Nobody would have suspected him, anyhow. He didn’t run cattle anymore. He wasn’t getting rid of the wolves because they threatened his stock, he was getting rid of the wolves because his forefathers had killed every last wolf in the U.S. of A. because they’d needed killing! Right along with cougars and grizzlies and lesser vermin like wolverines, coyotes and eagles that picked off lambs. The country was God-given for the people who used and grazed it and hunted on it, and he’d be damned if some government official was going to tell him what was vermin and what wasn’t.
He could have shot the bitch months ago, leaving the pups to starve, but it had been early enough in the season that another pair might breed. He’d figured he’d wait until the young ones were a bit grown and the pack was all together. Then he could get the bitch and the dog. Once the alpha animals were dead, the others would be disorganized, easier to kill. He’d made a new kind of silencer and he’d bought a new scope. Yesterday and the day before he’d used fifty rounds with both, sighting in the scope. With any luck at all, he’d have both alphas and some of the pups before the others knew what was happening.
Just now he was working his way up the slope to the ridge across from the den. It would be about a hundred-yard shot, easy with this weapon. When he neared the ridge, he dropped on his belly and crawled up, stopping once or twice when his sight blurred. He took off his goggles and wiped his eyes. The haziness came and went. He’d noticed it the last time he was here, too. Probably sun-warmed air rising off a rockface down the slope before him.
Raising his head slowly, he looked down on the den. The shelf above it was hip deep in dogs. He counted, eagerly. The four pups. The alpha bitch, the alpha dog, three others. He eased the muzzle of the rifle over the ridge, settled it firmly and applied his eye to the scope, put his finger to the trigger and began to tighten it …
And damn it, something screamed!
It was a sound so vehement, so near that he completely lost the target as he rolled and looked upward where the sound had come from. His first thought was eagle. Eagles screamed, though he’d never heard one as loud as that. Hell, it would take an eagle the size of a truck to scream like that, and besides there was nothing around! Just sky, and trees, and the line of the ridge, and across the canyon . . . not one damned wolf! Either down the den or gone, hell knows where!
He rolled into prone position again, cursing, staring at the trees around him. Except for the wavery air he saw absolutely nothing. His first clue that he wasn’t alone came when something invisible grabbed him by both ankles and yanked him, yelling his head off, straight up into the sky.
A Forest Service officer climbed to the same spot later in the day, to check on the den as he’d been doing at weekly intervals ever since the female pupped. He found the rifle lying at the top of the ridge. All around and on top of it were torn fragments of denim and flannel and knit cotton and leather, some of them bloodstained, like feathers someone had plucked from a chicken. There was no sign of anyone, however. Not even any bloodstains on the ground.
Sunday was a working day at the Waving Palms Motel, or what would be Waving Palms when the twelve-acre site was drained. The trick was, so Bubba Miller claimed, to get the acreage drained over the weekend, and do it so fast nobody had time to know about it. That way there’d be no complaints, no EPA challenges, no outcries about endangered species. Besides, it wasn’t any big deal, only twelve acres, and it had been in Bubba’s family since Grampa Miller took it on account of an unpaid repair bill, back in the fifties. It was plenty big enough for a small motel, and there were no recent changes of ownership papers floating around, requiring surveys or confusing things. The permit to dig a foundation that was posted on the road had been issued for a dry piece of land a half mile away. The permit had a mistake on it indicating that other piece of property. Just two numbers twisted around was all. Nobody’s fault, if anybody caught onto it. It just happened that way.