Earthbound (19 page)

That night after giving our horses a thorough
grooming and mucking out their stall (okay, can’t really call it a
stall, I’ll call it the place they shit), I got pretty drunk on
whiskey. What we had done was starting to settle in. Not the bank
robbing thing. The outlaw thing. I like Pace and all, but was that
gonna be it? Just him and me, our horses and some vultures? Would I
never have sex again? At least those girly magazines helped. Helped
me fall asleep anyway.

Anyway, my drunken sleep never lasted too
long. One night I woke up hearing something stirring. I opened my
eyes. And in the dim light of the fire, I saw eyes staring back at
me. Nearly shit myself. It was a wolf, fully grown, maybe six feet
away from my sleeping bag. It’d probably been attracted by the pig
carcass I left to rot a block away. Apparently not far enough. The
wolf obviously had no problem avoiding our animal traps.

One wolf was probably not much of a concern,
but they were never alone. They traveled in packs. If it had its
friends nearby, they’d have a fight on their hands – that they
might win. And if Pace and I survived, there was no guarantee for
our horses.

I slowly slipped my hand around my revolver.
I could take this one out. Shoot him cleanly in the forehead. The
only question was what would happen next. Would it scare the rest
off, if they were even there? Would it spook our horses, and cause
them to run right outside, where there was either a pack of wolves
or our traps? I wasn’t seeing many good options before me.

So this wolf and I just sized each other up
for a minute. Hell, maybe I surprised it myself. Maybe it was just
curious, not having seen a human in, well, ever.

It licked its lips. That wasn’t comforting.
But finally I saw the wolf blink. It started backing up, and then
it turned around and skipped out of the lobby.

“Pace!” I shouted. “Wake the eff up!” I leapt
up and threw on my boots. I had to give Pace a kick to wake him up
fully.

“What?” he moaned.

I leaned in and whispered in his ear.
“Wolves.”

That got his attention. In moments, he was on
his feet too, boots on, guns loaded.

We slowly made our way through the lobby,
looking closely in every direction in case we hadn’t spotted one of
‘em. Then when we made it through the entrance, there they were.
About twenty of ‘em. Mostly juveniles, but a couple of adults and
lots of yearlings. They all stood on the outskirts of our traps, as
if to taunt us.

Pace raised his arm to shoot, but I stopped
him. He looked at me, surprised. I didn’t want to speak to explain
that there was too many of ‘em. I could try to shoot a perfect ten
for ten using both revolvers and fell the whole pack. But my aim
with my left hand wasn’t perfected yet and I couldn’t count on Pace
to shoot perfectly. One of ‘em could get to us, or past us to our
horses, before we could reload. No, we couldn’t shoot our way out
of this one. I hoped they were just curious, and not hungry.
Please, I said to myself, let them be well fed! But they sure
looked hungry.

The standoff was taking too long. Every
second that ticked off, I felt I was getting a little less in
control of the situation. I needed to try something. I thought back
to how I handled wolf packs back on the ranch. Course I was riding
on my horse which made me a moving target, so I could blast away
with a shotgun more freely, but I was also yelling at those
animals. Made the situation chaotic so they’d scatter. I thought
maybe I should try that.

“Get the eff out of here!” I yelled, waving
my arms around wildly. “Go on! Get out of here. Scatter!”

That didn’t have the desired effect. Instead
that seemed to rile them up. Okay, I got it. They weren’t curious.
They were hungry. And me acting like an idiot only made me look
more appetizing, I suppose.

The leader of the pack – the alpha – made
himself apparent. He jumped forward at us, stopping only a yard
away, baring his teeth and snarling. The others followed suit. We
had maybe a second before they would pounce.

Suddenly I remembered what I’d learned about
wolf packs from the ranch. They follow the alpha wolf.

I raised my arm and fired, cleanly piercing
the alpha wolf’s skull. He didn’t whimper. He just fell down
dead.

This was the moment. Would the other wolves
attack, letting their hunger overcome their social order? Or would
they follow nature? Their leader was dead. They should run.

I wasn’t sure which way things were going to
go for a second… I started to pull back both triggers…and then they
ran. All of ‘em, as if at once. They left behind their alpha,
probably so they could go off and fight amongst themselves to find
out who would be the next alpha.

Pace and I collapsed against the wall,
lowering our guns with relief. “What the eff,” Pace exhaled. “I
thought you said no shooting.”

“Yeah, got lucky with that one.”

After the adrenaline coursing through me
subsided, I took hold of the alpha wolf by his paws and dragged him
into our lobby.

“Why are you doing that?” Pace asked with
surprise.

“Breakfast,” I replied.

I dumped the wolf on the cold stone floor in
the bank, far away from the fire. Didn’t need to worry about his
meat spoiling. Nature would be our refrigerator. I’d tasted wolf
before, and if it’s cooked properly it isn’t too tough. Better than
eating some of the hundreds of rodents we were sharing the building
with.

In the morning I harvested the wolf and
cooked what little edible parts there were over the fire. The meat
was pretty tough. Not a lot of fat on there, and I didn’t have any
cooking supplies to make it taste better. Like salt. But we ate it
anyway. Then we hauled away the carcass as far away from our
hideout as we could manage. Didn’t want to make the same mistake
twice.

And since a predator found it easy to wander
right into our hideout, it was clear we needed to protect ourselves
better. Since I had some pliers from that Walmart I went around and
cut off some useable chunks of barbed wires from other buildings.
We managed to raise around six feet of barbed wire around the
perimeter of our building so we’d have something akin to a proper
yard that’d be impenetrable to wolves and bears. Horses could
safely stay out there too. We built a temporary shelter for them,
akin to a proper stable but we needed a lot more wood to make it as
good as we’d like. It was enough though to keep them protected from
the wind. And it’d keep their shit outside. With everyone’s shit
outside it started to smell better. Or at least not awful.

Finally after all these weeks I felt like we
had our hideout in good working order. Food was plentiful, but we
still had an ongoing worry about other supplies. Pace kept
complaining about the diminishing water supply and I kept
complaining that we were almost outta whiskey. Clearly it was time
to resupply. The question was where’d we go next.

“So what’s next?” I asked. “You think things
through better ‘n me. So what’re you thinking through?”

“I have been thinking,” Pace replied. He
pulled a map of the Great Plains out of his saddle bag. He had
drawn big X’s through Great Falls, Augusta, Fort Benton, Havre and
Lewistown. All the banks we’d already robbed. “I think we go up to
Conrad next.” He circled it on the map, about sixty miles north. It
was sort of a risky choice, since that’s where we sent Augusta’s
lawman to go looking for us. No doubt he spoke with the local
authorities about us. But, as Pace reasoned, it was a bank we
wanted to hit eventually so why not do it now. “After Conrad,” Pace
suggested, “we should think about Choteau. After that, we should
think about taking a one-way trip north, to Shelby and Cut Bank and
Browning, and then on up to Canada.” Pace pointed out the route on
the map. “Or we should start heading to points south. Helena, then
Butte, Three Forks, Bozeman, Livingston, Billings. A one-way trip
southeast, maybe head to Wyoming.”

“One-way. That means saying goodbye to our
hideout.”

Pace shrugged. “You going to be okay with
that?”

“No.”

“Come on, you know we can’t live here
forever…”

“It’s not the hideout. It’s her.” I put my
finger on Great Falls on the map. “Becca. Can’t leave her forever,
no matter what.”

Pace thought about that for a moment, then
slowly nodded. We’d have to figure that out, one way or
another.

Once we passed the fork in the road that led
to Augusta, which we didn’t tread on in keeping with our agreement,
we continued north on route 15. We reached the outskirts of Conrad
without incident at around two in the afternoon. Nobody seemed to
be on the lookout for us so far. The Conrad settlement spanned out
to our right, so we rode unnoticed to the left, into their original
town. It wasn’t much, mind you. No skyscrapers, nothing impressive,
just a bunch of decaying buildings. But it gave us a place to hide
out for an hour to rest the horses and eat.

After that we hid in an overgrowth of shrubs
near the entrance to the settlement. We laid down on the ground,
our eyes darting back and forth searching with our field glasses
for something in particular. We found it relatively quickly. Much
easier when you know what you’re looking for. Then we just needed
something heavy. More on that in a second.

It would’ve been safer to wait until the sun
was setting so we felt we had sufficient cover to ride into the
settlement. They didn’t have much by way of street lamps, which
would be to our advantage. But we really wanted to get a good look
at the bank in the daylight.

I wasn’t too concerned about Pace getting
recognized this time actually, which was part of our plan. He’d
done a nice job straightening himself up beforehand. Put on a suit
he’d picked up back in Lewistown. Didn’t fit him quite as well as
the tailored one he had back in Great Falls but it did what it was
supposed to do. Lost the white hat. Needed a haircut though. Oh,
and he’d picked up a pair of spectacles too which he wore. Looked
downright civilized. More like a banker than he did when he was a
banker.

I of course just looked like me. No disguise
could fix this.

We tied off our horses a few steps away from
the bank. I peered in the window. “This is new. An armed guard.”
Pace looked as well. A sure enough sign that the Great Plains
Holding Company was starting to get a might annoyed by our
actions.

“All the better we’ve got a plan,” Pace said
confidently. Then he went into the bank. Alone. Not with guns
blazing. No. He went in that bank, right past that armed guard,
carrying about a hundred gold coins. I know I know. When you’re
robbing a bank you’re supposed to take money out, and Pace was
putting money in. Yeah, well that was all part of the plan.

I walked around the building to get a sense
of the place. Looked similar to the setup we were familiar with by
that point, except they had a guard with a shotgun perched on their
back porch. Extra protection we were gonna have to deal with. I
nodded to the armed guard as I passed by. He ignored me. Fair
enough. He’d be taken care of in due course anyway. Then I waited
for Pace until he emerged from the bank.

“Go all right?” I asked.

“Perfectly,” he replied.

“What’s the layout?”

“One teller. One armed guard.”

“There’s also a guard out back we’re gonna
need to be mindful of.”

Next we calmly walked up their Main Street
until we found their general store. I tipped the brim of my hat low
so as to keep a low profile. We bought as much food and water as we
thought our horses could carry. Some good whiskey. But you know
what I forgot to buy? Salt. I forgot to buy my own effing salt.

After we packed our purchases away in our
saddlebags, we had some time. I glanced over at their local saloon,
right next to the bank. I shot Pace a look. “One drink?” It was
risky. That saloon was fairly well lit. But what the hell. We were
armed.