When We Were Wolves (13 page)

“No, I run for myself mostly,” Hubert said softly. There was a long silence as they sipped coffee and crunched chocolate biscotti. The wind whistled in the power lines outside. Pellets of snow rapped at the windows. They could hear each other chewing and sipping. Under the table Perch grunted in his sleep.

“I must say,” Hubert said suddenly, making Lizabeth jump, “I admire the sled, the work you put into it.”

“Thank you. I’m glad I had a chance to drive it. Now I have ideas for a better sled next year.”

“Yes. I respect those who always try to improve.” Timber growled and jumped from Hubert’s lap to pounce on the sleeping Perch. Lizabeth laughed and Hubert studied the animals wrestling on the floor.

“Animals are funny,” Hubert said without laughing.

“I’m sorry,” Lizabeth said, “but I have to ask this. What about the rabbits, the hunting? I’ve heard stories in town …”

“There are many rabbits. I marinate them, yes, in cheap red wine, then sauté them in much garlic, a little onion. It is good for me to eat. Protein.”

“But why do you run and hunt them that way?”

“Its the only way I can hunt them. Without insulting them. I run because of this wilderness around us. I must run before there is nowhere left to run.” There was a long silence, sipping sounds, a clock ticking. “Enough of me. Tell me, why did you become a carpenter?”

She paused, digesting what he said. “When I was little, my father said to me, There are only two respectable occupations. One’s a bootmaker, the other, a carpenter. I never really saw myself as a bootmaker. I worked out of Telluride for a while. Jackson. Ketchum, Idaho. Just the summer months. I skied all winter, fished all fall. But it got so building saunas and adjoining bathrooms with fourteen-karat bidets in condominiums with names like the Bear Foot just put me off my feed. One morning I found
myself two stories up, hammering a Swiss-style molding on a Kmart Alpenhaus in Red Lodge, Montana. I set my hammer down, took the nails out of my mouth, turned and looked behind me, at the landscape I was helping to exploit and ruin. I collected my pay and moved to the high desert. Hams Fork. My father always used to say that people were breeding like rabbits. It’ll be a long time before many of them follow me here.”

“I agree with your father. A carpenter is a very respectable profession.”

“Yes. I’ve just decided to improve what’s already here. I don’t live life on a postcard anymore.”

Hubert stood awkwardly, signaling his need to go. “I have something for you,” he said, “because you know.” He let himself out into the snowstorm and ran to the sled, with Perch and Timber chasing after him. The Count reached into the foot of the cargo bag and produced a cloth flour sack. He ran back to the door and handed it to Lizabeth. “You understand,” he said, “you can do something good with these.” Lizabeth opened the sack. Inside were a dozen or so hare pelts. She was puzzled, but she reached into the sack and felt the fur with her fingertips as if pinching salt, and rubbing the pinch into a roux. When she looked up again, Hubert, his dogs, and his dogsled were gone.

The morning of the sled-dog race, Lizabeth dressed warmly and went next door to see if the Count wanted to go and watch the start of the race with her. She wanted to look at the sleds and get some more ideas. She thought she heard a noise inside the church but there
was
no answer to her knocks.

Hubert de Sablettes ran. Under the power lines held high with silver standards and the cellular towers like church steeples on the
ridgetops. Over the buried phone cables that allow the Californios to live in Teton County and commute daily to L.A. via their modems. The big bears were gone. The wolves. The mineral rights had been stolen from the Indians, who came from somewhere else and stole hunting rights from each other. It had all been wildness, before the polar ice caps began their melt. This place had become Europe, the only wilderness inside the hearts of a few.

The first mushers were French fur trappers who used the dogs to run their traplines.
Marche! Hike! Marche!
Now the top mushers in America are gaunt and hungry Europeans: Scandinavians, Austrians, Germans, and Frenchmen training out of Canada. They eschew heavy pac boots for running shoes that they duct-tape to their Gore-Tex pants to keep the snow out as they run, pushing their sleds up hills. The Americans have become thick and complacent and, though they can still afford the best of dogs, grow heavy on the sleds.

One musher that afternoon, an American from Grand Marais, Minnesota, told Hunter at the checkpoint midway between Hams Fork and Afton, that he had seen a man near the ridge, on foot, running by himself in the snow and rabbitbrush, twenty-five miles from town. The race director radioed in that they needed to call out Search and Rescue, that no one could survive up there, unaided in that wild country, the snow, wind, and cold, alone.

tah. Loaded down with honey. Our regular route. The December sun is coming up over Wyoming. While I keep a tired eye out for a state trooper’s black-and-white, Wayne is driving and singing.
Got an old dog, ain’t got much class …
The milk van strains as we tack up winding U.S. 89, a 6 percent grade, through Logan Canyon. We’re wired on adrenaline, coffee, and money.
He’s got three legs, and a hole in his ass
… The day is overcast, thick; it develops slowly, like a photograph.

On the broad side of the white panel van we restored—an old Ford Meadow Gold milk van with sliding doors and rounded panels—Wayne has painted a beautiful pale Indian maiden. Her hair is the color that you think is brown, but is actually red in the sunlight. She holds her honey dipper like a trident. Bees surround her. Below the maiden in crimson-and-gold letters:
QUEEN BEE HONEY COMPANY
. But her eyes! Her eyes are deep green, as if they go many
fathoms inside her to inside the truck, and the honey behind those thin sheet-metal panels is laden with the power of love or magic or something else, something more. Studying the sunrise, Wayne says this: “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.”

The laws of Utah scare us. They are arcane and cryptic. They sneak up on you, like game wardens and ATF agents. Utah is a 3.2 state: weak beer. Everything good here is regulated by the state, which is run by the Mormons. The people of Utah are deprived, and where there is deprivation there is money to be made. But, as my father told me years ago, you can’t legislate against what people want. I’ve memorized this road, the sagebrush and Mormon tea. In the vibrating rearview, underneath
WELCOME TO UTAH
, the sign will say “Still the Right Place.” You can’t legislate against what people need. The sign in front of us now reads:

The sea was here once, a long time ago. “I don’t get it,” Wayne says, offering another of his jeremiads after the singing turns to humming for a few miles, which makes him winded. Wayne is an artist, a painter, and a student of history as well as the fermentative sciences. “Used to be the Mormons could have their whiskey, wine, coffee, beer, art. Then somewhere along the way someone with authority had a vision and put the kibosh on everything worth getting out of bed for.”

Wayne and I offer them libation at a fair price. We have found a fortune to be made by importing U.S. Grade A Utah honey from the Beehive State, fermenting it on the lee side, and exporting Wayne Kerr Wyoming Mead back in. The Mormon men’s illicit social drink of choice is mead—nectar of nectars!—and they’re buying their own honey back, masterfully fermented, by the barrelful.

“Know the difference between a Catholic and a Mormon?” Wayne asks, fondling his beard. I shake my head east and west. “Catholic’ll say hi to ya in the liquor store.”

There are nights out here when the cavalry arrives in the form of a bright-orange snowplow. You can’t mind the weather if you’re going to live here in Hams Fork, Wyoming. Apocryphal stories about Wayne, about us, float around Hams Fork like flotsam and jetsam. He’s building a wooden sailboat, the
Cuba Libre
, in his back yard. His dream is to sell all that he has, hoist the sails and the Jolly Roger, and become a citizen of the world. Live off third-world economies where a few greenbacks will make you a tycoon. Eat a lot of seafood and grapefruit. Make love. Drink good rum every morning. The air in Utah tastes of salt.

It is bad luck to sail into the horizon at sunset. A bee on deck is a sign of good luck. It is bad luck for a preacher or a woman to be on board, which makes Neptune angry. “Unless the woman is topless,” Wayne says. “A topless woman is good luck.”