The Loop Read Free Page A

wolf just tried to kill his baby boy.’
     
    Twenty minutes and half a dozen phone calls later, Dan was in his car and on his way to Hope. Four of the calls were to game wardens, Forest Service rangers and other Fish and Wildlife people in case any of them had heard anything about wolf activity in the Hope area. None had. The fifth was to predator-control agent Bill Rimmer, asking him to meet him in Hope to do a necropsy on the dog.
    The last call was to the lovely and formidable Sally Peters, the newly divorced marketing director of a local cattle feed company. It had taken Dan all of two months to summon the courage to ask her out. After her reaction just now when he’d told her he wasn’t able to make dinner, next time, if there was one, it would take longer.
    It was about an hour’s drive from Helena to Hope and as he swung west off the interstate toward the mountains, now darkening against the pale pink of the sky, Dan reflected on why it was that anyone who worked with wolves ended up getting screwed by them.
    Over the years, he’d met a lot of biologists who specialized in other animals, from pygmy shrews to penguins, and though there were one or two damaged souls among them, on the whole they seemed able to stumble well enough through life like the rest of humanity. But wolf biologists were walking disaster areas.
    In every league - divorce, nervous breakdown, suicide - they came out tops. By these standards, Dan himself had nothing to be ashamed of. His marriage had lasted nearly sixteen years. It was probably some kind of record. And even if Mary, his ex, didn’t speak to him, Ginny, their daughter - who was fourteen, going on twenty - thought he was an okay dad. Hell, she adored him; and it was mutual. But apart from Ginny, what, really, at the age of forty-one, did he have to show for all these years of devotion to the welfare of wolves?
    To avoid answering his own question, he leaned forward and switched on the radio. Hopping through the commercials and the relentless country music (which, after three years in Montana, he still hadn’t learned to like), he settled on the local news. The last item did little to improve his mood.
    It was about a ‘wolf attack’ on a ranch near Hope and how the baby grandson of one of the community’s most prominent figures, Buck Calder, had only escaped certain death because a pet Labrador had bravely laid down his life instead.
    Dan groaned. The media had it already. That was all he needed. But it got worse. They already had a phone interview with Calder himself. Dan knew of him but had never met him. He had the deep, seductive voice of a politician. All daggers dripping with honey.
    ‘The federal government let loose all those wolves down there in Yellowstone and now they’re everywhere and threatening mothers and babies. And are we allowed to defend them and defend our livestock and our property? No sir, we are not. And why’s that? Because the federal government tells us these animals are still an endangered species. I tell you, there’s no more sense than justice in it.’
    The report ended and Dan switched off.
    The guy had a point. Until recently, the only wolves in the region had been the few that had ventured down the continental divide from Canada. Then, after years of furious debate between environmentalists and ranchers, the federal government decided to give wolf recovery a boost. At huge expense, some sixty-six wild Canadian wolves were captured, trucked to Yellowstone Park and Idaho, and released.
    In response to local anger, ranchers who lived in these so-called experimental areas were allowed to shoot any wolf they found attacking their livestock. But the released wolves had multiplied and because they weren’t too good at reading maps (or perhaps because they were), they had spread to places where shooting them earned you a $100,000 fine and even a spell in jail.
    Hope was one of these places. What’s more, it was wolf-hater heartland. If a wolf had