Fifteen

 

Garrett clicked into his skis outside the ranger station—Bengt Isaksson, his field partner, was already geared up and waiting—and began the early-morning trip out to Fishercap, where a wolverine was trapped. Or hopefully trapped. Occasionally the furious beasts chewed their way through the thick log boxes and got out before daylight. P2, in fact, had done this once before. Chewed a hole right through the timber and escaped with beaver bait in his jaws. Garrett had rebuilt more than one trap himself. An imperfect system, but the only one that didn’t risk injuring its quarry; if they used a cable snare or steel trap, the gulos might chew off their own feet to escape.

The sun had crested the Great Divide but wasn’t doing anything yet to warm Garrett, whose face was so numb he couldn’t feel the spindrift off the lake. Bengt drafted behind him, following in his tracks. Garrett herringboned up a knoll to stay warm, then refound the eroded outline of his tracks and skied down to the lake in them, listening to the ice sing to him as he crossed it, the eerie pings and pongs and pyoos, like a gunfight in outer space. Even in technical gear, hundred-dollar mittens, he couldn’t feel his fingers gripping the poles. Still, it had been worse in the middle of the night. The radio signal had come in sometime around two in the morning, telling them the trap had been triggered. They’d flipped a coin to see who’d do the night run, which once again Garrett had lost. He wondered if Bengt was using a trick quarter. He’d had no choice but to head out, in an exhausted dream-trance, to check the trap. Sometimes it was a marten or a lynx, staring back at you with sapphire eyes. But usually it was a wolverine, P2 or P3 or P7, and you had to wire down the lid and pack snow into the cracks to lessen the chance of escape, since it was too dangerous to sedate the thing at night. Then you had to ski back, in an even deeper trance, and return at daybreak.

Garrett and Bengt stopped on the north side of the lake, sharing a thermos of French press Bengt had brewed in the cabin. One thing about Bengt: he made good coffee. A lot better than the cowboy variety Garrett made on his own. They’d been out here minding the traps together for a month. Mostly this meant waiting around for a gulo to get stuck, then retrieving its GPS collar to record the data. Even teamed up, it could be lonely work. Rae Karnes, from the veterinary clinic, had come out once to do a radio implant on a yearling, but that was the only human they’d seen.

Bengt yawned, though he’d gotten to sleep through the night. He was a rock climber who did not happily take to land. Sometimes Garrett got up to pee in the wee hours of the morning and saw his hands moving around in the dark, as if scaling an invisible ladder.

“I heard you after you got back,” Bengt said. “You were talking to your sleeping bag.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Funny—neither could I.”

“What was I saying?”

“I think you were telling it jokes. About what a lazy excuse for a bag it was. Always sleeping.”

“I guess I miss my daughter.”

“She likes your jokes?”

“Loves them,” Garrett said. “It’s the only way I can get her to bed—by promising to tell her one.”

“If it’s any consolation,” Bengt said, “she must be an idiot.”

He handed the thermos to Garrett. This was the closest he’d come to friendship since college: with Bengt, Minkoff, whoever his field partner was. The particular partner almost didn’t matter. Sometimes, joking with Bengt, Garrett would think of Charlie—not the weird Happy Husband who’d invited them to the Margolises’ last July, bent on impressing them, but the real Charlie, the one who’d pretended to slip on his ass in front of Professor Yamamoto’s class, who’d turn pink if you kidded him about a girl or said something a tiny bit critical about his brothers. Garrett was surprised, honestly, by how much he missed him. It was a kind of loneliness, keen and Charlie-shaped, that no one else could fill. There were different forms of love in the world; why did the romantic kind always bully its way to the front?

“What are you doing up here,” Bengt asked, “if you miss your family so much?”

“It’s my job.”

“There are easier ways to make a living.”

Garrett shrugged. “When I’m up here, all I can think about is getting back to them. Cece and Lana. I can’t live without them. And then I go back and I’m so happy to see them, overjoyed—my soul is like, ta-da!—but after a couple weeks I start to get restless. All I can think about is coming up here again.”

“Sounds kind of miserable,” Bengt said.

Garrett looked at him in surprise. “Are you kidding? This is the happiest I’ve been since college.”

Bengt studied him through his goggles, as if trying to picture him as an undergrad. It seemed to exceed his powers of imagination.

“If it wasn’t for Cece,” Garrett said, “god knows where I’d be.”

“In a warm bar?”

“Probably dead.”

Bengt nodded seriously, doing his best to understand. When he wasn’t chasing animals, he was living like one, bivouacked on the side of a cliff and crapping in a bag. “Come to think of it, most of the climbers I know are the same way. The middle-aged ones, I mean.”

“What way?”

“Dead.”

“You do realize I’m only thirty-nine, right?”

“Like I said. Middle-aged.”

Garrett warmed his face in the steam from the thermos, worried about his frostbite scar. “I’m glad it’s my last day up here. So I can start to miss you again too.”

They headed on. The sunrise was in full bloom now, embering the clouds over the mountains and turning the sky a Martian red. Probably Garrett was just tired, half-tripping from exhaustion, but the red sky seemed to flatten for a moment, flap sickeningly like a flag. He blinked the tears from his eyes and it returned to its three-dimensional self. He hadn’t had a real episode in years. Not like he used to have: snowfall in August, the people turned to bouncing phials of goop. He’d eased off on most of his meds: just ten milligrams of Lexapro, which, compared to Garrett’s old regimen, was like popping a Flintstones vitamin. He’d dropped the therapist he’d been seeing in Kalispell, who’d cost a fortune and seemed to think global warming was a hoax—or at least a symptom of “catastrophic thinking.” Only when Garrett was in the field like this, exhausted from trap checks, did his brain get up to its old tricks; even then it was just a glimpse, like the flash of a monster’s tail.

Garrett tried to appreciate the sunrise, since this was his last day up here, though to be honest he’d gone a bit wolverine himself and had to remember it was beautiful. This required a mental step, a waste of thermal energy. He thought of the day he’d met Cece, on Charlie’s dock, when they’d admired the sky together. Had he really asked her about Australopithecuses? What a pretentious ass! Still, pretentious or not, it struck Garrett as a decent enough question. Admiring the sky served no evolutionary purpose whatsoever; in the Pliocene epoch, it might even have been dangerous. So who was it that first stopped in their tracks at the sight of a sunrise? Thought, Holy crap, that’s a beautiful thing? And supposing you were this person—or caveperson—what would you make of it? Probably it would frighten you, fill you with strange new feelings, a loneliness that made you feel special, because you might not survive the day and the sky seemed to know this about you: it was showing you exactly what you’d miss. You’d want to freeze it somehow and capture its beauty. So you would paint it, maybe, in your cave. The sunrise would be there, for admiring whenever. But it wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t measure up to the image you had in your head. You’d want to create something worthy of this image, to exorcise the useless longings it stirred in your heart—longings that had nothing to do with eating and hunting and making sure your children didn’t die. Even the sunrise you’d seen, the original, paled in comparison to what was in your head. Eventually you’d give up trying to copy it. You’d want to experience it firsthand. You’d learn how to fly like a bird, to go right to the source of the longings, in gigantic steel vessels that released great quantities of heat-trapping gas.

As soon as you started to admire something, to love it, you spelled its doom.

At Fishercap, they stopped well short of the trap and clicked out of their skis, then Garrett switched off the flashing safety light he’d set up in the middle of the night to keep P2 distracted. It seemed to have worked. The trap was more or less intact, only a loose pole brace where P2 must have rammed the lid repeatedly with his head. At the moment, though, he seemed to have given up and was listening to the crunch of boots in the snow. Garrett took a couple steps toward the trap, to see if this would piss him off. Sure enough, the box started to growl.

Garrett prepared the syringe while Bengt grabbed the jab stick from his pack, then the two of them approached the trap. The growling got louder, then louder still, amplified by the log box. An unholy sound, like something possessed. Garrett cracked the lid to look inside, shining his headlamp around the trap, or at least around the part of it they could see: P2 had shredded one of the inside walls, trying to claw his way out. Garrett should have been used to it by now, but the ketone-y stink of wolverine musk made him gag; even after a laundering, his backcountry clothes smelled like they’d been washed in cheap scotch. The animal himself, still hidden from view, had gone silent. Not even a hiss. Garrett took a moment to collect his nerve. Trembling, holding the jab stick like a spear, he signaled to Bengt, who cracked the lid another inch or two: the wolverine leapt suddenly at Garrett’s face, roaring viciously.

Bengt dropped the lid just in time. Garrett took a step back. The animals’ ferocity never ceased to amaze him. Again Bengt cracked the lid, but P2 lunged immediately, attacking so savagely he almost got loose. You could hear him panting inside, the log box steaming like a smokehouse. By the time Garrett managed to jab him, on the seventh try, his thermals were soaked with sweat.

He sat in the snow and waited for the tranquilizer to reach P2’s bloodstream. All this just to get at the animal’s GPS collar, so they could download the data points from the chip inside and find out exactly where he’d been the past couple months. Biologists understood very little about gulo behavior, even now. Dispersal patterns, mating habits, why the hell they occasionally decided to travel forty miles in a single day, and through rugged relief…sometimes Garrett wondered if he knew anything about them at all.

Garrett put his hands in his armpits to keep them warm. They had to do most of their trapping in fall and winter, when the grizzlies were hibernating; otherwise baiting the traps would be a death wish. Recently, the bears had begun to emerge earlier than ever, in mid-March, coaxed from their winter sleeps by the warming weather. As the winters had gotten less cold—less snowy, Garrett always clarified, because really it was all about this dwindling resource—P2 and his friends had been forced to travel higher and higher, many of them crossing the Divide into Canada. And it seemed like more and more mortality signals were getting radioed in every year. The animals were caught in bobcat traps, or crushed in avalanches, or shot because they’d ventured into the Blackfeet Reservation. Sometimes Garrett got so discouraged—so despairing, really—that he felt like giving up completely. Buying a grill for the backyard, so he could enjoy the early springs with Cece and Lana.

When P2 was good and zonked, Garrett laid a space blanket on the snow and lifted him carefully out of the trap and then sat there beside the blanket, holding the wolverine in his arms. Forty pounds? Thirty? How much smaller he seemed in Garrett’s lap: no bigger than a collie. It was during these sedations, when the animal’s ferocious strength was at its most mysterious, idling deep inside it, like some kind of motorless motor, a monster in repose, that Garrett occasionally touched the brim of something. It was a strange feeling, as if his lungs had turned to glass. He thought of his own father, the day that he’d died at the hospice. It had been three months after his stroke; his heart had simply given out, unable to keep the struggling mechanism of him alive. Garrett had seen him take his final breath. He’d expected it to be long, or remarkable in some way, but it was no different than any other one he’d taken. The last thing his dad had done was cup a hand to his forehead, suddenly, as if shielding his eyes.

Holding P2 in his arms, Garrett could feel the faint squirm of the animal’s heart. He felt winded by grief. He didn’t know why. It didn’t really have to do with his father. It had to do with the stillness of P2’s body, or maybe just with P2 himself, who seemed more alone than ever, lost in the wilderness of his dreams.