The coyote went rigid and a tiny sound leaked out of it like the pitiful howl of the damned in hell.
The woman stopped pinching and the coyote snapped at the rabbit again. The nerve pinch was reapplied, harder this time. The coyote was rigid with agony.
When the pinch was removed, the coyote wanted nothing to do with the rabbit, but the young woman wished to make her point and make it stick. Holding the canine by the scruff of the neck, she dragged it to the rabbit, forced it to smell the little rodent and then pinched it again.
It must have been a very effective pinch, because the whimpers that came out of the coyote were almost words. Then the coyote was free.
As it stood shakily, the young woman gently lifted the rabbit and offered it to the coyote. With a yipe it ran off so fast it almost left a coyote-shaped dust cloud.
“Thanks, Bugs,” the young woman told the rabbit as she set it down at the entrance to its burrow. “Let me know if those beasts come bothering you again.” Sunny Joe Roam chuckled in his old, dry throat. “Want to bet that coyote just swore off hare for all time?”
Remo Williams beamed with pride. “She’s a miracle.”
“Best tracker the Sun On Jo have seen since my grandfather’s days,” Sunny Joe agreed. “You should see her track rattlers with her bare hands.”
“He did, last time he visited,” Freya said as she approached the cliff bottom. “I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”
“You should see her hunt prairie dogs,” Sunny Joe said, not without pride himself. “Rattlers are easy compared to prairie dogs.”
“You should see me hunt wolves,” Freya said. Remo Williams, who was still smiling all this time, stopped.
His name was Winston, but what kind of a loser name was Winston? When you thought of “Winston” you thought of cigarettes or a gray old man in a suit and tie who lived his entire life in an office. Winston had once adopted a nickname, a true warrior’s name, but hadn’t quite lived up to it Now they just called him Winner. You could do a lot worse than Winner.
Winner Smith had lived through his share of troubles. He’d grown up too fast, but didn’t necessarily feel grown up even now.
The way he saw it, his life started for real on the day he came here, to the Sun On Jo reservation near Yuma, Arizona. The mess that came before, much of it of his own making, faded like a dream. Here, with the people who were his people, he somehow fit in. He learned to be at peace with the world without giving in to it.
Not long after arriving, his new life became more complete with the appearance of the sister he never knew he had. Freya was, then and now, a pain-in-the-ass brat. He couldn’t have loved her more.
Lately she’d been stirring up more trouble, and when Winner Smith saw what was coming into the village about midmorning he assumed the trouble was just beginning.
“Would you just please tell me what’s wrong?” Freya demanded.
“I want to see it first,” said Remo Williams, who had a strange look in his eyes. Winner had seen the look before, before he’d come to the rez. It was the look of— he didn’t want to even go there.
They were walking fast across the village, straight to the pit, drawing the attention of the meager population of Sun On Jos from their homes and hogans.
“First tell me why!” Freya insisted.
“First I see.”
“No!” She grabbed him by the arm and made herself a boulder. It should have brought Remo to a halt. She’d pulled that move on Winner and it felt like having your arm in a vise of iron spikes.
It didn’t work on the man who was their father. Remo did something with his arm, something speedy but gentle, and all at once Freya was off the ground, spun around and held against him with one strong arm around her waist. Kind of like she does to the coyotes, Winner thought happily.
“Let go!” She dug her fingers into Remo’s arm. Remo stopped at the entrance to the pit where a loosely woven mat covered the hole in the earth. “Freya,” he said, “that hurts.”
“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:”