Cutler leaned out of the saddle. “You see his tracks?”
“I see ‘em,” Jess said, hanging on to the horn, also bending low.
“All right,” Cutler said. “He came down this hollow, but that little mound, that rise, over there. You see? He circled to mount that, look all around. That’s the thing about a fox, coyote, or wolf. Every now and then, when they travel along a low place, they always have to climb a high place and look around. Now I’m going to put a trap right on that rise. You keep your pony back maybe twenty feet and watch what I do.”
“Yes, sir,” Jess said.
Forty feet from the little knoll, not much more than a pimple on the grassland, Cutler swung down from Apache. He walked back to the mule he used to pack his gear and detached the rawhide gloves he had boiled, buried, hung in juniper. After working one on, he slipped on the other, never letting his naked flesh touch the outside palm. Then he loosed a trap from the string hanging down the mule’s flank and took an extra ten-foot length of chain. He knotted the chain around the ring at the end of the shorter trap chain. After that, he unrolled the yearling’s hide and laid trap, extra chain, shovel, and trowel on it. Carrying it like a bag, he went up a rise. He spread the hide flesh side and knelt upon it. Then, using shovel and trowel, he carefully removed a clump of grass from the mound’s crest. He laid it on the hide.
With jackscrews, he set the trap, twisting the long springs around to make it easier to fit into the excavation. When it was neatly settled, he sifted dirt from the removed clump of grass between its open jaws, careful not to let any fall beneath the trap’s round, broad pan. Under that he rolled a loose ball of grass to keep dirt from working in.
The trap in place, he cut a small groove down the side of the knoll, lacing the extra chain into it. At the bottom, he dug another hole, still kneeling on the yearling hide. In it, he placed a heavy rock, weighing easily twenty-five pounds, massive, long and jagged, the trap chain wrapped around and anchored to it. When he had everything the way he wanted it, he covered up what he had done. Carefully he replaced the sod over the rock and the long chain, smoothing and patting the cut seams with the trowel. “That’s the drag,” he said. “If he gets into the trap, he’ll run the minute it hits him. But the drag’ll slow him down, catch in things, hold him up, and leave a clear trail.”
“Couldn’t you just put down a stake or somethin’,” Jess asked, “and anchor him tight?”
“Wouldn’t work,” Cutler said. “He’d run against the trap with all his strength, maybe pull out. You got to have a drag; then it goes with him, but he can’t get loose from it. Gives him nothing to pull against. Only with a trap and twenty or thirty pounds on behind, he can’t make any time and he’ll be easy to trail.”
He sliced the dirt off the bottom of the clump of turf from the knoll until it was thin and light, then laid it over the trap and sifted dust into the edges of the cut. Throughout, he’d laid all excess dirt on the yearling hide; now, carefully, he carried it far away and disposed of it. Then, with a juniper bough, he erased the last traces of his presence in the dust.
“Gee,” Jess exclaimed. “You can’t tell that anything’s there at all!”
It was true; there was no evidence, visually, that the earth had ever been disturbed, nor, Cutler thought, was even the wolf’s keen nose likely to pick up any trace of human scent, especially after the set had weathered for a day or so. “That’s the idea,” he said with satisfaction, mounting Apache.
It was plain hard work, demanding an infinite capacity for taking pains, but during the rest of that day he spread a band of wolf traps across the natural entrance to Fair Randall’s ranch. The next morning early, he and Jess arose, galloped out to look at them.
As always, as he neared the trap line, Cutler felt a quickening of his pulse, the same emotion a miner might feel nearing the mother lode, or a gambler staking everything on the dice’s roll, or, for that matter, a child on Christmas morning. It was the excitement of the unexpected, although in his heart he really had no hope of catching the wolf so soon.
Jess’s face fell as they found trap after trap undisturbed. Cutler grinned. “Trapper’s luck, boy. Got to take the bitter with the sweet and have a lot of patience. Catchin’ a smart old loafer like that’s a kind of needle in a haystack proposition. Now you ride along with me and watch where I make the rest of the sets. You and your mama are gonna have to look after this line for me for the next day or so.”
Late that night, as Fair lay in his arms in the wagon, he said, “Come morning, I aim to start for Tom Fellows’ place. Likely I’ll be there a day or so. Jess knows where all the traps are, and you and him ride out and see to ‘em first thing every day. You find one of ‘em pulled loose, you send the kid high-tailin’ it to Fellows’ spread, and you follow up the trail. If it’s the wolf, don’t mess with it; shoot it without gettin’ out of the saddle. And—you keep Big Red here at the ranch. I don’t want him stepping in any trap by mistake.”
The next morning, Cutler was up before the sun, digging more seasoned traps out of the horse pen, when he heard the drum of hoof beats coming hard. He straightened, turned, then recognized Tom Fellows pounding into the ranch yard on a lathered mount.
Fellows jerked the horse up short, quit the saddle in a leap. “Cutler!” he yelled, face twisting with rage. “That damned wolf killed again last night on my range! Pulled down ten prime head of she-stock and never ate a bite of any of ‘em. What the hell you gonna do about it?”
Cutler sucked in a long breath. Then he said, quietly, “Rest your horse, Fellows. Let me get these traps up and then we’ll ride.”
It was as if a bomb or cannon shell had exploded in the little valley, Cutler thought. Ten red carcasses lay scattered far and wide. Cutler rode among them as Tom Fellows and his single hired hand worked furiously at skinning and butchering the meat, trying to save what they could. In his mind, he envisioned what had happened, the great gray beast dashing into the herd like a fox into a flock of chickens, then, almost playfully, running down the stampeding Herefords one by one, slaughtering each with a single chop of powerful jaws. Cutler’s heart sickened at the waste, and he did not blame Fellows for the fury and frustration that literally shook the man.
When he’d made his circuit, he turned Apache back to where the rancher, bloody to the shoulders, was gutting a two-year-old heifer worth easily thirty dollars. Fellows straightened up, eyes blazing. “Cutler, I can’t use or sell all this beef.” His voice choked. “Ruined, just hundreds of dollars gone down the drain. Listen, I’m gonna leave two, three carcasses. Why don’t you fill ‘em full of poison? Maybe you can get the son of a bitch that way!”
Cutler shook his head. “Would get some buzzards, eagles, a few coyotes, maybe a stray dog. Not the wolf. Damn it, Fellows, you know yourself he never comes back to anything he kills.” He fished in his saddlebag, brought out the map Fair Randall had given him, swung down and opened it. “Listen, it’s possible that this will be his last kill. I’ve worked out a pattern from the information your association gave me, and this . . .” he swept out a hand “confirms he’s still holdin’ to it. He hit Fair’s ranch a few nights ago, now yours, accordin’ to this, next time he’ll swing north, here, behind this line of hills, Jud Bobbitt’s ranch.”
Fellows unconsciously wiped bloody hands on his pants. “Meaning?”
“Meaning I’ve got Fair’s ranch strung with steel. Two days, I’ll have yours full of traps, too. Meantime, though, you ought to get your association people together and head for Bobbitt’s. All the riders and dogs you can lay your hands on. Help him guard his range; likely, if you got enough people there, when he comes to kill, you’ll spook him and he’ll back off. Next time, he’ll cut south back across your land and Fair’s and head for Sam Kelly’s place, if this map means what I think it does. By then, you and the association can be at Kelly’s to turn him and I’ll have steel on Bobbitt’s ranch. We keep shifting like this, getting out ahead of him, you can buy time enough for me to get all the traps in place. Then we lay low and no matter where he goes, we got a good chance of gettin’ him.”
Fellows was silent for a moment; then he spat. “And what if you’re wrong? What if he don’t oblige by followin’ your map?” His voice rose. “Suppose he hits me again while we’re off somewhere else? I can’t afford another blow like this ...”
“Fellows, it’s the only way. He’s followin’ a route like a travelin’ salesman. Block him off while I get steel out all along it, we’ll have him soon. Either that or he’ll go to killing on Holz’s land, and Holz’ll pay the price for shelterin’ him . . .”
“Maybe,” Fellows said thinly. “Me, I think there is another way. But all right. We voted you in as the expert, fair and square. We’ll give you one more chance. But get this, Cutler, and get it straight. That wolf kills one more head of my beef, I aim to find Gilbert wherever he is and bring him in here and have him poison this whole range from end to end, if that’s what it takes to bring that lobo down. You understand?”
Cutler met his eyes. “I understand,” he said. “Now, let me get to work. There isn’t any time to waste.”
Leaving Fellows at the butchering, he mounted Apache, picked up the familiar enormous paw marks, spent a long time patiently unraveling the wolf’s route of travel. Even with the urgency that he could not help feeling, there was nothing for it but to make haste slowly. An ill-set trap only alerted and educated an animal as clever as the Victorio Wolf, and Cutler was meticulous, as always, in planting the big Newhouses. Perhaps even more so; for there was within him a grim determination to get this animal at any cost, not for the bounty, not even to stave off the poisoning of the range.
The wolf was a wanton killer and, animal or human, that was something Cutler hated. It had to be eliminated, and the only way to do that was to match his wits and cunning against its feral shrewdness. Long experience had taught him that the scale was not always weighted in favor of the human in such a duel; animals like this lobo possessed an almost uncanny sixth sense and a razor sharp intelligence of their own. But he knew now that he would not rest until he’d laid the Victorio Wolf low, and the remembered sight of all those slaughtered cattle and the desperation in Tom Fellows’ eyes restrained him from quick, slipshod work.
Just before sundown, Fellows and his rider pulled up to Cutler’s wagon as he swung down off Apache. “We’re doin’ like you said,” Fellows rasped. “Headin’ for Bobbitt’s place. Every other rancher’s doin’ the same. But God help you, Cutler, if you’ve guessed wrong. That wolf moves in, kills somewhere else while we’re all gone, your name’s mud in the Davis Mountains!”
Then he wheeled his horse, rode away.
It was noon two days later when Cutler’s wagon jingled into the Rocking R yard with Apache loping alongside; and Big Red, tethered to a tree, set up a thunderous welcome bark. Cutler stopped the mules, swung down wearily. All day yesterday he had worked from dawn ‘til dark stringing more steel across Tom Fellows’ range. Still, there could be no rest for him. If the wolf held to its pattern, it would hit Bobbitt’s herd tonight. He wanted to be there when it struck and have the Airedale with him. He’d give it another run, at least as far as Holz’s boundary, and if he failed to catch it, in the morning he’d start setting a line on Bobbitt’s land. He was, he vowed, not going to be idle for a minute until he’d studded every route the lobo traveled with cold steel.
After he’d wrestled with Big Red a moment, he strode to the house. “Fair!” he bellowed. “Jess!”
Nobody answered. In the kitchen, Cutler found a note. “John. We’re out running your trap line. Fair.”
Cutler shoved back his hat, chunked up the fire, put coffee on to make. It was just starting to boil when he heard the hoof beats outside, two riders coming hard. He strode to the door, frowning as he saw Fair and Jess lashing their mounts. Tensely, he waited until they came up. “Fair!” he snapped. “What’s wrong?”
“John!” She swung down off her horse. “Thank God you’re back. Jess and I just came in off your trap line and . . . John, it’s . . . it’s uncanny! It must have been last night . . . But the wolf has come along and dug out and sprung every trap you set!”
John Cutler stared. “What?”
“It’s true.” She sucked in breath. “Yesterday, the traps hadn’t been disturbed at all. Today they’re all turned upside down and the ground’s all scratched up around ‘em and . . . It’s like he did before, when Sam Kelly and Harry Dolan tried to trap him!” She rubbed her face wearily. “What is he, anyhow, John? Some kind of devil, like the Mexicans say?”
“I don’t know,” Cutler replied grimly. “Once in a while a smart wolf’ll find a trap or two and learn how to dig ‘em out and spring ‘em. I had it happen when I first started out. But not in the past five years . . .” He whistled for Apache. “I’ll ride out and take a look.”
“You can set ‘em again, can’t you?” Jess asked.
“Not in the same places.” Cutler shook his head. “On top of which, if I’ve been doing something wrong, I’ve got to figure out what it is.” He swung wearily up into the gelding’s saddle. “But right now, I’m damned if I know what it could be.”
“John!” Fairfax said. “Don’t you want to eat first?”
Cutler’s mouth thinned. “I’ve just lost two days hard work and maybe it’ll cost somebody some cattle. Until I make it good, I ain’t got time to eat!” Then he spurred the horse.
Fifteen minutes later, he was in the draw behind the house. All four traps he’d laid so carefully in a square to block its mouth lay jaws down and closed, chains exposed, and there were deep claw marks in the sand around them, typical scratchings of a wolf. Cutler hunkered there, staring dully at them, reviewing in his mind every minute detail of their preparation and setting. Then, slowly, he shook his head, gathered up the steel, lashing the devices on behind his saddle. For a moment he stared down at the house below. An animal that smart could come and go as he pleased and might do anything. Cutler felt the short hair on the back of his neck prickle, as Jess turned Big Red loose and began to frolic with him.
Then he rode on.
Two hours later, he’d completed the circuit of the trap line, and it was as Fair had said. Every trap had been dug out, overturned, sprung, and around each was that same contemptuous clawing. As he tied the last trap in place behind Apache’s saddle, Cutler frowned. Instead of mounting, he leaned against the horse, rolled a cigarette, ran his eyes over the surrounding hills. The Mexicans, he thought, called the wolf a ghost. Maybe they were closer to being right than anybody knew. Only an evil spirit could have sensed so aptly the location of every piece of steel despite all of Cutler’s precautions to disguise its odor and to mask the place where it was hidden in the ground. And only an evil spirit could have traveled the entire trap line, dug up every trap, left its sign wolf-fashion, and yet not have put down a single full and clearly visible track in between. A few fresh claw marks, yes—he’d seen those. But not one full pad print.
Cutler let smoke blow out his nostrils. Either he had completely lost his skill as a trapper or he’d run into an animal unlike any he’d ever encountered. It was as if the wolf had actually followed him as he had set the traps, marked with its own eyes the location of each, and then methodically gone down the line. Again Cutler’s gaze roved the hills. The damned animal might be up there now, hunkered down, tongue lolling, muzzle grinning in the way wolves had that was almost human . . . Once more Cutler felt that prickle of short hair on his neck. Then he shook his head, swung up on Apache. He’d not make Bobbitt’s ranch tonight. And now he had no confidence in what he had told Fellows. An animal that could do this might do anything.
And yet—Cutler’s mind worked, clawed at something. An idea moved beneath its surface, refusing to rise and take recognizable form. He rode back to the Randall ranch at a slow walk, shoulders slumped, brain seeming to churn, the bitterness of defeat like gall in his mouth.
It was impossible. After all the animals he had trapped. To have his nose rubbed in the dirt this way by a lousy lobo . . .
He dropped the traps by the corral, unsaddled Apache, turned him in with the mules. He’d let Jess feed him. He walked, head down, to the ranch house. There, Fair met him at the door, her face questioning him wordlessly.
“I don’t know,” Cutler said. “I just don’t know . . .”
“Come in and eat,” she said, her voice gentle.
He followed her to the kitchen, slumped into a chair, accepted the cup of coffee she put before him. His whole body seemed to fill with weariness. He stared at the veil of cigarette smoke that rose before him. Damn it, there had to be an answer . . .
Then he came straight up out of the chair as Big Red’s thunderous bark split the twilight silence. “John!” Fair exclaimed, but before she could go on, Jess’s voice rose high and shrill. “Hey, Mr. Cutler, come here, come here quick!”
Cutler’s long legs propelled him across the ranch yard at a run. Big Red was a rusty streak rocketing across the valley, and Jess, on his pony, leaned forward, pointing. “Look a-there, Mr. Cutler!”
It was a small, yellowish dot a quarter of a mile away. It weaved, twisted, contorted, fell down, got up again, ran ten feet, fell again. Even at that distance, there was no doubting that it was a coyote. Red made straight for it, then halted, skidding, as Cutler’s high-pitched whistle split the air.
“John!” Fair exclaimed, coming up behind him. “What . . .?” She broke off, shading eyes with her hand. “A coyote. But it’s acting so strangely. John, do you think—hydrophobia?”
“No,” Cutler said harshly, yet with exultation. “No, that’s not what it is. I know what it is.” He turned, ran to the corral, slipped the hackamore on Apache, swung up bareback. Then he was galloping full tilt toward the animal. Behind him, Fair slipped a bridle on her horse, also rode bareback after him.
By the time they reached the coyote, it was no longer walking. Foaming at the mouth, it writhed and rolled and twisted on the ground, snapping at its own belly as if its body were its enemy. Fair and Jess stared. “Good heavens,” the woman whispered as the little animal bent nearly double, sank its fangs in its own flank, then straightened out convulsively. “What . . .?”
“Poison,” said Cutler harshly. “The critter’s eaten a bait of strychnine. Not far from here, either, because it acts fast.”
“How ghastly,” Fair whispered.
“That’s what poison does,” Cutler said, and he pulled his Colt. Its thunder was loud in the silence of the dusk as he shot the coyote.
“Jess,” he said, in the hush that followed. “If you will, bury it. Then pile some rocks over its grave so nothin’ else can dig it up and eat it. Me, I’ve got business elsewhere, and I’ve got to hurry.” He swung Apache around.
“John!” Fair called. “Where’re you going?”
“As fast as I can get rolling,” Cutler said, “back to Tom Fellows’ ranch!”
Because he was up the whole night long, Cutler slept late the next morning. Awakening in the wagon, he yawned, stretched, swung out of bed. Around him, the home ranch belonging to Tom Fellows was silent and deserted; Fellows and his rider were still at Bobbitt’s, and Fellows was a bachelor. But, as always in this country, the ranch house was unlocked, and Cutler used its kitchen stove to cook a leisurely breakfast which he ate slowly and with enjoyment.
After that, he saddled Apache and rode out to check the traps he had set in the past two days.
When he came to the first one, he was not surprised to find it overturned and sprung in the midst of clawed sand. He grinned a cold grin that was itself very much like a wolf’s snarl. He pulled the Winchester from its saddle boot, laid it across the pommel, and rode on.
The second trap, set in a low draw just across a clump of cactus that the wolf was accustomed to taking in a bound was in similar condition.
Cutler left it, rode on, and now he was a long way from the home ranch. His whole attitude changed. The third was on a hump of ground overlooking the entrance to a canyon. Likely, he thought, that was where he would have had the action, and as he approached the set, he was tense, alert, eyes sweeping the land around him continually.
Then he was staring down at the place where he had set the trap, and he laughed softly, in his throat. It was not a pleasant sound.
The wolf trap was still in place, undisturbed. But a foot away, the ground was churned as if a mighty struggle had occurred there, and the big, clear mark of a heavy drag led off across the flat.
Cutler’s mouth thinned. Holding the rifle, he swung off his horse. Apache would stand indefinitely, ground reined, and Cutler dropped the hackamore. Then he went forward on foot, following the trail of the drag. He ran crouched low, taking advantage of every bit of cover.
The sign was plain to read; he’d used a three-foot section of thick juniper, buried in the ground. It made what was practically a road through the grama grass, leading toward the canyon’s mouth. Cutler halted once, fell flat on his belly. He stared at the canyon, its flanks clad with juniper. Up there in the thicket, he told himself. That’s where he’s got to be.
And now he was no longer a trapper. He was the man who had brought in the Thomas boys and wiped out the Boone gang in the Indian Territory, and he went forward slowly, sometimes crawling on his belly, sometimes running hunched from rock to rock—but always on the trail of the drag.
Now he was at the canyon’s mouth, a narrow entrance between two thicket-shagged hills. The trail led straight up into the juniper on the right. Cutler grinned, backed off, cut a wide circle. He took his time, climbing the back side of the ridge whose forward slope formed the canyon wall. He came down into the silent pungency of the juniper thicket from behind, his rifle ready, and he made no more sound than a ferret stalking a mouse. Dodging from trunk to trunk, taking advantage of every clump of branches, he descended the hill. There was no sound in here but the whisper of his own breath, the audible pumping of his heart.
Then he heard it, a strange, muffled groan. He gave that wolf’s grin once more, swung right. Twenty yards, still in utter quiet. Then he saw the gleam of gunmetal, caught the outline behind it. Slowly he raised the Winchester. He lined it carefully. Then his voice rang out, echoing in the hush: “All right, Gilbert. Drop the gun. You’re covered.”