a perch and hangs around till it’s empty enough to kill.” He finished his second cup of coffee, put the cup down, and laid his big hands on the table, the kind of hands that would coddle, protect and smother, if you let them. He got to the point of his visit.

  “Now that Betts has called in his sting operation the Fish and Wildlife Service is stuck with the bunch of birds they brought in for evidence. Only they don’t know how to take care of them, so they want me to help.” He shook his head. The irony of it wasn’t wasted on him. “It’s a big job and I could use some assistance. I was wondering if any of the birders are still around who know something about raptors.”

  “John King has gone,” I said. “But Avery is still here. He knows something about everything, maybe he could help.”

  We tracked Avery to his room, where he happened to be taking a nap, although he’d be the last to admit it. As a nocturnal being, midday wasn’t his best time. His fine white hair had enough natural electricity to crackle even before he tuned in, but his eyes blinked slowly awake behind his thick glasses and his skin had the rumpled texture of sleep. He was tucking his shirttail in as he answered the door. It made him seem not old exactly but vulnerable, to predation, maybe, or just to time.

  His door had a sign on it that said it was a no smoking room, which immediately instilled in me a desire to light up. His room had the same mottled wall-to-wall and plaid sofa as mine but it seemed more like a nest. It was the pile of books on the end table, I guess, the maps opened up and spread across the floor, or maybe the clothes he hadn’t bothered to hang up.

  “Neil,” he said. “Good to see you.” He did his happy little two-step again and made me feel that if I offered my hand, he’d kiss it.

  “Avery, this is Leo Wolfe. He’s a falconer.”

  “My pleasure,” said Avery. “What kind of bird do you have?”

  “Kestrel.”

  Do lions and wolves eat owls? I wondered. Was Leo’s ego massive enough and Avery old enough that Leo would patronize him just like a woman?

  “I need some help,” Leo said and he told Avery about the birds. He could dispense with the macho bullshit when he wanted to, but then Avery had the ability to bring out the best in people.

  “The birds are with a vet in town,” said Leo, “but he doesn’t know zip about hawks. You want to come on over with me and take a look?”

  “Be glad to,” said Avery. “Why don’t you come along, Neil? You might find it interesting.”

  “What time is it?” I looked around the room, but Avery—like me—didn’t seem to wear a watch or keep a clock either.

  Leo glanced at his wrist where some red numbers flashed. “Twelve-thirty,” he said.

  “I have an appointment with Betts at one-thirty. I guess I could come for a little while.”

  “You might tell Betts what I think of his sting operation when you see him,” Leo said.

  “It did seem to be a misguided effort,” Avery agreed. That was putting it kindly. Avery had lived a long time, had seen a great deal and had ended up kind. It said a lot for the man.

  Leo Wolfe hadn’t lived as long or ended up so kind either. “On second thought,” he said, “maybe I’ll tell him myself.”

  They left in Leo’s truck and I followed them to the vet’s office, which was in a Victorian bungalow on Q Street, neat and tidy looking outside but smelly as an old dog within. Avery and I waited in an examining room while Leo went to get a wounded peregrine.

  “Peregrines are the most elegant of birds,” Avery told me. “As they get older their wings become slate gray, their breasts are white and they have a chiaroscuro that reminds me of Fred Astaire in his tux.”

  The peregrine that Leo brought in was about eighteen inches tall, brown and beige with a mottled breast and wings and black markings around her wary eyes. Leo’s large hand held her by the legs.

  “She’s a young one,” he said, “trapped by some government operative in Utah to use as bait to put falconers in jail.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

  “Broken wing.” As if on cue, the falcon tried to flap her wings. One wing opened up, the other bent and flopped over.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  The peregrine’s eyes changed from wary to panic-stricken as her wing failed her, the same desperate expression seen in the eyes of the grounded oil-slicked birds in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Leo tried to calm her by stroking her breast gently with his finger.

  “What will become of her?” asked Avery.

  “We’ll set the wing but most likely she’ll never fly again. Makes you good and mad, don’t it, that some government jackass could do a thing like that to a falcon?”

  18

  I’D BEEN TO Betts’s office enough times to know the route by now. I knew that even-numbered streets went one way, odd numbers another, but, wrapped up in my thoughts and puffing on my Marlboro, I made an error and turned down Fourth Avenue the wrong way. Nobody was on Fourth at the moment and I cruised along unaware until suddenly a Subaru whipped around a corner and swung wide to avoid me. The driver waved frantically. Another car came up right behind him and another. A light must have turned green somewhere downstream releasing this tide of traffic. There was a lot of horn beeping and irritated gesturing. “Okay, okay,” I said, pulling into a driveway and smashing my cigarette out in the ashtray. “I get the point.”

  Wayne Betts awaited me at his large desk. As anticipated he had put two and two together and he didn’t waste any time telling me about it. While it was interesting to hear his views on Katharine, it wasn’t really why I had gone to see him. There was something else I wanted to discuss. Although his hands had been on the table when he’d talked to me before, his cards hadn’t.

  “This is not the first time we’ve had trouble with Katharine Conover,” he said. “She’s an animal … rights … activist.”

  The pauses indicated that “animal rights activist” was one of those phrases beloved by right-wing types who prefer slogan to thought. Obviously, it was supposed to stimulate me into some salivating, Pavlovian response, but my answer was to stare at Betts just as blankly as he usually looked at me. “So?”

  “Animal righ
ts activists are sick and violent individuals. Do you know what she did?”

  “No.”

  He leaned back in his chair, stretched his legs and gave his knuckles a little squeeze, looking just like a Texan about to spin a tall tale. Considering the circumstances, I accepted what he told me as the truth, but it was one of those true stories that are weirder than fiction. Like a lot of weird stories, it involved Californians. “Well,” he said. “There was a beaver farm in Crono, about fifty miles southwest of here. Some investors from California were trying to set up a business raising beavers for their pelts just like people raise mink. They had hundreds, maybe thousands, of ’em. Some people value beaver skins, but they’re not the nicest animals to keep around. They’re mean and smelly, not exactly household pets.”

  I didn’t know much about beavers in general except that they worked hard and sharpened trees up like pencil tips. However, I had once made the acquaintance of a particular beaver when I was a law student at UNM and had a boyfriend who liked to hike in the Pecos. We had a favorite lake we hiked in to swim nude. Anybody else who hiked in there swam naked, too, so that was no problem. The water was icy, high mountain cold, but by the time you got to it you were hot enough so it felt good for a little while. It was a favorite spot and the summer the romance peaked we spent a lot of time there. The next year the romance had begun a terminal downhill slide, but we hiked back up once anyway to try to recapture the feeling. It was a mistake. A beaver had taken over the pond and built himself a lodge at one end. The once-clear mountain lake was already starting to silt up, but we were hot, took off our clothes and leapt in. The beaver swam out of his twig hut, his rodent face just visible in the track he cut as he cleft the pond. He swam across the lake once, then came back again, edging a little closer to the spot where we stood. He head was slick and brown, and there was nothing cute or Disneylike about it. His broad, flat tail came up into the air and smacked down hard and loud as a gunshot against the water as if to say that pond was his now and he intended to be the only one in it. Who were we, uneasy lovers, to challenge him? I never went back there again.