Unpopular Science

“Oh.” Freya was shocked to see her fingers bloodied. There were punctures up and down the arm that was clamped immovably around her middle. “I’m sorry.” Remo toed the woven mat away from the entrance of the pit, allowing the morning sun to shine inside. He could see the shape huddled against the wall, alert and waiting. He placed his daughter on her feet, then stepped into the entrance and dropped to the earth, fifteen feet below, as easily as a man stepping off a curb. His eyes adjusted from bright sun to the dim haze, and Remo was eye to eye with the wolf.

The wolf cocked its head, appraising him, then raised its snout and sniffed at the air. At that moment Freya clambered through the entrance, hanging for a moment from the wooden beams reinforcing the roof, then dropped to the floor with a thud. She brushed dirt from the knees of her jeans and regarded them, the wolf, then Remo, and there was something wild and stubborn in her eyes.

“Young lady,” Remo said, “you’ve got some explaining to do.”

‘T heard you talking about the wolves the last time you were here. Remember?”

Remo had been on the rez a few months back, when he got a call from Upstairs. They had been watching for signs of the wolves for weeks, months. A series of savage attacks formed a trail that led onto the Fort Bliss Military Reservation in the New Mexico desert. There, in a ghost town that had once thrived on Sacramento Mountains silver, Remo had found evidence of the wolves.

Wolves weren’t normally the prey he sought, but there was nothing normal about these wolves.

“I didn’t talk about the wolves when I was here.”

“You were on the phone with Prince Junior,” Freya explained.

“How do you know Prince Junior?”

“I don’t.” She shrugged. “I just know you called him Prince Junior. He was the one who told you where to go get the wolves. Then the other one, Smitty, he gave you the cover to get into the exercises going on at Bliss. Later, Sunny Joe said you wouldn’t be coming back like you thought you would.”

“You were listening in on my phone calls?”

“When I’m standing right there in the same room it’s kind of hard not hear what you loudmouths are saying.”

Remo shook his head. “The dots still aren’t connecting, sweetheart.”

“I drove out to see about the wolves, that’s all. I found this one in the desert about ten miles outside the ghost town. He was with a dead one. This one had half his flank tom off, but I managed to stabilize him and get him home.”

Remo Williams was about as shocked as he had ever been, and there were so many things shocking him he couldn’t sort through them all. Freya had overheard his phone call from halfway across the room, which was surprising, yes. She had gone hunting, for dangerous animals. She had penetrated the security of a U.S. military reservation. She had taken the dying creature and escaped the military without being apprehended, then nursed this beast back to health. Every fact demanded a why and/or a how.

The wolf was indeed healthy now. It walked easily across the pit with only a slight limp and thrust its muzzle underneath the small, delicate hand of Freya.

It gave a small start when Remo silently came alongside to examine the beast.

“It’s small,” he said. That was a good sign.

He had to be sure. He took the animal’s head in his hands, held on to it and looked into its eyes. The animal panicked when it couldn’t break the hold, but Freya stroked it, spoke to it, as Remo searched the glassy orbs. He didn’t know what he was looking for, really, but when he let go of the wolf’s head he was sure he hadn’t found it.

“It’s just a wolf.”

Freya didn’t question that strangely obvious statement. She explained, “Its pack was wiped out by a rival wolf pack. This one only survived because it was small enough to slip through the rocks into a crevasse. It was starved when I found it. The other pack was long gone, but it was too afraid to come out of the rocks:”

“What about the other pack? You didn’t track them, did you?”

“I tried. The trail was cold and I lost it.”

Remo looked at the creature. “I didn’t know there were wolves still living in the desert.”

Freya’s eyes lowered. “Nobody did, and they really are gone now, I think,” she said. “She’s mute. I bet her entire pack was. It must have been just enough of an edge to keep them from being hunted. This might have been the last free pack of Mexican Gray Wolves in the Southwestern U.S. They were lucky and clever enough to stay hidden from man for decades. For generations. But now man’s finally found them and wiped them out.”

Remo considered what Freya had just said as he climbed out of the pit and as he ate his dinner, and when he lay down to sleep on his mat in Sunny Joe’s home.

Freya was intuitive. Remo never told her anything about the nature of the wolves that he was hunting, so how had she come to her conclusion that the pack of wolves that wounded her pet were “man”? How had she dared to go out in search of them?

What kind of a woman was Freya, anyway?

Chapter 3