When We Were Wolves (12 page)

Except to run, the Count rarely went out in public, but now he leaned nervously against the paneled wall of the Eagles Club and sipped his blush Chablis from a plastic cup as townspeople tried not to stare, and the auctioneer, an overweight man with a brushy mustache and 20x silverbelly Stetson, rattled off bids.
Hunerd dolla, hunerd dolla, I’ve a hunerd, do I hear two, two hunerd,
hunerd dolla, I need two
… Box wine and Budweiser, the Calcutta was not fancy, but the building was warm and folks could catch up on gossip with friends from the other end of the county, people they saw maybe once or twice a year.

The Count, awkward yet privileged in carriage, wore his hair oiled down, navy blazer, white oxford shirt, Levi’s, and handmade Luchese boots. The lobes of his ears and the very tip of his nose were purplish from multiple frostbite. His face was weathered, but he was extraordinarily fit. His leg muscles pressed like a horse’s through his pantlegs. His supposed age around town sometimes varied by thirty years. The Count cupped his wine close to his chest and made his bids in regal gestures with his right forefinger, enduring the hearty bids of several Reno-wise ranchers and miners who had pooled their money in order to afford the big names in the sport.

The race director, a tan former musher out of Jackson Hole named Hunter, stood in the back wearing a long red drivers parka with coyote-fur trim and dogfood company logos emblazoned on the back. His job was to raise the anemic bids, show enthusiasm in hopes that the bidders would think he knew something they didn’t. At times he would interrupt the auctioneer by walking down the aisle between the bingo tables in his arctic ringleader’s coat and take the microphone. “Now, Dale’s team has been training at altitude all winter long!” he might say with steely enthusiasm, or “Terry is especially hungry this race. He led through Dubois last year and he’s not coming to town with the idea of losing again.” Hunter’s tactics worked for the most part, though he was forced to sit on several teams running a gangline of roadkill-fed curs. Hunter wanted to recoup his losses with the favorite, Guy de Calvaire, a French-Canadian musher training on the provincial tundra out of St. Louis, Saskatchewan.
Fifteen, fifteen, yow, sixteen-hunerd, yow, seventeen, seventeen …

The Count kept Hunter and the ranchers at bay and took the rights of the favorite. De Calvaire’s team went for $3,500, the highest bid in the brief history of the Calcutta.
Sold. To the man in the navy-blue blazer and the big checkbook. Hope you’ve got you a rabbit’s foot.

“Les chiens,” the Count said softly. “Thank you. Marche.” When the crowd had topped off their drinks, the charity auction began.

“This sled is race-ready,” said the race director, looking straight at Lizabeth, “and I admire the construction. Solid ash driving handle, crosspieces, brush bow, rear stanchions. Teflon runners. Everything welded together with rawhide joints. Some of our mushers are gonna wish they were driving this baby come a week from now.”

The sled was beautiful, in the same linear way that antique gun stocks, oak letter desks, old saddles, bamboo fly rods, handmade cowboy boots, beavertail snowshoes, and wooden skis are beautiful.
Were gonna start the bidding on this fine piece of craftsmanship at three hundred dollars. Now who’ll open the bidding at three hundred dollars?
Hunter’s hand went up like the tail of the lead dog in the gangline as the crowd counts down the beginning of the race.
Three, now four, four hunerd, four hunerd, yow!
Hubert’s hand went up at four.
Four, now five, five hunerd, need five, five!
A glass of cheap wine later, the Count owned an expensive handmade dogsled. Lizabeth watched Hubert run his hands along the lines of the sled.

The next item up for auction was a rust-colored Alaskan husky puppy, a cross between a Siberian, an American pointer, and a little something else built for speed, which had been bred by Hunter. Timber, the blue-eyed puppy, had stumbled over to the Count halfway through the Calcutta to gnaw at the Count’s cowhide boots. Every once in a while the Count reached down and
scratched the dogs head. As the crowd watched him, Hubert slowly raised his finger and owned the puppy.

They stacked the metal folding chairs in the corner and the rest of the evening was the dance. Hunter, who had honed his dancing skills as part of a set of instinctive traits for Rocky Mountain survival, fared the best at the dance, dancing with every single woman and a few not single. A whistling cowboy dusted the floor with talcum powder, which covered the asbestos tiles like snow. The Noble Hussy Orchestra struck up a western swing. Hunter led Lizabeth through spaghetti turns and athletic dips.

By the third or fourth song the Count left his place against the paneled wall, pushing the sled across the talced floor toward the back door. Timber ran with the Count, hesitating when Hunter squatted to call him, but the puppy didn’t stop until he reached the door.

In the heavy snow and halo of light from the parking lot, with the mid-tempo “Smokin’ Cigarettes and Drinkin’ Coffee Blues” at his back, the Count looked over his shoulder and saw Hunter dancing closely with Lizabeth. He kicked the sled through eight inches of newly fallen champagne, all the way home, the other side of town.

The sled had a special place on what used to be the altar stage of the church. The Count carried it through the double front doors and set it gently on its runners atop the carpeted stage. He spent the next hour or so admiring the sled from every angle, testing the flex of the wood, the runners, the joints. The old church was sparsely furnished, a couch along one wall, a table near the kitchen, and piles of worn-out running shoes everywhere, holes in the uppers, frayed laces, soles flattened slick and worn through. Timber chewed on a shoe and Perch jumped into the sled—the new centerpiece of the place—and watched his master.

That week KHAM broadcast special hourly dog-racing-trail-condition
weather reports and updates on how the racers were faring on the legs prior to Hams Fork—Jackson to Moran, Moran to Dubois, Dubois to Pinedale, Pinedale to Lander, Lander to Hams Fork. From Hams Fork they would race to Afton, then on to the neon finish in Jackson. The map of the course was drawn on a Wyoming highway map in thick black marker and resembled, ten feet and a glass of blush away, an outline of France. Guy de Calvaire and a pack of Europeans stayed tight on the leader, an American dog food tycoon. The course would become more hilly, the dogs more tired. They would get a day of rest in Hams Fork.

The morning of the day before the Hams Fork leg of the race, a howling dawn, Lizabeth awoke to a knock at her door. She tied on her robe and answered it, holding tight to the storm door in the wind. “Oh, Mr. de Sablettes what a surprise. I’m flattered at what you paid for the sled.” She, like everyone, had heard the rumors and didn’t invite him inside, out of the sideways-blowing snow. The Count had never knocked on her door, never been to Lizabeth’s home.

“It’s beautiful,” Hubert said. “I have it ready and thought you might like to drive it.”

“I didn’t know you had a kennel,” Lizabeth said, opening the door wide to look at the sled in the street.

“No, just Perch and Timbre”—he pointed to the basset hound sitting by the sled and the puppy in the cargo bag—“and myself.”

“Well, I—” But Hubert had turned toward the sled and began linking himself to the gangline with a caribiner. Perch ran to Lizabeth and sat, eyes pleading for a hot dog.

Hubert, in harness, looked back to the door, which Lizabeth had pulled back tight against herself. He looked down to his feet. Then back to Lizabeth. Hubert wore track shoes, distance flats, with
quarter-inch spikes screwed into the soles. No socks. “Won’t you come for a ride? I have a beautiful new sled and now I need a driver.” His voice blew away on the wind, but his English was careful and Lizabeth could read his lips in the early-morning porch light. Hubert stood facing forward, concentrating, waiting for Lizabeth but no longer acknowledging her. She reached down to Perch and rubbed behind his floppy ears.

Mumbling to herself that this was crazy Lizabeth went inside to dress. She found her hat and mittens and stepped outside into the snow, where she could see each breath come nervous and fast. She led Perch back to the sled and wrapped him in the sled’s red cargo bag with the puppy. Hubert stepped forward, pulling the slack out of the gangline. “‘Gee,’ I turn right, ‘haw,’ I turn left. ‘Whoa,’ I stop, and you stand on the brake.”

Lizabeth stood on the runners and lifted the ice hook. “Mush,” she said softly, her breath rising upward.

“Sorry,” Hubert said. “Its difficult to hear you in this wind.”

“Mush!”

The brush bow lifted, then the sled tracked straight behind Hubert and leveled like a boat on-plane. “Hike!” They ran down Klondike Street in the low, muted light of the early-morning snowstorm, the crystals of snow the shape of tiny arrowheads. Hubert moved slowly, awkwardly, at first, but smoothed out and picked up the pace as his joints and muscles warmed and flexed. “Gee!” There were no cars on the streets, but the team set the racing dogs howling as they passed the parked mobile-kennel trucks awaiting the next day’s competition. It was feeding time, and the dog handlers stopped chopping frozen salmon and beef roasts, set their axes down, and gawked as the little team slid by. A dream? “Trail!” yelled Hubert as they passed the dog trucks, “Trail!” The hundreds of dogs in town began howling at the event, drowning the steady pattern of Hubert’s breathing.

Hubert had long ago become addicted to endorphins, the natural form of morphine his body produced through hard running. But as his running progressed, he needed more and more miles of it to produce the same effect, and the rush wore off faster. He ran harder and longer, running himself deeper into oxygen debt. Without a run he became dogged or edgy, enough that he had to avoid contact with anyone. So without running, he was convinced, he couldn’t survive. Running had become his habitat, and if that habitat shrank, like a constricted heart, he would no longer be wild inside, and he would die. He could not explain this to anyone. Only the rabbits knew. The hares. The coyotes. Perch.

They ran the streets of town, a line of quick color in the storm, Lizabeth keeping one foot on the runners and pedaling the uphills. “Haw!” yelled Lizabeth, and they turned left and started up the steep hill of Canyon Road. The sled tracked true in the fresh snow that covered the sooty streets, though she found herself thinking about the design, about modifications she would build into the next Calcutta’s sled, mostly slimming it down, making it lighter. Most of all the sled felt heavy, the Count straining alone on the gangline. Next year she would pare away at the stanchions, crosspieces, and slats. The footpads would be made of something lighter than strips of old snow tires. Guilty, she tried to pedal when she could, but Hubert kept the pace fast enough that her kicks did little to propel them forward. Perch and Timber pointed their muzzles out of opposite sides of the cargo bag. Perch still looked back at Lizabeth with hot-dog eyes. Timber had fallen asleep to the rhythm of the run.

“Haw!” yelled Lizabeth. They shot down Elk Street, Lizabeth standing on the brake so as not to let the sled run over the runner on the long downhill. “Gee!” she yelled again, and they swung onto the Union Pacific service road that paralleled the railroad tracks. A
yellow-and-black locomotive engine with a chevron snowplow over the cowcatcher blew its air horn as it slowly gathered momentum from a dead stop and finally passed the sled team at the other edge of town, on its way to the power plants of Utah with a load of coal. Lizabeth, warm in her down parka, lost track of time, but thought the Count must be exhausted. Crystalline rime formed on Hubert’s fleece hat and wind-shell jacket. “You’ve got to rest!” she yelled. “Let’s have coffee!” Hubert looked back, surprised. “Yes, all right,” he said. “Gee!” she commanded, and Hubert made a right onto Antelope. “Gee!”—another right onto Third West—and “Gee!”— across Moose, back to Klondike.

Hubert was skittish in public. People avoided him and he avoided them when he could. He shopped for groceries at night, bundled in winter clothes, just before the IGA closed, though people still studied him and speculated what he must be eating based on the basketful of ingredients he bought. Green onions and bulk garlic by the pound. Fresh spinach and anaheim peppers. Potatoes, carrots, parsley, avocados no matter what the season and their price. Dried beans. Rye flour. Brown rice. Tabasco and balsamic vinegar. Port wine. Apples. “How do you marinate rabbit?” they asked each other, or “What on earth could he be doing with all that garlic?” Now Hubert held Timber on his lap, stroking his ears. Lizabeth set the cup and saucer before him on the kitchen table.

“Cream? Sugar?”

“Black, thank you.”

The house now smelled musky, acerbic, of hard sweat and garlic. Sawdust and wood glue. It had belonged to a mine foreman in Hams Forks early days. Lizabeth had taken out some of the interior walls and now it was light and spacious. Most of the furniture was hardwood she had designed and built herself. “You must be training for something. The Boston Marathon? The Beargrease? Iditarod?” Her question echoed against the hardwood floors of the house.