Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(78)
As I rode the brake down the hill, a skinny old man emerged from inside the trailer.
I climbed out of the truck and raised my arm. “You must be Mr. Probert.”
“And you must be the warden with the wolf.” His voice was harsh as a raven’s, little more than a rasp.
He was wearing a leather hat, glasses that darkened in the sun, and a sweatshirt with a wolf airbrushed on the front. His slim-cut jeans only made his long legs look thinner. Cigarette smoke trailed from the butt clutched between his fingers.
I introduced myself and we shook hands. Probert’s face appeared even more gaunt, with just the thinnest layer of skin covering the bones. If I were to come upon his skeleton sometime in the future, I felt that I would be able to recognize him from his skull alone.
“Well, let’s have a look at him,” he said.
I moved around to the back of the truck and leaped into the bed.
Probert peered over the side. “High-content animal,” he said, expelling smoke with every word. “Ninety percent or so, I would estimate. What’s this handsome fellow’s name?”
“The people who had him last called him Shadow.”
“That won’t do,” said Probert. “An alpha like this deserves a kingly name.”
“How do you know he’s an alpha male?”
“You see the fierceness in those eyes?” When he spoke, the skeletal man used his cigarette as a prop, waving it in the air for emphasis, pointing the orange tip to draw attention. “I’ll tell you right now, if I were to let him loose in one of my pens with another alpha, there’d be a dead wolf in five minutes. What is his history? How did he come to be in your possession?”
“A couple of drug dealers got him from another drug dealer, who got him from who knows where,” I said. “But there’s a tattoo on his belly saying he came from Montana originally. No one knows how he got to Maine.”
“I am sure it was an odyssey,” he said. “But he looks healthy enough, and your lady friend said he’s been neutered and vaccinated. She is quite the pistol, your lady friend. I’d hoped she might be coming with you.”
“This is quite an operation you’ve got,” I said, surveying the acres of fenced pens.
I still couldn’t get over the howls I was hearing, or the aerial show overhead. To think that the ancient partnership between wolves and ravens, long gone from this part of the world, had re-formed here was nothing short of awe-inspiring.
Probert led the way. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”
We followed a dirty, trampled path to the first chain-link enclosure, where a couple of animals that looked more like German shepherds than wolves rushed forward, wagging their tails. The snow inside was grooved from the trails the animals had made, littered with chewed bones, and stained with urine. The fence looked to be about twelve feet high, but the unshoveled snowbank on the opposite side provided a natural ramp. It wouldn’t be hard at all for one of them to escape, I thought worriedly.
“Good day, ladies.” Probert extended his long fingers to be licked.
I judged the pen to be about an acre in size, maybe an acre and a half, with an island of short firs in the center. From the depths of the evergreens, a third wolf dog peered at us. It had the recognizable long legs and snout of the wilder mixes.
“That’s Macduff,” said my guide. “He’s a little shy. Bad story there. Terrible abuse and neglect. The people who had him in Pennsylvania never changed his collar, and so as he grew, it began to strangulate him. Amazing that he even made it here. Macduff has the distinction of being the only one of my brothers and sisters to bite me. It happened as I removed him from his crate, and no, I haven’t yet become a werewolf.”
Brothers and sisters? I wasn’t so sure Probert didn’t howl at the moon occasionally.
The wolves had grown louder since I had arrived. The arrival of the newcomer, Shadow, was causing a commotion.
“How many animals do you have here?” I asked above the howls.
“Thirty-seven at the moment. Housed in six pens. Each is a perfect pack structure, with an alpha and beta pair running the show. The way of the wolf.”
“And you run this entire refuge yourself?”
“My apprentice, Kara, is off on a ‘meat run,’ as we call it. A slaughterhouse generously gives us its scraps. Wolves prefer the company of females to males. They associate our sex with death and danger, I have come to believe. And with good cause.”
“They seem to like you.”
“That’s because I have taken the time to learn their language. Wolves communicate in all manner of ways, from their posture to their facial expressions. Their vocalizations are more nuanced than they might seem to the untrained ear, more complex than that of dogs. What you hear as yips and yaps, I hear as full sentences. But if you really want to see into the soul of a wolf, you need to look into its eyes.”
Dale Probert and Don Foss couldn’t have been any more different physically, and yet they both shared an inflated sense of self-importance and a mannered way of speaking, as if they had attended the same preschool eons ago. But whereas I had doubts about Foss’s motives, it was clear Probert sincerely cared for his wolves. As run-down as this refuge might appear, he seemed to be doing his best to create a true sanctuary. Unlike Pariahville, this was a place of protection and caring, not exile and exploitation.