Firstborn Read online

  “There’s nothing wrong with missing him,” I said. “He is your son.”

  “Where’d he go, Maggie?”

  “Why ask me?”

  “You think I didn’t notice how you stayed home from the hunt the same days he did?”

  I admit it was good to hear he paid attention to my movements. “I may have seen him a while back.”

  “Where?” he pressed.

  “You can’t tell him I told you.”

  “I won’t.”

  I pointed my beak to the southeast. “There’s a rocky knoll down that away.”

  He nodded. “Thanks.”

  “And Blue Boy?”

  “Hmm?”

  “There’s something you might be interested to know about Raze and Lupa.”

  “That they’re planning to go off and start their own pack with Ben?”

  “How’d you know?” I said, stupefied.

  “I may not have a bird’s-eye view of things, but I have eyes and ears. Coming on the hunt today?”

  Brooding can make you lose weight, and when you start at half a pound, you can’t afford to lose much. So I went. With Blue Boy and Hope both on the road to full recovery, the pack made short work of a tawny elk cow who’d strayed from her herd. After filling his belly, Blue Boy tore off a nice portion for Alberta and her brood, but the rest of us remained at the kill site and stuffed ourselves. I woke shamefully late the next morning. The wolves were even more lethargic, except for Blue Boy. He was gone—on an expedition to the southeast, I suspected.

  Blue Boy got back before the other wolves stirred, and he parked himself under my aspen, which was now stippled with tight red buds.

  “You were right about that knoll,” he said. “When you see him from below, you realize how big he’s gotten.”

  “Almost as big as you. Did you talk?”

  “No. There was a coyote on the summit. I figured he was stalking her, so I kept quiet. But when I crept a little closer I realized he wasn’t stalking—he was talking! To a coyote! She didn’t look the least bit worried. Relaxed muzzle, ears back. Seemed interested in what he was saying.”

  In all the time I’d known Blue Boy, I’d never heard him string so many words together. “What was he saying?” I asked.

  “Don’t know and don’t care. It’s got to stop. No future in it. He’s got my blood. He can’t pass it on with a coyote.”

  “You just left?”

  “I felt like grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and dragging him back. But he’s stubborn. He’d just leave again. We have to get him to come back on his own.”

  “How do you plan to do that?” I asked.

  “Do you think you could find my brother? Tell him I was in a rotten mood that day?”

  “You mean you’d let him into the pack?”

  “Then if Lamar hears about it, it might bring him back and save him from this lunacy. Think you could find Sully?”

  “He may have joined another pack, but I can try.”

  I must admit it felt good to be needed. I set off to the west before the other wolves had woken from their stupor-ish sleep. On the other side of Hellroaring Creek I ran into a hunting party that included the three wolves who’d taken Sully into their pack. I asked them if Sully was at their den site.

  “One Ear?” said the female. “He took off the other day.”

  I asked why, and she admitted they’d given him a rough time—calling him names and treating him like a court jester and leaving him only the gristliest bits of meat.

  “Something tells me he wasn’t really looking forward to babysitting, either,” she said. “He didn’t even wait to see the pups.”

  “Do you know which way he went?”

  “North.”

  I could just picture it. Stuck with crummy scraps, Sully had probably gone to sleep with visions of succulent cuts of beef dancing in his head. I would have bet my beak he’d headed back to Montana.

  In my gloom I’d actually contemplated going back there myself—and now I was. Spring was a nice time for it. When I soared over the Beartooth Mountains, the grazing land that stretched out before me was a tender green, the rivers full to the brim, the hillsides speckled with wild flowers. I was looking for Sully, but I couldn’t resist flying up to the Triple Bar T and spending the night in my old ponderosa pine, with its cozy vanilla smell. There was no sign of the cluttered nest or of Dan. He must have died or been killed, for I couldn’t imagine him moving away. First thing in the morning I flew down to the base of the big cottonwood. At first I was sorry that someone had filled in the hole between the roots; then I realized I wouldn’t really have wanted to confront Jackson’s skeleton. I flew up to his old perch on the weather vane. A magpie doing figure eights around the silos might have been my sister Marge. I also spotted a couple of my kids: Denny or Danny, I wasn’t quite sure, and Anastasia. But they were busy with their nesting, and if they recognized me, they didn’t acknowledge me. Of course, they’d hardly seen me since they were fledglings. I hadn’t been much of a mother.

  Before long the screen door slammed and out of the house sauntered Red Cap. He was as tall as his father now, and the cap had faded to a dirty rose. He still had a rifle, though. And there was still a ragged silhouette of a wolf on the target. When he took a shot at it, my heart lurched in my chest. I’d been away from my wolves less than two days, but even though I doubted they missed me, I missed them.

  I remembered I was on a mission and flew back to the south. When I reached the last ranch before the foothills, I landed atop a windmill. It was a big spread, and I figured it was probably the one Sully raided for cattle. But although there were plenty of steers, and cowboys on horseback with dogs trailing along behind, there was no sign of any wolf.

  I settled in for the night, thinking Sully might do his marauding under the cover of darkness. The moon was dull, with a halo around it, but it showed up a glint of eyes near the barn. I flew down for a closer look. It was just a housecat slinking around after mice or rats.

  In the morning I made another tour of the place. The rancher came out of the house and climbed into a pickup. He started to drive away but stopped by a corral full of horses to talk to a cowhand sitting on the fence. I landed on the fence in time to hear the rancher say something about a wolf.

  “Same dang critter, I’m sure of it,” he said.

  “Blue one?” asked the cowboy.

  “Yup. I called those dang tree huggers down in Yellowstone.”

  “Are they gonna get off their butts this time?”

  “They already knew he’d come back up here. Tracking doohickey in the collar. They said he’s headed back to them now.”

  “Like I said, sir,” the cowhand said, spitting a stream of brown juice onto the ground, “are they gonna get off their butts this time?”

  Across the corral a horse whinnied. A closer horse flapped his gums, and I missed the rancher’s reply. Once the horses settled down, I heard the rancher say:

  “May not need to, though. Think I winged him.”

  With that he drove away, kicking up so much dust, I had to fly straight up into the air to keep from choking. Wolves are as wingless as humans, and as I flapped off to the south, I wondered what “winged him” meant. I had an idea what “doohickey” meant. The collars on the original wolves from Canada must have had tracking devices in them. Blue Boy had played a good trick on the humans by getting his shot off.

  Halos around the moon usually mean a coming storm, and as I flew into the foothills, the clouds thickened and, even though it was mid-May, the temperatures dropped sharply. When the snow began to fall, I took shelter in a hemlock tree.

  That night the storm dumped over a foot. But by daybreak it had passed, and the pristine world it left behind was a joy to fly over. What’s more, without the new snow I never would have found Sully. As I was passing through a notch between two peaks, I spotted a strand of red drops on the blanket of white. At the end of the trail of blood Sully was curled up at the foot of a sno
wdrift.

  His spirits were very low. By “winged him” the rancher must have meant “shot him,” for there was now a bullet hole in his left rear thigh to go along with his missing ear.

  “You know the name of that mountain over there?” he said, pointing his snout.

  “No,” I said.

  “Froze-to-Death Mountain. Appropriate, don’t you think?”

  “You’re not going to freeze to death.”

  “Why not? Not much point in going on. Nobody gives a hoot about me.”

  “Blue Boy does.”

  Sully snorted, his breath vaporizing in the cold, dry air.

  “He wants you in his pack,” I said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Why do you think I’m here? He sent me specially to look for you.”

  A glimmer of hope crept into Sully’s eyes. He was in pretty bad shape, but hope is the best medicine in the world, and he made it through the snowy mountain pass and back down onto what’s called Buffalo Plateau, on the northern border of Yellowstone. What snow had fallen there melted in the course of that day. At nightfall we collapsed by a pond. In the morning we found that it was a beaver pond, but different from Sabrina’s, far bigger, with dead, half-submerged trees poking spookily out of the boggy water. Sully crept along the bank, his eyes fixed on a wake moving across on the pond’s surface. It was too small to be a beaver’s, and when Sully jumped in after it, I caught sight of a muskrat darting off into a hole in the bank. But in spite of his wound, Sully didn’t give up. Instead of climbing out, he stood knee-deep in the pond, his eyes fixed on something else in the water. He took a step, froze, took another step, and froze again. Finally he threw himself into a little inlet and, to my astonishment, came up with a fish in his mouth. I’d never heard of a wolf fishing. Maybe he’d picked up the skill during his long, first year as a lone wolf. But it was a small fish, and I doubt the energy he’d expended was worth the morsel. He climbed out of the water and trudged past the beaver lodge and dam, still looking around hungrily. His head hung lower and lower as we followed Buffalo Creek downstream to where it merged with Slough Creek.

  When we came around the boulder below the den site, Blue Boy and the rest of the pack were lounging outside the whelping den. I couldn’t tell if they’d gone hunting that morning or not, though there was some fresh-looking meat on an elk bone Blue Boy was gnawing. I landed in my aspen. Just since I’d been gone, leaves had broken out of their buds, like butterflies out of their cocoons. Sully stayed down by the stream, his tail between his legs, studying the muddy ground.

  Blue Boy rose to his feet, gave me a nod of acknowledgement, and fixed his gaze on his brother. “It’s good to see you, Sully,” he said.

  Sully lifted his eyes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so grateful.

  “Join us,” Blue Boy said.

  “That doesn’t look so good, Uncle,” Hope said, noticing Sully’s latest wound as he came up the slope.

  “Maybe I can help,” Frick said, and he trotted off into the woods.

  “Was it an antler?” Hope wondered.

  “Something like that,” Sully said, settling near her. “Looks like you had a little run-in yourself.”

  “Only a branch,” Hope said sheepishly. “It’s pretty much healed.”

  Sully gave his brother a timid look. “I heard you tangled with a buffalo, Blue Boy.”

  “Just a scratch,” Blue Boy said, shoving the bone his way.

  Frick returned with some healing herbs and laid them by the bone. But famished as he was, Sully was too dazed by his good fortune to touch either. His ear twitched as yapping came from inside the den.

  “A new litter?” he asked.

  “Five, I think,” Blue Boy said proudly.

  “How wonderful!” Sully cried. “I love pups!”

  17

  THE NEXT MORNING SULLY MADE a feeble offer to join the hunting party, but in his current condition he would have been more hindrance than help, and he put up no argument when Blue Boy told him to stay home and let Frick tend to him. Blue Boy led the rest of us along the ridge trail. It was quite a warm day, but as soon as we got down into the valley I heard what sounded like a branch snapping in the cold.

  Blue Boy slumped to the ground. When I realized he’d been shot, my wings faltered and I lost altitude. Barely catching myself, I swooped over to him. Hope rushed up and, crouching at his side, started licking at something stuck in his flank. Blue Boy lifted his head, panting furiously. In a moment his head fell back onto the grass, and his panting stopped.

  Raze, Lupa, and Ben were watching from a ways off, but a mechanical noise soon sent them skedaddling. Hope remained at Blue Boy’s side till a vehicle came jouncing right up to us. It was the same four-wheeler I’d seen at the wolf compound, and the two humans who climbed out of it were the same ones I’d seen there as well. They approached Blue Boy cautiously. The male with the furry face carried a rifle, the female with the long wheaten hair, a blanket. Furry Face poked Blue Boy with the rifle barrel. Blue Boy didn’t as much as twitch. The humans wrapped him in the blanket and loaded him into the back of the four-wheeler.

  I never thought I’d feel more devastated than when Trilby said, “Maggie, what on earth are you doing here?” I was wrong. But, unlike then, I wasn’t paralyzed. The only way I would have let Blue Boy’s body out of my sight was if the humans had shot me, too.

  I tore after the four-wheeler and followed it out of the valley and over three or four ridges to the compound. The humans parked outside the A-frame and carried Blue Boy’s blanket-wrapped body into the garage. There was a cage in there that hardly looked big enough to hold him, but they shoved him in it anyway. Horrible as this was, I figured it was better than a hole in the ground.

  As on my first visit, one of the outdoor pens was occupied: this time by a snow-white female wolf with a splint on her left hind leg. I landed on the chain-link fence, and as soon as the humans disappeared into the A-frame, I squawked:

  “He was just going hunting and the humans shot him!”

  “You’re kidding!” the she-wolf said. “They saved me.”

  “Saved you?”

  “A semi hit me on the interstate. The humans found me half-dead on the side of the road and brought me here. Ah, I thought so—look.”

  There was movement in the shadowy cage. Blue Boy was shedding the blanket and struggling to his feet! I dislike enclosed spaces, but I swooped into the garage and landed on the cage.

  “Maggie,” he said, looking at me groggily.

  “Are you okay?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “What’s that thing in your side?” I said.

  Only noticing it now, he worried it with his teeth till it fell onto the bottom of the cage: a tiny tube with a needle at one end and what looked ominously like a tiny bird feather on the other. I hopped down onto a latch on the side of the cage and pecked it so hard my bill almost cracked.

  It still hadn’t opened when I heard the squeak of a screen door. As the two human beings walked into the garage, I shot out onto the four-wheeler’s tailgate. The humans went up to the cage and peered in.

  “He already got the dart out,” said Furry Face.

  Blue Boy lunged at them, smacking his snout against the bars. The humans jumped back.

  “What a beast!” Furry Face said. “I shouldn’t have let you talk me out of killing him.”

  “He’s magnificent,” said Golden Hair.

  “He is something, but he has to be destroyed,” Furry Face said. “What’s the point of prolonging it? If we let him go and he heads north again, that rancher could get our funding cut off.”

  “We agreed we have to be sure it’s the right wolf. The rancher said he just shot him. That wound’s not fresh.”

  “He said the wolf was blue. And his tracker put him at Slough Creek.”

  “But we brought down two blue ones from British Columbia. Remember the big one that dug his way out?”

  “He got killed up on t
he Montana-Idaho border.”

  “That’s what we decided because—wait, Brian, look! He has no collar.”

  “Good grief. You’re right.”

  “Check the tracker.”

  I stayed put as Furry Face passed by me on his way out of the garage. He ducked into one of the trailers. Soon he came hurrying back.

  “Unbelievable,” he said. “There are still four by Slough Creek.”

  “We’ve got the wrong blue wolf,” said Golden Hair. “Aren’t you glad we used the tranquilizer?”

  If the only wolves they’d put tracking collars on were the original ones from Canada, the four had to be Alberta, Frick, Lupa, and Sully. They must have been able to follow Sully’s trek to and from Montana. But while they realized they’d tranquilized Blue Boy by mistake they decided not to set him free, reasoning that if there were two bluish wolves out there it would make sense to keep this one locked up till they got the cattle killer, to prevent another mix-up.

  “Want to move him to one of the pens?” Golden Hair said.

  “It’ll be a lot easier to leave him in the cage,” said Furry Face. “I can drive him back over there and release him after I track down the culprit—first thing tomorrow. Live ammo this time. There can’t be three blue wolves.”

  “I’ll grind up some of that sedative in this guy’s food to calm him down.”

  Furry Face went off into the A-frame, Golden Hair into another of the trailers. Golden Hair soon came back with a bowl of some kind of chopped meat and slid it through a flap under the door of Blue Boy’s cage. She flicked on a garage light before pulling the door down behind her.

  I wished she’d left the door open. Now I couldn’t clue Blue Boy in on the humans’ conversation, which I knew he hadn’t understood. And though the door had a window in the top panel, I wasn’t a hummingbird and couldn’t hover outside looking in. The best I could do was hop up onto the four-wheeler’s roll bar and watch over him through the pane of dirty glass. He gave the bowl of food a contemptuous sniff but didn’t eat any. And though he barely had room to turn around in the cage, he kept twisting this way and that. As the daylight waned, he got more and more agitated. I knew he was thinking about the den full of newborns he was responsible for feeding. The darker it grew outside, the more vividly I could see him in the lit-up garage. One of his deep-throated howls might have attracted the humans’ attention, but he didn’t howl—he just kept squirming around. Then he pressed himself against the back of the cage and launched a vicious attack on the bars. It was a gruesome spectacle, and I wanted to look away, like when he’d fought Raze’s father. But I couldn’t. I squawked for Blue Boy to quit. He kept at it in a blind fury. Then I thought I saw a tooth fly out of his mouth, and in my horror, I threw myself right into the window. But whether or not this distracted him from his self-destruction, I couldn’t say, for I fell to the ground in a daze.