Three of the pups wandered off immediately as the little dog weaned them, but one, a dis-coordinated male, stayed around and was tolerated by its mother. Grainier felt sure this dog was got of a wolf, but it never even whimpered in reply when the packs in the distance, some as far away as the Selkirks on the British Columbia side, sang at dusk. The creature needed to be taught its nature, Grainier felt. One evening he got down beside it and howled. The little pup only sat on its rump with an inch of pink tongue jutting stupidly from its closed mouth. “You’re not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do,” he told the mongrel. He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall … Nothing from the pup. But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant.
He tried telling Kootenai Bob of this development. “Howling, are you?” the Indian said. “There it is for you, then. That’s what happens, that’s what they say: There’s not a wolf alive that can’t tame a man.”
The pup disappeared before autumn, and Grainier hoped he’d made it across the line to his brothers in Canada, but he had to assume the worst: food for a hawk, or for the coyotes.
Many years later — in 1930—Grainier saw Kootenai Bob on the very day the Indian died. That day Kootenai Bob was drunk for the first time in his life. Some ranch hands visiting from across the line in British Columbia had managed to get him to take a drink by fixing up a jug of shandy, a mixture of lemonade and beer. They’d told him he could drink this with impunity, as the action of the lemon juice would nullify any effect of the beer, and Kootenai Bob had believed them, because the United States was by now more than a decade into Prohibition, and the folks from Canada, where liquor was still allowed, were considered experts when it came to alcohol. Grainier found old Bob sitting on a bench out front of the hotel in Meadow Creek toward evening with his legs wrapped around an eight-quart canning pan full of beer — no sign of lemonade by now — lapping at it like a thirsty mutt. The Indian had been guzzling all afternoon, and he’d pissed himself repeatedly and no longer had the power of speech. Sometime after dark he wandered off and managed to get himself a mile up the tracks, where he lay down unconscious across the ties and was run over by a succession of trains. Four or five came over him, until late next afternoon the gathering multitude of crows prompted someone to investigate. By then Kootenai Bob was strewn for a quarter mile along the right-of-way. Over the next few days his people were seen plying along the blank patch of earth beside the rails, locating whatever little tokens of flesh and bone and cloth the crows had missed and collecting them in brightly, beautifully painted leather pouches, which they must have taken off somewhere and buried with a fitting ceremony.
5
At just about the time Grainier discovered a rhythm to his seasons — summers in Washington, spring and fall at his cabin, winters boarding in Bonners Ferry — he began to see he couldn’t make it last. This was some four years into his residence in the second cabin.
His summer wages gave him enough to live on all year, but he wasn’t built for logging. First he became aware how much he needed the winter to rest and mend; then he suspected the winter wasn’t long enough to mend him. Both his knees ached. His elbows cracked loudly when he straightened his arms, and something hitched and snapped in his right shoulder when he moved it the wrong way; a general stiffness of his frame worked itself out by halves through most mornings, and he labored like an engine through the afternoons, but he was well past thirty-five years, closer now to forty, and he really wasn’t much good in the woods anymore.
When the month of April arrived in 1925, he didn’t leave for Washington. These days there was plenty of work in town for anybody willing to get around after it. He felt like staying closer to home, and he’d come into possession of a pair of horses and a wagon — by a sad circumstance, however. The wagon had been owned by Mr. and Mrs. Pinkham, who ran a machine shop on Highway 2. He’d agreed to help their grandson Henry, known as Hank, an enormous youth in his late teens, certainly no older than his early twenties, to load sacks of cornmeal aboard the Pinkhams’ wagon; this favor a result of Grainier’s having stopped in briefly to get some screws for a saw handle. They’d only loaded the first two sacks when Hank sloughed the third one from his shoulder onto the dirt floor of the barn and said, “I am as dizzy as anything today,” sat on the pile of sacks, removed his hat, flopped over sideways, and died.
His grandfather hastened from the house when Grainier called him and went to the boy right away, saying, “Oh. Oh. Oh.” He was open-mouthed with uncomprehension. “He’s not gone, is he?”
“I don’t know, sir. I just couldn’t say. He sat down and fell over. I don’t even think he said anything to complain,” Grainier told him.
“We’ve got to send you for help,” Mr. Pinkham said.
“Where should I go?”
“I’ve got to get Mother,” Pinkham said, looking at Grainier with terror on his face. “She’s inside the house.”
Grainier remained with the dead boy but didn’t look at him while they were alone.
Old Mrs. Pinkham came into the barn flapping her hands and said, “Hank? Hank?” and bent close, taking her grandson’s face in her hands. “Are you gone?”
“He’s gone, isn’t he?” her husband said.
“He’s gone! He’s gone!”
“He’s gone, Pearl.”
“God has him now,” Mrs. Pinkham said.
“Dear Lord, take this boy to your bosom …”
“You could seen this coming ever since!” the old woman cried.
“His heart wasn’t strong,” Mr. Pinkham explained. “You could see that about him. We always knew that much.”
“His heart was his fate,” Mrs. Pinkham said. “You could looked right at him anytime you wanted and seen this.”
“Yes,” Mr. Pinkham agreed.
“He was that sweet and good,” Mrs. Pinkham said. “Still in his youth. Still in his youth!” She stood up angrily and marched from the barn and over to the edge of the roadway — U.S. Highway 2—and stopped.
Grainier had seen people dead, but he’d never seen anybody die. He didn’t know what to say or do. He felt he should leave, and he felt he shouldn’t leave.
Mr. Pinkham asked Grainier a favor, standing in the shadow of the house while his wife waited in the yard under a wild mixture of clouds and sunshine, looking amazed and, from this distance, as young as a child, and also very beautiful, it seemed to Grainier. “Would you take him down to Helmer’s?” Helmer was in charge of the cemetery and, with Smithson the barber’s help, often prepared corpses for the ground. “We’ll get poor young Hank in the wagon. We’ll get him in the wagon, and you’ll go ahead and take him for me, won’t you? So I can tend to his grandmother. She’s gone out of her mind.”
Together they wrestled the heavy dead boy aboard the wagon, resorting after much struggle to the use of two long boards. They inclined them against the wagon’s bed and flopped the corpse up and over, up and over, until it rested in the conveyance. “Oh — oh — oh — oh—” exclaimed the grandfather with each and every nudge. As for Grainier, he hadn’t touched another person in several years, and even apart from the strangeness of this situation, the experience was something to remark on and remember. He giddyapped Pinkham’s pair of old mares, and they pulled young dead Hank Pinkham to Helmer’s cemetery.